Tagline:

“The goal is to survive.”

Entire Story in Fewer Words than are in this Sentence:

Men often kill, but they’d rather be fisting.

Homoeroticism:

Director Tony Scott and Producer Joel Silver have proven to be some of the most reactionary members of Hollywood over the past few decades, and this cock-fest is certainly no different. Misogyny, as practiced by these two titans of the industry, might not exclude the vagina altogether, but its subordinate status means that as an organ of power, the penis is more appealing, more potent, and far more deserving of screen time. Here, we don’t get the exposure we’d expect, nor do we see much of the naked male form, but the homoeroticism lies in the banter, which is shamelessly flirtatious at its most benign. The film opens with a football coach screaming at his sweaty players, “Open up the holes! Get in there like hogs! Like pigs!” And oh my how they oblige. Still, this is the Damon Wayans/Bruce Willis show, a couple of strapping gents who love each other so deeply that it’s all they can do to keep from tongue-kissing right there in the car. A sample of the dialogue:

“You ever play ball? You got a good build.” — Wayans to Willis

“Feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet.” — Wayans

“You don’t like women much, do you?” — Wayans to Willis

“Blow me.” — Wayans to Willis

Wayans also asks Willis to hold his cock when he goes to the bathroom (Willis refuses) and when they first meet in a strip club (Willis is completely oblivious to the tits standing before him), Willis threatens to crush Damon’s nuts and stick an umbrella up his ass and open it. They bond, exchange sob stories, and risk their very lives for each other. Few are willing to go the distance for anyone they can’t later fill to the brim with bodily fluids.

Corpse Count:

The final tally of 26 was a great surprise, as I thought going in this would be more about football. Imagine my giddy delight when bodies exploded in every corner of the screen.

How Bad is it Really?

In many ways, it’s no worse than a dozen other Reagan/Bush-era action films that hated women and glorified death, but the finale gives this particular entry a whole new dimension. A corrupt Senator is about to be killed by a swishy assassin at a football game, but not if Willis has anything to say about it! He climbs the stadium lights to stop the murderous beast, but only after throwing a football several hundred yards to hit the Senator in the face so that he gets out of the way of the killer’s rifle. Just to ensure that things reach maximum ridiculousness, Wayans rides in on a horse, cops give chase, guns blaze, and as a capper, Willis dances a jig to celebrate his kill. How did we reach this point? The story concerns the owner of a football team and his attempt to legalize sports wagering so that billions of dollars can be made. The Senator is the last man standing in the way of such legislation, so he must be terminated.

Of course, the plan is working to perfection before Willis gets involved, so people die, including a young Halle Berry as a stripper, who has in her possession incriminating tapes that threaten to bring down the whole sinister plan. Moreover, we’re asked to accept Wayans as an ex-pro quarterback who was banned from the league for shaving points, and Willis as an ex-Secret Service agent who was drummed out of the business by that same nasty Senator. Add to all that nonsense a Stupid Chief (who actually yells, “The next time I see your ugly mug, I’m gonna put a bullet in it!”), at least two Talking Killers, and a scene where Wayans is thrown from a bridge and lands on a car, yet sustains no injuries. Fine, I think he had a bloody lip.

Post-Mortem One-Liner:

As usual, just bad dialogue rather than anything immediately following a kill, although Willis does say “And then some,” after being told by his victims that he’s a “real bastard.”

“I spilled my cup of warm piss.” — Willis

“Officer, there are too many bullets in this gun.” — swishy assassin, right before killing a cop

“I think I fucked a squirrel to death and don’t remember it.” — Willis

And of course, this silly exchange between Wayans and the Stupid Chief in the interrogation room:

Chief: “I could nail you for obstruction!”

Wayans: “You couldn’t nail a two-dollar whore.”

Oh yes, let’s not forget Willis and his barrage of “Your momma’s so fat” jokes that came right before he slashed some dude’s throat.

Stupid Political Content:

Typically for the era, government is portrayed as evil and corrupt, but in a surprise turn, big business is no less wicked. Still, the film does endorse the idea that the cops (taxpayer funded) are overmatched and it’s better to leave crime fighting to the private sector (bounty hunters, P.I.’s, and the like). Other than that, the movie is somewhat apolitical, unless of course you believe it is a strong political statement to demonize and objectify women, highlighting their presence only if they are sucking cock or cooking breakfast.

Novelty Death:

One of the best, I’ll admit. A drug-crazed football star brings a gun onto the field and murders four players during his run for the end zone! After scoring the touchdown, he screams “Ain’t life a bitch?” and puts a bullet in his brain. Yeah, and it’s raining buckets at the time. There’s also the dude who is pinned between two speeding cars before receiving a “just-in-case” bullet from Willis. Then, to wrap it up in style, there’s the car that flies from the roof of a house, lands upside-down in a pool, and suddenly explodes. And of course, I’m always a pleased little boy when I get my standard “man on fire” sequence.

What You Learned:

The line “Fuck you, Sarah…You’re a lying bitch and if the cops weren’t here, I’d split your face,” is, for an 80s Action Hero, a declaration of love.

Long before Marilyn Chambers went Behind The Green Door, this big screen porno classic was shot. I’ll try to get as much of the plot line straight as possible. A Sex Ray from planet Porno is sent to Earth forcing everyone in its path to commit wanton acts of debauchery until Flesh Gordon and Dr. Flexi Jerkoff take Dale, a hot nympho who spends most of the movie naked and fucking, and try to stop them. Their spaceship is a gigantic, golden penis. On planet Porno they meet Wang the dictator, a Penisaurus Rex, and non-stop pudd pulling action. Sure this movie is older than your mom’s IUD, more worn out than your grandma’s diaphram, but it’s full of naked chicks! How can you say no to naked chicks? No?

Ruthless Ratings:

• Overall: 8
• Acting: 4
• Direction: 4
• Script: 7
• Stroke Factor: 10 tissue boxes +

Special Ruthless Porno Ratings:

• Number of times I thought of Barbarella: 9
• Number of times I laughed my ass off: 5
• Number of times I thought of smoking crack: 0
• Number of times I wished I could have directed this movie: 3

Most Memorable Momemt

• “Porno shall have a new queen tonight! Out of my way dildo!”

In Mystic Georgia there is nothing but poor white trash and
stereotypical blacks who still call the poor white trash Masser. This
is the home of Joe Lon Mackey, one of the most terrifying protagonists
since Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.
Joe Lon spends his free days running the beer, bonded whiskey, and
moonshine business that he inherited from his father, a championship
pitbull breeder whose cruelty to animals is revered by locals, along
with two Negro servants. His sister is a mental case who rubs fecal
matter in her hair and watches television all day. His best friend is
the town sheriff who lost his leg in Vietnam and who locks up and rapes
young, black girls who reject his advances. Most of the time Joe Lon
Mackey beats up on himself for abusing his wife who takes care of his
two youngest children and wallows in a mixture of past glory and
present regrets knowing that his football injuries during high school
cost him his future. Once a year Mystic has a rattlesnake roundup that
brings alcohol crazed lunatics from all over the Bible Belt to this
small town to hunt, kill, and eat snakes of all kinds. There is also a
bikini beauty contest and a pep rally the night before the hunt.

All of this makes for an interesting backdrop to a complete emotional
and spiritual breakdown of the human soul. By the end of the novel Joe
Lon can only find comfort in murder, an activity so devoid of context
for him that it makes him giggle. Some have argued that Joe Lon’s is a
tale of redemption, but I disagree. At no point is there any redemption
for Joe Lon, but instead his sister Beeder, and the servant’s Negro
daughter, Lottie Mae, are the ones who gain some sort of redemption and
freedom through the destruction of the oppressive male characters in
the story, as does his wife who is freed from his hidden physical
abuse. FEAST OF SNAKES is a novel filled with violence, ignorant
behavior, rape, castration, arson, sex, creepy Christians, animal
cruelty, murder, and fecalphelia.

I was intending on reading more Crews novels but couldn’t after this one. I had already read The Knock Out Artist, which was superb and thought FEAST would be a great progression. After Feast of Snakes
I literally had nightmares for the next two nights. I have tried to
avoid it since. This novel is creepier than anything Steven King ever
wrote, hands down.

A bitingly satiric look into the mind of a genius, Milak Solanka,
and his personal demons that takes us from Bombay to Manhattan to a
fictional Third World country (Pakistan again perhaps?) by the master
of the infinite entendre, Salman Rushdie. The hero and the girlfriend
he picks up after he leaves his wife and his son in India are thinly
fictionalized representatives of the author and his girlfriend,
reminiscent of his portrayal of the Ayatolla that put the fatwa on his
head. Rushdie tackles Americana and American politics with a lugubrious
zest akin to Baudrillard. Every satirical statement, every guarded
observation, reveals his ambivalence towards the media culture that
saturates and ultimately provides the language for the daily experience
of what it means to be an American. A strong follow up to the epic The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie is still at the height of his literary prowess.

Buy It!

That’s right, the guy that wrote Generation X,
wrote this book, and regardless of how you felt about that novel, this
one is worth your time. Trust me. Set in the late Seventies, Richard,
our primary narrator, and Karen are two teenagers making love on a
snow-topped mountain for the first time. Promptly thereafter, a
pregnant Karen slips into a drug coma for two decades only to emerge to
a despondent world where her high school friends are failing miserably
to form cohesive identities or assert themselves into the world.
Following her awakening and reuniting with the daughter she never met,
Karen is given the premonition of a severely prosaic apocalypse, and we
are treated to an unlikely and highly metaphoric end of the world, one
replete with philosophical musings about questions of identity and
human meaning in the coming millennium.

I found the use of a
sort of magic realism at the end, when the world slips into a painless
death via “sleep sickness” leaving only Richard, Karen, and their
friends alive to deal with the ecological disasters created by
unchecked machinery, to be as refreshing and intriguing as it was
corny. Given the premise of the novel, a woman in a coma for twenty
years, it is essential to suspend disbelief to read the novel in the
first place. Once that is out of the way we are left with compelling
and unique characters that loosely resemble people we know in real life
and care about, making Girlfriend In A Coma a smooth and enjoyable read right up to the last page.

The ground shifts repeatedly beneath the reader’s feet during the
course of Salman Rushdie’s sixth novel, a riff on the Orpheus and
Eurydice myth set in the high-octane world of rock & roll. Readers
get their first clues early on that the universe Rushdie is creating
here is not quite the one we know: Jesse Aron Parker, for example,
wrote “Heartbreak Hotel”; Carly Simon and Guinevere Garfunkel sang
“Bridge over Troubled Water”; and Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae
starred in “South Pacific.” And as the novel progresses, Rushdie adds
unmistakable elements of science fiction to his already patented
magical realism, with occasionally uneven results.

Rushdie’s cunning musician is Ormus Cama, the Bombay-born founder of
the most popular group in the world. Ormus’s Eurydice (and lead singer)
is Vina Apsara, the daughter of a Greek American woman and an Indian
father who abandoned the family. What these two share, besides amazing
musical talent, is a decidedly twisted family life: Ormus’s twin
brother died at birth and communicates to him from “the other side”;
his older brothers, also twins, are, respectively, brain-damaged and a
serial killer. Vina, on the other hand, grew up in rural West Virginia
where she returned home one day to find her stepfather and sisters shot
to death and her mother hanging from a rafter in the barn. No wonder
these two believe they were made for each other.

Narrated by Rai Merchant, a childhood friend of both Vina and Ormus,
The Ground Beneath Her Feet begins with a terrible earthquake in 1989
that swallows Vina whole, then moves back in time to chronicle the
tangled histories of all the main characters and a host of minor ones
as well. Rushdie’s canvas is huge, stretching from India to London to
New York and beyond–and there’s plenty of room for him to punctuate
this epic tale with pointed commentary on his own situation:
Muslim-born Rai, for example, remarks that “my parents gave me the gift
of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods
they held dear…. You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice,
but even if so, that’s a cup from which I’d happily drink again.”
Despite earthquakes, heartbreaks, and a rip in the time-space
continuum, and it’s epic length, The Ground Beneath Her Feet may be the
most optimistic, accessible novel Rushdie has yet written.

My favorite section of the novel is when Vina goes to Manhattan and
meets every freak in show business at what falls just short of a sex
club while hanging with her manager. Some of the names and occupations
of the people she meets will blow your mind!

Buy it and take your time reading it. I suggest cherishing this novel
like an expensive box of chocolate because writing this phenomenal
doesn’t come alone every day.

I hate to be contrary, but this book is not what it claims to be.
Given the title, it’s not surprising that it fails so miserably. The
author uses the thinly disguised narrator to tell us the true story of
his semi-tragic life in which both his parents died horribly from
natural causes within six months of each other and he was forced to
raise his younger brother while trying to start a brilliant but failing
magazine. [Ed Note: In what he considers one his very biggest failures,
our very own Jonny had an opportunity to work for Might magazine, but he screwed it up] A Hearbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
starts off well enough, then descends into the doldrums of boredom.
Eggers attempts to resurrect the book only lead to apathy on the part
of the reader and quite possibly scorn. The ‘indian summer’ narrative
trick at the end is transparent and insulting.

On the brighter
side, in the back of the book reading reverse, is a list of footnotes
that is easy to follow and fucking hilarious. Eggers scores big with
this addition of trivial addendum that I found to be more interesting
than the actual text.

Here’s a fun fact for you, Eggers is currently working on the site for
McSweeney’s literary journal and has sold the movie rights to this book
for one million dollars. Gentlemen, get out your typewriters!

Ruthless Ratings

• BUY IT OR BURN IT: Buy it. What the hell! Lord knows you could use to read more.

Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist visiting the Berkshires who befriends the main protagonist, Coleman “Silky” Silk, The Human Stain
is the story of the unraveling of the life of a iconoclastic college
professor at the hands of small minded PC liberals. As the faculty dean
of Athena College, Coleman hired young, fresh blood, like Delphine
Roux, and alienated most of those he brought in with his obstinate
personal philosophies, until in 1998, they turn on him and exploit an
idiom to expel him from his true life’s work. When two students fail to
show up to class Silk asks, “Do they exist or are they spooks?” Later
it is discovered that the students, whom Silk has never seen, are
black, and they use the word ’spook’ to file a fraudulent racism case
against the professor and the university. Silk rails against the
insufferable injustice of his expulsion and even blames the passing of
his wife on the shame the university has laid upon his name.

When Silk turns 71 he discovers Viagra, and an illiterate college
janitor named Faunia Farley who is half his age, igniting a passionate
affair that is eventually exposed by the jealous and scorned Delphine
Roux. ” I’m back in the tornado,” Silk decries.

Interspersed through the diaper wearing Zuckerman’s narration are the
details of Silk’s abandoned and covered up New Jersey upbringing as a
feather-weight boxer and pride and joy of a father who died early due
to health complications. It seems that, much like the love interest in
Francis Ford Coppola’s Cotton Club,
Silk has been disguising the fact that he is black, hence his sense of
outrage and indignation for being removed from his post for racial
comments.

Silk’s affair with Fauna eventually is his undoing as
her ex-husband is a mentally deranged Vietnam Vet, who refuses to allow
her to go on with her life after the accidental death of their
children. Roth is at his all time best here, delicately sketching these
characters from minute details that convey impressive depths of
emotion.

If you like to read you should buy this book. If you have a hard time
with text and idea’s and you thought that English Lit was a huge chore
in college, you should skip this book and go straight for David Lee
Roth’s autobiography.

I can sum up this movie from the quote I heard an eight year old make as we left the theater . “I wasn’t scared Daddy. I knew The Rock wasn’t going to die because he was the lead.” Fucking beautiful. What the hell an eight year old was doing watching The Scorpion King is a question of parenting.

This movie rips off Indiana Jones, The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer and, oddly enough (since Michael Clarke Duncan is in it), The Green Mile. It’s a generic tale of a ferocious warrior king named Memnon who can saw arrows up into dust a la Mel Brookes’ Robin Hood, played expertly by Steven Brand. He has this hottie little Asian sorceress, Kelly Hu AKA Cassandra (because she can see the future, get it? nudge nudge, wink wink) who is never fully clothed on but still manages not to show us anything. Together they beat the holy fuck out of every neighboring kingdom around them UNTIL that is, the hired assassin, the Acadian AKA The Rock decides it’s personal and he’s going to fuck with this mofo Memnon and steal his gorgeous bitch. Right. Got it? Good.

The original concept for this movie came from The Mummy Returns, in which The Rock makes his big screen debut as the Scorpion King, an evil character, who rises from the dead along with the armies of Anubus (jackal headed bad asses) and stomps his enemies to bits. The Scorpion King even burns down the library at Alexandria (So much for history). Not once is any of this acknowledged in The Scorpion King. Instead The Rock, I mean, the Acadian AKA The Scorpion King, is a fucking larger than life hero who can kill hundreds of men per scene yet still have time to knock boots with fine ass sorcerer bitches. Unlike Conan, he doesn’t throw his woman into the fire and we don’t get to see anything during the sex. As Spike Lee would say, “Ain’t that a bitch”? You can show countless people beaten and tortured to death but God forbid you show some tits and ass. That’s what’s wrong with this fucking country, you fucking Puritan hypocrites. If every fifteen year old in America had access to a hooker instead of a gun they’d stop shooting up their high schools. Someone ought to tell Al and Tipper that.

Michael Clarke Duncan is fantastic. He rules the Nubian tribes, and sleeps with two women every night. He nearly kicks the crap out of The Rock but in the end they become best buddies. No really!

Ralph Moeller is fantastic too. He just beats the crap out of people. What, you watch him for his acting ability? Come on.

My favorite scene of the movie though, comes when Memnon forces Cassandra to use her psychic powers to choose two out of six clay pots that don’t contain venomous cobra’s and stick her hands in them. She’s told him that she won’t be able to see into the future anymore if the two of them continue having sex. Of course, she’s gone off and fucked the Rock and Memnon knows it. We always know, ladies. So she takes out a snake and stuffs it in Memnon’s face and then The Rock falls from a rope with a can of whoopass in his teeth and starts to churn Memnon like butter baby. That’s fun for the whole family.

Final summation, this is a terrible movie, but it’s also terribly entertaining. Kudos to the producers for not throwing in any cheesy wrestling moves.

Ruthless Ratings

• Overall: 6
• Direction: 5
• Plot: 3
• The Rock: 5
• Gore: 7

Special, Non-Objective Ratings

• Numbers of times I thought I was watching Conan: 5
• Numbers of times I thought I was watching Indiana Jones: 3
• Numbers of times I thought of Branden Frasier’s faggy lips: 1
• Numbers of times I wished they would show Kelly Hu’s rack: 9
• Numbers of times I wanted to see WWF fighting action: 0

Yes! Finally, a show starring the woman who might be the best looking 38 year-old on the planet. I am of course referring to Pamela Anderson who stars on Fox‘s newest sitcom, Stacked. Call me old-fashioned, but I get sentimental when it comes to one of the hottest women my generation has had the pleasure of beating off to since puberty. Yes, my Generation Y readers, before Paris Hilton and her sex tape, there was a pornographic video of Pamela and Tommy Lee circulating the internet, and unlike Paris, who amassed her wealth as a brainless heiress, Pamela earned her dollars as a brainless model and actress.

Stacked is the standard “fish out of water’ comedy where airhead blonde Skyler Dayton (Pamela Anderson) tries to get along working in a bookstore among such intellectuals as a physics professor, a pretentious bookstore owner, and his horny brother. For the man who misses the level of pompous snobbery radiated by Frasier Crane, the show provides words like “meretricious’ and references to classics of literature (Sense and Sensibility, Tom Sawyer, Heart of Darkness, etc.) that serve to compliment the bookstore setting. For the man who enjoys the sight of a huge set of knockers, the show is sure to please. For the man who… well, actually all of the men I know fall into one of these two categories, colloquially known as “metro” and “straight.’

A show like Stacked is designed to revolve around its ensemble cast, but in actuality it comes across as a hot babe surrounded by a cast of nobodies (Ok, Christopher Lloyd isn’t a nobody, but what has he done since Back to the Future?) [Ed Note: Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, hello?]. The cast’s biggest name (Tom Everett Scott) was let go early in production. The only other woman on the show is an annoying fatso and she isn’t really even part of the bookstore. Rather, she makes coffee and complains to everyone about the woes of her accurate self-assessment of worthlessness in between stealing and scarfing down pastries by the dozen off camera, serving to make Skyler even hotter by comparison, which is her only real function.

The title Stacked is an obvious double entendre that even the show’s own teasers exploited all spring. It was as if Rupert Murdoch wanted me to sit at home and exclaim “OMG are they referring to the books and how they get stacked, or Pamela Anderson’s enormous, voluptuous hooters that every man in America wants to tit-fuck, Wednesdays at 8:30 pm, 7:30 central?!?!?!’ Check out the official website to see a suggestive photo of Pamela herself (sans the rest of the cast), as well as the catchphrase, “A comedy series that proves you can’t judge a bookstore by its cover girl.’ Finally the network known for pushing the envelop of raunchiness gives us a show about a hot babe while marketing it under no other pretense. It’s no surprise that Fox signed the show even before the pilot was made, simply because of Pamela.

Now, I enjoy sex without substance as much as the next guy, so I am not going to spend so much as one moment complaining that Stacked treats Skyler as a sex object who wears revealing clothes, discusses sex frequently, and is followed by the camera each time she bends over or climbs a ladder. The only further step Fox could take would be to simply cut the dialogue and have the camera follow Pamela around for 30 minutes. Hell, I’d still watch it. Her hooters are the only necessary and sufficient reason that has me tuning in week after week. But honestly, some of the jokes are almost clever enough to create the pretense that one is watching a comedic sitcom rather than an exhibition of tits and ass. Almost.

If there is little to say about the show, it’s because it is so vacuous and hollow. It’s relying merely on its ability to attract horny guys across America with a scantily clad Pamela Anderson, and each episode is sown together with only the thinnest of storylines. I mean, here is an example of a plot from one of the episodes:

Skyler wants to get hired at the bookstore. Hilarity ensues.

Plots like this compare to the intricacies of an episode of Seinfeld about as well as a steaming pile of gorilla shit compares to Thomas Mann. Additionally, one gets the impression that Pamela is not really acting, and that she is merely playing herself on the show. However, this is only a possibility if her real self includes the following;

• She is a model
• She is a nymphomaniac
• She is a party girl
• She dates rockers
• She wears revealing clothes
• She knows famous people

If Pamela’s real life does not consist of such activities then indeed what she does on the show can be considered acting. All that’s missing from her character are some frank discussions on hepatitis c and a hatred of fur clothing. All in all, the show is not too bad… but really, not too good either. However when it comes to watching Pamela Anderson cavorting about for a half hour, what better way can a guy spend his time?

Review Posted: 7.20.05