Read the bit about Godzilla on your website. Dashed funny, & quite true. These dinosaurs, mutated newts, wildly out-of-control comets and/or asteroids, and aliens bent on destroying the earth seem to make a bee-line for New York or Los Angeles nowadays. We have come a long way from those innocent days when aliens & so forth landed at night on abandoned roads in rural America. You mentioned that Harry Shearer and Hank Azaria make appearances in Godzilla; who else from the Simpsons' cast shows up? Mr. Burns as Panicky Guy #3. Lionel Hutz as the Uptight Assistant to the Mayor.
You should include a review about Bruce Willis's The Jackal. A world-class gentleman assassin who is not nearly as sneaky or clever as the chap in the Clint Eastwood movie about the chap who tries to assassinate the president while Clint is the over-the-hill secret service chap out to catch the first chap. Be that as it may, The Jackal seems to be merely a vehicle for Bruce Willis to wear funky costumes which center about his hair. Wild, long hair. Thick, shaggy rugs, as worn by DeNiro in "CopLand" (which I rather liked). Bleach blond hair. The hair-in-a-can people must be chalking up a great commerical success right around now with all the free publicity. And it served a second great purpose: they have Bruce in disguise as a Canadian, who goes about concluding each sentence with "eh?". I always suspected Canadians do that, and the two Moulson beer guys & The Jackal confirm my suspicions.
Technology plays a problem for the ingenuous assassin. Time was when a chap wanted to kill someone, he planted a bomb under their chair. Very easy. Now, you have to leave a trail twenty miles long buying computerized techno-guns, specially prepared titanium tripods, computers, minivans, cellular phones, & rely on that errant satellite for everything to work just right. I am reminded of the Villain who captures the Heroine, ties her to a chair. Ties a gun to a tripod and a string to the trigger. Ties a second string to the first and a brick to that. Then, lights a candle beneath the second string, which burns through, the brick falls, and pulls the trigger. But Dash Calhoun, Private Investigator, comes in & snuffs out the candle, leaving the Villain with all the work to do over again. Why not just finish the job over lunch break with a gun instead of all this technical mumbo-jumbo. I do not rail against modernity; I merely point out that it has flaws.
Furthermore, while I am bitching, they do not adequately explain just what the fuck Richard Gere as the IRA (who is my natural first choice to be an Irish radical) guy has to do with catching the Jackal based on the fact that he knows a girl who once saw the Jackal. They could have saved money on Richard Gere, and got one of those shabby guys from "Clerks" and wrote it up that he had sold The Jackal beef jerkey while philosophizing about the smurfs. The FBI (which for some reason is in Russia, rather than the CIA) still has to do the exact same leg work with or without Richard Gere as the Clerk-guy, so they might as well try to save a few taxpayer dollars for the effort.
Also, why "The Jackal"? I know there is supposed to be some chap in Spain called the Jackal, which is all very cool & so forth, but this is merely cashing in on someone's misfortune at the baptismal font. To be more accurate, why not call him The Chameleon or the Funny-Haired Assassin. It does not have the same ring to it, I suppose. Far be it from me to argue with Hollywood.
Finally, The Jackal goes about the whole movie as cool as some cucumbers. At the very end, instead of blending into the crowd and disappearing, cutting his losses if you see what I mean, he makes a desperate last stand against Richard Gere, and May the Best-Looking Man Win. (Thank goodness it wasn't Keanu Reaves as The Jackal, or he would have strode about half-nekid & greased up.) And then, the Basque chick comes in to save the day, having apparently made the voyage from Virginia to some obscure Washington, D.C. subway station in five minutes. Pure bull. You could offer me a hundred million dollars to go three T stops from Park Street Station to Copley Square, and it can't be done in less than thirty minutes, even under good conditions. And yet she pops into the station, finds them in a conveniently abandoned station, and finishes up the dirty work. Boy, I didn't see that coming from ten miles away.
But, I am merely splitting those few hairs Bruce Willis has. As I say, far be it from me to argue with Hollywood. They do not interfere with treasury accounting, & I stay out of the movie business. Never the twain shall meet.
Must dash for now. Must haul ass to Lollapalooza. I have an amusing anecdote which I shall send anon about monkies running amok in the Boston Garden.
-Evans
Thanks for the review fellow Shriner! [You never did send me the info about the primates running amok in Beantown tho'.] If you want to have a review posted here, just send it to me at gleep9@hotmail.com and I'll post it up.
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