I hardly ever go the movies anymore.

It just doesn’t really do it for me like it used to, and I don’t particularly miss it. Maybe it’s the idiots who can’t stay off cell phones for a whole ninety minutes. It could be that home theaters have made the movie viewing experience much more pleasurable in terms of controlling content and ambiance.

Or it might be that I just don’t really get excited by actors anymore.

I’m finding that I can’t really distinguish the latest discovery-of-the-moment from the incarnation who preceded him. Young actors are starting to all look alike to me — I’m not confident that I could pick James McAvoy, Robert Pattinson, Cillian Murphy, or Orlando Bloom out in a line-up even if one of them attacked me on the street — and there’s always some new Brit, Irish, or Australian import (sultry vamp and nekkid-ass werewolf from Being Human, you get a pass) who seems to miss the boat to stardom before I can manage to get acquainted with him. Stateside, the crop of sloe-eyed domestic actors are all like hypertrophic twelve-year-olds, forever “in search of the right girl” and apparently quoting from a callow ’50s pop ballad. Hollywood comes off, like so many formerly great American institutions, as more desultory and phoned-in than ever; just as I haven’t been buying much in the way of new music because everything is Auto-Tuned to death, I find I’m turning to cultier, more obscure movie fare from previous decades and other countries. (read the full article)

If you A) hate Disney, and B) would skim through Reader’s Digest or Cat Fancy before you would even think of touching People, then you can’t be blamed for missing Jake Gyllenhaal’s self-stroking, content-free interview which officially takes the tiara as the most unintenionally homoerotic “I didn’t get juiced for a part I was ethnically miscast for in the first place!” deflection ever put on record: (read the full article)

“I’m a dancer!”

Such is is the defiant, armored response of Showgirls’s vituperative Nomi Malone, her all-purpose deflection that she’s something – anything – more than a fifty dollar whore, a skid row stripper, a trailer trash refugee, and a girl born into the gutter.

This is a chick whose life fuel is teeth-gnashing, acrylic nail-brandishing desperation channeled to claw herself out of a hell not of her own making, and if anyone deserves to roundhouse her way up from the pavement to the penthouse, it’s her.

Nomi is your Venus.

Common sentiment is that you can’t really succeed in intending to create a cult film. Bad is just bad, but BAD – as in “Ja-mon! You know!” (to quote Michael Jackson by way of Trash Goddess Elvira) is like a solar eclipse: we may technically understand the phenomenon, but there remains something otherworldly and unknowable about it. Cult movies and figures aren’t born so much as they are adopted like the least pet shop window-presentable member of a litter, which makes Showgirls with its amped-on-all-cylinders heroine the unruly, in-heat kitty bent on biting the hand that feeds it and slinking off to the alleys as the hackle-raising Queen of The Night. (read the full article)

So as a director, you hire a witty, randy, gay Scottish actor to slum it up in your Z-grade, mostly-dubbed over monster epic. He likely takes the job as an excuse for a vacation in an exotic setting, and he’s obviously laughing during sequences that are supposed to be tense and harrowing. The time comes to shoot a key moment of romance between he and the film’s wooden leading lady after the horrible demise of another character. He’s a pro in the kiddie pool, so you let him improvise his dialogue in order to ratchet up his costar’s performance. He deadpans an ab-libbed line he assumes is destined for the cutting room floor, but because the project’s a total howler anyway, you opt to leave it in the final cut, thus ensuring Shark Attack 3: Megalodon’s ascension into immortality and the coining of a douchey come-on that’s since been used countless times but has never actually scored.

Hat tip to Michael Adams

It’s that time again when our focus drifts away from the flotsam and jetsam of Jersey Shore, Ben Shalom Bernanke and Russian douche knobs like Evgeni Plushenko, and lands like a sharp beam of light on more critical, substantial issues. Like the Academy Awards.

Because going to the movies, for me, is held in the same light as a religious ceremony (or tribunal), the Academy Awards is a particularly exciting event. I often resort to benzos the night before the awards, much like a nominee (or Barbara Parkins in Valley of the Dolls), because I can’t sleep due to nerves and ‘voices’ in my head. This year there were some genuinely stellar films and performances. Here are my winners and (sigh) predictions for winners — two notations that rarely mirror each other. Please, dear readers, add your predictions and favorites at the end of this celebration.

Disclaimer: When I take a disinterest in a film it’s for visceral, irrational reasons. The movie Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire is such a film. Wouldn’t see it. Never will see it. The obnoxious structure of the title alone was a huge turnoff. Too, the Oprah touch pushed it instantly into a kind of Hallmark meets Human Horror category, and then there were other reasons having to do with what I call ‘the emotional cow being milked’ syndrome. But I’m getting sidetracked, so here are my winners and predictions: (read the full article)

Paper-mâché dinosaurs, blue-skinned troglodytes, blond pageboy ‘dos, loincloths, chick fights, flaming swords, decapitated robots, and spacehips.

Greatest. Movie. Ever.

It’s Yor’s World…we just live in it.

When we first mentioned furries on Nightcharm, we had no idea that a movie like Avatar was in the works. The “Furry” moniker includes the the fans and artwork of anthropomorphic animal-human hybrids, typically with animal faces but human bodies and hands, and they’re often cast in a sexual context, with bulging genitals and insanely kinky sexual habits. A furry fan can design an human-animal character to epitomize her or his own personality, which is called, coincidentally, an avatar.

Which brings us to the film. Imagine slender, blue-skinned warriors with deerlike ears, polished fanged yet human-looking teeth and amazingly proportioned physiques. Their faces are vaguely feline, eyes large and yellow, their tails thin and whiplike. Imagine them running around with loin-cloths and arrows, with an intense sense of tribal duty and honor, leaping around on gigantic trees and floating rocks in a brilliant otherworld where familiar mores and taboos are unknown.

Sound familiar?

Furries have been special fodder for jokes in the online world for years, but Avatar might finally bring their anthropomorphic forms something that those with a wealth of imagination and mischievous creativity still lacked: mainstream recognition. (read the full article)