Issue #28/53, December 3 - 16, 1998  

It's been one heck of a busy week here in eXile Land... parties to plan, Starvin' Ivans to feed, benefit songs and videos to record. To top it all off, some new-media drone down in sector 7-G at the Internet Movie Database referred to me as (I'm checking back in the email to make sure I get this quote right) "a jerk of the first order" (no argument here). Things have been so busy, in fact, that I've barely had time to venture out to the theaters and do what I do most frequently.

Arriving this weekend, just a few hours too late for me to have anything of substance to say, is Ronin, an apparently critically acclaimed quasi-Euro flick (it's half in French, even) starring Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Jonathan Pryce, and various other turtleneck-wearers as a bunch of aging hit-persons who used to work for top-secret government agencies all over the friggin' place. And now they're all involved in some big, hush-hush op that seems to involve the city of Paris. Oh yeah, and the title derives from Japanese legend: a samurai whose feudal master had been killed not only lost most of the respect of his peers, but was also forced to roam the countryside carrying the much less hip-sounding moniker Ronin. Such is the life of a public servant, even in the Orient of old.

Also on tap this weekend (but just a wee bit too late for my purposes) is the Jackie Chan vehicle Mr. Nice Guy. Let's give Video King (and gifted crooner, as last weekend's Bandit-Aid recording sessions revealed) Bobby Brown a crack at this one? I quote: "Jackie plays a TV chef when one day a news reporter accidentally leaves him a video tape wanted by two opposing mob groups. The mobs try to get the tape, and that's when the action begins. The film is funny--you even see Jackie make spaghetti in his own original way. Jackie uses his cool karate moves to make your mouth drop to the floor. The end scene is one of the coolest in film history with a bunch of very expensive cars being destroyed, including a Lamborghini. I almost cried." Sounds smashing to me, baby.

Naked fans might also want to keep in mind that the Cinema Museum is currently running a retrospective of early Mike Leigh films without Russian translation. This is a rare opportunity that should please the nihilist and the cheap-O eXhole in all of you. See the starred films in the listings at right for details.

By now you may be wondering if I saw any films at all last week. Well yes, as a matter of fact, I did happen to see There's Something about Mary. This mega-hyped gross-out fest is the latest from the Farrelly Bros.--and for once the hype is fairly close to the money. Having split their wad fairly evenly with the surprisingly good debut Dumb and Dumber and the disappointing follow-up Kingpin, the siblings are back with a vengeance here, literally spewing out physically discomforting scene after physically discomforting scene. And if that's not enough, you also get unflinchingly realistic depictions of the differently abled that have the dreaded wheelchair lobby on the verge of wetting themselves in anger. Although frankly, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between an anger-induced self-soiling and your everyday, run-of-the-mill Depends undergarment failure. There's also the ever-bald Chris Elliot, in yet another role that will be unfairly ignored come Oscar time. But fuck 'em, dudes. By our count (and if there's one thing we was well at back in the school it was them maths class), Chris has never been in a bad film.

The titular Mary is played by Cameron Diaz, and the "something about" her is her uncanny knack for making bottom-feeding closet psychopaths (mustachioed private detective Matt Dillon, who has even lower ethical standards than the average screen dick, posing as an architect with a summer home in Nepal; some dirthead pizza delivery guy named Tucker who poses as a tweedy, bespectacled architect with a near-crippling spinal disability; suburbanite shoe fetishist and hive-sufferer Elliot, who doesn't pose as anything he's not, as far as I'm aware) fall madly in love with her. Although Mary is possessed of many fine features (she's beautiful, kind to animals and old people and the mentally challenged, and independently wealthy), I rather suspect it is her habit of prancing around bra-less and hard-nippled--not to mention undressing in front of open windows--that has this bunch of nitwits so easily entranced. (Incidentally, she's also the offspring of an Oreo marriage, but her pale complexion and straight blonde hair are never given much of an explanation.)

Eventually, Mary sends the manipulative deviants-a-packin' and chooses long-lost high school odnoklassnik Ben Stiller (now a mildly successful Rhode Island writer who's neither a psychopath nor a bottom feeder, but rather just a neurotic, small-city dork) as the love of her life. She also disses ex-flame and all-star Green Bay Packers QB Brett Favre, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense until you remember that his persistent painkiller addiction qualifies him as a deviant and effectively overshadows his more marriageable qualities.

Even if Mary does grow a sort of tacked-on anemic heart by the end, it is the blissfully low-brow slapstick that will have the overpaid middlebrows irrelevantly yelping about immaturity while all the sensible viewers are falling out of their seats with laughter. The above-average masturbation scene (although the non-adult-cinema world has still not advanced beyond the technique used in Fast Times at Ridgemont High when it comes to depicting this most basic of sexual acts) leads satisfyingly to a dangling-semen earring becoming an unusual mousse stand-in. Mary's retarded brother Warren makes for a superb deconstruction of Dustin Hoffman's overrated turn as the autistic savant in Rain Man. The opening segment's full-frontal male nudity involving the zipper on a rented senior prom tux shows the non-starter climaxes of The Full Monty and Boogie Nights how it's done. And this is definitely a movie that has its drug heart in the right place. Completing avoiding the alternaconsumer cul-de-sac of pot humor, the film gives us a pint-sized terrier that ODs on opiates only to be revived and subsequently drugged with enough crystal meth to produce two-months' worth of eXile issues (a leather-skinned, eavesdropping Florida old maid who receives similar treatment soon gives up on the booze to become an after-hours vacuum aficionado).

Now for the real shocker. I had no choice but to watch the movie with a dubbed translation, and I didn't regret it. I even laughed audibly--loud and repeatedly. The translation was extremely well done (even going so far as to Russify the Jonathan Richman street-musician interludes, which is unfortunate) and apparently free of any "what the fuck did he say?" howlers. It might even be a blessing in disguise to hear some anonymous Russian actor filling in for frequent cringe-inducer Stiller. Which makes this is one of those rare occasions when you have my express written permission to go watch a dubbed movie. You could wait a week to see There's Something about Mary in unadulterated form at the Dome Cinema--but then there's no guarantee you'll be able to hear what the people are saying anyway. On the other hand, you will at least have a fighting chance of hearing some new Jonathan Richman tunes. I leave the decision up to you.