CulturePulp.

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Drag Me to Hell' (and a hellish preview screening)

During the Friday, May 29 "Cort and Fatboy " broadcast (I turn up somewhere around 57:50):

• I put on my marketing hat to speculate about the prospects of "Up."


• A caller asks me if video games can be considered art. I answer, glibly.


• "Drag Me to Hell" makes me very, very happy. (Sam Raimi, please have a cinematic midlife crisis more often!)


• And then -- in a special podcast-only segment, starting around 1:06:45 -- I describe the Hellmouth-like screening environment in which I had to watch "Drag Me to Hell" with a seriously unwashed audience of world-class screening rats. It's an epic of muttering lunatics and flying snot. Enjoy. I didn't!

Also, between segments tonight, Cort showed me exactly how bad an Arnold Schwarzenegger commentary track can be.

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, May 29, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Drag Me to Hell'

From today's Oregonian....

Welcome back, Sam Raimi.

After disappointing fans (and, if interviews are any indication, himself) with the flabby, compromised "Spider-Man 3," Raimi apparently decided he needed to blow out the cinematic carbs. So he re-teamed with his brother Ivan (his co-writer on "Army of Darkness" and "Darkman") to make another micro-budgeted, creatively gory and hilariously sadistic horror comedy -- the sort that first made Raimi a cult sensation back in his "Evil Dead" heyday.

The result, "Drag Me to Hell," may be the ultimate commentary on the housing crisis: The trouble begins when a bank loan officer (Alison Lohman) forecloses on the home of a gypsy crone (Lorna Raver). The crone responds by putting an ancient curse on the loan officer: Lohman will be tormented by a goat-demon for three days, and then ... well, the title contains the curse's punchline.

The premise is classic "Evil Dead" Raimi, in that it exists largely to give the director an excuse to heap endless abuse on his lead. Lohman (an incredibly good sport) gets tossed hither and yon and ingests bugs, goop and, in one insane sequence, an entire zombie-gypsy forearm as she makes increasingly frantic/bloody attempts to shake the curse. You can practically hear Raimi cackling offscreen as he focuses the same, uh, oral fixation on Lohman that he used to unleash on Bruce Campbell. The low budget also brings out his gleeful old-school trickery -- the demon, for example, is realized almost entirely offscreen, with shadows, sound, music and wild camera movement creating a sense of comic dread better than CGI could ever manage.

It's too early to say if "Hell" stands alongside Raimi's raw splatter-comedy classics -- it is rated PG-13, after all, and when it isn't raising hell, it unfolds a bit more sedately than in the old days -- but Raimi as a filmmaker is clearly having more fun than he's had in years. So will his fans, I'm guessing.
_____

B-plus; 99 minutes; rated PG-13 for for sequences of horror violence, terror, disturbing images and language.

'Drag Me to Hell' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 22, 2009)

'The Bastard Spawn Speaks'

The birthparents with yours truly, early 1990s.

Here's something I don't think I've ever mentioned on my wacky movie and cartooning blog: I'm adopted, in the early '90s I tracked down my birthparents, and several years ago I gave a presentation with my bio-mom on the subject of post-adoptee reunion strategies.

Pasted below for your interest is a paper I wrote in 2000 to accompany that presentation. (You can also download it as a PDF.) It tells my side of the reunion story, as well as offering what I saw in 2000 as "The Post-Adoptee Rules of Engagement."

I suspect some aspects of my hard-liner stance on this subject have softened over time -- but in 2000 I was trying to counter the relentless (and frequently destructive) emotional/magical thinking that surrounds post-adoptee reunions and (especially) media coverage of same.

Anyway. I've always thought there might be a funny, blunt memoir in this story. Hope you enjoy it. Hope it helps. Also, Happy Birthday, Shelley. -- Mike Russell

____________

THE BASTARD SPAWN SPEAKS

In which biological son MIKE RUSSELL reflects on his post-adoptee search, his astounding good fortune, and the ground rules (as he sees them) for any adoptee looking for his/her birthparents

(Written circa February 2000)

____________

My post-adoptee birthmother search, in its entirety, took about 10 minutes.

I’m probably being a bit facile in writing that. The actual act of searching took 10 minutes — I put in a phone call to my adoption agency, asked if my birthmother was on the agency’s “reunion registry,” and got a call back that said she was — but the seeds of action had been germinating in my head for about three years prior. And the seeds of curiosity had been germinating before that for pretty much my entire life.

I was extremely fortunate that my post-adoptee reunion went very, very well. I’ll never deny that, and I’ll further admit that my success affords me a vantage point from which I can make some pretty strident remarks about adoption and the reunion process — remarks I might not be making if things had gone badly, or if I’d been stymied in my search.

Following (after the jump) are my recollections of my reunion with bio-mom Shelley Smith, and what I feel are the “ground rules” for any successful adoptee/birthparent reunion.

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Terminator Salvation' depression

During the May 21 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we spend well over 20 minutes ripping apart "Terminator 4" in rambling, spoiler-happy detail.

Discussed: Abandoned themes! Alternate endings! One-note performances! Dumb supercomputers! Dumber screenwriting!

In case you were wondering, I pop in somewhere around 1:09:30.

Cort and Fatboy (Thursday, May 21, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Brothers Bloom'

From today's Oregonian....



Writer/director Rian Johnson is a cinematic mashup artist. His 2005 "Brick" was a tightly plotted mix of Dashiell Hammett and John Hughes, in which kids in a modern suburban high school talked and murdered like they were in a hard-boiled '40s noir. (Rent it. You won't be sorry.)

Now Johnson has created another singular universe with "The Brothers Bloom." It's a con-man comedy-drama about a pair of legendary grifter siblings -- one bold (Mark Ruffalo), one meek (Adrien Brody). After a quick Ricky Jay-narrated account of their childhood that plays like "Pushing Daisies: The Movie," the adult Blooms unleash an epic, globe-hopping "perfect con" on a hobby-collecting, shut-in heiress (Rachel Weisz, who has quite possibly never been more quirkily adorable).

Johnson's mashup this time is that he sets the film in an out-of-time universe where people travel by steamer ship but use cell phones, and (more crucially) Johnson finds and mostly sustains a groove you might call "low-key screwball." The costumes are Marx Brothers-vivid (bowler hats abound), the cons and counter-cons pile on with increasing lunacy, and there are bits of well-staged, broad farce involving car crashes and explosions. But Johnson counterbalances the pleasant, old-Hollywood comic fizz by moving at a slightly more thoughtful pace and letting his leads give naturalistic performances -- performances that explore the finer points of romance, sacrifice, melancholy and sibling rivalry.

It’s a mad tonal balancing act -- a "Road" picture full of high adventure and dark emotional underpinnings -- and Johnson doesn't just make it work: His confident direction takes what could have been self-consciously precious and makes it hugely entertaining and a little moving.
_____

B-plus; 114 minutes; rated PG-13 for violence, some sensuality and brief strong language. Playing in Portland at the Fox Tower.

'The Brothers Bloom' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 22, 2009)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian'

From today's Oregonian....

It's nearly impossible to lather up much of an opinion about "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian." Like the 2006 hit that precedes it, "Smithsonian" gets off to a clunky start before becoming an inoffensively diverting, middlebrow, brightly lit all-star kitchen-sink comedy in which the joke -- the entire joke -- is that classic historical exhibits have been cleverly brought to life by state-of-the-art special effects, and hey, sometimes those living exhibits are played by comic actors who've been funnier in other, raunchier movies.

I reviewed the first "Museum" back in 2006, and just had to dig that writeup out of my archives to even remember what happened. Having done so, I now realize that I basically just watched the first movie all over again -- only slightly bigger and without Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney.

This time, Ben Stiller (now a successful inventor) has to don a security guard's uniform again to sneak into the Smithsonian, where Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan and most of the rest of the first film's exhibits have been moved into storage -- and where they're at war with evil reanimated exhibits (played by the likes of Hank Azaria and Christopher Guest) over the exact same magical Egyptian artifact from the first movie. There's a lot of pointless scampering about. The Lincoln from the memorial stands up and talks. The special effects make fine-art sculptures, paintings and photos come alive this time. Amy Adams has moxie as Amelia Earhart (and, if I may be unapologetically male, she looks remarkable in aviator trousers) -- but I'm not sure whoever wrote her dialogue has any idea how people in the '30s actually talked. And because they visit the National Air and Space Museum, planes and rockets fly around. That's kind of neat.

Your 12-and-unders will dig it, and it might even serve as a sort of movie-Bookmobile and get them to read a little history, or at least a little Wikipedia. But otherwise it's utterly dispensable.

____

C-plus; 105 minutes, rated PG for mild action and brief language.

'Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian' (The Oregonian, Friday, May 22, 2009)

'Rigoletto: The Comics Adaptation': the booklet: the giveaway

UPDATE: All booklets given away! Thank you for your interest!

So I have these ten Chick-tract-sized print versions of "Rigoleto: The Comics Adaptation." I designed this little booklet as a souvenir for the Portland Opera's cast and crew.

I will give away each of these ten copies, signed, to the first ten people to e-mail me here with the subject line "Rigoletto." (If you live outside the United States, you'll have to pay me a couple of bucks in postage via PayPal; we'll work it out.)

Of  course, if you just want to make your own booklet at home, print out this PDF and follow the instructions after the jump.

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Angels & Demons'

During the Friday, May 15 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, I pop in around 57:00 to discuss "Angels & Demons," the disappearance of Funny Tom Hanks, and breakfast-cereal energy drinks.
_____

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, May 15, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]

CulturePulp 82: 'Rigoletto: The Comics Adaptation'

So on Friday, May 8, 2009, the Portland Opera invited me and five other writers to participate in a “Blogger Night @ The Opera” performance of “Rigoletto.”

We got a backstage tour and sat at a special table in the lobby -- where (before and after the show and during intermissions) we were to chronicle our “Rigoletto” experience.

There was no way I was going to out-blog my pal Geoff, who shot the whole backstage tour with his Flip and posted the video on YouTube before the show even began. So I broke out a Sharpie and drew a “live comics adaptation” of the opera instead -- posting the drawings to Twitter as the show unfolded.

I've now organized those drawings into a linear comics format. You can read it now at Webcomics Nation. You'll also find links at the end of the comic to all the other "Blogger Night" coverage.

CORT AND FATBOY: Geeking out on 'Star Trek'

During the Friday, May 8 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, we discussed our head-over-heels nerd love of that new "Star Trek" movie. (Seriously. Loved it. Can't wait to see it again.)

I turn up somewhere around 51:00. There's an interview with Leonard Freaking Nimoy earlier in the show, though -- and from the sound of things, Fatboy roused some very non-Vulcan emotions in the man.

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, May 8, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ stream ] [ iTunes ]