NOTIONAL HEADLINE #23:

 

G. GORDON LIDDY'S CORPSE ANNOUNCED AS REPLACEMENT FOR TUCKER CARLSON.

BURNING QUESTIONS IN A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERY #42:

 

What if the movies Lost Highway, Gozu, The Brown Bunny, and Infinity Pool all turned out to be secret entries in the National Lampoon's Vacation franchise?

That would explain a lot.

BOOK REVIEW: HEAT 2 (2022)

 

by Michael Mann + Meg Gardiner

Published in 2022 by Michael Mann Books aka William Morrow aka HarperCollins aka Rupert Murdoch.

. . .

"Rumors you hear about Ciudad del Este-consider 'em all half true. Whatever you want, whatever you need, people here will find a way to get it for you. If . . ." He rubs his fingers together. "Capitalism uber alles."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Heat 2 is a sequel/prequel to the 1995 movie Heat written by the movie's writer/director Michael Mann in collaboration with the respected novelist Meg Gardiner. Heat 2 is not a movie-as of this writing-but is, in fact, a book with words you can read if you are so inclined. It tells a story that picks up right after the ending of the 1995 movie, and then it goes back in time to what happened before the events of the movie, and then it goes forwards past the movie, and then it goes back, and then forwards-Heat 2 goes backwards and forwards in time. It jumps around, as your parents might say after watching Pulp Fiction.

So, in order to get the full value of Heat 2 you have to have seen the movie Heat. And if you haven't seen the movie, well, there's a concise prolog that serves as a "Previously on Heat-"

-BTW try saying out loud "Previously on Heat," it's good for a laugh-

-so, I guess Heat 2 technically functions as a stand alone read . . . but not really. Of course, I cannot assess this objectively, because I've seen Heat numerous times over the years. My widescreen double cassette VHS copy was a prized possession of my adolescence, and my 2005 two disc DVD edition has seen much play over the years. If I were into numerology-two tapes, two discs, Heat 2-my head would be kinda fucked'n'sputtering right about now. In my opinion, Heat 2 is marketed towards the fans, and we're probably the ones who'll get the most value out of this spinoff novel.

If you have never seen Heat, it is a hard-boiled crime thriller about a supercop on the hunt for a supercrook. The supercop and the supercrook-a professional thief-develop an unexpected rapport and mutual respect even as they escalate their war-in-the-streets. Basically, they are the ultimate frenemies. The supercrook tells the supercop that he will never return to prison, even if that means blasting the supercop. The supercop tells the supercrook that he, too, is not going to give up, even if that means he has to kill someone he sorta respects. It's all very fraught. The supercop is played by Al Pacino. Robert De Niro played the supercrook. The scene where these two connect over coffee has probably launched a fair few Honors Thesis statements about the nature of masculinity and friendship, or so I assume. Heat also features a large supporting cast of cops'n'robbers, all played by top notch actors. Among them is another supercrook memorably portrayed by Val Kilmer. Heat 2 primarily revolves around these three: Pacino, De Niro, and Kilmer-the same three actors marketed as the stars of the original film. 

Now, these characters do have names: the supercop is named Vincent Hanna; De Niro's supercrook is named Neil McCauley; and Kilmer's supercrook is named Chris Shiherlis. However, even the marketing copy on the dust jacket mentions the actors' names, so we are clearly supposed to visualize the people from the 1995 movie even as we read the book. Of course, you could imagine different people in these roles. Bruce Vilanch could be interesting casting for Hanna. Or maybe even G.Gordon Liddy. Did you know Liddy had a career as a film actor? As for McCauley, either YouTube's Rich Evans or Shaq would work for me. I could see Report of the Week-another YouTuber-as a fitting replacement for Kilmer. But those are just my picks. Feel free to come up with your own casting choices!

Heat 2 offers a lot of 'Extended Universe' content, if you will, including flashbacks to both Hanna's and McCauley's experiences with the madness of war in Vietnam; Hanna's cocaine and Adderall habits; McCauley's attempts at maintaining a family; and, most significantly, Hanna and McCauley's parallel histories of making moves on the streets of Chicago. But my favorite passages concerned Shiherlis, especially his endeavors in the Paraguayan Free Trade Zone of Ciudad Del Este, in which Mann and Gardiner rework material from the 2006 movie version of Miami Vice. Shiherlis's evolution into a kind of anarcho-capitalist mafia's field commander has the feel of a Grand Theft Auto avatar evolving into a criminal iteration of a 4x strategy gamer. It's undercooked, but the ideas are there. It's also weirdly hilarious. There's even a needle drop of Tupac's "California Love" as Shiherlis guns his motorcycle through the traffic of the Paraguayan tri-border Free Trade Zone. 

I was less taken with what Heat 2 does with Hanna and McCauley. Much of the novel revolves around their conflicts with a character who is original to Heat 2: a scuzzbag named Otis. Otis did not work for me. I was not convinced that a character as single mindedly violent and reckless as Otis would achieve the station that he eventually occupies in Heat 2. Moreover, what was fascinating about Heat was the moral confusion experienced by Hanna and McCauley as they realize their true soulmate is someone they'll either have to kill or be killed by, and how that dilemma illuminates the wastelands of their private lives. Otis is just a bad guy from a 1980s action flick who deserves to get lit up, a scapegoat of a kind that allows Heat 2 to avoid the really difficult shit that Heat faced head-on, with no apologies, and no compromises. So, unfortunately, even as a Heat fanboy, I cannot recommend Heat 2.

Allegedly, Michael Mann has plans to make a film out of Heat 2. If he does, I hope he shitcans the Otis character, and just focuses on Shiherlis's adventures in the Free Trade Zone and beyond. It's undercooked in the text, but the basic ingredients are there. Just needs a little more time in the oven. Basically, I hope the movie ditches the prequel stuff, and leans into the sequel material. Although, honestly, I have no plans to watch it no matter what form the movie version takes. First off, Heat 2, the book, left my ass kinda chapped. Secondly, the 1995 movie has no need of a sequel. Heat's loose ends and ambiguities are part of the point. If you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen it, well, I recommend you give it a shot. Even if it doesn't sound like your kind of movie, you may be surprised by its depths. Hanna and McCauley are a couple of hardasses, yet the final moments of their saga are unexpectedly tender. Heat 2 doesn't have anything like that, but it does have a big fiery car crash/shootout on a freeway. 

Which is the damndest thing, isn't it?

The book ends up dumber than the movie.

Sorta genius, that . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: IMAGES (1972)

Directed by Robert Altman

Written by Robert Altman and Susannah York

Production Design by Leon Ericksen

Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond

Edited by Graeme Clifford

Music by John Williams

Soundscaping by Stomu Yamashta

Starring

Susannah York as Cathryn (Author)

Rene Auberjonois as Hugh (Husband)

Marcel Bozzuffi as Rene (Dead Frenchman)

Hugh Millais as Marcel (Aggressive Creep)

Cathryn Harrison as Susannah (Author's Child Self)

John Morley as Old Man with Dog

Barbara Baxley as Voice on the Phone

. . .

"There is no one else. There is only you."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

In a decrepit house in the heart of a fairytale countryside, a woman writes a book about gnomes, elves, unicorns, and mystical walks through enchanted forests. There are four or five landline phones inside her house. They ring, she answers, and weird voices assault her. Inside a single call one voice spontaneously transforms into another. Maybe it's crossed wires. Her husband enters the scene, harried about work, and his creepy driving gloves made me suspect him of being a killer from a giallo flick. Hubby spontaneously transforms into a dead Frenchman who openly acknowledges the fact that he is dead, and, amusingly, he still wants to make love. A hyper aggressive third man shows up to sexually harass the author and coerce her into rekindling their affair. The husband seems to have a sinister doppelganger-so that's two versions of one husband. When the author checks the storage space beneath the stairs she glimpses a younger version of herself in a magic mirror. The ghosts of past, present, and future seem to be haunting this house, which is, itself, doubled. The author, too, has at least one adult doppelganger, perhaps more than one. Everything swirls around the author, thus giving off the strong impression that We the Audience are inside her fractured mindscape.

Images is a film that uses careful camera placement, precision editing, intricate blocking, disquieting soundscaping, reality-based locations, and committed actors to construct the author's psychological landscape. There are only four or five practical special effects set-ups. Everything here is accomplished by cleverly tweaking basic film grammar, and applying these tweaks to intense performances. The results are eerie and uncomfortable. We're left with an uneasy mixture of fantasy, fear, trauma, resentment, and oppression. The author is not liberated by the fragmenting of space and time but rather seems to be trapped in each scene, in each moment, and at times seems to forget whatever brought her into a scene only to have her memories randomly return in upsetting fashion.

Eventually, the author does retaliate against this oppressive mindfuck, but she is unable to escape it. The all-encompassing mindfuck rearranges itself to absorb whatever the author throws at it, and so she remains trapped. Or it could be the case that she is only reliving actions and emotions she has already experienced, and/or iterations of same. I was left with the impression of a kind of 'Memory Shock,' like a Petroleum Shock-memory as a finite resource that you can stockpile and stretch and ration and refine but that has inescapable limits. Images seems to depict a closed-off mindfuck system that is still functional, but is winding down even as it involutes upon itself in upsetting and spectacular fashion.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #7: INFINITY POOL (2023)

 

Dude, like, these National Lampoon's Vacation movies just get funnier and funnier!

WARDSBACK #2:

If you receive a constant stream of emails from political campaigns hitting you up for money, just start emailing them back, saying,

Hey.

How are you?

Let's try this.

YOU give ME money.

Just for a change of pace.

And then, you know, we just lock that in as Status Quo for a decade or two.

YOU giving ME the money.

I think I'd like that very much.

All right.

Look forward to those dump trucks full of cash money.

Peace.

And then you just kickback, and wait for that tsunami of dollars to sweep you away to paradise!

Amen.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #6: JOHN WICK: CHAPTER FOUR (2023)

 

Whimsical fantasy adventure in which assholes with guns kill each other as opposed to schoolchildren.

THE NEW DREAM #13:

"When things get boring, just send in the man with the flamethrower. I learned this whilst filming Golf Father VI: Mission to Jackhoffsville. This was a straightforward Midlife Crisis-sploitation flick about a paunchy forty-something who golfs his way into the heart of a younger woman. I made fifteen movies of this sort over a six month period when I was in desperate need of alcohol money during the economic downturn. Golf Father VI was indeed the fifteenth of that sequence-the end of the cycle, if you like, and, I flatter myself to think this at any rate, this was my conceptual breakthrough. The paradigm shift you could say. During the pivotal moment where my middle-aged horndog bursts into the bar during Maid Cafe Fetish Night and proposes to his collegiate cutie, I thought, 'What if, instead of pandering to our demographic of creepazoids, we actually did something boldly refreshing and had a guy with a flamethrower come on the scene and set me on fire?' Of course, the director was opposed, but I won him over by throwing him against a brick wall fifty-seven hundred times. I had been gearing up something fierce in those days, so it was zero biggie. Once I had converted the reluctant director into various stains, my Roid Mind received a direct transmission from Hell that my script changes were approved, and to bring on the flamethrowers. Admittedly, both audiences and critics were confused by what was, to all appearances, a complete non sequitur. Also, it should be noted that, due to the haste with which I implemented the new paradigm, the flamethrowing was rather indiscriminate, resulting in, well, the entire cast being glazed with sticky jelly fire. We all burned to death, went to Hell, and when we all came back from the dead, we realized that as cool as that last blazing scene was, it sorta came late in the proceedings. If you're going to have the flamethrower action you may as well lead with it. My idea was that I would keep up with my super-geared persona, and we would unleash hell on the green, so we could have burning golf carts zipping around, y'know, have that visual interest and such. Well, that went down like gangbusters. Sure, the critics called me out as old hat, but you have to empathize with those folks, their job is to see every damn thing that gets shoveled into the omniplex-I don't hate on the critics at all. Not a bit. But we went over well with the regular audiences, who were already in the depths of a pyromania craze. We caught that action off of one of the reality shows-House Fire Season 56-which started out as metaphorical, y'know, with 'fire' being, like, 'drama,' but as it happened one of the housemates was an actual firebug in addition to being an actual drama queen, and so the tone was set for the nation. But I swear to you that my own conceptual breakthrough really was independent innovation. I cut the cord years ago, no disrespect to those hard working Reality TV folks, I was just much more into the gear life which gave me that Roid Mind which has carried me so far up 'til now, you see."

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #5: THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE (2023):

 

I liked it better when it had a silent protagonist.

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #22:

 

U.S. HOUSE REPUBLICANS PASS LAW REQUIRING ALL CITIZENS TO PUT FORK IN WALL SOCKET AS REVENGE FOR BEING BORN; HOLOGRAM DOC HOLLIDAY APPROVES.

THE NEW OBVIOUS #2:

 

A fork in the wall socket is worth two in the bush . . . a new American motto . . .

NOTIONAL HEADLINE #21:

 

WILLIAM SHATNER THREATENS COVER VERSION OF "A CRUEL ANGEL'S THESIS" IN RETALIATION FOR 'EAR-SCRAPING RENDITIONS' OF "FLY ME TO THE MOON."

THE NEW OBVIOUS #1:

U.S. Republicans have to ban books, defund libraries, and promote pedophilic child marriage because ideas are a mortal threat to an intellectually and morally bankrupt political faction.

GENERATIVE A.I. PITCHES #2:

Balenciaga by Robocop

Balenciaga by Gundam

Balenciaga by Aliens Power Loader

Balenciaga by the 8th Man

Balenciaga by Soviet Russia

BURNING QUESTIONS IN A UNIVERSE OF MYSTERY #41:

 

What if in the next John Wick movie we find out that the whole franchise is just a big-ass set of interconnected rage rooms?

That would explain a lot.