BEACH GAME!!!!

11.30.11
3:22 pm
 
Recently, I watched Danny Boyle's "The Beach".
It should have been titled "Someone Took A Shit On The Beach".
Because watching it was the equivalent of stepping in a pile of sand-covered feces on a beach...for two hours.
Danny Boyle earned a hell of a lot of cred with "Trainspotting" and lost it all on this bag of balls.
From the random character choices made by characters you didn't care about to all the pointless yelling and then the fact that the idea of paradise is a bunch of smelly hippies with an unlimited supply of weed.
Yes.
Paradise is a commune, folks.
Run by Tilda Swinton, perhaps the strangest-looking woman in Hollywood...although she was great in "Constantine".
And, at the end of the movie, all the poor, life-is-too-hard-man-so-just-roll-up-a-joint-and-let-the-sun-GOOOOOOO-BAYBEEEE!!!! stoners have to leave their sticky, green Shangri La and return to the real world.
Total bummer, dude.
I'm sure once they reconnect with their respective dealers though, that life will be a little easier.
And thank goodness for that.
I'm willing to wave away this fart of a movie simply because everything else this guy has done has been great and everybody gets one.
"The Beach" is Danny Boyle's one.
Let's move on...
 
In anticipation of Fincher's "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" remake, I've been reading up on him.
Did you know the first thing he directed was a music video for Rick fucking Springfield?
It's for a song called "Bop Til You Drop" and could not have less to do with Rick Springfield or bopping.
It (sort of) still holds up and was probably one of the weirder things on MTV at that time.
Or certainly one of the most ambitious.
After a handful of interviews, I realized two things: that he's kind of a megalomaniacal, control-freak dick (which makes for a great director) and that I need to watch more of his stuff.
I had totally forgotten that he directed "The Game" back in 1997, a movie which involves Michael Douglas in an "ARG" when an "ARG" was merely something the Hulk exclaimed in comics.
If you haven't seen "The Game", see it.
It's a brilliantly made mindfuck of a movie.
Michael Douglas is great as is Sean Penn.
Granted, it's one of those "The Usual Suspects" type revelation movies, but, also like "Usual Suspects", it's fun the whole way through.
And it still holds up.
I plan to rewatch both "Panic Room" and "Zodiac", though I remember not loving either of them.
Then, once I've gotten through them, I'm going to do "Fight Club" and "Se7en", two of my favorite movies.
Between those two and "12 Monkeys", I learned to love Brad Pitt for more than his DSLs and myriad abs.
 
So yes, in short, avoid "The Beach" like a dirty hypo lying on a beach and embrace "The Game" as the kick ass future glimpse it was/is.
 
Also, next Friday, I am going to be recording a bunch of characters for an upcoming Speakaboos project.
Google Speakaboos, think of me and then laugh and laugh.