Rosenbush Cafe

Action genre specialist Tony Scott directs Denzel Washington for the fifth time (Man on Fire, Déjà vu, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and Crimson Tide) in “Unstoppable,” another “inspired by a true story” film, which means don’t expect the truth but plenty of action since this one featuring a runaway train, loaded with a dangerous cargo. The film also stars Chris Pine (Captain Kirk in last summer’s JJ Abram’s Star Trek), Rosario Dawson (Sin City) and Kevin Dunn (Transformers I, II, III). Slated for a November release, the trailer gives away enough to perhaps spoil any story arc; however, Washington, who is one of the most charismatic actors in the business, always elevates any movie he stars in and this looks to be another opportunity to shine. Stay off the tracks!

It’s been such a busy year I have rarely had time for one of my favorite past times; movies. Although I did finally hit the dollar movie circuit, in Hoover, to see a few films such as Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” and “Iron Man 2″ I haven’t enjoyed the big screen experience as much as in years past when it wasn’t inconceivable for me to see over 50 in a year. Recently, however, I saw two films that were surprisingly satisfying, even on the small screen: 2009’s “Män som hatar kvinnor” aka “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” and this year’s graphic action-superhero comedy hybrid release, “Kick-Ass.”

You couldn’t watch two films, on a double bill, that were more dissimilar; however, both succeeded in what they set out to accomplish.

Niels Arden Oplev’s “Girl,” part one of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s worldwide best seller (he died in 2004), compresses the narrative into a tense and rewarding murder mystery that starts as the search for a missing 16 year old girl from 40 years earlier. The further the plot develops the darker and deeper it gets with bizarre religious subtext (is there any other kind?) and a serial killer hook. With top notch performances, led by Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyquist, this art house hit did not receive much-deserved exposure in the U.S.It is followed by two more films, already in the can in Sweden, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which opened internationally last month and finishing the series with “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” I can hardly wait to see them since the first film leaves open the opportunity for the sequels while simultaneously tying the loose ends of the first film’s complex plot.

At the other end of the spectrum comes a wildly entertaining, and thankfully politically incorrect, comic book to movie scenario with “Kick-Ass,” which finally offers those of us tired of heros with super powers, “non-super” heros battling crime in NYC (actually lensed in Toronto). Graphic on every level with then 11-year-old Chloe Grace Moretz, soon to be seen in the Americanized version of “Let the Right One In,” as Hit-Girl, an avenger who could single-handedly wipe out the entire Soprano’s clan, teamed with her father, portrayed with a wink to Adam (Batman) West by genre favorite Nick Cage. The film would not have worked had it not been for the winning perf by Brit Aaron Johnson, who does a nice job losing his accent, as Kick-Ass, an ordinary high schooler with dreams of standing up against criminals. Mark Strong, so good in RocknRolla, is the nasty master criminal Frank D’Amico. Mixing humor and action, irreverently, “Kick-Ass,” won’t please everyone, but anyone looking for a film that circumvents the “Spider-Man” and “Iron Man” franchises will be pleasanty entertained.

With outrageous violence and profanity and jet black humor this film, despite its graphic nature, actually has a serious and sweeter subtext than most viewers might suspect.

Full reviews of both films the week of August 16th at the Cafe.

Truck Accident That Killed Rafters in Canyon Sparks Truck-Canyon-Rafter Reform Debate

Al-Qaeda Calls Off Attack On Nation’s Capitol To Spare Life Of ‘Twilight’ Author

Adam Grant, a nondescript kind of man found guilty of murder and sentenced to the electric chair. Like every other criminal caught in the wheels of justice he’s scared, right down to the marrow of his bones. But it isn’t prison that scares him, the long, silent nights of waiting, the slow walk to the little room, or even death itself. It’s something else that holds Adam Grant in the hot, sweaty grip of fear, something worse than any punishment this world has to offer, something found only in the Twilight Zone.

Since June, 2010 was, at least for me, a nighmare relived repeatedly from the first nanoseconds on Tuesday, June 1st through moments ago today, on the 31st, I felt compelled to offer one of my Top 10 favorite The Twilight Zone episodes, “Shadow Play,” wherein a convicted murderer Dennis Weaver (Duel; Gunsmoke) is forced, as cosmic comeuppance, to relive his execution over and over and over again. While there may be some plot devices at play, to recall seeing it as a child in 1961 it made me aware of a larger force behind life itself.

Nothing quite as profound as learning about existentialism, nilhism, metaphysics and nightmare reality at age eight!

With a wicked and twisted teleplay by genre specialist Charles Beaumont (adapted from his short story, “Traumerei”), and directed with plenty of black humor by John Brahm, the 62nd episode of Season Two keeps the audience entertained in the most morbid fashion as Adam Grant (Weaver) tries to convince the DA (great character actor Harry Townes) that the entire proceedings are all part of dream he has every night!

Existentialism meets metaphysical nilhism and gets a transcendental lesson in parallel universes while reality is sucked into a temporal warp of possibilities as the story unfolds in “real time.” We meet a colorful cast of prisoners, who were manufactured from his real life, movies and imagination, a hard drinking newspaper editor, the scared death row prisoner hoping his “imaginary mother” will save him, the unafraid black inmate and a priest: “no wonder I didn’t recognize you, you died when I was 10 years old!”

As a lucid hypnagogique dreamer and writer I explore where the “cast” in my dreams come from; are they real, imagined or I am inside their dreams and they exist but we have never met? The familiar dreaming leitmotif, where one tries, in vain, to awaken from a nightmare, hoping it really is a dream, is an ethereal treatise on the nature of reality and unreality; dreams trapped within a myriad of other dreaming universes is fascinating and provokes deeper exploration into what happens after our eyes are closed for slumber.

The concept of a murderer who is punished for eternity makes capital punishment itself seem less brutal than what comes afterwards.

The episode is dated in some minor respects but has enough clever machinations to never bore and is truly disturbing: the scene where Grant gives another inmate a sobering account of the final moments leading up to death in the electric chair is followed by a sizzling steak; when Grant later tells the DA to look in his oven, it is now a roast, supports the great dark humor on display!

The dénouement, while being unsurpising to some, still packs a solid punch and this is one episode that will make the viewer think longer about the nature of their own dreamstates and reality and how nightmares can merge with the “shadows.”

Death itself may not be the final punishment with fate providing an eternity of reminders as to why murderers deserve a special wing of “Hell.”

Pleasant dreams…..

Opening of 1974 film “The Parallax View” Why? Read on…

30,000 visits to Rosenbush Café occurred at 8:27 p.m., CST, Monday, June 28, 2010.

For several days it became clear that I was going to exceed a once impossible dream: 30,000 visitors. I was told in the beginning, by someone who at the time I trusted and admired, that I would never reach 10,000 and my original programmer gave me six months before the Café would fold. Ironically, the programmer left the private sector to work for a corporation, the original mentor and I parted ways and the blog continued as a one-man, 13 cat operation!

As I told the café femme fatale felines earlier today I would not be surprised if the visitor was from an unknown country and city on the StatPress Spy page; for those unfamiliar, on publishing platforms bloggers can keep up with their traffic and except in some cases, tell where the reader came from by country and city, what they read and from where they came to reach their site. It is helpful in ascertaining what attracts readers and often I will double back on search engines to see what the visitor was searching for. After I reviewed the Sandra Bullock comedy, “The Proposal,” I found people were interested in the name of one singer so I went back and expanded the post to accomodate and still get hits for that artist.

Sometimes it is more obscure since I write my consciousness stream, eXisTenTiaLNihLisT pieces laced with black humor, Dadaism, Surrealism, Metaphors, arcane references to art and mythology, diatribes against intolerance, bigotry, homophobia, political corruption and the woeful state of affairs of the educational system and the lack of intelligence of sentient beings!

I get hits for Kalliope Amorphous, Anaïs Nin, Hieronymous Bosch, Psychedelia, my offbeat French and Spanish art musings, past movie and musical retros and reviews daily.

And, I was correct about number 30,000: Unknown Country and Unknown City!

I do know this visitor read my retrospective on one of my all time favorite paranoia thrillers, “The Parallax View” (1974) written in 2007; expanded and updated in May, 2009, and they arrived from a site promoting smokeless cigarettes!

That calls for a puff!

Well, I have so many reasons to smile. Since RC began in late November, 2006, and I endured lean years in 2007 and into 2008 when I was fortunate to have 30 visitors a month, I have slowly increased a worldwide readership from places as far from West Ala as Australia, the Russian Federal, Korea, Iraq, Germany, Brazil, Singapore and Latvia, and in the United States a core of friends from Rhode Island, New York State, Pennsylvania, Texas, California, Washington State and Georgia.

The least number of visits come from my home state! Hahahahahaha. In fact, I almost never receive hits from my home town which actually is unsurprising and tickles my black humored funny bone.

I went to the PV retro and found the movie trailer had been removed from You Tube for copyright violations while the famous and brilliant, albeit, disturbingly realistic 5-minute montage that anti-hero journo Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) watches in the LA office of the Parallax Corporation; a hybridization of stock footage depicting the truth by any semblance of an “American Dream,” was intact.

Tu Youb is a mis-useful and maddeningly unpredictable venue for resource materials, is it not? Movie trailers disappeared by day and by night people post insanely unfunny children and baby vids craving more than Andy Warhol’s promise of 15 minutes of fame. No offense, but we are not amused by laughing babies and children getting attacked by irate pussycats. Your child is cute to you and no one else.

Dig?

Thank you to the myriad audience of Rosenbush Café for support of this free enterprise where my goal is to educate, entertain, enlighten, enrage and encompass everyone in euphoria from Europa to Uranus.

To commemorate this historic occasion, I have included the link to my retrospective, sans the trailer: Parallax View: Paranoid as American as apple pie 35 Years Later