A Simple Twist of Debate

Sometimes I think it’s time this web site gets back to what it was originally intended to provide: lots of book reviews. Along the way, it lost the course. This is probably because it became clear that most of the Little Cube News audience would read anything and was not very interested in quality of writing. So it only makes sense I review a book no one would find of much relevance anyway.

A Simple Twist of Fate is about the making of one of my favorite albums of all time, Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. I could not pass up the opportunity to read an entire book about a much loved record, especially since I don’t foresee even a magazine article dedicated to the making of The Doggfather or Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In being written anytime soon. The first sign of trouble was the excerpt on the back of the book – a showy account of why Dylan decided to re-record a few songs for Blood after laying them down first in New York: “It was a gamble, but one he knew he had to take.” I’ll forgive the fact (for now) author Andy Gill makes it sound like Dylan was making a decision equivalent to Kennedy’s in not invading Cuba (although I think he actually makes that comparison in chapter 6). But the inference, arduously reinforced in the book, is that the resulting tunes were superior. Meanwhile, a legion of self-important Bob Snobs will tell you that the “New York sessions” were the actual masterpiece and should never have been tampered with. Gill is not interested in opinions, though, unless they are his own, which seems to make them facts in his mind. His fawning reaches a peak when he appoints Dylan’s return in the early 70’s as the only emancipating moment of the decade, a decade he describes as a “swelling sea of MOR pablum and prog/glam fantasy.” Even if I fully understood what that meant, I have to point out that “Kung-Fu Fighting” and “Come Sail Away” came out around the same time.

Despite the awful prose, the truth is I never knew I there were so many things I didn’t want to know about this album – the kinds of microphones used, the order of every cue sheet, and the life story of every studio musician present, for example. Skip this book – but if you want a bootleg copy of Blood on the Tracks – The New York Sessions, e-mail me. It’s a much better version, anyway.

On a scale of nasal decongestants, where Drixoral is a 1 and Flonase is a 10, A Simple Twist of Fate rates a straw with a plate of Cayenne Pepper, the painful and numerical equivalent of a 3.8.

Tent City Book Club

Faced with the prospect of spending 24 hours in Tent City, Arizona’s jail for severe traffic violators and the semi-violent, I asked around for advice. Many told me to bring a book because it’s boring and hot. One guy I met in a bar told me he spent 30 days in Tent City for beating up his best friend and I needed to punch the first Mexican who makes eye contact and say, “There’ll be none of that.” I’m hoping my stay involves more of the “boring and hot” stuff than any race riots in the yard. So I have to decide what book to bring. I have a whole pile of unread ones because I love the idea of books more than actually opening one up late at night when Seinfeld reruns are on. If you have an opinion or suggestions, please e-mail me. These are my current options, provisionally ranked from least likely to most likely:

Bone – An unfortunate title, as I don’t want anyone to think it is what I am searching for in jail (or any derivatives made from adding a suffix; -er, -ing, etc.). It is also a graphic novel, which is just code for a comic book that certain adults fool themselves into thinking is OK to read past the age of 13. If geeks are treated the same way in penitentiary as they are in high school, I think I’ll pass.

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale – This autobiography of Jenna Jameson includes pictures. The negative consequences of this are many. Even if it is not taken away from me as contraband I imagine many inmates would want me to “share” it. I don’t even want to “share” it with my friends because I’ve seen what they can do to a magazine when they work together.

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind – This is a comprehensive history of large cats and their cultural impact through time. I don’t know why I bought this since I’m sure it is probably required reading for a college course out there. I don’t read books that could easily be found in a classroom (unless maybe the classroom is used to teach a course on Jenna Jameson).

Among the Thugs – This book about English soccer fans certainly has the most ironic title of the bunch. I don’t think irony fairs well when pitted against a shiv fashioned from the springs of a bunk bed, though. Plus, the guy on the cover looks like someone who I have been seeing enough of in my pre-incarceration nightmares.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – This book has the second most ironic title of the bunch (especially if I die from heat exhaustion in tent #3A). But I also have to imagine that my “prison mood” would not be enhanced by anecdotes of medical cannibalism.

Under the Banner of Heaven : A Story of Violent Faith – This is a book about Mormons. I do not expect to find and offend any members of this particular faith behind bars, plus it is a hardback, which means it would make a better weapon.

Moneyball – This is a highly acclaimed book about the quest for success in baseball. I figure the subject of sports will signify me as a “normal dude” who is at least behind the “fish that smells like fear” as a candidate for the lifers to make their wife. I should say a “lifer” is equivalent in Tent City to doing the 10-30 day stint.

The Best American Short Stories 2004 – As you can probably tell, I don’t read a lot of fiction. On the other hand, if I don’t like one story I can quickly move on to the next, which may be the most important thing when your stuck with only one book. The decision by a friend in the same situation as me to bring “Ghost Ships” was a big mistake. He thought it was a sequel to the classic horror movie Ghost Ship starring Julianna Margulies, when it was really an epic love story involving figures of the surrealist movement. The day after getting out he had a weird look in his eyes and couldn’t stop talking about Salvador Dali. Well… that and the shower raping.

Angry Snakes Vs. Undead Hookers

I have a friend named Steve who likes to pour honey-mustard on everything he eats. “It just makes things better,” he says. When a screenwriter sits down for the first time to work on a new script, he is beginning at square one. The only way he can make it better immediately is with a decision to put zombies in as many scenes as possible*. As such, it is also that much harder to screw up a movie after a positive “zombie verdict” has been reached. Actually screwing it up? That’s just like giving Steve a plate of ravioli, waiting for him to smother it in honey-mustard, then taking a huge spit on it . That’s how I felt when watching Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Except it felt like the spit was directed at my face. And since I made someone else watch it with me, it was kind of like I was responsible for the spit on her face, too. And that was barely the worst movie I saw that night.

The script of Resident Evil: Apocalypse is not so much an “adaptation” of the video game as it is a “photocopy somebody made at a Kinko’s somewhere between the offices of Capcom Games and Sony Pictures”. It has something to do with Milla Jovovich fighting zombies, devil dogs, and a monster named Nemesis that is armed with a bazooka and urinates flaming acid. Though Milla is the tacit heroine, the movie really belongs to the character who goes through half the film playing the role of “Nameless Black Pimp”. He eventually tells somebody his name is Leroy (but he will always be a nameless black pimp to be). Like any worthy post-Grecian protagonist, he has a tragic flaw and it is a predeliction for prostitutes of the walking dead. Early in the movie he crashes his car because he can’t take his eyes off the topless zombies and he is forced to walk through the rest of the movie blasting with his gold-plated pistols. The only encouraging aspect of the this entire ordeal is that there will probably be a sequel, and if anyone in Hollywood knows what America wants, the subtitle will be Leroy Jones Takes Manhattan.

As far as subtitles go, the second movie I watched that night may own the most useless ever: Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. I guess they not only wanted to attract the “crappy horror movie crowd” but the “botanists who love quests for rare flowers crowd” as well. Where zombies are the equivalent of Steve’s honey-mustard, this movie has the equivalent of Heather’s Italian dressing. This particular friend doesn’t like Italian dressing on everything, but she likes it on a lot of things. Anacondas has something that a lot of movies would be better with – a pet monkey who gives a reaction shot to everything. For instance, when the boat’s captain (piloting down a river in an Amazon forest infested with man-eating snakes) proclaims he’s “taking the shortcut,” we know the shortcut is not a good idea when the monkey slaps his forehead in exasperation. The monkey also masters the expressions of fear, surprise, jocularity, intense rage, and sadness (pictured left). It is all the more tragic that the monkey is the best actor in the film, especially considering the original Anaconda featured a flawless B-Movie cast of Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, and J. Voight!

It used to be that a midnight double-feature of movies featuring bio-engineered mutant zombies and snakes the size of freight-trains would yield something other than annoyance; maybe at the very least, some guilty amusement. I guess that’s not the case anymore. On a scale of salad dressing, where peppercorn is a 1 and honey-mustard is a 10, the combined rating of Resident Evil and Anacondas is lemon dill, the numerical equivalent of a 3.9.

* While I have not verified this theory with any scientifically accepted method like case studies or philosophical proofs, just imagine how boring Dawn of the Dead or Return of the Living Dead would be without the zombies. Conversely, there is an endless list of movies, including the Oscar-caliber likes of Rain Man and Chariots of Fire, that would be much better with a few zombies.

Kevin’s Monkey of the Week

My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys. I don’t remember much about the NFL Superbowl this year because I accidentally had my TV turned to the Animal Planet channel as the game was starting. They were running something called Puppy Bowl. It was completely idiotic – just shots of dogs playing in a cage painted to look like a football field. I spent most of the next 3 hours on the phone trying to contact anyone at Animal Planet to pitch them my idea for a little something called Amazing Monkey Bowl. I can’t go into details for obvious reasons, but once I finally get a hold of them, I think next year’s Animal Planet lineup for Super Sunday will be a little more exciting.

I did catch most of the much heralded Superbowl commercials. As usual, some of them featured apes. The one that made me the angriest was the one where a guy is disgruntled because he has to work with a “bunch of monkeys”. Of course, they literally are monkeys. I’m not even sure what the ad was for – I’m assuming cell phones or beer. But if I could boycott both, I would. Most of the animal actors, stump tailed Macaques as far as I could tell, were reduced to whoopee cushion jokes. Meanwhile, it has been proven in a laboratory setting that these chimps are more than capable of stapling, three-hole punching, rearranging boxes to save space, and collating multiple sheets of paper.

I work with a guy who can barely make the coffee the in the morning. He would be easily replaceable by most any species of simian, and I would have much more fun playing Hearts over our computer network with it. Shoot the moon, Mr. Bananas! My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys.

One Day Movie Reviews

Into the Blue - The best I can say about this movie is that it had the most gratuitous ass-shots I’d ever seen in something rated PG-13. I have to say I was both surprised and delighted by Jessica Alba’s and Paul Walker’s rear ends in what was an otherwise dull affair. The only other good part was when the gratuity proliferated to crotch shots at the end as Jessica punched and squeezed the testicles of an evil pirate lackey before tossing him in the water. Apparently, a shark smelled the blood and nuts because the pirate was soon eaten.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose – A mostly successful amalgamation of the courtroom drama and satanic horror flick. It was not the first, though, because I had a great idea for one years ago. I wasn’t sure what the plot was about even then but the trailer went something like this: An unscored, uncut scene of Michael Moriarity (reprising his role as the baddest Executive ADA in New York, Ben Stone) grilling some normal, white collar, Republicano looking dude about a horrible crime for about half-a-minute. Then he finishes a question with, “… and isn’t that true… demon?!” There is an awkward pause before the defense attorney screams, “Objection!”. Then Stone reaches under the table because he rigged a gun under there just like Gary Busey did in The Firm except this time it’s a shotgun and he pulls it out and yells, “Overruled!” The defendant hisses and shows his Vampire teeth for about a second before his head completely explodes and we see Stone standing there with a smoking barrel. The screen slowly fades to black and shows the title while we hear the judge timidly say, “I… think it’s my job to rule on objections?” That adds a moment of levity but then everything is serious again when the last shot is of Moriarty and every other great fired Law & Order cast member (Chris Noth, Richard Brooks, Jill Hennessy, Dann Floreck, etc.) standing in a sewer with flashlights and crossbows as Stone says, “Ok, let’s do this.” Granted, this would have to be an internet-only trailer because of its coolness/goriness, but I think it would build good buzz.

Murderball – This is supposed to be an inspirational film but if you are anything like me you will feel like a bad human being after watching it. It made me kind of mad that every murderballer (paraplegic rugby player) had extremely hot girlfriends. Even the Captain Dan character had one. Then I felt even worse after giggling when it showed footage from an old 80’s video about quads having sex.

No One Knows – This is a foreign movie about four young siblings who survive alone in Tokyo in a small apartment because their mom left them. This was an especially touching story for me because I think the same thing is happening in an apartment near mine inhabited by nine or ten small Mexican children. I’m led to believe this because they are always playing in the parking lot and I once glimpsed inside their doorway – the place was a pig sty and smelled like dog food even though I’ve never seen a pet in there. I’ve also seen four of the little munchkins carrying a laundry basket down to the laundry room, each one struggling to hold up his or her side of the basket. This was actually kind of cute and made me wonder if I should begin to raise them as my own. In my mind I saw a montage of us painting the walls, building some neat bunk beds in the living room, and learning to cook Ramen noodles. We would walk through Target with each of them holding onto a rope tied to my waist while we shopped for clothes. Every now and then, the one named Santiago would come to my apartment and sleep on the couch because of nightmares about the terrible things that could’ve happened to his missing mom. The movie would be called Only Nathan Knows.

Flightplan – It is annoying to me when otherwise reputable critics will sacrifice their opinion in order to include some shrewd play on words in their reviews. I can only imagine this is what happened when Roger Ebert called Flightplan “airtight”. Other recent examples might be “It doesn’t suck!” for Underworld: Evolution or “Set sail for the greatest movie of the year!” for The Island or even “That was really good!” for Crash. Needless to say, there were quite a few holes in Flightplan’s plot. Plus, it spent most of its time casting Sean Bean and Peter Sarsgaard in various amounts of shadowy suspicion in order to keep us guessing who the real villain was. I know Jodie Foster is an Oscar winner, but instead of her name above the title on the DVD, I would have liked to seen “Sarsgaard Versus Bean!” That’s something that I’ve never seen before, which is more than I can say for the movie.

Kevin’s Monkey of the Week

My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys. If I could combine two of my favorite things into one, we’d have a show exactly like Quantum Leap in every way except that Dr. Sam Beckett would be played by a mountain gorilla instead of Scott Bakula. Aside from me hitting the Lotto, I doubt this will ever happen. Fortunately, someone has combined two of my other favorite things, monkeys and video games.

Though most credit Donkey Kong as the first video game star to be an ape, they are quite mistaken. A game created in 1961 entitled Spacewars featured an enemy spaceship piloted by an evil chimp named Megator. Many apes have been featured in video games since. One of my favorites may be George from the 80’s hit Rampage. However, I think the most important has to be Dixie Kong.

She was, I believe, the first true embodiment of female equality in a video game. Before her, Ms. Pac-Man was too docile, while later heroines like Lara Croft too objectified. Dixie Kong, first appearing in an early Nintendo 64 title, was the perfect combination of grace and action. She was also the first to make it socially acceptable for a monkey to be looked upon as a sexual symbol. And let’s face it, every game she’s been in, including the new Donkey Konga, has been one hell of a ride. My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys.

3 Days From Yesterday

Once I saw The Day After Tomorrow over two months ago, my first order of business was to forget everything about it, and with any luck, that I had ever even seen it. This happens a lot when a movie’s credits begin to roll and I realize that videotaping myself banging my head in a toilet seat for an hour and a half would have been more productive, as it would leave me with video footage more interesting than the film. (This always happens when the credits begin “Directed by Roland Emmerich”. He was, of course, partially responsible for Matthew Broderick’s Godzilla among other things.)

Yet, reviewing a film now I barely remember is probably one of the least desirable positions to be in as a columnist. The only one worse is not having seen the movie at all, but that hasn’t stopped me before. The two things I do recall from Tomorrow are the storms that freeze people instantaneously and the devil wolves (pictured left). Hey, that actually sounds pretty good. Combine those with the fact the video game based on the movie apparently requires the player to shimmy through a sewer to avoid floating mushrooms (pictured right), and you have, what I believe, a fantastic combination that should prevent any movie from totally sucking: immobilizing ice storms, hell hounds, and magical toadstools. In fact, I had to wonder if my initial negative impressions were completely off base and I should rent the movie again. Instead, I just read some other reviews so I could kind of justufy writing my own.

It seems that the plot revolves around a global eco-disaster that kills half the world’s population, yet solely focuses on the journey of one workaholic dad to rescue his son. Judging by the narrative contrivances frequently mentioned by near every critic, concentrating the story on several of the stupidest and oblivious humans alive at the expense of the billions who deserved to live but were killed by monster tornados was not a smart choice. Other phrases repeatedly thrown about by professional critics were “monumentally inept”, “thick and stupid”, “dumb and flat”, and “exceptionally stupid.” I could find no mention at all of magical toadstools, leaving me to conclude the video game makers took some artistic license in the big screen-to-gameboy adaptation.

On a scale of environmental tragedy, where hurricanes are a 1 and melted polar caps are a 10, I would probably give The Day After Tomorrow the rating of an oil spill if I really remembered it, the numerical equivalent of a 2.

Boston Eagles

The Practice was one of the worst shows in all of television history, right behind Joey and One Tree Hill. Of the 15,023 episodes that aired, 9 were somewhat enjoyable. These were the last 9 because James Spader was on them. He was so good, in fact, they rolled his character over into a new a series, Boston Legal. Unfortunately, it seems the only reason he was so good on The Practice was because he finished filming the episodes before the network could even think about firing him, so his performance had a wonderful “fuck this” je ne sais quoi de chi.

On the outlandish Boston Legal, however, he has the look of a dog paid to be beaten too much by ABC. Combine that with the similar glazed look of William Shatner, and you’ve got a disaster waiting to happened. Or more precisely, a disaster that’s already happened. If nothing else, you know the show is horrible because of the way it uses funky music to signify something quirky just happened the same way a sitcom uses a canned laughter to indicate a joke that was supposed to be funny just occurred.

As you may have already guessed, the reason I called this review “Boston Eagles” is because it rhymed with the shows title, and if the Philadelphia Eagles magically turned into a basketball team and the entire franchise was traded to Boston and Terrell Owens became the best power forward in Boston since Raef LaFrenz, that whole scenario would be more believable than anything that will ever happen on Boston Legal.

On scale if insults to Boston, where the Big Dig is a 1 and Bill Buckner is a 10, Boston Legal rates a city native Barbara Walters, the numerical equivalent of a 3.4.

Kevin’s Monkey of the Week

My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys. My monkey of the week goes out to any primate who is a service monkey (it’s not what you think, I don’t love monkeys that much). Service monkeys are like seeing eye dogs, but can perform roughly 170 more life tasks than an average canine. These include dialing the telephone, making the bed, and assisting in the loading of a DVD or audio tape. They also provide love and friendship to their helpmates. I like to say, “A dog can roll over, but can he do backwards and forward somersaults, too?”

Most service monkeys are capuchin monkeys, which are slender bodied, arboreal animals. It is poetic justice that the capuchin monkey has finally realized it’s potential as a useful contributor to society, as it was the capuchin monkey that labored for so many years as a punch line next to carnival organ grinders. Of course, most any ape is smart enough to be a service monkey. In the early eighties, though, when monkeys were first being trained for assistive purposes, an incident occurred and it was decided that giving control of a silverback gorilla (and it’s ability to snap limbs) to disabled people who also generally suffer from bi-polar disorder and manic mood swings was not a good idea.

It makes me angry when these primate friends of ours are mistreated even today, as demonstrated in the recent news story about a two-year old in a supermarket who kept pulling on a monkey’s hair until he got bit. Yet, for some reason, it is not the two-year old who is threatened with being locked up. I trace the disrespect back to the 80’s horror movie Monkey Shines, which featured a service monkey trying to butcher his human companion with a scalpel. All the good that Project X had done, like teaching us that chimps could fly jet planes, was wiped out. I think it’s about time this country reexamines it’s attitude toward these special creatures. I don’t even need a service monkey, but sometimes I wish I was a quadriplegic just so I could have one. If I did have one, I would name him Frodo. My name is Kevin Shaughnessy and I love monkeys.

Amazon Movie Reviews

Starship Troopers 2: Heroes of the Federation

This was awesome. It is not as good as my favorite movie, Jeepers Creepers 2, but is still pretty good. I loved it because it was like a combination of a bunch of other movies like these:

Starship Troopers 1 (more bugs for the Federation to kill)
The Hidden (new bugs that get inside you)
Aliens (space marines get trapped)
Species 1 and 2 (a Martian girl walks around naked)
Army of Darkness (a burning skeleton)
Braveheart (decapitations)
Gremlins (one of the creatures explodes in the microwave)
Deep Space Nine (I’m pretty sure it was shot on video)

Anyway, those are just a few. I would give this 10 stars, but for some reason this only goes halfway, so I gave it 5.

Godsend

This was a pretty cool movie starring Rebecca Romaine-Stamos from X-Men and Craig Kilborn. It is not as good as my favorite movie, Jeepers Creepers 2, but is still pretty good. If you like evil kid movies, like The Good Son, then you’ll like this. The best part is that the DVD has 4 different endings. Both times I saw it in the theater it had one ending and it was the same each time.

Taking Lives

This was a good psychological crime thriller. It is not as good as my favorite movie, Jeepers Creepers 2, and not even as good as Cradle of Life, but Angelina Jolie is still very believable as an FBI criminal profiler. The best part is that you know who the serial killer is 10 minutes into the movie. Some people might say this makes it predictable, but when you know what the French cops can’t figure out, it makes you feel very smart. I don’t want to ruin the movie, but let’s just say its got a great ending. It’s even better than the new movie The Village when you finally find out that the whole thing is taking place in modern times.