This week on Alcohollywood, Mystery Month continues with the 1999 superhero comedy Mystery Men! This Schumacher-tinged tale of a group of misfit superheroes who attempt to save Champion City from the evil Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) is definitely interesting in concept – and bolstered by a great cast – but the script is incredibly spotty. Director Kinka Usher’s schizophrenic direction and the poorly-aged music and song choices don’t help, but the film manages to find quite a few moments of deconstructive superhero comedy (despite this leading to a film that doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts. Guest Jesse joins us for our review and drinking game, along with a quiz – check it out!

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Psycho-frakulator

2 parts lemon vodka

2 parts cherry rum

2 parts gin

2 parts silver tequila

1 part triple sec

1 part blackcurrant liqueur

4 parts watermelon juice

1 part lime juice

2 parts lemon-lime soda

Combine liquors and juices and shake; top with lemon-lime soda.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime a character delivers a pun

2) Drink for uncomfortable close-ups of characters’ faces

3) Drink every time a character explain their superpower or gang-related gimmick

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The Shoveler (William H. Macy) says “Now do we go out there and kick some Casanova butt…OR DO I EAT THIS SANDWICH?!”

Join us next week when we take a look at the 1930s horror-mystery film Mystery of the Wax Museum!

Despite its morbidity, it used to be super-popular, to the point where you’d be as likely to see a print of Isle of the Dead in a German parlor as you would be to see a poster of Bob Marley or John Belushi in a college dorm room today.  Even Hitler (yes, that Hitler) hung an original Isle of the Dead in his office.  (It is not known whether Böcklin owned any of Hitler’s paintings, but it is unlikely because Hitler was a shitty painter and an asshole.)  Part of the appeal of the painting is its vivid symbolism.  It evokes a mood; it tells a story.  It’s hiding something.  It has an awe-inducing stillness, a serene, perfect, beautiful gloom.  There’s a movie, also titled Isle of the Dead, and it takes place in that painting, and all of the same descriptors apply.  Scroll up and look at it again.  What do you think happens on this island?  Did you say, “a small group of people combat superstitious paranoia and a plague outbreak during the Balkan Wars?”  No?  Well, it’s open to interpretation.

Isle of the Dead—I’m talking about the movie now—is one hell of a scary story.  It doesn’t jump out at you and make you scream, but instead it aims to unnerve you, to creep into your thoughts and stay with you all day, like a bad dream.  The setting itself is a cramped, confusing mess of mausoleums.  Outdoors, the shadows hang heavy and thick, and indoors, the walls and ceilings do the same.  In the beginning, when director Mark Robson frames his actors, he doesn’t allot any extra space.  His cast fills the screen to the edges.  There’s nowhere for them to go.  Later, as the plague begins picking off the characters one by one, he allows more negative space, and the island, by contrast, begins to feel very empty indeed, but no less claustrophobic.

But what really anchors the terror here is the irreplaceable Boris Karloff.  Karloff is best remembered as the monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein, a performance which made him a cultural icon overnight.  The blessing of such a role is that it will be remembered forever, and the curse is that it continues to overshadow the rest of his body of work.  Karloff starred in 14 other films… in 1931 alone.  He acted in about 160 films throughout his career, many of which cast him as some variation of ghoul, mummy, or warlock.  In Isle of the Dead he plays a general in the Hellenic army.  He’s even more terrifying without monster make-up.

In the opening scene, Karloff is washing his hands.  Across the room, one of his errant colonels begs for mercy as he’s stripped of rank.  Without a single word, Karloff hands him a gun and sends him outside the tent.  We hear a gunshot, and Karloff nods approvingly where a compassionate man would have flinched.  So intimidating is General Karloff that he can spook his troops into shooting themselves with a stern glance.

Oh, and the colonel’s crime?  Tardiness.

But Karloff’s general isn’t merely a single-minded tyrant.  On the contrary, the fact that he can also laugh and enjoy a glass of wine only makes his menace more unsettling.  The trait that makes him a good general also makes him an evil person.  He can commit atrocities, and justify them, and still love life and sleep well at night.  He isn’t heartless.  The whole reason he’s on the island is to visit his wife’s grave.  When he arrives he finds that all the tombs have been picked clean by robbers since his last trip.  Fittingly, they’re refilled by the end of the film.  Because while he’s touring scenic Cemetery Island, plague strikes, and Karloff intends to fight it off the same way he fought off the… who did they fight off in the Balkan War?  The Ottomans?  I think it was the Ottomans.

Unfortunately, Karloff doesn’t have his army with him.  He’s used to commanding people, not cajoling them.  And even when these civilians obey him, they still end up dead.

A major theme of the film is that evil thoughts and emotions have a will of their own.  Helene Thimig, the resident old peasant woman claims that an evil spirit is to blame, and that Ellen Drew is possessed by this spirit, and after all of the really sane people die, Karloff starts to believe her.  He slowly transforms from a practical, tactical atheist into a Greek Van Helsing.  It makes sense contextually.  In this movie we never get a sense of where off-screen characters might be, or where they might come from, or what they might be up to while we’re not looking at them.  The uncertainty breeds suspicion, and Karloff, desperate for a solution, starts thinking, “Could Ellen Drew really be a Greek vampire?  Well, I don’t know for sure, but not killing her hasn’t stopped anyone from dying…”  These pernicious ideas spread faster than any plague, and are more damaging than an actual vampire spree.

Of course, there’s no real monster on the island.  The humans fulfill that role well enough.  But it’s not just a pissing-contest or a blame-game that gets out of hand.  What’s really scary is that everybody’s on their best behavior, doing their utmost to be rational adults in a time of crisis, and they still end up burying each other alive.

The Great Gatsby / dir. Baz Luhrmann / Warner Bros. Pictures

Baz Luhrmann has long been known as a purveyor of spectacle: from Romeo + Juliet to Moulin Rouge and beyond, the Australian director has a penchant for loud visuals, boisterous atmosphere and a frenetic sense of storytelling. With his latest film, the newest adaptation of the infamous Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann both expresses reverence for the source material and makes it his own – the results are a bit mixed, but it’s fun nonetheless.

The film follows Nick Carraway (a doe-eyed Tobey Maguire), a recovering alcoholic whose therapy in a 1920s sanitarium involves writing about his experiences in the nouveau-riche West Egg, at the height of the Roaring Twenties. Most importantly, Nick documents his encounters with reclusive millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio, acquitting himself tremendously to the material), his cousin Daisy Buchanan (an effective, but slightly unchallenged Carey Mulligan) and her husband, boisterous blueblood Tom Buchanan (an intense Joel Edgerton), in a tale of debauchery, love, greed and death – all components of the great American story. The film, like the book, is deeply introspective, with Nick constantly attempting to chip away at Gatsby’s façade to find out what truly makes him tick.

First, the positives: the movie looks gorgeous. Luhrmann’s hyperkinetic style can grate to those who aren’t open to it, but he knows how to perfectly capture and update the kind of empty spectacle that was the hallmark of the Roaring Twenties. Gatsby’s parties are depicted with the kind of circus-like insanity of modern club culture (combined with the bacchanalia of the Moulin Rouge in his prior film), yet the later parts of the film slow down tremendously to allow the characters and scenes time to breathe. West Egg and East Egg are divided by an impenetrably foggy river, a visual symbol carried over from the book to show the diametrically-opposed cultures of old rich and new rich that was the novel’s bread and butter, and even the rare moments of humor are well-paced and subtle. As per usual for Luhrmann, the art design is phenomenal, and the costumes are effortlessly stylish (definitely one of the big highlights of the film – Gatsby and Nick sure wear some snazzy suits, and Daisy’s outfits are perpetually gorgeous).

As for the performances, they’re mostly excellent; DiCaprio and Edgerton stand out especially as Gatsby and Tom, respectively. Leo carries himself with the kind of desperate grandeur and delusion that one would expect of a newly-rich man whose own story is shrouded in secrecy. DiCaprio’s performance is self-assured, yet anxious; you can tell that his confidence is all on the surface – an attempt to hide the insecurities he has regarding his true identity. The cracks that show in his friendly demeanor (given sufficient pressure) are evident throughout Leo’s performance. This makes for one especially great scene where Gatsby is crippled with anxiety over the prospect of meeting Daisy again – filling Nick’s home with flowers and anxiously breaking Nick’s clock on accident. Meanwhile, Edgerton is the id to DiCaprio’s ego; Edgerton is all bluster and swagger in his wonderfully imposing performance, his square jaw and angrily slack face personifying Tom Buchanan’s need to maintain control and power over those around him.

Where the movie falters, however, is in the sum of its parts; for one, the pacing is a bit wonky. I appreciate on an artistic level the fact that Luhrmann front-loads Gastby’s bashes at the beginning of the film, lending the rest of the film that kind of lazy melancholy that people feel at the tail end of a dying party. At the same time, it does make it a bit of a slog to watch, as the pace remains fairly slow for the last hour-and-a-half of the film.

The framing device of the film (something missing from the book) is also a bit unnecessary; just because your film is based on a book doesn’t mean you have to have the characters read it out for the audience. It does play into the film’s themes of authorship of your own life (Gatsby attempts to rewrite and reinvent himself, as Nick attempts to rehabilitate himself and Gatsby’s reputation through the book), but the intercutting kills the pacing, and Nick’s narration often redundantly describe the actual events happening on screen. Were it not for Nick’s status as the audience surrogate, his role would be almost entirely unnecessary after Tom and Daisy reunite, making it difficult to identify with him. At a certain point, his role in the film is relegated to reading off Fitzgerald quotes from the book as they appear on screen, which eventually wears a bit thin.

The Great Gatsby is a bit of a mixed bag; some good parts, some bad – the film’s biggest (and only real) crime is that it can be boring at times. The film doesn’t do as much with Fitzgerald’s socioeconomic themes as I would have liked, eschewing greater exploration of the conflict between old-rich and new-rich that was at the heart of the novel  in favor of the romanticism and drama of Jay and Daisy’s love story. All the same, this is, surprisingly, one of Luhrmann’s more restrained efforts; he seems to leverage his own opulent style to draw in audiences, only to draw them into the enigma of Gatsby and the anxious desperation of his character – the other true appeal of the film. (Oh, and the 3D is worth it, so you won’t be disappointed if you take that option.)

In short, Luhrmann’s style (and the film itself) is summarized in one interesting exchange during that aforementioned flower scene. The house absolutely filled with flowers, Gatsby asks nervously, “Do you think it’s too much?” to which Nick hesitantly replies, “I think it’s what you want.” Love it or hate it, The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly peak Luhrmann.

Clint’s Verdict: Liked It

Drinking Rules for The Great Gatsby:

1) Drink whenever Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) calls someone “old sport”
2) Drink whenever you see someone with a drink in their hand
3) Drink every time anachronistic music plays

Finish Your Drink When:
Nick says, “They’re a rotten crowd. You’re better than all of them put together.”

Join us next week when Clint reviews J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness and the Michael Shannon thriller The Iceman!

This week, we continue Mystery Month with the 2010 wire-fu historical action flick Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame! In 7^th century China, in the wake of a series of mysterious spontaneous combustions, Detective Dee (Andy Lau) is brought in to stop an assassination attempt of Empress Wu on the eve of her coronation. Director Tsui Hark and fight director Sammo Hung provide some great wire-fu action sequences amongst the absurdly-convoluted plot that is typical of these kinds of Chinese epic modern films. All of this is framed with a Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes-esque production design, with copious color timing and CG backgrounds used to emphasize the sweeping vistas of historical China. Despite the sometimes-confusing nature of the plot and the dry characters, there’s plenty of great action choreography and some insane images (watch for some deer-on-man kung fu action) to make it worth a watch. It’s available on Netflix, so be sure to watch with our review and drinking game below!

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Deer Punter

2 parts torched cherry-flavored rum (Bacardi)

1 part cinnamon-spiced whiskey (e.g. Fireball)

1 part red apple juice

2 parts red bell pepper juice

1 part spicy ginger beer

Cinnamon bitters

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime you see ropes and/or chains

2) Drink whenever you see extensive CGI backgrounds

3) Drink whenever someone says the word “Empress”

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Dee says, “Shatuo…Do you still remember Donkey Wang?”

Join us next week as we leap forward to the 1990s and solve the mystery of the superhero comedy Mystery Men!

It isn’t so easy to be unobjectionable when the subject of your biopic is composer Scott Joplin, because Joplin died of syphilis at 48, and you can’t catch syphilis from a piano, if you get my meaning.  Scott Joplin: The Story of a Man and His Music and also the Brain Disease he Picked Up from Some Whore is not a movie that will air on ABC.  This movie is a curiosity because it attempts to address the issue of the sexually-transmitted disease that took his life, as well as the life of his child, without directly implicating Joplin as accountable.

One day, Joplin is minding his own business, playing a piano in a building that happens to be a brothel, when all of a sudden, wordlessly, a mysterious siren appears.  She does a sexy dance and drags him upstairs while he’s helplessly trapped in the spell of her strange lady-magic.  That’s how the movie sells it, anyway.

Billy Dee Williams’s performance as Joplin is completely at odds with that sort of honey-coating, and he sets aside his famed playboy persona to fill the character with guilt and self-consternation.  When the disease first starts to attack his nervous system, and his hands quake and freeze at the piano, you can see what he’s thinking: “How could I have been so stupid?”  He doesn’t blame life, or the woman, or even the disease.  He clearly hates himself for jeopardizing his greatest passion by indulging a lesser one.  Those expecting a jovial, freewheeling Lando Calrissian-as-Scott Joplin will be disappointed.  Even from the start, Williams’s Joplin presents a humorless dignity.  Music isn’t fun for him—it’s gravely important.

Attempting to outgrump him is Art Carney, the surly music producer who signs him to his label.  By which I mean Carney prints sheet music of his songs so that people can play them on their own pianos at home.  One cool thing about the turn of the 20^th Century, this movie reminded me, was that there was a musician in every home.  If you wanted to hear music, you had to play it yourself.  I think, for that reason, people appreciated music more back then, and they really did take it more seriously, as Williams does here, because it actually required effort just to listen to it.

As you might expect, the music—all Joplin’s—also has a starring role in this movie, which takes any montage, concert, or travel sequence as an opportunity to play one of his rags in its entirety.  But only the ones that you already know from The Sting.  We hear “The Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer” at least three times each, while some of his less well-known but superior works like “The Magnetic Rag” are neglected entirely.  Joplin composed hundreds of such songs in his short lifetime, all of them dazzling, and this film could have exposed casual admirers to more of his ouvre, especially since the rights to his songs are as cheap as free.  Instead, Scott Joplin falls into a common failure of the biopic: expecting the audience to “get” that a thing is important because they recognize it from somewhere, rather than letting the thing, in this case music, stand on its own merits as it has done for decades.

Scott Joplin presents its title character as a genius unappreciated in his own time, who wanted only for his music to be heard and enjoyed by others.  The film closes with Joplin disappearing down a snowy alleyway to go die alone and penniless somewhere, as Carney narrates an epilogue explaining that, yes, that was Joplin’s music in The Sting, and he won a Pulitzer too, and you half-expect him to say “and now we’ve even made a movie about him!”  And that’s supposed to be the note of triumph.  But what the epilogue doesn’t say is that people listen to his music all the time now, because we definitely don’t.  Being “the guy whose music was in The Sting” was not the summit of his aspirations, and the reference does him no favors.  His ambition for a real audience remains unfulfilled.  This movie could have helped change that, but in the end, it’s about as inspiring as a paragraph in a music history textbook.

Iron Man 3 / dir. Shane Black / Walt Disney Pictures

Now that “Phase One” of Marvel’s all-encompassing, homogenized marketing bonanza is over, Phase Two begins with the third Iron Man film. While we’ve covered the first two Iron Man films on the show, and I came away feeling that the second film was probably the weakest of the Marvel movies so far, my heart was lifted once I found out that Shane Black, writer/director of the hilarious Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and 90s action movie wunderkind, would be taking the reins. I can’t really say I was disappointed with Iron Man 3, but I can say it delivered just the right amount of entertainment that I expected and no more.

Like both Iron Man films before it, the film’s chief subject is Tony Stark himself (always played with a deft hand by Robert Downey Jr. – his is one of the best casting decisions a superhero movie has made, and Black already knows how to handle him quite well). This time around, Tony’s having nightmares and PTSD from his brush with death in the climax of The Avengers, leading him to become more emotionally and psychologically dependent on the suits, tinkering around with about 30 new prototypes in the intervening months since the New York alien attack. Meanwhile, a mysterious pan-Asian terrorist named The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) is sending out mysterious, ominous broadcasts while performing terrorist attacks. After Tony’s right hand man Happy (Jon Favreau) is attacked and put in a coma for the rest of the movie – a fun wink to the fact that Favreau is giving up the helm to Black for this installment – Tony sees his home and his suits taken from him, leaving him to finish his investigation with only his wits and whatever friends he has left.

The humor of Iron Man 3 is most definitely its strongest suit – Black has a great eye for comedy, as evidenced by the early acts of the film where Tony has to work on his own with few resources. In this way, we see Tony’s personality meld a bit with his KKBB protagonist Harry Lockhart, as he fumbles and stammers his way through detective work, this time with the help of a little kid named Harley, to a) find the culprits of a series of mysterious bombings and b) get his groove back. Tony works on his own for most of the movie, relying on his wits, his inventiveness and what little bits of the Iron Man suit he can use to dispatch his foes – there is many a scene where all Tony has to defend himself is one Iron Man glove and a stolen gun. Iron Man himself is barely seen in this film, and when the suits show up they are frequently shown to malfunction or become really flimsy – Tony has let Iron Man get away from him, and the lesson he has to learn is that he, not the suit, is Iron Man.

**SPOILERS**

The only real weakness in the film is its final act – while the reveal regarding the Mandarin is sly and unexpected (and Ben Kinglsey really sells it) the film’s real villain (played by Guy Pearce) leaves something to be desired. In effect, Pearce’s Aldrich Killian is an even more spiteful and physically active version of Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer, without the nervous charisma that made Hammer one of the few great parts of IM2. I really adored Black’s commentary on the Mandarin as the same type of Othered, Orientalized figure that cable news teaches you to fear – the amalgamated puddle of everything “not American” that leads the public to have a specific enemy to rally against.

At the same time, I wish they’d followed the reveal with a more interesting villain, and a slightly less messy climax (there are so many things going on in that final action scene that it feels a bit rushed). The “Extremis” subplot also gives us a few subtle notes on the poor treatment of veterans once they return from active duty – two of Killian’s major henchmen are injured vets who come home to small-town America with little to fall back on. However, the effects of Extremis themselves are fairly weak, turning the bad guys into vaguely glowy guys who can breathe fire and are super strong. Still, I should count my blessings – this is the first Iron Man movie where he’s not fighting other Iron Men.

**END SPOILERS**

In conclusion, I did very much enjoy Iron Man 3 – this film, more than the other Marvel properties, has its own feel and atmosphere to it, with Black’s fingerprints all over the final product. It may not gel as completely with the other films, but that’s a good sign; despite a somewhat sloppy final act, Iron Man 3 is extremely entertaining and a nice breath of fresh air from the straightforward Marvel movie universe.

(On a side note, further kudos go to Brian Tyler for finally giving an Iron Man film a good score – the hero himself finally has a discernible musical motif, and the end credits surf rock-inspired jam is a blast.)

Clint’s Verdict: Liked It

Drinking Rules for Iron Man 3:

1) Drink whenever someone puts on (or takes off) any part of an Iron Man suit
2) Drink for the usual Tony Stark quips
3) Drink whenever you see a quick scene with Pepper or Rhodes, reminding us that Gwyneth Paltrow and Don Cheadle are, indeed, in the film

Finish Your Drink When:
Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) says, “That was really violent!”

The Reluctant Fundamentalist / dir. Mira Nair / IFC Films

If Iron Man 3 points its finger at you and laughs for ever buying into the Islamic caricature of The Mandarin,  The Reluctant Fundamentalist attempts to explore the attitudes that go into that Otherization. Based on the 2007 novel, acclaimed Indian director Mira Nair tells the story of Changez (a captivating Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani man who moves to America to find success on Wall Street. Getting in the good graces of Jim (Keifer Sutherland), the head of a financial analysis firm, he finds himself living the American Dream – he gets himself a cute American girlfriend (Kate Hudson), he dresses in tailored suits, and has a tight-knit group of work friends. However, after September 11 hits, he finds himself in a much different world than he entered: one which distrusts him and his loyalties because of his nationality. This leads him on a journey that places him in the middle of a tense hostage situation in his home country, with only the good graces of a sympathetic journalist/government agent (Liev Schreiber) to possibly save his life.

Nair’s film takes on the unenviable task of exploring the post-9/11 Islamophobia that struck the nation in the wake of those attacks, and how people who are the recipients of that profiling might feel. Ahmed is a revelation here, a tightly-coiled ball of self-confidence and idealism who constantly battles against the cynicism and darkness that poisons the American Dream he so believed in. One constant mantra of his is that he “loves America”; over the course of the film, characters (and the audience) examine what that means and how that changes once he discovers that America might not love him back. At every turn, Changez increasingly gets the impression that the Westerners around him either fear him (as in the number of scenes where he is interrogated and violated by airport security, Homeland Security, etc.) or fetishize him (his colleagues treating him like their token Arab, his girlfriend being revealed to use his ethnicity as the crux of her modern art project).

There is a constant push-and-pull for Changez, as his family and countrymen look down on him for embracing the culture and ideals of the capitalist West. Changez comes to America looking for a level playing field in life; the implication given is that the events of 9/11 tilted that field, killing the American Dream in the process. Though Changez is shown to be dramatically affected by these attitudes, the character remains problematically saintlike; there are far too few moments where we see him doubt his love for America – he merely hates the Americans who don’t seem to get how good they have it. Nair plays with these ideas, but never really comes to a satisfying conclusion; the implication is that he still ‘loves America,’ but what that truly means to him is never fully explored.

Despite the interesting drama of the America segments, the Life of Pi-esque framing device of the film (in which Schreiber listens to Changez’s life story in Pakistan to get possible information on a missing professor) actually comprise the film’s biggest stumbling block. By alternating these redundant, 24-esque political thriller scenes with the actually intriguing story of how Changez evaluates his relationship to his home, the film flits about schizophrenically in tone. While Ahmed and Schreiber make those scenes very watchable (they’re fine actors), they really clash with the rest of the film – I would have much preferred to just watch Changez’ journey from seeker of the American Dream to teacher of the new Pakistani Dream.

Even within that context, some of the events in the film are fairly convenient (ill-timed texting of siblings being confused for terrorist activity, Changez’s friends happening upon government agents ransacking his office, taking a cell phone picture of it and getting away, etc.). However, much of this is in service of a larger melodrama, which touches on the notion of misguided assumptions and expectations, as well as the danger of cynicism in a post-9/11 world. Nair directs with aplomb, and Michael Andrews’ Eastern-influenced score is effective. It’s all very workmanlike in its presentation, effective but unremarkable but for the stellar performances by the majority of the cast – Ahmed and Schreiber are fantastic, as is Kiefer Sutherland and Om Puri (playing Changez’ father). Hudson is merely serviceable in an admittedly underwritten role; one has a hard time telling if her aloofness is purposeful or a shortcoming in the performance. While I wish it had narrowed its focus onto Changez’ disillusionment and not shoehorned a half-baked Tom Clancy novel throughout the film, it’s a perfectly well-executed film that succeeds in its goal in challenging expectations and starting conversations about the perception of the East by the West (despite doing it with the subtlety of a sledgehammer).

Clint’s Verdict: Liked It

Drinking Rules for The Reluctant Fundamentalist:

1) Drink whenever someone gives Changez a suspicious glare
2) Drink anytime the film switches chronology (e.g. skips forward to Schreiber conversations)
3) Drink anytime Changez says “America”

Finish Your Drink When:
Changez says, “Some truths take their time.”

Look out for next week’s reviews, as Clint dives into the Roaring Twenties with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, and Eli Roth’s new horror flick Aftershock!

This week on Alcohollywood, we start Mystery Month, where each week in May we take on a new movie with the word ‘mystery’ in the title!  Starting off, we talk about 1989’s Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train, a strange and hip anthology film featuring three stories of people (both native and tourist) navigating the magical crazyland known as Memphis, Tennessee on the same night. From a disaffected young Japanese couple seeking the home of rock stars, to a lost Italian woman trying to find her way, to a trio of locals out on a night of crime, the movie is an exercise in effortless meanderings, with Jim Jarmusch’s naturally underplayed style out in full force (along with a great rock-and-roll soundtrack). Musicians like Joe Strummer and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins interact with idiosyncratic character actors (Steve Buscemi, Rick Aviles) to create a weird soup of rock history homage and quirky character study. Check out our review and drinking game here!

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Memphis Lost

Peanut butter

Milk

1 part crème de banana

2 parts spiced rum

Blend peanut butter and milk; combine 2 parts PB-milk and remaining ingredients, stir.

RULES:

1) Drink for Japanese mispronunciations of American musicians

2) Drink whenever any character says “Elvis”

3) Drink whenever a character takes swigs of alcohol

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The devilish hotel desk clerk (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) says to his bellhop, “Say, do you have any more of those Japanese plums, or any other exotic fruits from around the globe?”

Join us next week, when we continue Mystery Month with the Chinese historical fantasy Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame!

Cagney, surrounded by a uniformly qualified cast, plays a Coca-Cola executive trying to move his product into the communist market, when he’s tasked with babysitting his boss’s näive, impressionable—actually, let’s just go ahead and call her stupid—daughter.

One, Two, Three takes place during the Cold War, with scenes on both sides of the Berlin border.  The sudden construction of a certain wall there interrupted filming and destroyed much of the comedy’s box-office appeal.  Though a comedy about a global crisis made during that crisis may not always make money in its own time (see also: Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be), history may be kind enough to increase its value, transforming a bleeding-edge satire into a fascinating time capsule.  For this transformation to take place, however, the satire must be great to begin with, and luckily that duty rested in the hands of its director and co-author, Billy Wilder.

Wilder’s body of work includes some of cinema’s most beloved comedies, but Wilder doesn’t really shoot comedies; he shoots sober, calculated documentations of an insane world.  One, Two, Three gives us a few examples of this.  Firstly, in how he deals with the problem of laughter.  In a live theater, you can pause for laughter, and if you need to extend the pause or skip it altogether, you are afforded that agency.  In television, you can add a laugh track, so that even if a joke doesn’t take, it at least won’t be followed by complete silence.  Film is not allowed these luxuries*, and there is nothing more painful than the morbid silence following a D.O.A. gag.  You either have to have an instinct for how long audiences will laugh at a joke—an instinct that quickly disintegrates once you’ve watched the scene sixty times in the editing room—or, you can do what Wilder does here, and say “Fuck pauses.  Fuck laughter.  Just keep the thing moving.”**

Rather than suffocating his film with distinct punchlines and pauses—the conventions of an alien medium—he instead suffocates the audience with their own laughter, which takes advantage of the durability unique to his medium.  It’s the Marx Brothers’ approach to farce.  Let the folks miss a gag or two or twenty.  It’s film.  If they miss something, they can buy another ticket and see it again.  I started out making notes of especially funny lines and moments  to share with you, but I’m afraid I was overwhelmed by them and had to give up about fifteen minutes in.

On top of that, and ultimately necessary to the success of this picture, is Wilder’s precision, both as a director of actors and of images.  It’s easy to aim for breakneck pacing and it’s just as easy to end up with sloppy execution.  The seemingly intuitive staging and framing of One, Two, Three is exactly what Great Guy was missing.  The mark of a great director is that you can pause their film at any random point and the composition of the image, now removed from its context, will still tell a story.  I paused this film many times before I simply stopped taking notes.  Images of ex-Nazi Coca-Cola employees standing at attention for their chagrined employer; of untethered balloons that say “YANKEE GO HOME” drifting into the sky; of Russian spies who lean in and menacingly glare at your face even as they shake your hand and say hello.  It’s an amazing, impossible list of details to compile.  Oh, and you know what?  The dialogue’s pretty swell, too.

*I’m not sure why there’s some kind of rule against laugh tracks in film, but I wish there was a rule against them in general.

**Not an actual quotation of Billy Wilder.

Pain & Gain / dir. Michael Bay / Paramount Pictures

Michael Bay is, to put it mildly, a divisive filmmaker – his works have been called some of the worst movies ever made, and his love of explosions, hot chicks and fast-paced entertainment have earned him pejoratives like “hack,” “MTV frat boy,” etc. To an extent, I can most certainly agree that some of his most popular and well-known films (the Transformers series, Pearl Harbor) are greatly dumb, and often quite clumsily put together. However, he’s still the guy who has made surprisingly decent schlock like The Rock and The Island, and few can argue that he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. With Pain & Gain, Bay has actually managed to shake the constraints of big-budget action fests and done something that fits his Miami Vice-on-crack visual style: make a hilarious crime comedy on par with the Coen Brothers’ Fargo.

The film follows the “unfortunately true” story of Daniel Lugo (a pumped Mark Wahlberg), a disenfranchised personal trainer with an eye for the American Dream. Obsessed with his body and the prospect of becoming what a sleazy self-help guru (Ken Jeong) calls a “doer” instead of a “don’t-er,” Lugo brings on two of his bodybuilder friends – steroid-pumped impotent dumbass Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and ex-con born-again gentle giant Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) to kidnap, torture and extort money from Jewish fat cat Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub).

Here’s where it gets interesting, though, and the comparisons to Fargo become more appropriate: these three are complete and utter dumbasses, and their plan (and lives) start to quickly fall apart under the weight of their egos, their inexperience and their sheer, ballsy naïveté. Bay makes great use of multiple voiceovers and narration to give us the inside scoop on each character’s motivations and principles, including Kershaw and the PI he hires (Ed Harris) to get revenge on the guys who stole money from him. As usual, Bay’s direction is slick, but now that he doesn’t have to focus on blinding, incoherent action, the stylized elements allow the silliness of the actual story to be mined even further for brilliant comedy. At one point, during the film’s most ridiculous moment, Bay even stops the movie to fling up a piece of interstitial text that reminds us “This is STILL a True Story.” The movie is full of these gleefully energetic touches, making Pain & Gain a fun one to watch.

This film is also, surprisingly, Bay’s most philosophical movie to date. Through the actions of Lugo and his cohorts, we see the breakdown of the American Dream – Lugo and others pack themselves into hotel conference rooms to hear people regurgitate AA speeches, repurposed to make them money telling you how to make money. Lugo and Doorbal have incredible body issues, from Lugo’s desire to get even more pumped to Doorbal’s steroid use and the impotence that follows. Doyle, meanwhile, is earnestly trying to follow the right path, but eventually gets drawn in by the money, drugs and sex that their initially-successful heist nabs them. (Johnson is easily the best part of this movie, as he channels his natural charisma into this wonderful character whose descent into darkness is fascinating – and hilarious – to watch.) Even Kershaw’s hard-earned money can’t save him from being beaten and tortured, and Ed Harris’ detective finds his own retirement boring, feeling the need to do something instead of reveling in his hard-earned material pleasures.

The ballsiest move Bay makes is at the very end – after we’ve all had our fun laughing at the dumbasses goofing around and cooking severed hands on a charcoal grill – when the movie reminds us once again that these were people. We are told the fates of the real guys: two of them sentenced to death row and another one (the one least involved in the scheme) dying in prison despite having a lighter sentence. It’s a strangely disquieting moment, made even queasier as Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” plays over splashes of neon paint and stenciled text. Bay flaunts the grim reality of this crazy caper in your face at the end, proving to me what the film had been visually telling me all along – this guy just might be a master satirist, drenching his critical messages in exactly the kind of hyperkinetic sheen that might fool less discerning minds into unironically cheering for these self-styled folk heroes.

I really want to pair this with Spring Breakers (one of the other best movies of the year so far), since I think they would go well together – two neon-tinged movies about crime and money in Miami, with dumb protagonists chasing the American Dream and finding more than they bargained for. There’s a surprising amount of earnest profundity in the middle of this chaotic, energetic and hilarious film, and I highly recommend seeing it. Don’t be scared by the name ‘Michael Bay’ – he’s a smart filmmaker when he’s not working with big CG robots.

Clint’s Verdict: Loved It

Drinking Rules for Pain & Gain:
1) Drink whenever you see crosses or Christian slogans
2) Drink anytime the film changes narrators
3) Drink for every piece of interstitial text
Finish Your Drink When:
Ed Harris’ wife mutters, “Every man has to fight for his dignity.”

The Big Wedding / dir. Justin Zackham / Lionsgate

It’s a funny thing, doing these paired film reviews – you start to notice some strange similarities between two wildly different films. Like in Pain & Gain, The Big Wedding features characters who have both a) a troublesome relationship with religion and b) struggles with their sobriety. In Pain & Gain, this is used to give Dwayne Johnson’s character a certain tragic quality, as he falls back into a life of crime and evildoing because he falls victim to his temptations.

In The Big Wedding, however, the sober character’s relapse is treated as a thin joke meant to reveal plot points, after which it’s never mentioned again (and he’s immediately sober after relaying the needed information without inhibition). Such is the difference between Pain & Gain and The Big Wedding; we’re meant to laugh at the stupidity of the former film’s characters, while in the latter we’re meant to sympathize and relate to them by the end.

Suffice to say, it doesn’t work.

The Big Wedding is yet another of those Meet the Parents/The Family Stone-esque romantic family comedies tailor-made to take your oversharing mother to – it features older actors they remember (Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton and Robin Williams – all wasted here, by the way), plenty of raunchy-yet-actually-pretty-safe sex and drug jokes to scandalize your mother into laughter, and hot young stars from those TV shows she puts on during dinner (Katherine Heigl and Topher Grace).

The story is deceptively simple yet implicitly offensive: the dysfunctional yet well off Griffin family  - holy fuck, I see what they just did there – is about to marry their adopted Colombian son Alejandro (Ben Barnes, a British dude with a spray tan acting like a Latino) to bland WASP Amanda Seyfried. Soon, though, Alejandro reveals that a) he’s invited his Spanish-speaking, super-Catholic stereotype of a mother Madonna (get it?!) to the wedding, and b) he hasn’t revealed that De Niro and Keaton are actually divorced, and De Niro is eating out his girlfriend Sarandon in the house that he and Keaton built instead. What results is the typical (and completely hamfisted) comedy of errors that will leave you scratching your head while your mother chuckles heartily in the theater.*

There’s not much to say about The Big Wedding, because it all pretends to be so inoffensive, desperately working to entertain you while working as little as possible to actually make you enjoy yourself. However, as with most of these kinds of movies, there’s also a pernicious undercurrent of racism, misogyny and homophobia that drips from this movie like a sponge of prejudice that’s being wrung out over the sink. (I am not good at metaphors.) Basically, this movie doesn’t know what Latinos are, as evidenced by the casting of an orange-tinted British actor as your leading non-white character – though to be fair, Ben Barnes looks just about as confused as I am at the fact he is playing this role. The white characters of the film treat speaking Spanish or being nonwhite as some sort of alien custom that everyone has to grit their teeth to get through – there are so many scenes of white people half-assing pigeon Spanish or overemphasizing Spanish accents in order to clumsily and confusedly communicate with people who have a different skin color. The whole thing is made even grosser by the fact that the main characters actively sneer at Seyfried’s parents, who are painted as the real racists, when the protagonists are basically just as sheltered and uncomfortable as they are.

The characters are all unrepentant jerks, and again, in this film you are meant to root for them. This is the kind of movie with a dysfunctional family that learns to love each other by the end, and you’re supposed to say ‘aww.’ Looking at the actions of the characters, though, that gets harder and harder – De Niro pushes away his current girlfriend (Sarandon), sleeps with his ex-wife during their ruse (Keaton), but then gets off the hook because everyone in this love triangle has basically slept with everyone else, so I guess all is forgiven because everyone’s just terrible anyway.

The kids aren’t much better: Katherine Heigl’s role is in a vacuum, as her conflict happens entirely off screen, every scene with her featuring her character ruminating on this non-conflict that is only hinted at and then conveniently resolved once the other party in the conflict finally enters the movie. Topher Grace, meanwhile, is a hot 29-year-old virgin doctor who decides to wait for love, but then gets hot for his future sister-in-law because she skinny dips around him and jerks him off under a table during dinner. (Oh, so Latinos are both laughably strict religious types and young exoticized sluts. Got it, movie.) Meanwhile, Barnes and Seyfried stand around acting like the plot points with legs that they are.

I could go on about the homophobia (Seyfried’s mom’s bisexuality is revealed to her, the film painting her as a middle-aged swinger weirdo, and Seyfriend spends the rest of the movie in a daze, complaining that her mom is a “part-time lesbian”), Robin William’s look of shame throughout most of the film, the oddly profane nature of what styles itself to be an innocuous family comedy, etc., but I won’t. It’s all too exhausting, and the film really isn’t worth it. All I will say is that I hope the stars’ salaries from this film help them to buy more wonderful plastic surgery, and encourage them to be in good movies again. Come on, De Niro, you just started trying again with Silver Linings Playbook; don’t blow it for us again.

*Full Disclosure: I did not actually take my mother to see this movie.

Drinking Rules for The Big Wedding:
1) Drink for out-of-place and tonally crass profanity
2) Drink whenever the film pauses for laughter after an unfunny joke
3) Drink every time someone who isn’t a white straight person is discussed or treated with discomfort or scorn
Finish Your Drink When:
Missy (Amanda Seyfried) says, “My mother’s a part-time lesbian.”

This week on Alcohollywood, we take one of Fight Club/Se7en/Social Network director David Fincher’s lesser-known films, the 1997 thriller The Game! Uptight, Scroogelike investment banker Nicholas Van Orton (a wonderful Michael Douglas) receives a 48th birthday present from his ne’er-do-well brother Conrad (Sean Penn) to participate in a service that turns his life into a thrilling ‘game.’ When the game starts to go too far, Nicholas is forced to fight for his life, while also trying to track down who’s behind  these dangerous pranks. The film is wonderfully made, with very strong performances, crisp, slick direction from Fincher, and enough twists and turns to keep you genuinely guessing until the very end. Furthermore, we’ve got our own ‘game’ for you to play to The Game, along with our custom cocktail!

LISTEN HERE OR DOWNLOAD:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: CRS-titution

2 parts Campari

1 part rhubarb juice

1 part saffron simple syrup

1 pint blonde ale

Combine campari, rhubarb juice and saffron syrupinto a shotglass, then drop into pint of blonde ale.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime Nicholas asks a question

2) Drink whenever you see a closeup of an object

3) Drink whenever Nicholas’ clothing is damaged or ruined in any way

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Conrad says, “I had to do it, Nicholas – you were becoming such an asshole.”

Next week, we start Mystery Month, where we spend May breaking down films with ‘Mystery’ in the title! Our first film in that series is Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 anthology film Mystery Train!

You might expect a story like that to fit the template of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, as a contemporary example, or Flash of Genius, as a modern one.  Movies where an ordinary man values an ideal above himself, and uses only perseverance and compassion to bring a corrupt system to its knees.  Great Guy does not fit that template.  Those movies are humble.  Great Guy has no business with humility.  Even the title is a brag.  And the titular guy of greatness has more in common with Eliot Ness or Sonny Crockett than he does with any kind of Capraesque underdog everyman.  He doesn’t take his fight to the courthouse.  He takes his fight to the streets.  His fight, again, being the fight for accurate weights and measures.  That is the fight that he takes to the streets.

There are several scenes of “shakedowns,” not of black market drug rings, but of regular market onion rings.  He’ll visit a grocer to make sure their produce is being weighed properly, he’ll decline a bribe to overlook the discrepancy, and then, a fistfight will break out.  But of course, these crooked poultry barons are just a symptom of an even greater injustice.  And oh yes, this one goes all the way to the top.

This Chief Deputy of Ass-Kickings and Name-Takings is a scrappy Irish-American ex-boxer played by James Cagney, in a characteristically magnetic performance.  Mae Clark (who was also paired with Cagney in The Public Enemy and Lady Killer) plays his equally pugnacious fiancée.  Their romantic partnership brings out the softer side of Cagney.  When he’s not out punching conspiracies into submission, he’s with her, picking out furniture, or arguing over where to eat, or making fun of her ugly hat.

“My best friend gets hit by a streetcar and winds up in the hospital; civil war in Spain; earthquakes in Japan; and now you wear that hat.”

Eventually, however, their conversations always turn to the subject of money.  Sometimes it’s about the money they’ve saved up for their new life together, sometimes it’s about Cagney’s suspicion of Clarke’s employer.  It turns out that his fiancée is the head villain’s secretary, because literally every woman in this movie is a secretary.  And it’s representative of Cagney’s dedication to principle that he’s willing to sacrifice her gainful employment, in addition to a lucrative job offer for himself, in order to save the entire community from losing pennies on the dollar.

So where does this movie fit?  It’s not a hard-boiled actioner, it’s not film noir, it doesn’t even really aspire to be an impacting drama.  The stakes are far too low.  One arena where you do take small stakes and inflate them into a crisis, is comedy.  This film has the trappings of a tough police procedural, but it wears them like a mask.  That said, Great Guy isn’t a comedy, either.  In fact, any attempt to definitively categorize this film is a misunderstanding rooted in modern perspective.  This film, like many others, embraces the “Golden Age” ideal that a well-made film should blend the elements of drama, comedy, romance, and intrigue.  Director John Blystone blends these elements fairly evenly, but the lighthearted tint that he used with Buster Keaton, and Laurel & Hardy, shines through.  The tone throughout is breezy, and the pacing is brisk.  Actually, it’s too brisk.  We’re talking iced tea on an autumn evening levels of brisk.  This is one of the few movies James Cagney made outside of Warner Bros., and admittedly, it shows.  The editing is choppy.  Like its hero, the film itself is a bit rough around the edges.  But I like ‘em that way, don’t you?

Great Guy has some of the makings of a serial.  It has a lovable hero, and it would have been fun to see him tackle other challenges, such as an insufficient postage racket, perhaps, and given its variance of tonality and strident pacing, it might have felt more “at home” as a series, with more room to breathe.  Unfortunately, that would not be possible, since his jurisdiction only extends to crimes involving either weights or measures, he is essentially the Aquaman of detectives.

Oblivion / dir. Joseph Kosinski / Universal Pictures

Science fiction is an inherently incestuous medium, especially when it comes to big-budget genre flicks; homages and references to what has worked before can oftentimes be inevitable. When a film like Oblivion comes along, with nearly its entire genetic makeup being made of homages to previous films of its ilk, the viewer has a choice to make: are these homages or cliches? Does the film serve as an ode to its influences, or is it a shameless ripoff? In the case of Oblivion, I’m willing to wager the former.

The film (the second from Tron Legacy‘s Joseph Kosinski) follows Jack Harper (Tom Cruise), a drone repairman on a long-ravaged and abandoned Earth; an alien attack left the planet a wasteland, but he and his lover/partner Vika (Andrea Riseborough) remain behind to look after automated drones that look after the machines that scoop up the Earth’s remaining resources for the remnants of mankind, now safely living on Titan. Jack can’t remember anything beyond the last five years of his life, but little dreams and flashes of memory haunt him – particularly images of a beautiful brunette who seems to know him (Olga Kurylenko). As his five-year shift nears its end, however, Jack begins to learn more and more about the nature of his mission, his superiors, and even himself. To say more would be to spoil a fairly interesting series of twists, though many of them were already spoiled if you saw any of the trailers.

Kosinski’s abandoned Earth is beautiful; huge craters flatten Yankee Stadium, the Empire State Building has been reduced to a shell of its former self, and the sky is filled with both the ring-like, shattered moon and the haunting tetrahedron space station that acts as both paradise and an oppressive overseer for our protagonists. The future-tech is some of the prettiest I’ve seen in a recent film; Jack’s signature white suit and blocky, futuristic rifle are lovely, as are the design of his bubble-ship and the drones (whose sound design is comprised of a wonderfully dangerous series of warbles and sonic blasts). Kosinski seems to love creating very Euro-styled, minimalist technology, as evidenced by the ergonomic starkness of both this and his debut film. Electronica band M83 provide a wonderfully ambient and electronic score which augments Oblivion‘s adoration of 1970s and 1980s science fiction well, even if the cues are a bit repetitive and unambitious at times.

Where this film falters, however, is in its characterization and plot, just like with Tron Legacy. The homages are just fine, with everything from Planet of the Apes to 2001 to Silent Running to  Predator and much more being mined for visual and thematic cues, but the actual human beings we are saddled with sometimes come up short. I’m no detractor of Tom Cruise by any means – despite any behind-the-scenes craziness, I find him a highly entertaining actor who throws himself into his roles – but he did not impress me here, as Jack Harper is a fairly flat protagonist whose only quirks include a love of motorcycles and the forced quips he gives to his little bobble-head friend, Bob. Instead of feeling like natural affectations, they seem put-on, perfunctory (like much of the film).

I wouldn’t fault Jack for being a flat character (given the nature of his true identity, which is smartly revealed piece by piece in the most compelling moments of the film), if the other characters weren’t similarly robotic. Kurylenko doesn’t inject much life into her role as endangered survivor Julia, while Morgan Freeman is somewhat wasted as underseen and underutilized resistance fighter Malcolm Beech. The one bright spot is Riseborough’s controlled sadness and confusion as Vika; I would have loved to have seen her journey (and her exposure to the truth) played out a bit more than we are given. None of this is helped by script and editing choices that leave things somewhat weightless and blank, sometimes breezing through plot points and setpieces without giving us time to breathe.

By the end of the film, I was entertained, though not particularly thrilled and excited – in short, Oblivion doesn’t do as much with these borrowed elements as I would have liked, and I await a Joseph Kosinski film that brings as much to the characters and pacing as it does the worldbuilding itself. In the meantime, it’s still a reasonably watchable work that simply doesn’t reach far enough for me to praise outright.

Clint’s Verdict: Liked It

Drinking Rules for Oblivion:

1) Drink any time you see the ‘Tet’ triangle symbol
2) Drink whenever Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) quips to his bobblehead friend, Bob (no, I’m not joking)
3) Drink anytime Jack asks a question

Finish Your Drink When:
Jack says, “Fuck you, Sally.”

To the Wonder / dir. Terrence Malick / Magnolia Pictures

Terrence Malick’s films are more divisive than any other director I can think of; with few exceptions, you either love them or you hate them. This is mostly due to Malick’s own dreamlike aesthetic, which eschews traditional plot and characterization for overt presentationalism and a strong focus on theme to the exclusion of nearly all else. To the Wonder is no exception; it fits nicely as a companion piece to The Tree of Life (which we have covered before in our podcast), in that the film explores the nature of love, life, death and family through vagueness and visual beauty. However, while I was ambivalent about Tree of Life, I actually liked To the Wonder  quite a bit more. I am certainly open to the possibility I am simply more used to Malick’s aesthetic now, and knew what to expect, but I still believe that To the Wonder is simply a more polished, assured effort.

The film follows (as much as that word applies to a Malick film) a couple, played nearly wordlessly by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko, as they navigate the complex and often chaotic nature of their relationship. Feelings are repressed, commitments are broken or never made, and tensions bring them together and apart in equal measure. Though Malick gives us very little to work with scriptwise, that is not Malick’s wheelhouse; his language is image, tone, symbols. What thematic content there is, the film provides us in whispered voiceover (another Malick staple) in which characters – Kurylenko, mostly – discuss their yearning for love, for belonging, etc. Malick tackles big issues in his films, and so he doesn’t have time for the nitty-gritty of naturalism and complex characterization: Affleck and Kurylenko are lovers personified, with their anxieties and simply joys being presented as universal.

Theirs is not the only journey we follow, however; the film also gives us glimpses of a lonely priest (Javier Bardem), who is frustrated at his own sadness and yearning for God to present himself to him, and at his lack of ability to deal with the troubled and the weak, who constantly look to him for solace. We also see, for a short period of time, Affleck’s budding relationship with a young blonde farmer (Rachel McAdams) during a time of separation between him and Kurylenko, showing the potential for happiness that is undone by his own indecisiveness and Kurylenko’s return.

The reason that I love To the Wonder while I only appreciate Tree of Life is fairly simple – Malick’s story here is more focused and universal, which I believe is where his unique cinematic tricks are best applied. In Tree of Life, the story stops on occasion to give us the the birth of the universe, and there are many other instances of outright  surrealism that undercut the simple aims of his stories. While these are strong themes, and Malick’s imagery suits them well, that film seems completely disjointed compared to To the Wonder. Here, the focus stays almost on Affleck and Kurylenko, with appropriate thematic asides to Bardem and McAdams. In this way, the human drama itself is elevated through Malick’s majestic visuals; I find that much more interesting than Malick’s treatment of The Big Question, which comes up short and doesn’t find a true compass.

In To the Wonder, images and symbols are repeated and contrasted: figures wandering through empty houses, tattoos on people’s chests, the rush of water over someone’s feet, the tall, ancient buildings of Paris contrasted with the empty plains of the Midwest, etc. This is how Malick speaks; not through dialogue, but through objects in space. The characters themselves are objects, avatars through which the themes are spoken. Affleck’s character is a commitment-phobic control freak, while Kurylenko is a culture-shocked woman in desperate need of excitement and Bardem is a lost soul who does not know how to help those who reach out to him. These flaws are not pitiable, but infinitely understandable; when Affleck refuses to marry Kurylenko, when Kurylenko has a one-night stand in a motel, etc., you know why without it ever being said.

It’s tough to truly quantify what makes Malick good when he really nails it, but To the Wonder captivated me with its ability to so perfectly capture loneliness and repression, and the nature of love.

Clint’s Verdict: Loved It

Drinking Rules for To the Wonder:

1) Drink for frolicking
2) Drink anytime you see a new source of water
3) Drink whenever you hear quiet narration in a foreign language

Finish Your Drink When:
You catch a brief glimpse of a hawk on Olga Kurylenko’s shoulder. (The movie’s mostly wordless, so we’ll make an exception for lines this time. That moment’s pretty cool, though.)

Next week, Clint checks out Michael Bay’s Miami Vice-inspired true-crime heist flick Pain & Gain, and likely suffers through the Robert De Niro-Katherine Heigl romantic comedy The Big Wedding!

This week on Alcohollywood, we grab our zithers and wander back to post-WWII Vienna for Carol Reed’s noir classic The Third Man! Starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, the film follows writer Holly Martins (Cotten) who works to unravel the mystery behind the assumed death of his friend Harry Lime (Welles), finding romance, mystery and intrigue along the way. The film’s cinematography is second to none, and Anton Karas’ inimitable zither score has become one of the most recognizable pieces of music in cinema history; Welles, Cotten and the rest of the cast are equally superb. If you haven’t seen it, the film is well worth a watch. When you do, be sure to listen to our review and try out our custom cocktail and drinking rules!

LISTEN HERE OR DOWNLOAD:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Holly Would End Lime

1 part Dutch akvavit

2 parts genevar

1 part Heering cherry liqueur

1 part lime juice

6 parts soda water

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you see Dutch angles

2) Drink whenever Anton Karas’ zither starts back up again

3) Drink every time a character starts speaking German

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Holly Martin says, “One can’t just…leave.”

Join us next week as we delve into the mysteries of the David Fincher thriller The Game!

42 / dir. Brian Helgeland / Warner Bros. Pictures

Biopics are a strange animal; their very nature requires them to be both faithful to the man or woman they are vilifying or celebrating, while also maintaining coherency as a film itself. The debate is relatively simple: play up the flaws of the figure in question to make them more interesting, or hide the flaws to emphasize the struggles they went through. While I know little of the man under the uniform, writer/director Brian Helgeland’s effort, 42, feels like it does the latter – this tale depicting the life of major league baseball’s first black player, Jackie Robinson (an effective Chadwick Boseman) plays it a little too safe at times, turning Robinson (and most especially his wife Rachel, played with saintly patience by Nicole Beharie) into a nearly flawless figure, whose single vice is that he has a bit of a temper. Even then, that temper is justified in the racist 1940s, where Jim Crow was still out in force, segregation and intolerance were rampant, and the n-word is thrown around more times than at a screening of Django Unchained.

To that end, the film becomes not a tale of whether or not Jackie will make it to the big leagues, but whether he can refrain from punching every single cartoony racist in the film (including a charmingly buffoonish Alan Tudyk, who mines his small, thankless part for quite a few dark laughs). The film’s setting is conveyed with sepia-toned earnestness by Helgeland, whose directing is perfunctory and workmanlike (only a few sequences stand out cinematographically, though the production design does a fine job of replicating the vehicles, clothes and architecture of the time).

Jackie is helped along in his task by ambitious team executive Branch Rickey, played by a still charming Harrison Ford – giving his best Nixon impression while the years gradually turn his face into a plate of mashed potatoes. His role is meaty, but somewhat incomprehensible; he exists mostly to a) give Jackie and other players advice about how to beat racists at their own game and b) growl at people over the phone, to the point where multiple characters hover over their bedside telephones late at night, afraid of the boogeyman who will disturb their slumber. Despite the growing superfluousness of his role as the film progresses, Ford holds his own – particularly during an emotionally powerful scene involving a broken bat and a weeping Jackie (the best scene in the film, bar none).

There’s not much more to say about the film – events unfold as history dictates, not-racists act supremely smug about being not racist, racists act cartoonishly racist, and Jackie Robinson grits his teeth and perseveres. While, as previously mentioned, the film is perfunctory and workmanlike, its results are effective – Helgeland provides an inspiring true-life fable, and its earnestness seems to defy most criticisms you can levy against it. It’s conventional, but that just means the filmmakers knew their limits. They just sit back, relax, and let the events speak for themselves – while the racism of the film can seem goofy on its face, it’s important to remember that, for instance, Tudyk’s character really did taunt Jackie Robinson with a bevy of racial slurs in that historic game. These were real struggles felt by real people; Boseman looks like he carries the weight of Atlas on his shoulders, and never takes for granted the responsibility he has to his family, and to civil rights as a whole.

Despite its schmaltzy moments, 42 works. Insert ‘home run’ pun here. (If I didn’t like it, I was going to do a ‘by the numbers’ pun. If I point it out, does it still count as exercising restraint?)

Clint’s Verdict: Liked It

Trance / dir. Danny Boyle / Fox Searchlight Pictures

Danny Boyle is an interesting filmmaker; cutting his teeth in British thriller-comedies, he’s now run the gamut from zombie apocalypses (28 Days Later) to kid’s flicks (Millions) to sensitive Oscar fare (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours). With his latest film, Trance, Boyle returns to his roots a bit with a British erotic/heist thriller (not “erotic heist” thriller, mind you) reminiscent most acutely of his debut feature, Shallow Grave. In both films, a trio of characters (two men, one woman) form, test and break alliances over the prospect of riches and a better future; while the former film featured quirky twentysomething roommates breaking apart, this time, it’s a shaky truce between an amnesiac art dealer (James McAvoy), a French thief (Vincent Cassel), and the hypnotherapist who holds the key to their riches (a brilliant Rosario Dawson).

The plot’s fairly convoluted – leading to most of my problems with the film – but the gist is this: after a botched art heist in which Simon (McAvoy) hides a painting, then gets amnesia from a hit on the head by Franck (Cassel), both consult the cool and collected hypnotherapist Elizabeth (Dawson) to dig the location of the stolen painting out of Simon’s memory. What follows is a disorienting and dreamlike clash of personalities, with Elizabeth quickly taking charge of the group (and the film). However, despite the intriguing nature of the first half of the film, the plot gets bogged down in a number of ill-defined and murkily-presented twists, resulting in a mindbender that leaves the audience at a distance. By the time the third act rolls around, Boyle throws one too many curveballs at you too quickly, with character dynamics shifting so abruptly as to feel inorganic.

As with most of Boyle’s work, the visuals are stunning; the heist sequence at the start of the film is by far the film’s highlight, a delightfully kinetic intro that lulls us into a false sense of security. During the film’s many hypnosis sequences, notes of Inception (with even a bit of Cronenberg body horror) can be recognized in the design of Simon’s subconscious meanderings, with halls of floating paintings, mistaken identities, and men coming back from the dead. Boyle’s use of reds, Dutch angles and creative use of reflection intrigue and unsettle the viewer, and the whole presentation is elevated by Rick Smith’s pounding electronic score.

The ridiculousness of the film’s final moments (as well as the clumsy third-act exposition scenes that begrudgingly allow an exhausted audience to catch up) undercuts the mystery of the film’s premise: the idea of exploring the mind through hypnosis to solve a heist is an interesting one, and the roads the film goes down are a little disappointing. To the film’s credit, I have seen few films that actually convey important themes and subtexts through the shaving of pudenda; the much-publicized bare bush of Rosario Dawson is not there strictly for eye candy, but the shaving itself is an act of defiance – a slap in the face to Simon’s subconscious search for perfection and control in his life.

McAvoy and Dawson acquit themselves well here, McAvoy a shuddering mess of anxiety and rage and Dawson an assured, confident and measured survivor. Cassel does fine with his performance, but his role is fairly insubstantial, simply acting as an equalizer between the two extremes of McAvoy and Dawson (whose relationship forms the movie’s true center). All in all, the film’s style alone makes it worth a watch, but the dime-store jilted-lover character reveals just might make the film’s big picture seem a bit banal when you piece it all together.

Clint’s Verdict: Liked It

Next week, Clint checks out the Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller Oblivion and Terrence Malick’s latest meditation, To the Wonder!

This week on Alcohollywood, we crash and burn with guest Derek as we talk about 1990′s cult hit Robot Jox, directed by Stuart (Re-Animator) Gordon! In the far-flung future, the Cold War still rages, but now territorial disputes are settled by gladiatorial robot fights. Achilles (Gary Graham) our illiterate, guilt-wracked hero, squares off against Alexander (Paul Koslo) for the territory of Alaska, helped by his genetically-engineered love interest Athena (Anne-Marie Johnson) and the flamboyant Tex Conway (Michael Alldredge). Along the way, however, we’re treated to wonderfully cheesy acting, a half-realized dystopian world where everyone wears two colors, delightful stop-motion robot fights and so much more. Check out our review and drinking game below!

LISTEN HERE OR DOWNLOAD:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BRobot%2BJox%2B%25281990%2529.mp3)

WATCH THE FILM HERE:

1 part silver rum

1 part dry gin

1 part St. Germain elderflower liqueur

splash, lemon juice

dash, Peychaud’s bitters

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime Achilles is browbeat, disciplined or talked down to

2) Drink anytime a character gives a ‘crash and burn’ thumbs-up gesture

3) Drink whenever you see viewscreens, TV monitors, etc.

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Achilles (Gary Graham) shouts, “I’m gonna get in this thing and I’m gonna KICK. YOUR. ASS!”

Join us next week as we get classy with the Orson Welles-Joseph Cotton masterpiece The Third Man!

“Bill Pullman AND Bill Paxton.”

Yes, the two “Joe Everyman” supporting actors, who are so frequently misidentified that their interchangeability has become a cultural joke, appear together in this film.  The results are magical.  In their scenes together, they appear to be competing for the title of Smarmiest Actor.

One of the pleasures of B-movies is getting to see your favorite character actors and bit-players get more screen-time, often in roles that lie outside of their regular idiom.  Another of course, is sheer dumb fun—the joy of nonsense.

And make no mistake, this is a B-movie.  The 1990 film Brain Dead, not to be confused with 1992′s Brain Dead AKA Dead Alive or 2007′s Brain Dead, didn’t fall through the cracks.  It was deliberately stuffed down the cracks as soon as nobody was looking.  But the letter-grade “status” of a film does not invalidate its position in film history.  Every film, regardless of budget, reflects the trends and ideas of its era, and represents a step in the evolution of cinema.  Brain Dead, in particular, represents a popularity spike of an odd sub-genre of science-fiction, which more-or-less began with The Twilight Zone and is still present today in movies like Inception.  It’s a sub-genre that I like to call “mindfuck movies.”  They’re movies in which a) the argument of perception as reality is questioned and explored, and b) the whole fun of watching them is trying to figure out what’s going on.

In Brain Dead, neurologist Bill Pullman (those words usually aren’t seen so close together) is contacted by his old friend Bill Paxton, a corporate crony with a problem only a doctor can solve.  For beginning players, Pullman is the one with floppy hair, and Paxton is the one with awful Wall Street style slicked-back hair.  Anyway, a brilliant mathematician named Halsey has lost his marbles, and Paxton’s company needs some numbers pulled out of his head.  Pullman is reluctant to help, but Paxton appeals to his ego with eloquent lines such as these:

“Nobody knows more about paranoia than you.  You’re the… brain man, for Christ’s sakes.”

Dr. Bill Pullman has been studying the brains of paranoid schizophrenics his entire career, but only when they were in jars.  Once he meets a live one, his own latent psychosis starts to surface, and he gradually becomes his own case study.  In other words: let’s watch Bill Pullman go insane.

The secretly marvelous thing about this film is its structure.  It’s not just “random things are happening now because he’s crazy.”  That would be impossible to follow, or enjoy.  Instead, every person, image, and event that Pullman encounters during his episode is alluded to earlier in the film.  Even impromptu, throwaway figures of speech, such as, “You open that door, and you step off a cliff,” become dangerously literal later on.  I can’t say this about many B-movies, but you might actually appreciate Brain Dead more on a second viewing.  Plus, this structure endows the film with a sort of dream-logic, and gives the story a sense of connectivity that urges you to try to puzzle out the missing pieces.  You may find yourself formulating three or four theories at once: “I’ve got it!  Pullman is Halsey!  Or, no, it’s the other way around!  I bet Pullman died in that car accident and this is just his dying dream!  No no no wait!  Pullman himself is a brain in a jar and the entire film is what he thinks he’s experiencing!”  Pullman eventually develops an hypothesis of his own: that he and everyone else in the world are all part of a huge dream being dreamed by Paxton’s evil corporation, EUNICE.  It’s a ludicrous theory, but not one that the film ever invalidates.

As the film goes on, and the cracks in reality turn into fissures and then chasms, the scenes themselves become briefer, and separated by larger distances of location and elapsed time.  I mention this just because it’s always nice when the structure of a film reflects its theme.

If this all sounds like a Twilight Zone episode on drugs, that’s because it was based on a screenplay by Twilight Zone scribe Charles Beaumont, which sat on a shelf for twenty-three years after he died and then became this movie with the help of some drugs.

The film ends with not one but two Twilight Zone-patented ironic punchlines.  In the more chilling of the two, Pullman dies, and the neurosurgeon operating on him wrings his hands and says, “Well, at least he didn’t feel any pain.”  If only they could know what he’d been through inside his mind!

The film begins with Pullman adjusting the number on the door to his lab.  Number eight.  It’s fallen sideways, to become the symbol for infinity.  It’s a symbol later used as a logo by the EUNICE corporation.  It also represents the potential of the hundreds of human minds stacked up on shelves behind that door.

Bill Pullman also has a stretched-out human face behind that door.  Brains I get, but who donates their face to science?

Evil Dead (2013) / dir. Fede Alvarez / TriStar Pictures

Sam Raimi’s 1981 horror debut The Evil Dead, despite being a somewhat spotty and amateurish effort that resulted in unintentional comedy, remains a wonderful early look at what would become the launching pad for an influential horror-comedy franchise and the careers of its director and lead actor Bruce Campbell. Nearly thirty years later, Fede Alvarez (in his feature film debut) remakes the time-old tale of teenagers visiting a cabin in the woods, only to find demonic horrors awaiting them. The result is an entertaining and bloody (if occasionally spotty and oddly paced) effort that’s well worth seeing in a crowded theater.

One of the biggest changes made to the original story is that the five friends in this one aren’t just heading to the cabin to hang out and party: their goal is to provide isolation and support during the detox of their friend Mia (Jane Levy, the only actor to give a truly good performance in the film – the rest are serviceable). In an economic way, this change removes many of the ‘no-duh’ moments from these kinds of horror films – they want to go where no one will find them so that their friend will be forced to detox completely, and they won’t let her leave so that she can potentially relapse. Mia is, of course, fated to become the possessed girl in the basement, and so scenes of her initial withdrawal (in which she freaks out, thrashes and cries out in panic) cinematically liken possession with addiction.

Despite the interesting change in the premise, however, the rest of the film’s emotional content is bogged down in poorly-written and tepidly played discussions of both Mia’s addiction and her checkered past with her distant brother David (Shiloh Fernandez). Suffice to say, the first half hour of the film attempts to set up these emotional conflicts, but these promptly fall by the wayside by the time the real horrors happen, making the conflicts seem like filler meant to keep us from the gore.

Another huge change, and one I’m still torn on as to its effectiveness, is the bait-and-switch of protagonists. The first half of the film follows Mia, in her attempts to kick her addiction, relate to David, and deal with the initial horrors before becoming possessed. Once she’s thrown in the basement, David becomes our Ash, complete with double-barreled shotgun and blue button-up shirt, and the film follows him for the majority of its escalating terrors. When his internal conflicts find their way into the flesh-ripping antics, though, it distracts more than enhances; you’ll shake your head at David’s almost comical hand-wringing about whether or not to take action against the demon possessing his friends and sister.

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

However, at a certain point 15 minutes before the film’s end, he is able to successfully revive Mia and make amends with her, right before sacrificing himself to destroy the cabin, leaving the newly-resurrected Mia to become the Final Girl for the big confrontation. While this bait and switch is interesting, it undercuts the emotional conflicts they attempt to set up in the film’s first half hour; the final sequence is incredible in its escalation of tension and gruesome visuals, but it feels somewhat unearned. After all, we gave up on her status as the main character ages ago, and the film had told  us its focus had shifted from Mia’s addiction to David’s guilt at his abandonment of his sister. To suddenly reassess this character as a tough survivor is somewhat jarring.

(END SPOILERS)

Regardless of the clunky and misdirected character moments, the film more than makes up for it with its primary attraction: the gore. Alvarez has a great eye for visuals, and he films the grand guignol spectacle in the same kind of stylish tradition Raimi nearly patented with his first Evil Dead; frantically swinging and tipping cameras abound, and the 100% practical gore effects are refreshing and visceral in an age of CGI blood splatters and bloody stumps. Blood pours down in rainstorms, limbs are removed with barely a scream, and characters act as human pincushions (especially Lou Taylor Pucci’s Eric; he really takes a beating in the film) – all of it adds up to an amazingly tense and engaging bit of horror architecture. Shots before the gore dazzle as well; there’s an inverted moving shot of a wood-bordered road that provides a macabre elegance to the beginning of the picture’s main story – a dazzling palate cleanser for the nightmares to follow. It’s about as thin as your typical horror film, when all is added up, but the gore is just so good that I don’t care; it completely understands why it exists, and completely delivers on its promises of horror spectacle. In this light, it succeeds in its modest goals.

Clint’s Verdict: Liked It

Related Episodes: Evil Dead 2 (1987)

Next week, Clint takes on the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 and finally, actually sees Danny Boyle’s Trance!

This week on Alcohollywood, Clint and Jared (along with our friend Mark of Our Fair City and Blastropodcast) take on the Steven Spielberg classic Jurassic Park, just in time for its release in 3D this weekend! The tale of a group of paleontologists, scientists and children who visit an island-based attraction inhabited by newly-cloned dinosaurs has captured imaginations for generations, and it’s hard to argue against how fun and awe-inspiring the film’s visuals are. It’s quintessential Spielberg adventure of the finest caliber, bolstered by a great cast that includes Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Wayne Knight and Sir Richard Attenborough. Check out our drinking rules and cocktail before you head out to the theater!

LISTEN HERE OR DOWNLOAD:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BJurassic%2BPark%2B%25281993%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Mr. DNA

Apple juice

1 part green chartreuse

1 part silver rum (Costa Rican)

mint

lemon slice

tangelo slice

dash, simple syrup

Freeze apple juice (along with chocolate bits) in ice cube tray. Muddle mint, tangelo and lemon; add chartreuse, silver rum and syrup; shake vigorously. Pour over apple juice cubes.

RULES:

1) Drink every time you see the Spielberg Stare

2) Drink for every tucked-in shirt you see in the film

3) Drink every time you see an ass, human or dinosaur

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Muldoon (Bob Peck) mutters under his breath at his imminent demise by inventive velociraptor: “Clever girl.”

Join us next week as we usher in National Robotics Week by watching hot bot-on-bot action with the cult robot fighting movie Robot Jox!

“What if we think a statement isn’t true or false, but in between?”

“I’m afraid there’s no ‘in between’ to check.  You’ll have to make a choice.”

These are the opening lines of Ladybug Ladybug, and the scene is a sixth grade class taking a standardized test, but the exchange is also applicable to the imminent nuclear holocaust that soon becomes the focus of the film.  It’s hard to make firm decisions in the face of an unpreventable catastrophe which you’re only half-sure is about to happen.  And it turns out schoolchildren are especially terrible at making such decisions.

In an unnamed schoolhouse in rural America, there’s a little yellow nuclear attack alarm, because it’s 1963 so they have one of those, just roll with it.  Like a fire extinguisher or a map of emergency exits, it’s mostly just there to make everybody feel safe.  Until it’s actually needed, at which point, it has the opposite effect.  What’s worse is that no one can verify whether or not the warning is genuine.  In the meantime, for safety’s sake, the threat is treated as real, and the children are sent home.  One very frightened teacher walks her group of kids down an endless unpaved road to their respective houses, so that, at the very least, they can die with their parents.  If their parents are at home.

I’m fascinated by mid-century nuclear panic dramas.  “Mid-century nuclear panic dramas” will probably be the next category Netflix suggests for me.  When done poorly, they’re amusingly histrionic propaganda pieces.  But when done well, the victims-to-be argue about how to best handle the crisis with such frenzy and furor that it demonstrates, on a smaller scale, why the crisis exists in the first place: we fight because we are afraid.

Having once worked at a “haunted house” in a major Midwestern amusement park, I can personally attest that violence is our natural response to fear.  It turns out, if you jump out of the dark and roar at people, they will hit you with whatever they are carrying, and they will throw their shoes at you, and they will run away, and they will not come back for their shoes.  I think, in better lighting, they would not have elected to broadside a teenager in zombie makeup, but I guess instinct just takes over when you believe you’re about to be brutally killed.

Of course, those were all adults.  A child’s response to fear is quite different, and the most heart-rending theme of this film is that when children are confronted by the promise of death, their instinct is not to fight, but to try to protect what they most love.  In vain, it’s worth adding.  One little girl runs home, takes her goldfish bowl off the shelf, and hides under the bed with it.  One boy safeguards a tiny frog he found.  Another goes to great lengths to trick his senile grandmother into taking shelter in the cellar with him.  And finally, when a group of children huddles together in a cramped bomb shelter, they must decide whether a latecomer is loved enough to be saved.    And at this point, the frenzy and the furor begins—they become adults, arguing viciously and condemning the poor girl outside to die.  At this point, the film flirts with becoming a kind of a “Lord of the Flies in a Bomb Shelter,” which is a title I am writing down in my Big Book of Ideas to Steal

The adults, meanwhile, still aren’t sure the threat is real.  The principal stubbornly dials and redials the phone but can’t get anything but busy signals (remember those?).  The school cook fills every pot she has with drinking water until she starts crying.  And the pregnant secretary wanders the art room, idly rearranging toys and dragging her hand through the sandbox, imagining the empty world—the childless world—that may take the place of the world she knows within the hour.  While the children bicker in their shelter, growing aggressive—and growing up—their teachers realize their ineffectualness, and regress.

And what about the girl they won’t let in the shelter?  How does she attempt to escape the nuclear blast?  She makes like an archaeologist adventurer and hides inside a fridge.  Yes, “nuking the fridge” was already a thing in 1963.  But here, it feels as though she’s sealing her own coffin.  We never find out if the bomb actually drops, because that’s not the point, but I think we’re meant to infer that, if it does, she burns up in there, and if it doesn’t, she suffocates because it’s probably really hard to open a fridge door from the inside.

With its emphases on uncertainty, dramatic irony, Cold War paranoia, and unprepared individuals pitted against an unsympathetic world, Ladybug Ladybug often feels like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone.  One brave boy does leave the shelter to rescue the unwanted girl.  Runs right past her fridge.  Sees a plane overhead.  It’s deafening.  It’s big.  He looks up at it and he yells “STOP!”

Cut to black.  No credits.  Time’s up, everybody.  We have to go on.

G.I Joe Retaliation (2013) / dir. John M. Chu / Paramount Pictures

I’m not gonna lie: I had high hopes for GI Joe Retaliation. The Rock coming in to star? Great! A partial reset of the shiny CGI cartoon that was the first? Sure thing! The director of Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 3D? Well…okay, but the trailer looks decent. Perhaps my expectations (suspended for a year as the film underwent reshoots and a 3D conversion) were unreasonably high, but I wanted at least a decent action flick out of Retaliation. However, even those meager hopes were dashed in a haze of half-scripted nonsense, tonal confusion and poorly edited spectacle that left me wondering what the hell went on by the end.

The impossibly convoluted, yet confusingly simplistic plot is as follows: after a padded-out intro establishing the Joes (led by Channing Tatum and The Rock, the two engaging in decently entertaining banter meant to pad out the recently-impressive Tatum’s early role in the film), the team is betrayed and Tatum killed off by Zartan, a face-shifting villain impersonating the President (a hammy Jonathan Pryce, providing the best performance in the film bar none) who wants to free his boss, the masked Cobra Commander, for various world-ending and nefarious reasons. Meanwhile, mute ninja Snake Eyes must track down his nemesis Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun, one of my favorite Korean actors, wasted here except for his glorious upper body) whose allegiances are fluid at best. Oh yeah, and Bruce Willis reads cue cards for a few minutes near the end of the film – seriously, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen most of the scenes he’s in.

Where do I even begin with this movie? The editing is all over the place in this movie, and is likely one of the film’s biggest flaws. From the inciting incident until the lead-up to the climax in the film, two tonally dissonant movies happen – first, there’s Dwayne Johnson and friends working underground to undo Cobra, mixing Call of Duty antics with a little Mission: Impossible; secondly, there’s mute Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and his effectively-as-mute sidekick Jynx, who are shoved into a separate storyline whose establishment and execution gives you whiplash. Mouse (Tim from Jurassic Park, all growed up; also, why does every team in science fiction have to have a “kid of the team” named Mouse, who is the first to die?) spends his one prominent scene describing a homing camera-bullet, then uses the bullet once in the following action scene. The bullet (and Mouse) are never used again. Why do we waste time in a 100-minute movie with this stuff, when important plot information is breezed over in the form of montages woodenly recited by a blind RZA?

Some scenes are just patently ridiculous: I still have no idea what was accomplished during the beginning action scene, where Roadblock sees an unknown flag on a pole and adorably almost swears before we smash cut to the title; for the climax, Bruce Willis brings in a couple of his “friends,” none of whom seem important to the plot and are just there to punch a couple unimportant guys in a couple of cutaway shots. There was NO reason for them to be there.  The movie’s treatment of female characters is also pretty troublesome; the most prominent female character, Lady Jaye (Adrienne Palicki), spouts progressive platitudes about joining the army to prove to her dad that women are just as good at fighting, all the while her secret power seems to be the same as Bugs Bunny’s: dress real sexy, and the bad guys will just be too entranced by her ass to resist. Even bland Flint gets in on the ogling. It’s pretty disgusting.

The final shot of the film is so ridiculous I’m chuckling writing this: The Rock, having been given Gen. Patton’s .45 handgun by Willis (to implicitly use on Cobra Commander when they find him), responds to this gesture of respect by just firing this handgun into the air. FIN. (Why did that happen? What was he shooting at? Was that part of the ceremony? Could he have hurt someone? Why was it loaded? What was that meant to signify? Questions abound – it’s just such a silly way to end the movie.)

The whole thing isn’t a complete wash: Chu, with the exception of a couple of adequately-composed action scenes (the Storm Shadow-kidnap sequence, from beginning to end, is done without dialogue due to its basically mute participants, which made it an interesting experiment at least), thrusts all of the action at you with no sense of geography or place, and the dialogue scenes (what few there are) are flatly directed. Jonathan Pryce, as mentioned before, looks like he’s having a lot of fun as well, and there are a few moments of comedy that work in a sea of moments that don’t. There are too many ludicrous moments in here, but suffice to say that GI Joe Retaliation is only a marginal step up in quality from its predecessor (which isn’t saying much).

Clint’s Verdict: Skip It

The Host / dir. Andrew Niccol/ Open Road Films

The Host comes to us from the Stephanie Meyer canon of supernatural/science fiction-themed romances; this time, the boy-meets-girl-meets boy story is given the Invasion of the Body Snatchers treatment by way of K.A. Applegate. In the future, a race of glowy caterpillars (aptly named Souls) has taken over Earth by inhabiting people’s bodies, turning them into bland drones with glowing eyes who perpetually dress like it’s Labor Day. The ridiculously-named Melanie Stryder (Saiorse Ronan, trying admirably to transcend the material), one of the few humans left, is captured and implanted with a Soul named Wanderer.

Unlike most hosts, Melanie remains alive inside her body, which Wanderer controls, and converses with her in the form of bratty voiceover. I’m sure the narrative device works better in the book; it’s easier to convey warring internal monologue in prose form than depict it on screen (as David Lynch’s Dune taught us). As it stands now, however, Melanie simply exists to act as an obnoxious devil on Wanderer’s shoulder, who nags at her alien occupant about everything under the sun, resulting in unintentional hilarity due to her flippant reactions to things. “What are you doing?! Stop?! Don’t kiss him!”

After a comparatively interesting first act where Wanderer explores Melanie’s memories and weighs her allegiances to her fellow Souls, Melanie convinces Wanderer to escape and find her uncle (an incredibly tired and sedate-even-for-him William Hurt) and family, who constitute most of the rest of the human resistance and spend their days farming and hiding in a series of caves. It is here that the movie’s pace screeches to a halt, as the remaining hour and a half of screentime is dedicated to tedious scenes of Wanderer’s trust being constantly called into question, ponderous and ultimately pointless scenes pontificating on the nature of identity, the occasional low-energy action scene, and really obnoxious and poorly-handled romance scenes. The cinematography is admirable enough, but there are only so many ways to film open dirt roads and cave walls before it gets interminably boring.

Apart from Ronan, Hurt and Diane Kruger (who tries really hard, and whose small arc constitutes the only interesting scenes in the film), the cast is rounded out entirely by bland, sandy-blond hunks who look like they stepped right out of a CW pilot. In a world where humans fight for their individuality in the face of a homogenous alien force, I find it telling that I can’t really tell the three hunks apart, whether in personality or looks. They certainly don’t bring anything to the table except for half-formed and unresolved scenes of sexual tension, where two of the hunks try for equal time with two women in the same body. (Question: if one of them were to sleep with Wanderer, would it technically be a threesome?)

Andrew Niccol, who delighted with the science-fiction thriller Gattaca, attempts a tepid rehash of some of his previous films’ themes and lo-fi portrayal of the future (which just consists of everything being blandly labeled in Helvetica, and the Seekers – alien bad guys – decking out their designer cars and traffic helicopters in solid chrome), and it really doesn’t work. For a story about how the end of humanity is nigh, no one really has any sense of urgency; the alien conflict is resolved far too smoothly and gradually to make it work, and one never gets the feeling that people are in danger.

What’s more, except for the basic philosophical horrors of being stripped of your humanity, the Souls don’t really seem that dangerous, since we are shown few examples of their wrath or destructive power – in fact, they seem a highly moral society. While you can explore the implications of such a society and make it work, this film most certainly does not, instead opting for junior-high histrionics that are fuzzily resolved, leaving even the most patient wanting to walk out of the theatre after the first hour.

Clint’s Verdict: Skip It

Check in next week when Clint hopefully has a better time with the remake of Evil Dead and the Danny Boyle thriller Trance!

Saddle up, partners, because we (along with returning guest Todd) head to the Wild Wild West (of Italy) for the 1964 spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars! Clint Eastwood plays The Man With No Name, a lone gunslinger with no allegiances and an eye for money, who wanders into a desert town besieged by gang warfare and decides to clean house. The film was a career-defining effort for both Eastwood and director Sergio Leone, who helped to define the spaghetti Western and its unique sense of dramatic, operatic style. Ennio Morricone delivers a dynamite score that charms as much as it thrills, and the film’s climax is famous in its building of tension and excitement. Unofficially adapted from the 1961 Akira Kurosawa samurai flick Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars is a worthy transfer, and a great film in its own right. Check out our review and drinking game below!

LISTEN HERE OR DOWNLOAD:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Drink With No Name

1 part silver tequila

1 part triple sec

1 part celery juice

6 parts green tea

basil

cucumber

dry vermouth

dash, agave nectar

Rinse glass with splash of dry vermouth; muddle shaker with basil leaf and cucumber. Combine tequila, triple sec, celery juice, green tea and agave nectar and shake. Pour into vermouth-rinsed glass.

RULES:

1) Drink for flute trills in the score

2) Drink every time you hear laughter

3) Drink whenever a character (esp. The Stranger) takes a cigar in or out of their mouth

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The Stranger (Clint Eastwood) says “My mule don’t like people laughin’…”

Join us next week when we kick off the release of Jurassic Park  in 3D with our review of the Spielberg classic!

Imagine you’re a country doctor, living in Maryland with your wife and daughter.  Late one night, a desperate man comes banging at your door, his leg severely wounded.  Naturally, you treat his injury—you took the Hippocratic oath.  The mysterious man then takes his leave, and later, you find out he was a famous actor.  Name of John Wilkes Booth.  Hours before meeting you, he shot the president, and you’ve been instrumental in abetting his escape.  How do you feel about that, sucker?

In Warner Baxter’s performance as Samuel Mudd, the aforementioned country doctor, the response is astonishment, denial, dread, rage, panic, and finally deep black despair.  And that’s all in the first act.  Before they break his spirit.  Most tellingly, however, is that at no point in the film does he express a flicker of remorse.

Like most movies “based on a true story,” The Prisoner of Shark Island plays fast and loose with historical details for the sake of drama.  But what it lacks in factual accuracy, it makes up for by authentically capturing the social climate of the days and weeks surrounding the assassination.  The bereaved nation he fought so hard to unify and enlighten is assembled in the streets, crying out for blood.  Sure, Booth was gunned down while resisting arrest, but that’s not good enough. They want a hanging.  You know, something they can all enjoy.

So the military rounds up eight of Booth’s conspirators, including Dr. Mudd, for a speedy execution that will mollify the rabid public.  But first, a quick show-trial.  After all, this is America.  In a private meeting of the officers who will adjudicate Mudd’s military trial, the Assistant Secretary of War (Arthur Byron) gives them a speech that seems to have been clipped from a Dystopian novel:

“The object of this trial is not to determine the guilt or innocence of a handful of rebels, but to save this country from further bloodshed… You must not allow your judgment and decision in this case to be troubled by any trifling technicalities of the law.  Or any pedantic regard for the customary rules of evidence… You must not allow yourself to be influenced by that obnoxious creation of legal nonsense, ‘reasonable doubt.’  Is that clear?  The voice of this court has got to be the voice of the people…”

He then gestures to the window—outside, The People are burning the conspirators in effigy.

Here, the Assistant Secretary of War is something like a dark reflection of Lincoln.  He has the same ultimate objective—to preserve the Union at all costs—but his decisions aren’t tempered by compassion.  In this way, The Prisoner of Shark Island makes for an interesting comparison to Spielberg’s Lincoln, in which Honest Abe must also dance around legality in order to maintain a nation founded on that very principle.

Okay, yes, yes, but what about Shark Island?

Mudd, the only convict not hanged, is instead incarcerated on an island called Shark Island.  If you took Alcatraz, filled it with deadly insects, doused it in a plague of yellow fever, and, yes, surrounded it with man-eating sharks, it would be something like Shark Island.  A title card refers to it as “a bit of burning white hell in the Gulf of Mexico, where life imprisonment was an ironic term for slow death,”  which is pretty fucking metal.  On top of the insufferable living conditions, everyone on the island treats Mudd as if he’d pulled the trigger himself, especially the sinister Sgt. Rankin (John Carradine), who greets Mudd with a punch to the face and refers to him only as “Judas.”

Carradine’s performance is mesmerizing, and his gaunt, tight-lipped face make for some memorable close-ups.  Most notably, a moment during Mudd’s escape attempt, where Rankin is gazing out the window, pensively smoking a cigar, as the twin lights of Mudd’s escape ship are reflected in his eyes.

Scenes like this are indicative of the hand of the director, the legendary John Ford.  Ordinarily, when we talk about Ford, we talk about Stagecoach.  We might also mention The Searchers, and The Grapes of Wrath, and Rio Grande, and if we go on long enough, maybe even The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  It’s a pity that The Prisoner of Shark Island is comparatively unexamined, because Ford’s brilliant, innovative sense of scope, with which he so famously photographed the American plains, is equally apparent as he captures the crowded streets of Washington, D.C., or the claustrophobic tunnels of a penal colony.  You’ll never see another prison breakout sequence shot like this.

Although Mudd makes it past the guards and the sharks and the escape is successful, he’s recaptured at the last minute and dragged back to the island.  As punishment, they through him into a pit, along with the accomplice, his loyal servant (formerly his loyal slave), who followed him to the island.

Meanwhile, up above, everyone is dying of yellow fever.  Because if you put a bunch of people and a bunch of mosquitoes on an island together, the mosquitoes are going to win.  When even the staff doctor falls victim to the disease, they decide it’s time to drudge up Mudd from his hole in the ground.  Mind you, Mudd and his friend have been lying in this pitch-black oubliette for days with nothing but a bucket of water and a pile of straw.  Suddenly, a guard comes down asking if he’d mind risking his life to treat their little plague outbreak situation.  After everything he’s been through, he’d have every right to tell them all to go straight to Hell.  What he says instead is, “Once before I was a doctor.  I’m still a doctor.”

He says it as though he’s trying to keep himself from crying.

Not only does he help, he works himself past the point of exhaustion, inspiring the terrified guards to assist him, and convincing a reluctant supply ship to dock on Shark Island by firing cannonballs at it until it comes to shore (hey, it works).  In the end, he succumbs to the fever himself, but his grateful captors circulate a petition to President Johnson to have Mudd pardoned.  Sgt. Rankin, after an equal dose of fever medicine and humble pie, volunteers to be the first to sign.

Back in Maryland, as his wife and daughter await the return of the prodigal Mudd, they embrace, anxiously, and Mrs. Mudd whispers, “Darling, Daddy’s coming home.  And when he comes, he… he may not look like he did when… when we last saw him, but don’t say so.  Don’t look at him like that, dear, just… because… his face may be old and sad and tired.  And he may be thin and… and his hair… but don’t notice it, dear, just… just kiss him.  Kiss his cheeks.  And his eyes.  And his arms.  And his wrists…”  And then she sobs into the breast of the child she was trying to console.

A simple story has a wrongly convicted man prove his innocence.  A simple story has a guilty man see the error of his ways and redeem himself.  A complex story has a man of arguable fault who must overcome great suffering for doing what would’ve been, under other circumstances, “the right thing.”  And an awesome story sends a man to a place called Shark Island.

Spring Breakers (2013) / dir. Harmony Korine / A24, Annapurna Pictures

I want to preface this review by saying this is my very first Harmony Korine film; I’d heard of Kids, Gummo and even Trash Humpers, but have no experience with them other than as these unseen, fabled depictions of lower-class white destitution, sex, drugs and debauchery. From what I can tell, Spring Breakers is among the most accessible of his work. Following four college girls (Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Melody Korine and Ashley Benson) who do whatever they can to pay for the spring break bacchanalia their richer classmates are enjoying (including holding up a fast food restaurant), the film is a hypnotic, stylized experience that is difficult to quantify, but endlessly fresh in its execution.

The film has a wonderful dreamlike quality; as the girls scheme and plot their way to Spring Break, we are treated to wordless and abstracted scenes of spring break debauchery (providing somewhat of a Greek chorus of ‘Spring Break’ personified throughout the film). By the time we get to spring break itself, we start to understand these girls as desperately seeking something beyond their small-town boredom – Gomez particularly so, since her character is the least adventurous one. At the same time, the film is a wonderful dark comedy, particularly by the time we get to James Franco’s white, be-grilled rapper Alien – who is at once a corrupting force in the girls’ lives and just as childlike and innocent as them. Like these newcomers, he just wants life to be “Spring break…spring break…spring break forever.”

The cinematography of the film is doused in a wonderfully garish neon, with a generous amount of dirt and grit thrown in, while a great (if occasionally monotonous) Cliff Martinez/Skrillex score reminds you further of Drive. Franco has rarely been better as well; these kinds of off-kilter, naturalistic roles are much more his speed than in Oz the Great and Powerful, where he felt uncomfortable. There are some great sequences in here, including Franco’s “LOOK AT MAH SHEEIT” monologue, which firmly entrenches Spring Breakers into dark comedy territory – as well as a head-busting montage to Britney Spears’ “Everytime” that is simply amazing. In short, the film is Girls Gone Wild and Natural Born Killers if Terrence Malick and Nicholas Winding Refn’s bastard man-baby wrote and directed it – in short, it’s wondrous.

Clint’s Verdict: Loved It!

Olympus Has Fallen (2013) / dir. Antoine Fuqua / FilmDistrict

The Die Hard formula is one of the most tried-and-true single-sentence movie pitches in Hollywood: “Die Hard on a spaceship,” “Die Hard on a plane” – you get the picture. With Olympus Has Fallen, the first of two “White House under attack” films set to come out this year, the film is transparently “Die Hard in the White House” – there are entire scenes completely transplanted from the former, including the ‘bad guy acts like good guy to fool good guy, shares cigarettes but gives himself away with verbal mistake’, which is the height of laziness. Basically, former secret service agent Gerard Butler, removed from the President’s detail (after a prologue vaguely establishing that he messed up while not really messing up, thus making President Aaron Eckhart nonspecifically mad at him), manages to run into a besieged White House to take out Korean terrorist after Korean terrorist, Jack Bauer-style. Fuqua (of Training Day and Shooter fame) directs the movie with a decent amount of style, though I still didn’t get the sense of real spectacle I was hoping for with an action film of this scope.

Perhaps one of the strangest parts of Olympus Has Fallen is the tonal shifts between ‘fun siege action flick’ and ‘horrifying political thriller’ – the White House setting, and the conveniently North Korean villains necessitate the kind of political attacks that will inevitably remind one of 9/11 (including a strangely evocative destruction of the Washington Monument). It’s an astonishingly ‘oo-rah’ Republican wet dream, including torture that works, drones only used by the enemy, and tearful/solemn depictions of American soldiers as above reproach. However, I honestly have a hard time working up escapist excitement when dozens of civilians explode in rivulets of CGI blood, along with female government officials repeatedly beaten and stripped – even Gerard Butler’s one-liners lack the humor and elan this kind of movie should have. He’s stronger here than he has been recently, but he’s not helped by a completely useless and wasted supporting cast, including Morgan Freeman as a hand-wringing Speaker of the House and Robert Forster as the gruff general who gives Morgan Freeman someone to talk to. Rick Yune (Diamondface from Die Another Day) doesn’t impress here, either, since he feels like a henchman in his own movie.

There are some wonderfully silly moments to be had in the film: take a drink every time the picture or bust of an American president is featured (especially when Butler uses the bust of Lincoln to dispense American justice), the mini-act where Butler saves the president’s son is a highlight, and the third-act introduction of a literal Doomsday Device to artificially raise the stakes is something you simply have to throw your hands up at and accept its ridiculousness. Even the hand-to-hand combat scenes are so darkly-lit and frantically edited that it’s difficult to find variation in them or enjoy them on their face.  In the end, however, the empowerment fantasy we get from Butler cracking skulls is undercut by other scenes where American pilots, soldiers, government officials and civilians are annihilated while others look on in grave horror. As an exercise in action-movie excess, it just wasn’t exciting enough for me.

Clint’s Verdict: Skip It

NEXT WEEK: GI Joe: Retaliation and The Host!

This week on Alcohollywood, we delve into Jackie Chan’s early Hong Kong career with the bizarre creature Fantasy Mission Force – a mixture of The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, Drunken Master and a whole bunch of crack, the film follows an incomprehensible band of travelers (with occasional visits by a lecherous, wise-guy Jackie Chan) who are meant to rescue several nonspecific generals who have been captured behind enemy lines. In this scattershot hero’s journey, all manner of rented costumes are used to full effect as the Fantasy Mission Force encounters a group of Amazons led by a fey man in a tuxedo, Chinese Nazis driving American muscle cars, Asian Scotsmen, and many more strange horrors. Part of the charm (and the frustration) of the film is just how hyperactive it is, but if you can ride with the bizarre energy you can have a lot of fun laughing at it. While Jackie Chan isn’t in it much, his fight scenes are as dynamic and skillful as ever, so if you’re a Chan fan, you’ll still get your money’s worth (which is no money, since it’s on Youtube)! Check out our review, drinking game and cocktail here!

LISTEN HERE OR DOWNLOAD:

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WATCH HERE:

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Chinese Costume Chamber

2 parts Baijiu

1 part ginger liqueur

splash, orange syrup

dash, habanero shrub (or sriracha)

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you see a new crazy costume

2) Drink every time it feels like a new movie starts (Also shout “New Movie!” at the screen)

3) Drink whenever characters laugh inexplicably at the end of sentences

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

One of the Chinese Nazis says matter-of-factly, “We know you came for the hostages, but let me tell you….I’ve got the hostages!”

Next week, we’re saddling up and returning to the Wild West for the first time in quite awhile, with the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars!

Erin go bragh from Alcohollywood! To celebrate everyone’s favorite drinking holiday, we invoke the luck of the Irish with the Hallmark TV special The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns, a three-hour epic slog starring Whoopi Goldberg and Randy Quaid! This tale of a dumpy American visiting Ireland, falling in love, and interfering with the class warfare of magical Irish creatures features a bevy of beloved Irish and Scottish actors shaming themselves for the sake of perpetuating some of the worst stereotypes of the Irish, while terrible special effects and school-play production design assaults the eyes. Luckily, we’ve got just the drink and game to endure the magical legend in time for St. Patty’s Day!

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Shamrock-y Road

2 parts marshmallow-flavored vodka

2 parts white creme de cacao

2 parts amaretto

1 part creme de menthe

vanilla ice cream

ice

Combine in blender; mix well.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you see magic tinkles

2) Drink whenever someone says the word “fairy”

3) Drink whenever a character pratfalls or engages in physical comedy at their own expense

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Jack Woods (Randy Quaid) casually says, “No time, we’re off to see the Grand Banshee – Moonstone Mountain.”

Join us next week when we take a look at Jackie Chan’s early career with the amazingly corny Fantasy Mission Force!

LISTEN HERE (OR DOWNLOAD):

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Dapper Dan

4 parts white rye whiskey (infuse with carrot, sage and golden raisins)

1 part apple juice

1 part Budweiser

splash, lemon

dash, Liquid Hickory Smoke

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever someone exercises superlative verbosity and use of rhetoric (i.e. Everett or someone else uses a word more than three or four syllables – you’ll know them when you hear them)

2) Drink whenever a folk song begins

3) Drink at each mention or appearance of Dapper Dan pomade

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Ulysses Everett McGill says after a long silence to Delmar, “….I’m not sure that’s Pete.”

Next week, we run to the end of the rainbow for our St. Patrick’s Day special, where we endure the Hallmark TV movie The Magical Legend of the Leprechaun!

This week on Alcohollywood, our Disney princess Cherish joins us as we visit the Mary Poppins carbon-copy follow-up Bedknobs & Broomsticks! Apprentice witch Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) takes in three obnoxious Cockney children, only to promptly drag them along on her grand adventure to win the war for the British using the dark arts – which, apparently, just involves ‘substitutiary locomotion’ to get ordinary objects to float and perform pranks on people. The film, despite its good intentions, interesting visual effects and charming performances from its leads, doesn’t hold a candle to its predecessor Mary Poppins because of its meandering story, scenes and songs that drag on too long, and repetitive, derivative cartoon sequences that just rehash animation and backgrounds from Robin Hood and The Jungle Book. That being said, it’s an interesting case study in Buena Vista/Disney’s attempts to make lightning strike twice, and is helped immensely by our custom cocktail and rules!

LISTEN HERE:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Beautiful Briny

2 parts gin (ideally New World gin)

2 parts orange juice

1 part St. Germain

1 part jasmine liqueur

spoonful, blackberry preserves

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you hear indecipherable Cockney

2) Drink whenever the oldest child, Charlie the killjoy, says something dismissive

3) Drink every time someone is turned into a rabbit

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Paul says, “At least I’ve still got this!” while displaying his knob for all to see.

Join us next week, as we take on the Coen Brothers’ classic Odyssey adaptation O Brother, Where Art Thou?!

LISTEN HERE:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Emancipator

2 parts Knob Creek bourbon whiskey

1 part applejack

1 part lemon juice

1 tbsp. mint syrup (combine water, sugar and mint leaves over heat to make syrup)

dash, blood orange bitters

Combine and stir. Emancipate your liver.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you see or hear the names of places

2) Drink whenever you see a document or paper of any kind

3) Drink when you actually see an African-American character in a scene

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

George Yeaman (Michael Stuhlbarg) says during the ratification vote, “I said aye, Mr. McPherson. AAAYYYEEE!!!”

CLINT AND JARED’S OSCAR POOL PICKS:

Best Picture:
Jared: Lincoln
Clint: Argo

Best Actor:
Jared: Daniel-Day Lewis, Lincoln
Clint: Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Actress:
Jared: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Clint: Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Best Supporting Actor:
Jared: Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
Clint: Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Supporting Actress:
Jared: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Clint: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

Best Director:
Jared: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
Clint: Ang Lee, Life of Pi

Best Original Screenplay:
Jared: Zero Dark Thirty
Clint: Moonrise Kingdom

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Jared: Lincoln
Clint: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Best Animated Feature
Jared: Wreck-It Ralph
Clint: Paranorman

Best Foreign Language Film:
Jared: Amour
Clint: Amour

Best Cinematography:
Jared: Lincoln
Clint: Skyfall

Best Editing:
Jared: Lincoln
Clint: Argo

Best Production Design:
Jared: Lincoln
Clint: Anna Karenina

Best Costumes:
Jared: Lincoln
Clint: Les Miserables

Best Makeup:
Jared: Les Miserables
Clint: The Hobbit

Best Original Score
Jared: Thomas Newman, Skyfall
Clint: Mychael Danna, Life of Pi

Best Original Song
Jared: “Skyfall”, Skyfall
Clint: “Skyfall”, Skyfall

Best Sound Mixing:
Jared: Lincoln
Clint: Skyfall

Best Sound Editing:
Jared: Skyfall
Clint: Django Unchained

Best Visual Effects
Jared: The Avengers
Clint: Prometheus

Best Documentary:
Jared: How to Survive a Plague
Clint: Searching for Sugar Man

Best Short Doc:
Jared: “Open Heart”
Clint: “Inocente”

Best Short Film:
Jared: “Death of a Shadow”
Clint: “Buzkashi Boys”

Best Animated Short:
Jared: “Paperman”
Clint: “Paperman”

Next week, we dip back into the Disney well with the half-animated spiritual sister to Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks!

Happy Valentine’s Day from all of us at Alcohollywood! In lieu of our regularly scheduled programming, our friends Julia and Todd join us to take on the 2009 Nia Vardalos vanity project I Hate Valentine’s Day! In this tragic misfire,  the My Big Fat Greek Wedding star plays a patently psychotic florist whose strict five-date system blows up in her face in the wake of a fling with a charming, down-to-earth restauranteur (John Corbett, her co-star from Greek Wedding). The humor falls flat, Vardalos’ personality is grating, and the cast is full of obnoxious comic relief characters who are given no inner lives except in relation to Vardalos’ Genevieve. Seriously, this film looks like it was shot in a facsimile of New York City made on a different planet – it’s worth at least one painful watch, with the help of our custom cocktail and drinking rules!

LISTEN HERE:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: I Hate “I Hate Valentine’s Day” Day

2 parts vanilla-infused vodka

1 part Kinky vodka liqueur

2 parts ginger ale

Combine and stir. Garnish with strawberry.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever the dialogue comes to a pregnant pause

2) Drink every time Nia Vardalos flashes her psychotic, manic grin

3) Drink whenever you see wine/wine glasses on screen

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Greg (Corbett) shouts, “Genevieve! Here’s some stuff that scares you!”

Take a look out for us at the end of February, as we guest on The Film Pasture Podcast!

THE OFFICIAL ALCOHOLLYWOOD ROMANTIC COMEDY BINGO CARD:

Next week, we take a look at 2012′s Oscar slate as we make a drinking game and cocktail for the new Spielberg film Lincoln!

This week on Alcohollywood, we take on one of our more obscure listener requests – the mid-90s microbudget action movie Felony, starring a bevy of B-movie stars (Jeffrey Combs, Lance Henriksen, David Warner, Joe Don Baker) who shamble through this film without really knowing what they are doing! The convoluted story follows a cameraman (Combs) and a bunch of nebulously-linked groups of people, all looking after a tape that might incriminate the villains somehow. The movie takes place in a magical land where cars have a Pinto-like combustible fragility, everyone switches their allegiances at the drop of a hat, and the citizens of a major city completely ignore car chases and shootouts, even when they’re in them! We try to untangle this mess with the help of our signature cocktail and drinking rules, so take a listen!

LISTEN HERE:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Greatest Tape

3 parts bourbon whiskey

1 part herbsaint

4 parts coconut water (pineapple flavored)

dash, honey

dash, Pechaud’s bitters

Bacardi 151

orange peel

Combine whiskey, herbsaint, coconut water, honey and bitters; stir. Cut orange peel into desired shape; soak in Bacardi 151 rum for several minutes. Garnish drink with peel and light on fire.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever a car is damaged, either through accidents, gunshots or explosions

2) Drink whenever a character says the word ‘tape’

3) Drink whenever a character double-crosses another character

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Cooper (David Warner) says incredulously, “Double-crossed!”

Join us next week as we get in touch with the romantic spirit for our Valentine’s Day special – this year, we’re watching the 2001 middle-aged romantic comedy Town and Country, starring Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re watching the 1997 disaster flick Dante’s Peak, starring Pierce Brosnan and The Terminator‘s Linda Hamilton as a rockstar volcanologist and a small-town mayor, respectively, who attempt to escape a rampaging volcano terrorizing the small town of Dante’s Peak. Basically Jaws with a volcano, the film is a cheesy rollercoaster ride, but not nearly as obnoxious as its volcano-film partner, Volcano – the effects hold up well, the stakes are clear, and the filmmakers actually go for the gut with some of the deaths. With that in mind, it’s certainly an interesting artifact to explore: a perfect encapsulation of a time when coffee was ubiquitous, everyone dressed like Blossom, and science robots were still a fascinating gimmick. Check out our rules and custom cocktail, as well as our review below!

LISTEN HERE:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Grandma’s Acid Bath

muddled sweet Thai chiles

1 part espresso-infused vodka

1 part triple sec

2 parts Irish cream

dash, Aztec chocolate bitters

Muddle chiles; pour in remaining ingredients. Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink for blue, tucked-in work shirts

2) Drink every time you see or hear ‘Dante’s Peak’

3) Drink anytime the screen is nothing but grey

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Grandma (Elizabeth Hoffman) says “Stop looking at me like this is my fault.”

Join us next week when we check out the direct-to-video Lance Henriksen vehicle Felony!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re getting weird with it! 1977′s House (Hausu) is a wacky, sprightly, insane Japanese horror-comedy that follows seven teenage girls (all named after their chief personality trait) who visit an aunt’s house for the weekend, only to be greeted with carniverous pianos, watermelon-based horrors, deadly mattresses, and spooky cats, all filmed with a colorful, cartoony edge by experimental film director Nobuhiko Obayashi. The result is incredible in its wackiness and childlike glee, and truly has to be seen to be believed. We are joined this week by Three Brothers Theatre’s Nick Ostrem, who helps us untangle this madness, along with our signature cocktail and drinking rules. Check it out!

LISTEN HERE:

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THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The House That Crack Built

3 parts sake

1 part absinthe

cucumber, muddled

raspberries, muddled

2 parts orange-flavored tea

Muddle raspberries and cucumber in shaker; combine other ingredients and shake with ice. Pour into Collins glass; garnish with cucumber zest and raspberry.

RULES:

1) Drink every time you see Blanche the cat

2) Drink every time the director uses circular framing (fisheye lenses, soft focus, irising in/out)

3) Drink whenever you see limbs or body parts

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Prof says “Kung Fu! The cat! Destroy it!”

Join us next week as we see what lengths James Bond and Sarah Connor have to go to in order to survive a deadly volcano in 1997′s Dante’s Peak!

Clint from Alcohollywood will be at B-Fest at Northwestern University on Friday, January 25th, watching 24 hours of awful B movies with some good folks and presenting the film Rhinestone! Check out details and stop by http://www.b-fest.com to learn more and snag some tickets!

One award loss and one sprained ankle later, Jared and Clint return from Vegas to resume their duties as your humble hosts! This time, friend of the show Craig stops by to help us dissect and make sense of one of his favorite films – the 1982 post-apocalyptic Italian anomaly She, starring Conan the Barbarian‘s Sandahl Bergman as a sexy warrior-goddess helping two be-permed schlubs find a girl captured by the garishly dressed Norks. This film is a schizophrenic nightmare that will either leave you rolling in your seat or screaming in filmic agony: setpiece after setpiece of shoddily-assembled and murkily plotted events see our heroes avoiding werewolf orgies, fighting robot Frankensteins, cutting the limbs off multiplying stand-up comedians guarding bridges and more. It’s a film you really have to see to believe; luckily, it’s available on Netflix streaming. We’ve also got the drink and the rules to get you through it!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BShe%2B%25281982%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Cancellation

1 part moonshine

1 part sweet potato vodka

1 part amaretto

splash, Jagermeister

pinch, black pepper

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you see random acts of brutality

2) Drink whenever someone says ‘She’

3) Drink every time a new freakishly strange character appears

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Godan’s secretary yells “We BELIEVED in you….and you BETRAYED US!”

Next week, we’re diving into the strange, psychedelic cult 1970s Japanese horror film House (Hausu)!

ANNOUNCEMENT: On January 25-26th, Alcohollywood will be sponsoring a screening of the film Rhinestone as part of Northwestern University’s B-Fest Film Festival. It’s a 24-hour screening of awful B-movies in Evanston, IL, and we’ll be there to endure the agony along with you! You can check out the lineup and buy tickets here. See you then!

Coming to you live from Las Vegas, Nevada, this episode of Alcohollywood sees Jared and Clint podcasting from the New Media Expo (recorded on Jan. 8th), joined by Editor-in-Chief of AMC Movie Talk John Campea, who graciously sits with us and gabs about Oscar nominations speculation (with which we make many wildly inaccurate guesses about what ended up being nominated). For the most part, however, we end up talking about James Bond’s biggest Vegas vacation, Diamonds Are Forever! The start of the overt campiness of the Bond era, we see a very tired and flabby Sean Connery come back to the role to interact with one of the weirdest rogue’s galleries a Bond film has ever had. Along with John, we also get into the Bond series as a whole, and we all learn a little something.

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BDiamonds%2BAre%2BForever%2B%25281971%2529%2Bw%252FJohn%2BCampea%2Bof%2BAMC%2BMovie%2BTalk%2B%2528NMX%2BVegas%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Tiffany Case

2 parts diamond-filtered Vodka (e.g. Ciroc)

1 part ruby red grapefruit juice

splash, yellow chartreuse

splash, honey syrup

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime Bond or another character makes quips

2) Drink whenever you see diamonds

3) Drink whenever you see fluids or liquids (foams and fire extinguishers also count)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Blofeld (Charles Grey) says to Tiffany Case, “We’re showing a bit more cheek than usual, aren’t we?”

Join us next week as we take another user request, do a small recap of our experiences at NMX, and talk about the strange, schizophrenic 1980s film She, starring Conan the Barbarian’s Sandahl Bergman!

(We also wish to extend our heartfelt thanks once again to John Campea, who was extremely kind and great to talk to during the podcast, as well as all the other podcasters – Spill, The Beerists, etc. – we met at NMX!)

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BThe%2B13th%2BWarrior%2B%25281999%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Drinkers of the Dead

2 parts Frost vodka

1 part milk or cream

1 part butternut squash juice

1 part blueberry syrup

sage, muddled

Muddle sage; add remaining ingredients and combine. Pour into glass; garnish with blueberries and sage leaf. Vanquish thine enemies.

RULES:

1) Drink for closeups of Antonio Banderas

2) Drink whenever you see the strange red dog in the Viking village

3) Drink whenever you see a decapitated head

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Herger (The Joyous) yells “Goodbye, Arab!” at Ahmed during their farewell.

Next week on Alcohollywood, we’re coming at you live from the New Media Expo in Las Vegas, NV for the Podcast Awards – be sure to watch the live stream at http://www.podcastawards.com Monday, January 7th at 8:30 CST to see if we won Best Food/Drink Podcast! Since we’re there, our next episode will celebrate the town we’ll be recording from, as we dip into the James Bond well once again for Diamonds Are Forever!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays from the folks at Alcohollywood! For the holiday season, we’re tackling yet another unconventional Christmas film – the 1985 dystopian cult classic Brazil, directed by Terry Gilliam! In this 1984-on-crack world of dystopian steampunk Britain, mild-mannered accountant Sam Lowry (a wonderfully befuddled Jonathan Pryce) tries to track down the girl of his dreams while stymied by stunted bureaucracy, terrorist attacks and intrusive family and friends. The result is a wonderfully realized, dreamlike and endlessly entertaining flick that is evocative of the best science fiction and Expressionist films in film history. Luckily, we’ve got the perfect cocktail and rules to accompany you on this dystopian adventure – just be sure to bring the right paperwork!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BCHRISTMAS%2BSPECIAL%253A%2BBrazil%2B%25281985%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Tuttle’s Duct Sludge

2 parts Cachaca rum

1 part eggnog

spoonful, cranberry jelly

pinch, cloves

dash, nutmeg

Combine and shake vigorously. Top with nutmeg. Fill out the necessary forms, then drink.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime we hear ‘Tuttle’ or ‘Buttle’

2) Drink whenever you see paper

3) Drink whenever you hear the song “Brazil”

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Jill Layton (Kim Griest) says, “Care for a little necrophilia?”

Join us on the other side of the new year, as we break in 2013 with The 13th Warrior, where Antonio Banderas navigates a strange sci-fantasy Beowulf(?) with Omar Sharif and a bunch of other guys. Check that out next week, and have a happy holidays!

It’s the end of the world, and we feel tipsy – this week on Alcohollywood, we watch the Roland Emmerich disaster flick 2012 and figure out just how worried we should be about the coming Mayan apocalypse (Hint: not at all). Follow John Cusack and a bloated ensemble cast of international actors, all slumming it for cash, as they alternately engage in philosophical hand-wringing about the end of the world and evade one CGI sequence after another. Despite some engaging disaster porn, it’s still pretty overlong, and you can see entire characters and plot progressions lifted wholesale from Emmerich’s previous disaster flicks (Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow). At the same time, we’ve got a custom cocktail and drinking rules to get you through to the other side!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2B2012%2B%25282009%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Mutated Neutrino

2 parts silver tequila

2 parts silver rum

2 parts celery juice

1 part lime juice

muddled jalapeno

muddled mint

splash, agave nectar

1 part soda water

(optional) 151-proof rum

Muddle jalapeno and mint; combine tequila, rum, agave,  celery and lime juices and stir. Pour into glass; add soda water. Garnish with jalapeno slice, mint leaf and lime wedge. (OPTIONAL: Top with Bacardi 151 rum (pour over back of spoon) and light on fire.)

RULES:

1) Drink every time you see a computer screen

2) Drink whenever Cusack et al. switch vehicles (e.g. vehicles, planes)

3) Drink whenever a new historical landmark is destroyed

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

John Cusack’s little girl Lilly whispers to him, “No more Pull-Ups!”

Join us Sunday as we ring in the new year with one of our favorite movies (and a frequent request by our listeners): the 1985 Terry Gilliam dystopian masterpiece Brazil!

Harry Connickuh everybody! In celebration of that, we check in with Little Man Tate, the 1991 kid dramedy starring (and directed by) Jodie Foster. Foster plays Dede, a working class mom in New York who struggles to raise her little man, Fred Tate, a young genius, and the pressures of celebrity and achievement coming from the early-90s obsession with kid geniuses. Connick himself also stars (well, cameos) as a charismatic college student who teaches Fred the ways of pool and awkwardly walking in on someone having sex. Despite its good intentions, the film’s a bit of a slog, and most of the characters (particularly Fred) don’t have the charisma to carry a feature film. Nonetheless, give it a shot and find out what you think, bolstered by our custom cocktail and rules!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BLittle%2BMan%2BTate%2B%25281991%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Little Man Shake

2 parts Chopin potato vodka

2 parts Kahlua gingerbread liqueur

1 part amaretto

vanilla ice cream

ginger snap cookies

raspberries

Combine in blender, serve. Garnish with whipped cream, ginger snap, raspberries.

RULES:

1) Drink every time someone gives a glassy-eyed stare (Jane, Dede, Fred)

2) Drink whenever Fred does something “smart” (answers a question, drops a factoid)

3) Drink whenever Jodie Foster ends her sentences with an affected “Heh?!”

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Fred asks Jane (Dianne Wiest), “What’s wrong with you?”

Join us next week as we celebrate the end of the world with Roland Emmerich’s 2012! (Also, check us out at the Underground WonderBar Monday, December 17th at 7:30pm as we stream and riff the Star Wars Holiday Special, complete with its own rules! Free admission and drink specials galore!)

This week on Alcohollywood, we check out the 1980s Danny Devito-directed comedy Throw Momma from the Train, starring DeVito as a schlubby mama’s boy who, wishing the death of his mother (Anne Ramsey, The Goonies) gets mixed up in a Strangers on a Train-like bargain with his struggling writing teacher (Billy Crystal) to kill his mom in exchange for her lamprey-like ex-wife. The result is a surprisingly hilarious and darkly comic buddy piece, with Crystal and Devito giving career-high performances bolstered by a strong, genuinely witty script and nuggets of magical realism in the strange world of the film (one of Devito’s hallmarks as a filmmaker). Throw yourself off the wagon with our custom cocktail and drinking rules!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BThrow%2BMomma%2Bfrom%2Bthe%2BTrain%2B%25281987%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Momma’s Throw-Made Apple Pie A-La Mode (of TRAINsportation)

2 parts vanilla vodka

1 part spiced rum

1 part sour apple liqueur

2 parts ginger ale

dash, lemon juice (to taste)

Combine and stir. Throw into your mouth.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you hear someone (usually Billy Crystal) says “The night was…”

2) Drink whenever you see a zoom

3) Drink whenever Larry or Owen fantasize about murdering someone

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Larry says “I’m gonna go kill the bitch. You want anything?”

Next week, we light the Connickuh pianocandle as we celebrate our favorite made-up holiday, by watching Little Man Tate!

(Don’t forget to check us out at the Underground Wonder Bar Monday nights at 7pm, as Jared and Clint screen movies with some of our signature drinking rules! Next Monday’s is TBD, but that’s all the more reason to show up!)

This week on Alcohollywood, we praise Crom with our review and drinking game to 1982′s Conan the Barbarian, the John Milius flick that put Arnold Schwarzenegger on the map! This silent, episodic epic follows the eponymous barbarian (Schwarzenegger) on his quest for revenge against the warlord-turned-cult leader Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), joined by his friends Valeria (Sandahl Bergman) and Subatai (Mongolian Sonny Bono). With a huge and bombastic score from Basil Pouledoris, fantastic camerawork, and an unconventional 80s feel, it’s definitely worth a watch, even if the pace drags a bit. Luckily, we’ll help you crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women with our custom cocktail and drinking rules!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (%5Btindeck.com%5D+-+Alcohollywood%2B-%2BConan%2Bthe%2BBarbarian%2B%25281982%2529.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Riddle of Steel

2 parts whiskey

1 part orange liqueur

1 part gold tequila

1 part amaretto

splash, bitters

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink for lines of dialogue (lines being an entire piece of dialogue from an individual)

2) Drink for snake iconography (images of snakes, not real snakes/things that are supposed to be real snakes)

3) Drink whenever you see fire

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Conan prays to Crom, finishing with “Grant me revenge….and you do not listen…then TO HELL WITH YOU!”

Join us next week as we catch up with Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito, as they Throw Momma from the Train!

ANNOUNCEMENT: Two big announcements – first, we are confirmed as attending the Awards Ceremonies at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 7th, so look out for the stream to see if we won Best Food & Drink Podcast at the Podcast Awards!

Secondly, if you’re in the Chicago area, you can start seeing us live Mondays at the Underground Wonder Bar on Clark and Huron (in River North), as we play a drinking game to a film, riff on it, and chat with you fine people! Our first go-round, starting December 3rd (this next Monday), we’re watching Die Hard. See you there!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re ushering in the new Spielberg film (Lincoln) with one of his last films named after the surname of one of the main characters – Hook! This 1991 nostalgia misfire, starring Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman, explores what happens if Peter Pan wakes up and becomes a cynical workaholic lawyer who ignores his kids, complete with floppy ’90s cellphone. When the nasty Captain Hook (Hoffman) kidnaps his kids to bait Peter to come back, Tinkerball (a distracted Julia Roberts) must drag him kicking and screaming back to Neverland and train him for the fight of his life against Hook. Does it still hold up twenty years later? Check out our review and drinking game here!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (62-Hook-1991-2.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Gonna Rufio Grog

1 part spiced rum (Sailor Jerry or other)

5 parts hard cider

splash lime juice

splash orgeat

- Almond extract

- water

- sugar

- orange blossom

Captain Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch

nutmeg

TO MAKE ORGEAT: Stir together almond syrup, sugar, water and orange blossom to taste.

Combine rum, cider, lime juice and orgeat; stir. Crush Captain Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch into crumbs, mix with nutmeg; rum lime across rim of glass and ‘salt’ with cereal. Pour mixed drink into glass.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime Peter Banning (Williams) demonstrates his ineptitude as a man and a father

2) Drink for the “Spielberg Stare” (e.g. adults/children looking just past the camera in wonder)

3) Drink anytime someone says “Hook”

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Peter creepily whispers, “Thank you for belieeeeving!” as he flies away from the Lost Boys.

See you next week, when we discover what is best in life with the 1980s Schwarzenegger classic Conan the Barbarian!

The name’s Bond….James Bond! This week, Alcohollywood is doing its first New Release with the latest James Bond film Skyfall, in which James Bond (Daniel Craig) deals with the specter (get it?) of his childhood and his empty life as a spy, all while melding the gritty Bourne-era Craig Bonds with more traditional elements. Here, an attack on M (Judi Dench) brings Bond back out of the shadows, in order to track down her potential killer and a list of undercover spies that is threatened to be released by flamboyant villain Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem). Throw in a couple Bond girls, a new Q (Ben Whishaw) and Ralph Fiennes channeling a more serious John Steed from his Avengers movie, and you’ve got a great cast bolstered through strong direction from Sam Mendes, absolutely gorgeous cinematography from Roger Deakins, and a wonderful score from Thomas Newman (pinch-hitting for David Arnold) to create a fantastic Bond movie that attempts – for better or worse – to bring the character a bit more dimension, and question the validity of these kinds of movies in today’s technological world.

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (61-Skyfall-2012.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Severine

6 parts Gordon’s dry gin

2 parts vodka

1 part Lillet rouge

Shake (don’t stir!) and serve in martini glass. Garnish with apple slice.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever James Bond makes a signature quip

2) Drink whenever a light is turned on or off

3) Drink whenever James Bond is center frame

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Kincaid (Albert Finney) says, “Welcome to Scotland!”

Next week, we’re heading back to Neverland with Steven Spielberg’s 1991 fantasy Hook, with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman!

Remember Dorf? Those 1980s VHS tapes with Tim Conway where he plays a dwarf golf instructor by standing in a hole in the ground, with tennis shoes glued where his knees are to simulate having shorter legs? This week on Alcohollywood, we’re finally tackling one of those hit “cult bad movies” you kids these days seem to like so much – Tiptoes! This time around, we get to see the “Dorf effect” be given to acclaimed actor Gary Oldman, in what the schizophrenic trailer claims is “the role of a lifetime.” I assume this means that, after you do it once, you have enough sense not to do it again. Either way, the film vacillates between (attempts at) a tender drama of midget relations and the complexities of starting a new family – personified by bored and confused thespians Matthew McConaughey and Kate Beckinsale – and a wacky comedy about just how funny those midgets are. Co-starring real dwarf actor Peter Dinklage as a greasy French Marxist and Patricia Arquette as a dumb-as-nails drifter, this film is as perplexing as it is misguided. Luckily, we’ve got our custom cocktail, some drinking rules, and frequent guest Julia, who joins us for a quiz! Take a listen:

Remember to vote for Alcohollywood to win Best Food & Drink Podcast at the 8th Annual Podcast Awards here – voting ends November 15th, and you can vote once a day if you want until the end! 

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (60-Tiptoes-2003.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Short Island Iced Tea

Short Island Iced Tea

1 part gin

1 part silver tequila

1 part silver rum

1 part lime juice

1 part triple sec

2 parts pomegranate juice

Combine and stir; garnish with line wedge.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever a character states the obvious

2) Drink anytime a character wears outrageous costumes/clothing

3) Drink anytime the orchestra dives headlong into saccharine piano

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Steven (McConaughey) says, “What I need…are new chromosomes.”

Next week, we’re going to try out our first New Release, as we’ll talk about the new Daniel Craig James Bond flick Skyfall and let you know how you should drink to it (ideally after it comes out on home video – or in the right theater)!

Welcome to the second episode of Alcoholloween, as we finish up HORROR OCTORBOR!, our month of Stephen King films, with the 1982 horror anthology Creepshow! Here, dated and wacky cartoon transitions from George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead) speed us along five tales of terror. Prepare for two hours of: a vengeful father who just wants his cake; a dumb yokel (a blissfully rare acting role from King himself) finding a meteor with strange properties; a vengeful husband takes his sadistic jollies from torturing his wife and her lover; a strange Yeti in a crate helps a weak-willed husband solve the problem of his shrewish wife; and finally, a Scrooge-like germophobe  deals with a pernicious bug problem. The film is full of 80s kitsch, so be prepared for that – we’ll help you along the way with our custom cocktail and drinking rules!

ANNOUNCEMENT: Alcohollywood has just been nominated for Best Food & Drink Podcast in the 8th Annual Podcast Awards! You, our loyal listeners, can help us win by voting for us on their website – starting November 1st, vote for us every day to help us win! We cannot thank all you loyal listeners enough for your help, since your votes already helped make us a finalist in the first place – we very much appreciate it, and keep the votes coming!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (59-ALCOHOLLOWEEN-Creepshow-1982.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Meteor Shit

3 parts pumpkin-and-pecan-infused Jim Beam

1 part Kahlua

2 parts apple liqueur

2 parts milk

Combine and stir. Top with splash of grenadine to create a creepy blood-pouring effect.

RULES:

1) Drink every time you see comic-book effects (animation, borders, panels, dutch angles, cartoonish lighting, etc.)

2) Drink every time a character talks to themselves

3) Drink whenever you see a character drinking

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The trash guy, upon finding out the Voodoo Doll has been sent away for, says, “….Yeah, we can’t get that…”

Next week, we take another user request to watch one of the most offensive portrayals of dwarfism ever committed to screen – the infamous Tiptoes, starring Matthew McConaughey, Kate Beckinsale, and Gary Oldman (as a midget)!

This week on Alcohollywood, we check in to the Overlook Hotel with 1980s Stanley Kubrick film The Shining, as we continue HORROR OCTORBOR! Watch the slow but intense haunting of the Torrances, who care for the hotel by themselves, with the help of fantastic cinematography, chilling performances and a haunting sense of atmosphere that makes thus truly one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date (even if King himself doesn’t think so). Along with this, we can descend into alcoholism right with Jack along with our drinking game and custom cocktail!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (58-HORROR-OCTORBOR-The-Shining-198.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Tony’s Red-Rum Punch

Jack’s Red Rum Punch

3 parts pumpkin-infused spiced rum

1 part Cointreau or other orange liqueur

1 part Goldschlager or other cinnamon liqueur

2 parts cranberry juice

dash Pechaud’s bitters

rosemary, muddled

Muddle rosemary; combine liqueurs and shake. Pour into glass and finish with cranberry juice and bitters. Stir and serve.

RULES:

1) Drink for grins

2) Drink every time an implement is swung (keep a drink handy during the baseball bat and ax scenes).

3) Drink every time you see or hear ‘Redrum’

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

(you guessed it) Jack Torrance, through the broken door, growls, “Heere’s Johnny!”

Look out next Tuesday for our second Alcoholloween special, where we take on Stephen King’s horror anthology Creepshow!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re headed back to the 1980s with the Stephen King-written werewolf flick Silver Bullet, starring Gary Busey as alcoholic-yet-fun uncle Red, who helps handicapped Corey Haim track down a werewolf that’s killing the increasingly-simpleminded denizens of his small Maine town. Luckily, they’ve got the help of their spunky sister, a bunch of unfounded assumptions, and Corey’s flipping-sweet motorized wheelchair, the “Silver Bullet”! Keep a look out for other actors who probably shouldn’t be here, including Terry O’Quinn as the well-meaning town sheriff, Everett McGill as a preacher with a terrible secret (SPOILER: he’s the werewolf), and Lawrence Tierney as the town bartender. Bite into our custom cocktail and drinking rules for Silver Bullet!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (57-HORROR-OCTORBOR-Silver-Bullet-1.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Holy Jumped-Up Jesus Palomino

The Holy Jumped-Up Jesus Palomino

1 part moonshine (get it?)

4 parts Coors Light

3 parts cranberry juice

1 part spearmint schnapps

Combine and stir. 

RULES:

1) Drink whenever another character takes a drink (alcoholic or no)

2) Drink anytime someone curses

3) Drink anytime you hear howls or growls (either from the werewolf, Busey, or anyone else)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The gun shop owner slurs, “How ’bout a wurrrwolf?”

Join us next week when we get into our final regular episode of HORROR OCTORBOR! before our Halloween special. This time around, we’re covering the most well-known and acclaimed adaptation of a Stephen King story, the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re continuing HORROR OCTORBOR! by sitting through the three-hour miniseries IT, starring a bevy of B-level actors at the height of their popularity in the early nineties, plus a “special appearance” by Tim Curry as the titular character! Let’s get the Stephen King checklist out: After a group of seven kids (check) in a small town in Maine (check) destroy a creature that preys on their everyday fears (check), the kids – one of whom is a famous horror author (check) – must return to this town as adults to defeat the monster and recapture their childhood. This one’s a bit of a slog, but it terrified audiences in 1990, so we thought we’d check it out. Will Pennywise the Clown steal these kids’ souls, or will he be defeated by a slingshot and naive belief? Check out our rules, drink and review below!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (56-HORROR-OCTORBOR-IT-1990.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Hallo-wine Spr-IT-zer

Hallo-wine Spr-IT-zer

4 parts Hallowine spiced wine (you can find it at your local liquor store around this time of year)

1 part amaretto

1 part spiced rum

3 parts club soda/sparkling water

dash, blood orange bitters

Combine and pour into goblet of your choice.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever someone says the word ‘It’

2) Drink whenever someone uses an odd, uncommon figure of speech or taunt (“Kingisms”)

3) Drink whenever the narrative transitions between past and present

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Richie (Harry Anderson) retorts, “I can’t really help you with that, buddy, but thanks for sharing.”

Join us next week as HORROR OCTORBOR! continues with a movie that combines two of our favorite things: Gary Busey and werewolves. We’re watching Silver Bullet next week, so check that out!

This week on Alcohollywood, we start HORROR OCTORBOR!, where we celebrate Halloween by reviewing and drinking to Stephen King adaptations! To begin, we tackle the 2007 thriller 1408, starring John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson and one evil fucking room. In typical Stephen King fashion, the main character is a cynical horror writer (Cusack) with family issues who investigates a notoriously scary hotel room in New York – you can guess what happens next. The movie is, if nothing else, great for fridge freakouts, Samuel L. Jackson’s sly performance, and some great, atmospheric direction from Mikael Halfstrom. Check it out along with our review and drinking game, and our custom cocktail!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (alcohollywood55.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Evil Fucking Room

The Evil Fucking Room

1 part caraway-infused black cherry syrup:

- caraway seeds

- black cherry juice (no sugar added)

4 parts honeycrisp apple juice

0 parts (get it?) dry sherry

8 parts scotch

Heat up black cherry juice on stovetop heat till reduced; pulverize caraway seeds and add to juice. Stir until combined. Pour a bit of dry sherry into the empty glass, swirl, and pour that out. Pour juices and scotch into the glass, and garnish with keys.

 RULES:

1) Drink anytime someone says ’1408′ or any other number (also when they are seen)

2) Drink every time John Cusack shrieks or screams or yells

3) Drink any time John Cusack speaks into his tape recorder

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Nick Enslin (John Cusack) shouts “I WAS OUT! I WAS OUT!!!!”

Join us for next week’s installment of HORROR OCTORBOR!, as we take on some evil fucking clowns with IT!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re getting in touch with our feminine sides with frequent guest Julia, as we cover the Drew Barrymore late-90s you-go-girl fairytale Ever After, costarring Anjelica Huston and Dougray Scott! This retelling of the Cinderella fable takes away all the magic and plops the story into a loose version of 16th-century France, complete with anachronistic Leonardo DaVinci and games of rock-paper-scissors. This time around, young cinder girl Danielle (Barrymore) attempts to find love and assert her girl power while wooing the young Prince Henry (Scott) under the nose of wicked stepmother Rodmilla (Huston). Regardless of your gender, we’ve just got the magic potion to accompany your next viewing of this slice of 1990s cheese!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (54-Ever-After-19981.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Green Fairy Godmother

The Green Fairy Godmother

1 part bison grass

1 part lemon-flavored vodka

2 parts amaretto

Combine and pour into wine glass.

ABSINTHE-VANILLA FOAM:

3 parts absinthe

2 parts lemon juice

2 parts egg white

splash, vanilla extract

whip ingredients together into foam (via immersion blender or mixer); pour over drink.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you see a slow pan from one direction to another

2) Drink for eyebrow-raising

3) Drink whenever you see conduct unbecoming a “lady” (e.g. punching, rudeness, pratfalls by a female character)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Danielle de Barbarac (Drew Barrymore) says to herself, “Just breathe.”

See you next week as we start HORROR OCTORRBOR!, where all of our episodes cover adaptations of Stephen King works! Our first episode for October is the recent John Cusack-Samuel L. Jackson hotel thriller 1408, where we get to see John Cusack freak out over spooky shit and tear up hotel minifridges. See you then!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re giving you a double-dose of action with the French parkour thrill rides District B13 and District 13: Ultimatum! These mid-2000s French action pics, produced by Luc Besson, follow a cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and a thief (parkour co-founder David Belle) as they save the downtrodden residents of District 13, a walled-up ghetto in future Paris, from both overly-ambitious gangsters and an uncaring, homocidal dystopian government. Filled with wonderfully choreographed fight scenes and an unexpected dash of energy and humor, the District B13 series is definitely a great dose of Jackie Chan-esque kinetic thrills. In order to fuel your need for wall-jumps and crazy flips, we’ve got just the drink and rules to get you through these two films!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (53-DOUBLE-FEATURE-District-B13-200.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Parkour de France

4 parts applejack

1 part creme de cassis

3 parts coconut water

4-5 dashes, Paycheaud’s bitters

mint, garnish

RULES:

1) Drink every time a character does a parkour jump

2) Drink whenever you see a Fast and Furious-style garish car

3) Drink whenever you see graffiti

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

District B13: Damian says “Mega-mission accomplished!”

District 13: Ultimatum: The French President says, ” I’d like a little brandy.”

Join us next week as we take a break from back-breaking action to get in touch with our feminine sides – we’re tackling the mid-1990s Drew Barrymore fairy tale Ever After!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re delving into the world of Dirty Harry with his fifth, final and most unfortunate installment, The Dead Pool! Join hard-boiled detective Harry Callahan (a rapidly aging and crotchety Clint Eastwood) and his new Asian sidekick as they solve a series of murders related to a betting pool called The Dead Pool. Along the way, enjoy early roles from Patricia Clarkson (as Harry’s reporter love interest), Liam Neeson (as an effete British director/prime suspect) and Jim Carrey (as a strung-out rock star who becomes one of the killer’s first victims). This cop movie is mired in 80s excess, and a creaky Clint Eastwood; luckily, however, we’ve got the drink and the rules to get you through it – take a listen and hear our thoughts!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (52-The-Dead-Pool-1988.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Sudden Magnum Pool Enforcer

2 parts Irish whiskey

2 parts black coffee

1 part Cointreau

1 part apple juice

1 tbsp. caramel syrup

dash, cayenne pepper

Combine; if served hot, stir. If served cold, shake.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever someone fires a gun

2) Drink whenever a character prefaces someone’s name with their title or position

3) Drink whenever someone says the words “Dead Pool”

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) says “I’ll kick your ass so hard you’ll have to unbutton your collar to shit!”

Join us next week for a double dose of parkour, as we trundle through the dystopian French action films District B13 and District B13: Ultimatum!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re headed back to our roots by tackling a Steven Spielberg film for the first time since our first episode! This time around, we’re doing his very first movie, the made-for-TV thriller Duel, starring Dennis Weaver as a nebbish 1970s wimp dealing with the worst case of road rage imaginable – the unseen driver of a monstrous, murderous semi truck that seems to stop at nothing to terrorize him. The result is either a wonderfully Expressionistic, abstract look at the nature of the rapidly emasculating man set against the road-trip atmosphere of the American 70s, or a sweet horror movie about man vs. truck, however you want to look at it! Whatever your perspective on the film, we’ve got the drink and the drinking game to spice up the proceedings, so start your engines!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (51-Duel-1971.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Road Rage

The Road Rage

4 parts tequila

4 parts grapefruit juice

3 parts ginger liqueur

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime you see Dennis Weaver in a mirror (e.g. rear view/side mirrors, bathroom mirrors)

2) Drink anytime Dennis Weaver actually says a line (NOTE: Drink only once for the start of internal monologues)

3) Drink whenever you hear a horn blast from the antagonizing truck

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The lady at Snakerama (Lucille Benson) says “Take a look at my snakes when you have the time.”

Next week on Alcohollywood, we are finally addressing the Clint Eastwood RNC controversy by checking out a film wherein he talks to chairs with people in them: The Dead Pool, the unfortunate last entry in the Dirty Harry film series, with early roles from Liam Neeson, Patricia Clarkson and Jim Carrey!

This week on Alcohollywood, we celebrate our 50th episode with some of our previous guests (Rachel from our Captain America episode, Julia from several of our episodes, Craig from our Fellini Satyricon episode, and Nick from our Independence Day episode) to watch the Wolfgang Peterson children’s fantasy film The NeverEnding Story! Join Bastian Balthazar Bux (Barret Oliver) as we watch him reading a book, while learning the tale of young warrior Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) and his fight to save the kingdom of Fantasia from the Nothing!

We also announce the winner of our Alcohollywood Drinking Game Contest: user TTBF from SA, who gives us this drinking game for the podcast:

“Rule 1: Drink anytime for laughter – It doesn’t matter if it is laughter, a giggle, a snort, or any other audible form of finding something humorous. Drink for it.

Rule 2: Drink anytime technical aspects of a film are mentioned – Cinematrogaphy, blocking, lighting, mise en scene, and even motifs.

Rule 3: Drink every time someone goes off topic – Whether it to be discuss other movies an actor’s been in, some hard science, or other such things. Optional addition: Include skipping around in the movie as being off-topic.

Finish your drink line: Finish your drink when you hear any variant of ‘And that brings us to our finish your drink line.’”

(NOTE: Beware that this episode is filled with more alcohol-fueled antics than normal, as well as a couple stuffy noses.)

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (50-50TH-EPISODE-SPECIAL_-The-NeverEn.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Nothing

The Nothing

5 parts gin

2 parts Flimm Apfel apple liqueur

2 parts Goldschlager

1 part St. Germain

splash, lemon

splash bitters

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever you see a reaction shot of Bastian (either before or during his reading session)

2) Drink anytime someone says “Atreyu”

3) Drink a character says the word “nothing”

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Bastian (Barret Oliver) screams, nearly unintelligibly, the name he gives to the Childlike Empress

Join us next week as we revisit Steven Spielberg’s ouvre for the first time since our first episode – this time, we’re taking on his first film, the direct-to-TV thriller Duel!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re finally tiptoeing our way into Nicolas Cage territory with the 1988 horror-comedy Vampire’s Kiss! Follow high-powered literary agent Peter Loew (Cage) as he slowly loses his mind after an encounter with a young woman who is potentially a vampire (Jennifer Beals). Apart from that bare-bones plot, watch as Cage kills pigeons, shouts at his secretary (Maria Conchita Alonso), and generally overacts himself into oblivion. Luckily, we’ve got our custom drink and rules (well, one rule) for you to get through this 80s gem!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (45-Vampires-Kiss-1988.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Alphabetical

The Alphabetical

2 parts rye whiskey

2 parts cherry liqueur

4 parts Francis Coppola Cabernet Sauvignon

dash Aztec Chocolate bitters

lemon

Combine and stir; pour into wine glass. Garnish with lemon.

RULE:

1) Drink anytime you see a Cage-Out (Nic Cage has an overacting freakout in the middle of a scene)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage) recites the entirety of the alphabet, to the chagrin of his therapist – Waterfall through the recitation of the alphabet, the goal being to finish your drink by the time he says “That’s ALLL you hafta DO!”

Join us next week for our 50th episode, where we bring back as many of our previous guests as possible to tackle a childhood favorite – The NeverEnding Story! (Don’t forget to comment or post your ideas for a drinking game to the actual Alcohollywood podcast itself – the winner gets a $20 Amazon gift card!)

Happy Shark Week, everyone! In order to celebrate this hallowed occasion, we’re taking to the high seas with a quirkier brand of marine science with Wes Anderson’s 2004 indie flick The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou! The titular oceanographer (Bill Murray) goes after the fabled (and animated) jaguar shark, with the help of his estranged maybe-son (Owen Wilson), a perniciously pregnant reporter (Cate Blanchett) and a crew of marine biologists, documentary filmmakers and David Bowie cover artists. With the typical Wes Anderson traits of quirky music, 1970s-era color palettes and deliberately flat acting, The Life Aquatic is deserving of at least a review, if not our signature cocktail and drinking game!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (44-SHARK-WEEK-SPECIAL_-The-Life-Aqua.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Belafonte

The Belafonte

2 parts whipped cream orange-flavored vodka

1 part cranberry vodka

2 parts spearmint schnapps

2 parts soda water

splash, blue curacao

Combine and stir; serve with Swedish Fish.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever a shot is made with a fisheye lens (i.e. it looks stretched out, like you’re looking through a peephole or into a fishbowl)

2) Drink whenever you see an animated, stop-motion creature

3) Drink whenever the lights turn off/burn out on the Belafonte

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Steve Zissou says, “We’ll give them the reality this time. A washed-up old man with no friends, no distribution deal, wife on the rocks, people laughin’ at him, feelin’ sorry for himself.”

Keep a look out Friday 12PM CST, as we livetweet all the way through a four-movie marathon of Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3D, and Jaws: The Revenge – all on our Twitter feed @alcohollywood!

Join us next week as well, when we tackle our first Nicolas Cage movie by user request – Vampire’s Kiss!

We’ve got our 50th episode coming up, which will air Thursday, August 30; there, we will announce the winner of our Alcohollywood Podcast Drinking Game Contest! All you have to do is either email jared@alcohollywood.com or clint@alcohollywood.com – or you can post on our Facebook or tweet us – with your ideas for a drinking game to play on the podcast. We need:

a) Three rules

b) A “Finish Your Drink” line

The winner, announced on the 50th episode, will receive a $20 Amazon gift card, so get started and we’ll see you then!

Jared and Clint from Alcohollywood (along with photographer/frequent guest Julia) just got back from Wizard World Chicago Comic Con, a four-day extravaganza of comics, celebrities and costumes in Rosemont, IL, and we’ve got coverage! In this special podcast, we give our impressions of the things we found there (Avengers colognes, Poison Ivys, sometimes-misogynist paintings of comic book characters), plus quite a few interviews with groups and organizations there. In addition to that, we had the unique privilege of getting a few minutes in with noted actor James Hong (Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China, Kung Fu Panda), who imparted his wisdom on wine, voice acting, and the state of Asian and Asian-American actors in the film industry today.

Special thanks go to James Hong, Ghostbusters Chicago Division, Gorilla Tango Burlesque, 501st Legion Midwest Garrison, Zombie Squad Chicago, Jurassic Park Legacy and all the other amazing groups that we met throughout the convention, as well as the staff of Wizard World themselves for their graciousness and support!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (44-Wizard-World-Podcast-Special-fea.mp3)

Tune in later this week as we return to our regular programming with our Shark Week holiday special! In honor of that special time of year, we set sail for The Life Aquatic w/Steve Zissou, complete with custom cocktail and drink. We’ll also be livetweeting on Friday a marathon of the four Jaws movies, so be sure to look out for that!

We’re still looking for entries for our 50th episode Drinking Game Contest! Basically, all you have to do is come up with three rules and a Finish Your Drink line to use for our podcast itself. The winner, who will be announced during our 50th episode, will get a $20 Amazon.com gift card – enter now!

This week on Alcohollywood, we handle one of the stranger films we’ve ever come across – the 1978 Italo knock-off of Star Wars, Starcrash! Follow the adventures of sexy-yet-useless Stella Starr (Caroline Munro) and her mysterious, be-Jewfroed alien ally Akton (Marjoe Gortner) as they search for Prince Simon (David Hasselhoff) before the evil Couth Zarth Arn can defeat the Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe (Christopher Plummer). Confused yet? So were we! With a nonsensical plot, laughable effects and inexplicably awful acting, this Roger Corman co-production is one of the greater guilty pleasures we have come across, and so we decided to give it the Alcohollywood treatment!

Starcrash is available on Netflix streaming!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (43-Starcrash-1978.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Deadly Ray

Deadly Ray

3 parts absinthe

2 parts jasmine liqueur

1 part pear liqueur

muddled mint

1 part sweetened lime juice

2 parts tonic water

Pour liquor and lime juice over crushed ice; finish with tonic water.

RULES:

1) Drink for every ponderous, awful shot of a model spaceship

2) Drink every time Stella Starr changes outfit

3) Drink every time Akton reveals a new power, ability or important piece of information

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe (Christopher Plummer) says, “IMPERIAL BATTLESHIP….HALT…THE FLOW OF TIME!”

Next week, we’re celebrating Shark Week with an aquatic-themed special that’s a bit more classy than this week’s entry: the Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou! On Friday, we’ll also be doing a special livetweet of all four Jaws movies, so look for our Twitter account @alcohollywood to tune in and tweet with us!

Also, look out Monday for a special podcast episode recorded live at Wizard World Chicago, with our upcoming interview with James Hong (Blade Runner, Kung Fu Panda, Big Trouble in Little China)! We will also be livetweeting at the event this weekend and uploading pictures, so stay tuned!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re gearing up for this year’s latest unnecessary remake by revisiting the 1990 sci-fi classic Total Recall! In this Philip K Dick adaptation, surprisingly Austrian Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes to get an exciting fantasy implanted into his brain, only to find out he’s already living it…or is he? A great combination of gore and classic Arnold action combined with a thought-provoking idea or two and one of Jerry Goldsmith’s best scores, you’ll have a blast along with our custom cocktail and rules! Check them out below!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (42-Total-Recall-1990.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Triple-Nippled Space Hooker

Triple-Nippled Space Hooker

2 parts kiwani juice

1 part citrus cordial*

2 parts tequila

*HOW TO MAKE CORDIAL: Squeeze desired number of lemon, orange and limes into pan, add sugar, place under heat. Boil until syrup forms.

Combine and stir; garnish with kiwani peel.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever glass is broken

2) Drink whenever someone says “Mars”

3) Drink whenever someone (usually Arnold) gives a pained expression

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Cohaagen (Ronny Cox) says “In thirty seconds you’ll be dead…and I’ll blow this place up and be home in time for Corn Flakes!”

Check us out next week, as we travel the stars with David Hasselhoff and Christopher Plummer in one of the most amazingly entertaining Roger Corman productions we’ve ever seen – the 1978 Italian Star Wars rip-off Starcrash!

ALSO, be sure to check us out August 9-12 in Rosemont, IL, as we cover Wizard World Chicago Comic Con in all its glory!

This week on Alcohollywood, Jared and Clint (and special guest Craig) tackle one of the most flat-out crazy and out-there movies any of us have ever seen – the dreamlike, episodic 1969 tale of Roman debauchery Fellini Satyricon! Directed by famed Italian director Federico Fellini, this strange, bawdy and extremely Roman escapade follows a pair of Romans as they explore what it means to live in the empty excess of Rome…plus minotaurs. It’s a real treat if you haven’t seen it, but be prepared to be confused and amazed!

Fellini Satyricon is available on Netflix Instant!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (41-Fellini-Satyricon-1969.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Bacchanalia

The Bacchanalia

4 parts pinot grigio

2 parts Aperol

splash, blood orange bitters

peaches, diced

Pour over ice and stir. Top with peaches.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime you see tits or asses

2) Drink anytime a character uncomfortably stares in the direction of the camera

3) Drink whenever characters have inappropriately loud and oddly placed laughter

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Encolpio (Martin Potter) says, “Dear Minotaur, I will love you if you spare me….”

Join us next week when we get our asses to Mars with the Arnold flick Total Recall, just in time for the Earth-centric remake!

Don’t forget to look out the weekend of August 9-12 in Rosemont, IL, as we crash Wizard World Chicago Comic Con, get some interviews with actors and celebrities, and discover just why there are so many Jedi lightsaber master classes taking place!

On the eve of the release of The Dark Knight Rises, we here at Alcohollywood decided to check out one of the more infrequently-discussed films in the Nolan ouvre – 2006′s The Prestige, starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johanssen and Michael Caine! The film follows two rival magicians whose constant need to outdo each other leads them to increasingly monstrous acts, while Michael Caine watches on dispassionately and gives poignant monologues. With the dreamlike quality of Inception and a cast consisting of half the active superheroes in Hollywood (Batman, Wolverine, Black Widow, David Bowie), The Prestige is definitely not to be overlooked!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (40-The-Prestige-2006.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Transported Man

The Transported Man

Green olives

splash, lemon and lime juice

6 parts Cointreau

4 parts egg white

3 parts orange juice

2 parts water

leaf basil

juniper berries

Vodka

1) Place one green olive apiece in sections of ice cube tray; add lemon and lime juice, fill with vermouth. Keep in freezer until frozen.

2)  Whip Cointreau, egg white, orange juice, water, basil and juniper until it forms a foam (you can also use a nitrous oxide canister and dispenser to create the foam).

3) In Collins glass or martini glass, fill with vodka, insert vermouth cube, top with foam. Add juniper berries for garnish.

(NON-MOLECULAR MIXOLOGY VERSION: Make your standard vodka martini; add Cointreau, insert leaf basil and juniper berries.)

RULES:

1) THE PLEDGE – Drink whenever a character points out Borden’s or Angier’s character flaws

2) THE TURN – Drink whenever someone or something is imprisoned in anyway

3) THE PRESTIGE – Drink whenever you see silly facial hair

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) finally says, “Abracadabra.”

Keep a look out the weekend of August 9-12 to get our coverage of Wizard World Chicago Comic Con in Rosemont, IL!

Next week on Alcohollywood, we’re covering one of the strangest movies we’ve ever seen – Federico Fellini’s Fellini Satyricon!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re turning back the clock to review and drink to the 1940s film noir classic Double Indemnity, starring Fred MacMurray, Barbra Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson! This tale of intrigue, murder and illicit romance follows insurance salesman Walter Neff (MacMurray) as he hatches a scheme to kill the husband of his lover (Stanwyck) to get a ‘double indemnity’ payout on a newly hatched insurance policy. The twists and turns, as well as the tension, are fantastically played even by today’s standards, and Fred MacMurray is stellar as the world’s tallest detective, who loves grabbing womens’ shoulders when he makes out with them. Check out our drinking game and review here!

The full movie is also available for free on Youtube!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (40-Double-Indemnity-1944.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Double-Fisted Squeeze

White Drink:

2 parts cranberry vodka

1 part coconut rum

1 part triple sec

4 parts milk

Pour over ice; stir.

Black Drink:

2 parts cranberry vodka

1 part espresso (or espresso-infused vodka)

4 parts Guinness

Pour over ice; stir. Pick your poison, or use the white drink as a chaser for the black drink.

RULES:

1) Drink for double entendres

2) Drink for light shining through Venetian blinds

3) Drink every time a character calls another character “Bebbeh”/Baby

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) says “Then I got to thinking about what cemeteries are for…they’re to put dead people in.”

Next week, we’re pulling back the curtain to reveal the secrets of Christopher Nolan’s magic/science flick The Prestige, in belated honor of Nikola Tesla’s birthday!

ANNOUNCEMENT: We’re going to our first official convention, offering press coverage of Wizard World Chicago Comic Con 2012, so stay tuned for special podcast treats the first weekend of August!

Happy birthday America! To celebrate your stars and stripes, and the destruction of your many famous landmarks, we watch the 1996 sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day! Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, and Will Smith play three red-blooded Americans from different backgrounds who lead the fight against aliens with the worst holiday timing. Also starring the incredible Randy Quaid and the always-entertaining Harvey Fierstein, Roland Emmerich’s piece is a powerhouse of practical effects and goofy charm. Say what you will about the other times he’s tried to destroy New York, he really pulls it off here. Check out our review and drinking game here!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (39-FOURTH-OF-JULY-SPECIAL_-Independe.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Fat Lady’s Song

2 parts Irish Mist

1 part St. Germain

1 part Caribbean coconut rum

1 part Russian vodka

16 parts American ale (e.g. Liberty Ale)

Pour and stir over ice (I don’t care if you’re pouring beer over ice, do it)

RULES:

1) Drink for title cards (names, locations, etc.)

2) Drink for every explosion you see

3) Drink for every time technology fails (nukes don’t work, TV signals break down, etc.)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Steve Hiller (Will Smith) quips, “Welcome to Earth” after punching an alien in the face

and

Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) says, “I picked a hell of a day to quit drinking.”

Join us next week, as we check out the Billy Wilder noir classic Double Indemnity! Slap on that fedora, you nerd, and check out some old-school romance and detectiving!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re taking another user request and checking out the genre-bending French import Rubber from 2010! On the surface, this film follows the head-exploding adventures of Robert, a sentient tire who wakes up with no apparent sense of purpose except to kill. Learning about his environment and what he desires, we also watch the exploits of the “audience” that is watching him through binoculars. Both a campy horror film and an interesting experiment looking at the relationship between a film and its audience, the film’s a short but intriguing ride that’s definitely not for those who don’t like the absurd. In the meantime, fuel up with our custom cocktail and drinking game below!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (38-Rubber-2010.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Tire Fire

5 parts brandy

2 parts Grand Marnier orange liqueur

3 parts sweetened lime juice

agave nectar

1 part apple juice

Combine and shake; add bitters (optional).

RULES:

1) Drink whenever a chair is destroyed/toppled

2) Drink whenever the spectators raise/lower their binoculars

3) Drink whenever Robert the Tire vibrates

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The man in the wheelchair (Wings Hauser) says “I’m not part of the movie, I’m just watching…”

Join us next week as we celebrate OUR INDEPENDENCE DAY (and an early Connickuh) with the Will Smith-Bill Pullman-Jeff Goldblum sci-fi summer flick of the same name!

This week on Alcohollywood, we handle another user request – Clint and Jared (with guest panelist Cherish, returning from our Beauty and the Beast episode) take a spoonful of sugar with everyone’s favorite magical alien nanny, Mary Poppins! This 1964 Disney classic combined live action with animation, took away five Academy Awards (including Best Score, Best Song, and Best Actress for Julie Andrews) and captured the imaginations of children everywhere. Watch Britain change from a stuffy man’s world to a slightly less-stuffy world of mild joy and suffrage, while charming old-school performances are combined with obnoxiously bloated musical sequences and creepy old men. Along the way, we’ve got our custom cocktail and drinking game to help the nearly two-and-a-half hour runtime go down!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (alcohollywood36.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Medicine

Medicine

2 parts vodka

2 parts lemon juice

1 part pomegranate liqueur

1 part blueberry-lavender limoncello

A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR GET IT

Combine and stir. Add spoonful of sugar and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime a character says “Banks” or the word “bank”

2) Drink whenever Mary Poppins or anyone else uses FUCKING MAGIC

3) Drink anytime you hear a nonsense phrase (“supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” “hum-diddle-diddle-dee”) or outdated or underused turns of phrase (“gallivanting up there like kangaroos”)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Mary Poppins says, “Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking.”

Tune in next week when we tackle the polarizing, self-aware French horror film Rubber, starring cinema’s most dangerous Goodyear!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re tackling another user request – the infinitely hilarious and genuinely entertaining Evil Dead 2, starring Bruce Campbell and directed by Sam Raimi! The followup/remake/reimagining of their first cult classic, the film sees Ash Williams (Campbell) fighting demons, monsters, ghosts and his own hand in a mixture of great campy effects and kinetic camerawork. Swallow your soul (and your inhibitions) with our custom cocktail and drinking game below!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (35-Evil-Dead-2-1987.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Drunk by Dawn

Drunk by Dawn

2 parts American bourbon

1 part triple sec

1 part aprocot nectar

2 parts (Bruce) Campbell’s Tomato Juice

splash, bitters

Combine and stir. Garnish with toy monster arm (Here, we have Mumm-Ra from ThunderCats.)

RULES:

1) Drink anytime Ash is physically injured

2) Drink anytime Ash screams/shouts/cries out

3) Drink for property damage (cars, doors, windows, etc.)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Ash, after suiting up with his chainsaw-hand and sawed-off shotgun, mutters, “Groovy.”

Join us next week as we choke down a spoonful of sugar and hallucinate cartoon birds while we await a visit from everyone’s favorite omniscient and all-powerful nanny, Mary Poppins!

Did you like The Fast and the Furious, but felt that there were too many car chases? Are you a fan of Ryan Gosling, but not when he talks too much? Do you wish that Michael Mann would put just a little more mood and 80s-infused music into his gritty crime thrillers? If the answer to those questions is ‘yes,’ Clint and Jared (and special guest Jeremy) have got quite a film for you this week – 2011′s Drive, starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Danish auteur Nicholas Winding Refn! This film costars Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and a bravuro turn against type from Albert Brooks. In Drive, the unnamed main character (played by Gosling) navigates the gritty criminal underworld of Los Angeles with nothing but his wits, a hammer, and what seems to be debilitating autism. Check out our review and drinking game here!

Drive is also available on Netflix streaming!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (34-Drive-2011.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Yellow Scorpion

Yellow Scorpion

cilantro

poblano pepper seeds

teaspoon, sugar

4 parts silver tequila

1 part freshly squeezed lime juice

2 parts pineapple juice

2 parts soda water

avocado (garnish)

Muddle cilantro, seeds, and sugar. Shake tequila, lime juice and pineapple juice and pour over ice. Add soda water and garnish with avocado slice.

RULES:

1) Drink whenever the Driver (Ryan Gosling) speaks

2) Drink whenever Ryan Gosling stares unblinkingly off camera

3) Drink for every gruesome moment of violence

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The Driver says to Irene (Carey Mulligan) over the phone, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” (I don’t know, Ryan Gosling….CAN you?)

Tune in next week when we tackle another user request – this time, we’re grabbing our boomsticks and running into the woods to join Bruce Campbell for the 1987 Sam Raimi horror comedy Evil Dead 2. Stay tuned!

Tired of your boring, dead-end job? Ever feel like you haven’t taken any chances in your life? Does every woman you’re romantically interested in look suspiciously like Meg Ryan? If so, then we’ve got the movie for you – this week on Alcohollywood, we’re covering Joe vs. the Volcano, the 1990 Tom Hanks film written and directed by John Patrick Shanley (Doubt). Combining Expressionist visions of corporate America with Tolstoyian plot developments and the hands-down most racist portrayal of island natives you’ve ever seen, Joe vs. the Volcano is sure to make you think – either in confusion or delight. Check out our drinking game and review here! (NOTE: First 10 minutes or so are in all-right quality, but we move to our fancy mic around the drink ingredients, so remain vigilant!)

Along with the ride on our steamer trunks, we’ve got Brockett from the Biggest Fan Podcast, so be sure to check out his vast podcast musings!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (33-Joe-vs.-the-Volcano-1990-w_Bigg.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: The Big Woo

The Big Woo

1 mango, peeled and diced

1 coconut, halved and shaved

2 parts cranberry juice

2 parts black cherry juice

2 parts silver tequila

2 parts coconut rum

2 parts triple sec

Blend mango, coconut, juices, tequila, rum and triple sec with ice in blender. Pour in coconut shell and serve.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime someone says the name “Joe”

2) Drink anytime someone says the word “feel”

3) Drink every time a character steps into a new costume

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Patricia Graynamore (Meg Ryan #3) says, “You didn’t get a second opinion on something called a brain cloud?”

Join us next week when we cover one of the most criminally underlooked films of 2011 – Drive, the Nicholas Winding Refn crime thriller starring a strangely near-mute Ryan Gosling!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re tackling the 1987 crime drama The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner and Robert De Niro as Eliot Ness and Al Capone, men on two sides of the War on Booze in Prohibition-era Chicago. This masterfully directed, thrilling film features an Oscar-winning performance from Sean Connery as the Irish (yet surprisingly Scottish-sounding) Jimmy Malone, exploding kids, a dated and uneven score from Ennio Morricone, and more shotguns than you can wave a parasol at. Nonetheless, we show you how to watch this movie the “Chicago way” – with some booze in your glass!

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (32-The-Untouchables-1987.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Poor Butterfly

Poor Butterfly

1 part white corn whiskey

1 part ginger liqueur

1 part orange juice

2 parts apple juice

1 part soda water

drizzle of honey

dash, bitters

Combine and stir.

RULES:

1) Drink anytime someone says “Chicago”

2) Drink anytime you hear a gunshot

3) Drink anytime you see a child (e.g. Ness’ children, the Union Station scene)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Jimmy Malone, having chased down one of Capone’s bookkeepers, says “All right, enough of this running shit.”

Tune in next week, when we and some TBD special guests preside over the case of the Tom Hanks vehicle Joe vs. the Volcano!

It’s one of the Coen Brothers’ most well-known and tremendously popular movies; it’s spawned a convention series and a religion, and nearly everyone knows at least one line from this movie. This week on Alcohollywood, we’re covering The Big Lebowski, the dark comedy/neo-noir/Gulf War period piece that has more or less defined the careers of both the Coen Brothers and Jeff Bridges. The search for a replacement for his prized, pissed-on rug sends aging hippie Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski (Bridges) on a journey fraught with danger, ferrets, nihilists, bowling, and much more! We’ve got a lot to talk about here, so pour yourself either our signature drink or the White Russians the Dude is so fond of, and check out our review and drinking game here!

SPECIAL GUESTS: For this trip through SoCal in the early ’90s, we’re bringing along with us Matt K and Ry the Movie Guy from another great podcast in the Chicago Area, CinemaJaw; also, look out for their next great episode, which they were gracious enough to have us on as guests! (Due to some technical difficulties, 47:00 to 48:30 is a little lower-quality than usual, so be patient; the audio quality clears back up quickly.)

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (31-The-Big-Lebowski-1998-w_CinemaJ.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Walter’s Whiteys

Walter's Whiteys

2 parts vanilla flavored vodka

1 part coffee liqueur

1 part Irish cream

1 part Chambord

1 part walnut liqueur

Combine and pour over ice.

RULES:

1) Drink every time someone says “Dude”

2) Drink every time a character says “man”

3) Drink every time something is vandalized (rugs, cars, etc.)

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

The Dude (Jeff Bridges) sums up his attitude toward life in the offhand line, “The Dude abides.”

Look out early next week for a special truncated episode with some goodies from our Captain America and Big Lebowski episodes (Hint: take a listen if you’re a fan of trivia quizzes); also, our drinking game/review next week is for the Brian De Palma hit The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro, and Sean Connery as a very Scottish-sounding Chicagoan.

Subscribe to us on iTunes, comment here or in our suggestion box if you have movies you want us to do for you, and see you next week!

This week on Alcohollywood, we’re sailing up the Moon River with the 1961 romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring Audrey Hepburn as the first Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Holly Golightly! Based on the Truman Capote novella, the film follows Paul Varjak (George Peppard, pre-making plans come together in The A-Team), an aspiring writer who falls for the sprightly woman-about-town (Hepburn) and has plenty of 1960s sex comedy antics doing so. The film includes such treats as 1) a horribly offensive Asian stereotype played by Mickey Rooney, 2) dime-store heists in animal masks, and 3) the world’s least creatively-named cat.

LISTEN HERE:

Download audio file (30-Breakfast-at-Tiffanys-1961.mp3)

THIS EPISODE’S DRINK: Diamonds at Denny’s

Diamonds at Denny's

1 part espresso-infused vodka

1 part chocolate liqeuer (e.g. Trader Vic’s Chocolate Liqueur)

1 part amaretto

5 parts sparkling wine

Whipped cream

cocoa powder

cocoa beans

Swizzle in glass; top with whipped cream, cocoa powder and cocoa beans.

RULES:

1) Drink every time a bell is rung

2) Drink every time a character says “Daaahling”

3) Drink every time you see a new stupid hat

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN:

Paul ever-so-progressively tells Holly at the climax of the film, “I love you! You belong to me!”

Tune in next week for the film we’ve had the most requests for – the Coen Brothers neo-noir comedy The Big Lebowski, starring Jeff Bridges in the role he will never live down! We’ll also be joined by the crew of the CinemaJaw podcast as special guests, so stay tuned there!