Miss Fire

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough @James_Killough

I had completely forgotten while I was watching Haywire that Gina Carano was cast from the TV show American Gladiators.  Director Steven Soderbergh has chosen to film the fight sequences without hip-hop, rapid-cut editing; rather, he holds the camera steady while we watch the real actress, not a stunt double, kick the living daylights out of actors who aren’t trained up as fighters to anywhere near her degree.

It's cavewoman week here at PFC. Above: Gina Carano for Maxim magazine.

It reminded me of when I was about nine and used to practice judo with my nanny, Diane, a horsey butch lass from Coventry with bad acne and a brown belt in aikido.  She’d just toss me across the living room like a rag doll.  Watching Carano do the same to Channing Tatum, who lists a film called Fighting in his credits, is quite something.  I’d almost say this is the first time I’ve ever felt that the female lead in a film was a bully.

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.

This Gwyneth Paltrow Has Been Sanitized for Your Protection

BAKER STREEET | REVIEW

by Eric J Baker

Think back. You’ve touched your face within the past minute or two, haven’t you? You’re probably doing it now, after running your hands over that bacteria farm of a keyboard no less. Bad move. Oh, and take that finger out of your ear. You don’t know where that finger’s been!

Those last two lines belong to a scene from the movie Airplane! (1980) in which a man offers that sage advice to another character who is using his ear for a nose. Yes, you know the sequence, but I bet you don’t know who that man was. He was acclaimed movie director Steven Soderbergh.

"Call Ryan Murphy, tell him I'm sorry I fucked up the Prince "Kiss" number in 'Glee.' And don't let that screeching harridan Madonna sing 'Like a Prayer' at my funeral."

That’s actually not true at all. I made it up. I’m sorry. But you’ll excuse me for getting confused, because Soderbergh’s new film, Contagion, dispenses the same message as Airplane! did 31 years ago: Take that finger out of your ear! It’s dirty.