There's a scene in the Emilio Estevez cinematic classic Freejack, where Emilio's character is eating at some really skanky greasy spoon. For some douchebag reason, Emilio feels the need to stare at some poor ugly old schmuck trying to eat his plate of slop. Eventually, the old schmuck looks up at Emilio and pulls out an old-school single action revolver and tells Sr. Estevez something like "If you keep staring at me, you'll see me kill you" and I was like Right on, Old Dude! But then punk ass Emilio pulls out a fucking Glock, places it on the table and not only continues to stare at the old dude but then starts to smile at him! Daddy-O's outgunned, so he has no choice but to go back to polishing off his dish of gruel, while bitch-ass Emilio keeps maddogging him. There was a point I was trying to make here, but I forgot, so I'll just say that I'm not kidding about Freejack being an awesome flick, 'cause it is. The fucking movie ends with a song by Scorpions during the end credits, need I say more? No I don't, so there.
Look, I understand taking notice of motherfuckers who make spectacles of themselves in one way or another, otherwise I wouldn't be able to write half the shit I'm writing. But when you go out of the way to look at your fellow man in some kinda sick "amuse me, slave" mentality, then you're just being a fucking asshole. Don't fucking look at me unless you want to fucking talk to me, is all I'm saying. Unless you're a chick, then that'll just make me think you wanna fuck me or something and that's cool.
Anyway, after seeing Valkyrie I was on my way home and I noticed a video store with a banner reading "GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE". Now for most people, that means a chance for buying cheap DVD's, but if you're like me (and I really hope for your sake that you aren't) you see this as an opportunity to look for old VHS movies. Movies that will most likely disappear after VHS and will never see a higher format release ever again. Most normal people will not shed a tear, because who wants to waste their time on shit like that? I, on the other hand, have and will shed tears for these movies when they are never seen again. So it is my mission, along with my fellow nerds, to buy as many of these movies whenever and wherever we find them. So I took a left turn and drove up to the place.
I mentioned Valkyrie in the last paragraph and that reminds me of something else. I remember about 12 or so years ago there was a review in Entertainment Weekly of Bryan Singer's first movie Public Access (here's my review: It Sucks), which had finally come out on video. There was one part that I remember pretty well, where the reviewer compared Singer with Quentin Tarantino. Both were film brats of the same generation and both were darlings of the film world at the time because of their first couple of films, but they each had differing types of film education and tastes. Bryan Singer went to USC film school and studied the classics of film and the masters of filmmaking, or as the reviewer said "Singer boned up on the good stuff", developing a keen and discriminating taste in cinema. Quentin Tarantino, on the other hand, inhaled every kind of movie in that video store he worked at, from the greatest work of film art to the trashiest piece-of-shit ever released, and to QT it was all the same. Good times equals good times to homeboy, whether it was directed by John Ford or Cirio H. Santiago.
I don't know where the fuck I'm going with this, but I guess the best way I could put this is that when it comes to movie watching, sometimes I feel like Quentin Tarantino in a Bryan Singer world. Sometimes I'll show one of these flicks to a buddy or relative and when it works, it really works. But other times I'd get the sense that he or she would rather be watching something else -- ANYTHING ELSE. So I guess the cool thing about this blog is that I can at least talk about some of this shit without wasting too much of your time. It's one thing for me to force you to sit through Master of the Flying Guillotine for ninety minutes and another for you to choose to spend five minutes reading my exaggerated recollection of it, I think. I hope. So that's where I'll be coming from when I start talking about some of these flicks. You're welcome.
Back to the video store. Lucky for me, they had quite a large collection of old VHS movies, most looking like they're just what the doctor ordered. I could watch a couple of these at night, washed down with some booze and for the next three hours or so I can forget that I live in a world of shit. Which I guess is the whole point of movies, no? Escapism? Over twenty years ago, most of these movies were sold for anywhere from $29.95 to $99.95 and today I was able to get them for .25 cents each. This is cool because it slightly muffles that part of my brain that keeps nagging me "Don't you have better things to spend your money on, you broke bastard! PRIORITIZE!". It's all going to shit no matter what, so fuck it, I say. I'll write "reviews" for them sometime soon.
One more thing. This a kind of addendum to my earlier review of the roadshow version of Che, a few blogs back. During the battle scenes in the first half of that flick, I felt something familiar about the whole deal, like I'd seen it before. Then I remembered: Guerrilla War for the good ol' 8-bit NES:
Turns out that this thinly-veiled recreation of the Cuban Revolution wasn't so thinly-veiled over in Japan, where this game was called "Guevara" and gamers actually played as Che Guevara (player 1) and Fidel Castro (player 2)! I'm no socialist or commie, but goddamn it if I don't wanna play this game right now. In fact, I will:
Viva la PSP homebrew revolucion!
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