The Girl With The Orchid Medallion

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough

Shortly after his disastrous foray into animation with Arthur and the Invisibles in 2006, semi-auteur Luc Besson announced he was retiring from directing.  Steven Soderbergh did the same thing last year.  Both have been directing since they were in their mid-twenties, and the process has clearly long since lost its appeal.  As Marcello Mastroianni, playing an uninspired director in Federico Fellini’s autobiographical 8 ½, says in a panic to his lading lady Claudia Cardinale, “Ma non c’ho niente più da dire!”  But I have nothing left to say!

"Next motherfucker tells me I have a 'bootie like Beyoncé,' I'll blow a hole in his groin with the Mossberg 500. How's my hair?"

Or, as Michael Bay’s putative natural father John Frankenheimer—who was so furious that Bay claimed to be his son that he tried to disprove it, but failed—said in an NPR interview shortly before he died, “Directing is for younger men.”  What Frankenheimer, who directed the seminal thriller French Connection, was referring to was the sort of hyper-kinetic action adventure films he helped pioneer with Connection, and which his natural son took to an extreme that I am not alone in considering unwatchable, despite the fact my dog Henry co-starred in Bay’s graduating student film at Wesleyan University.

Thugs Is Heroes, Yeah?

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough

“That was really good,” my friend Mike Poursh said the other night as the end credits were rolling after Attack The Block.  “I enjoyed it.  How come it isn’t more popular?”

“It’s in a foreign language,” I replied.  Which was just me throwing an easy zinger in there because Block is in English, of sorts.  Or rather, it’s in a heavy-duty teen slang “Sarf” London quasi-dialect, which isn’t properly speaking cockney because that comes from the East End of the city, which has it’s own particular cultural references you should trample on at your own peril.  Regional linguistic quibbling aside, the dialogue is probably too difficult to follow for many Americans outside sophisticated urban environments.  And that’s why it’s not playing in every cineplex around the country and raking it in as a sleeper hit.

We can be heroes... but just for one night, yeah? Just to fuck up dem aliens 'n shit, show dem we own dis here block. Trust!

That’s a shame because Mike is right: as far as summer creature features featuring teens on bikes who save the world against alien invasions go, Block kicks the shit out of Super 8, and does it with gusto, toking on weed, wielding baseball bats and samurai swords, and wearing hoodies.  Block was made for $13 million, Super 8 for a reported $50 million, which doesn’t include print and advertising.  I’d tack on a good $25 million more onto that fifty mill, but it doesn’t matter; Super 8 has already made a quarter billion worldwide.  Block has only made $4.5 million, and I have yet to find a friend in London who has seen it.

Ring Around A Volcano

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEWS

by James Killough

I know, I was supposed to post on Tuesday, but I’m not sure that properly speaking I had a Tuesday.  Well, I had sort of one, but it was in Delhi, which wasn’t really a Tuesday in the West, and we’re on a PST time schedule at PFC.  I worked flat-out all day, wrapped my last shoot a half hour before I travelled for twenty-eight hours home, eighteen of which were on a non-stop flight from Dubai to LA.  We had to skirt the volcano in Iceland and fly south.  The journey would have been more of a bitch than it was had it not been for the fact I was able to lie down and get a good night’s sleep, and gurgle when I was awake like a stupefied baby at the gazillion channels of entertainment on Emirates.

I would even be willing to endure a knee-lift like Demi if I thought I stood a chance with Kutcher.

I was going to blog from forty thousand feet, but I felt more inspired to watch inflight Hollywood crap.  Most of the plane was watching inflight Bollywood crap, which just goes to show that even when given the choice, Indians would rather keep it real with the caca; we will never prevail over them with our cinematic pablum.

Most inflight entertainment is crap that has just been released on DVD, which sort of justifies this mash-up of reviews.  In the case of Virgin Atlantic, which is more prone to have a selection of quality films side by side with the crap, they will often screen a British film that has yet to be released in the States, or an American one that hasn’t been released in the UK.  That’s what you get when a former entertainment company owns an airline: better contracts with the film companies. 

Desert Lesbian Realness

The best thing about these blogs is I sit here tinkling away at the keyboard some evenings — and you’d think I was high as a kite the way they come out, but I’m not, haven’t even had a drink since New Years — grinning like Liberace rolling on E while he plays the Turkish March for the blue-rinse brigade in Vegas.  Sometimes I will write something that catches me completely unaware and I snort and Coke Zero goes through my nose and onto the keyboard.

It’s not Spanking Galliano that gets me going these days, that’s sort of sad in a twisted way, and it’s certainly not the Satanic Natalie Portman.  It’s Mama Gaddafi from the House of Gaddafi.  I’m feeling a need to repost that image from an earlier blog with the caption:

Still furious about his exclusion from the seminal documentary on black drag queens,"Paris Is Burning," Mama Gaddafi from the House of Gaddafi vogues Pan-Arab Tyrant Realness while Our Fearful Leader tries not to giggle, lest Miss Thing bomb a United jumbo this time, now that Pan Am has gone out of business.

Correction: Natalie Portman IS Satan

Whaddaya know, it turns out I was prescient about Natalie Portman.  There I am trying to lure readers with silly, lurid post titles like Natalie Portman Carrying Satan’s Child, and the next thing you know, Repube presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is jumping on my bandwagon and attacking her, too.  The difference is, he’s serious.

Natalie Portman rules in hell. Let's face it, the Black Swan was so much cooler than the White, who deserved what she got, that simpering ninny. I bet there will be moments when Nats looks at her bf like this when she's giving birth.

Or Huckabee was serious until he back-pedaled and then said he was glad that Nats was marrying her boyfriend, as if the impending marriage made it all okay and legitimized the pregnancy and the relationship and crap-wallah-wallah-crap.  Okay, Mike, let’s forget for a minute how offensive that comment is to the underclass ten percent (at least) of this nation who can only legally marry their fag hags.  Actually, let’s not forget.  Cleverer political commentators than I can poke more accurate holes in you and your idiocies.  I just need to underscore how outrageous this whole marriage thing is, period.  Why don’t we simply ban the whole institution, already, there’s bound to be something unconstitutional about it.

Who The F*ck Is Brooklyn Decker?

I don’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to spell out fuck in the title.  I feel like an old-fashioned wuss.  I’ll never forget what my mum said after I gave an (extremely) drunk toast at my sister’s civil wedding in New York (as opposed to the ten-day one in India), “You said fuck nine times in your speech.  But you’re so intelligent.”  As if saying the word fuck is equated with stupidity.  And this is coming from an Australian woman; I think her own mother taught me the word to begin with when I was five or six.  But Grandma Iris taught me how to say it proper Aussie-like, in a cluster, as in “shit-fuck-piss.”  Slippery slide into American middle class mores, there, mum.  The fact that some friend of the family’s whose name I can never remember still comes up to me at cocktail parties and tells me, ten years later, how that was the best wedding speech ever is irrelevant.  I’m still a foulmouthed dummy.

I will never really know who Brooklyn Decker is because I will never see "Just Go For It," despite the fact that I really like Jennifer Aniston. This new piece of studio boardroom-generated dreck is presumably why Brooklyn has shot to number two on the IMDb Starmeter, just below the demonically inseminated Natalie Portman. Brooklyn is on the right. Apparently she plays the sweet, giddy blonde (formerly incarnated by the prototype sweet, giddy blonde, Goldie Hawn, in a previous version of the film) opposite Jennifer's savvy-sassy modern woman blonde, originally played by Ingrid Bergman, who was never blond despite being Swedish.

Yes, I’m still crapping on about the IMDb Starmeter.  Why, you ask, as you keep one eye on my blog while you prepare to download a movie from Vuze and contribute to the further decline of the movie business? (Go ahead, download.  I’ve got my fiddle ready to play when Bel Air burns.)  Well, one reason is that discussion about the Starmeter, which measures search hits of celebs on the IMDb, sort of segues from the whole intention of this blog to begin with: to increase my visibility online and drive customers to my web design and content shop, Pure Film Creative.  The other related reason is that my experiment worked yesterday: By slanderously, or as my mother might say unintelligently, slapping on that headline about Natalie Portman bearing the devil’s child, hits to my blog soared.  Sorry, Nats (I know people call you that because I used to bang one of your posse from Harvard — damned kinky bugger, I might add), but I work fucking hard on this blog and need readers, even if it’s at your expense.

So Brooklyn Decker is now number two on the Starmeter, which everyone pretends not to care about, and in fact it is kinda boring after the first three days of tinkering with it, but in reality almost everyone really wants to be as popular as possible.  You can graduate us from high school, but never take the high school out of us.

Another pic of Brooklyn Decker I downloaded from the IMDb. I can't seem to find any pix of her breasts, which would bring more hits to my blog. She looks like my former landlady, Linda Hertsgaard, whom I miss so much these days when I'm being persecuted by the execrable Susan Blais.

What do you think happened to make Brooklyn Decker, who doesn’t look like she was ever unpopular, so popular outside of the Sports Illustrated crowd?  Do you think that women ran out of this Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston rom com remake of a Walter Matthau/Ingrid Bergman original and dove to their computers and madly looked up Brooklyn Decker on the IMDb, shooting her to number two, sandwiched between two Academy Award nominees for best actress, bride-of-Satan Natalie Portman and Jennifer Lawrence from “Winter’s Bone“?  Or do you think her publicist, listed on the IMDb as Jesse Stowell, had some oompa-loompas in India or somewhere compulsively click on Brooklyn’s name until she reached the stratosphere of Starmeter-dom?  Frankly, the latter prospect sounds exhausting and ludicrous, but you never know.  People really do take this shit seriously.  I mean, look at me, scribbling over a thousand words a night sometimes trying to raise my internet presence, ten years too late.

Okay, I've sort of found a pic of Brooklyn Decker's breasts. Call them demi-breasts. Is that brown re-growth under the "blond" hair? Tsk, tsk, so disappointing.

Speaking of which, do you know what the going rate for an internet article is? One cent a word.  One cent.  To give you an idea of where we are with this, a decent traditional print magazine pays between a buck and two PER WORD.  If you’re famous, more.  That’s one hundred times more, minimum.  Oh Gaddafies of internet content, hear me: if the average web article is 450 words, one cent is less than minimum wage.  The savagery of this iniquity is almost enough to make me regret I didn’t joined the Writer’s Guild before my eligibility ran out (they never told me I only had three years after the release of my one and only feature film to be released in the US to pay the exorbitant joining fee).  I’m sure the Guild will shut down the entire internet at some point to rectify this, ‘cuz that’s the power of film, baby.

Natalie Portman Carrying Satan’s Child

The title of this is an experiment.  It seems that when I write about hookers and celebrities the hits to this blog spike.  I figured that if I threw the devil in the mix I might attract Mel Gibson’s crowd as well. Yesterday’s backhanded self-help blog, which I tried to masquerade as vitriol flung at my (in my opinion) psycho landlady, Susan Blais, has the lowest rating ever. Clearly nobody out there wants to hear about how I’m pulling myself up by my bootstraps and soldiering on.  Hmpf.  All they care about is Amanda Seyfried’s boobs.

The obdurately angelic Natalie Portman. And they complain that there are no movie stars like there used to be. Just look at that swan's neck, wouldya? If Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco, can you blame Natalie for doing one better and shacking up with the Prince of Darkness?

The reason I’m picking on Natalie is she is number one today on the IMDb Starmeter, which is a ranking of who has the most hits on the IMDb public page, as opposed to the IMDbPro page.  So by making this about her, I’m hoping for more hits to my blog when scandalized Googlers, who always suspected there was something fishy about that Portman girl, just way too nice, tune in here to get the real story about her hooking up with The Horned One.

Now, we people in The Biz are not supposed to care about our IMDb ranking, it’s decidedly not cool.  At most we use IMDBPro for its industry news aggregation and because it has a reasonably up-to-date listing of who represents what actor.  But I’ve just looked mine up for this blog (honestly, I swear, I never look at it), and I’m the 265,783rd most famous person on the IMDb, which is weird because last week my ranking was 444,840.  Hmmm. I know last week’s because the Starmeter keeps a record of it, and because last week I was writing about the IMDb for an audition web content article I scribbled for InteractMedia in which I commented about my lowly status in the industry, and I looked it up then.  So this means that people have been hitting the IMDb looking for me.  But I have had no news posted about me lately, nothing to warrant a surge of close to 50% in popularity.  I’m now paranoid.  What if it is the (in my opinion) villainous Susan Blais and her minions scouring the web for information about me to add to the pyre on which she intends to burn me alive?

A screenshot of my IMDb Starmeter page in detail. Note that I was extremely unpopular over Christmas; I dipped below one million, shamefully. Normally I would feel unloved except I remember that my bike was stolen on Christmas day, so obviously someone out there, albeit some junkie, was thinking about me.

We’re not supposed to care about this because those of us who are so lowly on the Starmeter rating system know that the big kids, the real celebs, the people ranked above 20,000, don’t give a damn about the IMDb, much less their Starmeter rating.  They don’t post pictures to their profiles, those are pulled from news services, or managed personally by IMDb staff members, I’m guessing.  I learned my lesson about this shortly after they invented the Starmeter and like a total dweeb I congratulated Louise Ward on her client Channing Tatum making the number one spot, currently occupied by Natalie Portman, who may or may not be carrying the spawn of Beelzebub; after all, her career has suddenly soared due to a horror movie, of all suspicious things.  Louise kinda went, “Huh? What’s that?  Oh, that IMDb thing.”  I felt small for caring.

The truth is there are people out there, people I work with, who do care very much about their ranking, much more than I do.  I won’t say who you are. Or maybe I will because I want your hearts pounding while you hold your breath and murmur, “Sweet, Jesus, James! Don’t let them know I monitor my rating!  I’ll option your script, promise!”  When I blog more about the HATTER dramedy two years ago, I’ll even introduce you to some characters who had pictures taken purposely, professionally for their IMDb profiles — that (in my opinion) is the height of dweeb.

I remember another Starmeter rating moment when I was having lunch at the Cannes Festival with a producer of mine in 2008.  This was the peak of my rating: I was above 70,000 that week.  When I told my colleague he said, “You bitch! Mine has never gone above a hundred thousand AND I’VE JUST PRODUCED A FILM WITH ROBERT PATTINSON.”

Yes, he’s gay.