Bob Calhoun's Open Salon Blog

The One Thing Missing from The Avengers

Thu, 10 May 2012 02:05:38 -0400

_{New Yorkers have a long tradition of not taking crap from super villains as seen here in "Spider-Man" (2002).}

It's "Superman II." General Zod and his renegade Kryptonians have seemingly put Superman down for good. The Kryptonians are all powerful, but this doesn’t matter to the Metropolisians re New Yorkers caught on the streets of the DC Comics version of the Big Apple. They ain’t gonna' let this happen in their town.

They pick up broken pieces of debris, pipes, rolled-up newspapers—whatever they can find that resembles a cudgel, and they bum rush Zod, Ursa and Non. This attack is totally futile. All Zod and co. have to do is exhale their super breath and the substitute New Yorkers go flying back several blocks, yet this is the most inspiring scene in the film (and makes it even more dramatic when Superman shakes off several tons of rubble and a city bus to return to the fray).

So inspiring in fact that Sam Raimi gives us a similar scene in his first "Spider-Man" movie. Spider-Man is hanging by his web to the bottom of the Queensboro Bridge, using every last shred of his spider-strength to suspend Mary Jane Watson and a Roosevelt Island tram car filled with school kids over the East River until a barge can make its way to assist the superhero.

The Green Goblin, not about to let Spidey save both his lady love and a bunch of kids, swoops in on his jet-propelled glider for the kill. The Web Slinger is barely hanging on. He’s defenseless against even the slightest attack from the Goblin, but the New Yorkers again rise up against the Goblin despite his high-tech weaponry and mastery of flight. They ain't gonna' let this happen in their town.

"You mess with Spidey, you mess with New York," an African American man with dreads yells as he hurls garbage into Gobbie’s flight path.

"You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us," a pissed-off white guy with a Queens accent says before tagging the villain with more junk.

Cinematic New Yorkers have been giving monsters and villains the what-for ever since Bela Lugosi met a Brooklyn Gorilla, the Bowery Boys met the monsters and Bogie united a gang of Runyonesque characters against the Nazis in "All Through the Night" (1942). And Uppity New Yorkers are an intrinsic part of the Marvel Universe as well with the Yancy Street Gang throwing banana peels at the Thing from the Fantastic Four on a regular basis—and he's one of the good guys!

But as cool as it was to see Thor battle the Hulk on the S.H.I.E.L.D. Hellicarrier (!) or Cap taking command and deploying Hawkeye and the Black Widow against Loki’s space army in "The Avengers," I kept waiting for New Yorkers to pitch in during the climax of Joss Whedon’s new superhero record breaker. Admittedly, I may have even jumped on Whedon a bit (at least to my meager Twitter following) if he had done something so predictable and derivative, but that didn’t stop me from missing this scene when I didn’t get it.

Instead of giving the bum’s rush to super-powered beings, the New Yorkers in "The Avengers" huddle fearfully in their high-rise office buildings as creative destruction descends upon Wall Street from a rift in the time-space continuum. Earlier in the film, we do get one old German man defying Loki's Zod-like orders to kneel before him, but his act doesn't rally his fellow Europeans, who remain bowed with fear like the Manhattanites of the movie's conclusion.

There are all kinds of potential reasons why Whedon didn't include defiant citizens tossing dirt clods at Loki even though his blockbuster cries out for it, but I can’t help but wonder if the sight of disgruntled mobs rising up against a demigod wouldn’t make overpaid Disney execs and film industry financiers a little bit nervous with Occupy Wall Street and even the Tea Party going on. It’s also worth noting that both "Superman II" and "Spider-Man" are pre-911, while "The Avengers" isn’t. ("Spider-Man" was released in April 2002, but shooting wrapped in June 2001, with extensive post-911 editing taking place to remove all visuals of the World Trade Center.) And lastly, there’s always gentrification to think of. It's just more realistic to depict today’s Manhattan dwellers sitting back and waiting for Captain America to bail them out.

Inserted somewhere amongst all the senses-shattering cataclysms in "The Avengers," a skull-faced cosmic bad guy says that Earthlings "are unruly because they cannot be ruled."

But from watching the movie, I’m not so sure.

Bob Calhoun is the author of the punk wrestling memoir "Beer, Blood & Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling" (2008, ECW Press). He is currently working on a book on conventions and tradeshows. You can follow him on twitter at @bob_calhoun.

Straight-to-DVD: Marsha Brady & the Snow White Slasher Flick

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 01:04:36 -0400

For reasons unknown, 2012 is the year that the cumulative efforts of so many Hollywood lunches and industry cocktail parties have resulted in the release of several live action retellings of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." Currently, there's the light-hearted "Mirror, Mirror" with Julia Roberts as the wicked queen with Charlize Theron taking up the role in the decidedly more gothic "Snow White and the Huntsman" coming out in June. Never one to pass up the opportunity to snooker hapless redbox patrons into renting zero-budget dreck, Lionsgate has released "Snow White: A Deadly Summer," the teen slasher version of the fairy tale where dysfunctional teens stand in for the seven dwarves and get killed one-by-one instead of singing "Heigh-Ho."

Okay, so there's no A-list wicked queen in the straight-to-DVD "Show White," but we do get Maureen McCormick—yes, the original Marsha Brady from the 1970s "Brady Bunch"—talking to herself in the bathroom mirror of her sparsely furnished McMansion and plotting against Snow (Shanley Caswell), her rebellious stepdaughter. Now the amount of time McCormick spends by the bathroom sink becomes especially funny when you consider that she also spent a lot of time brushing her hair in a suburban john during five seasons of "The Brady Bunch." It's almost as if after reading the script, the casting director said, "This wicked stepmom spends a lot of time looking at herself in the mirror in the can. I know, get me Maureen McCormick!"

"…And if you can't get her, see if Eve Plumb is still taking roles these days."

Yes, it'll always be Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!

And if Marsha Brady turning evil isn't enough, we also get Julia Roberts' brother Eric as the milquetoast stepdad who wears suits that look at least one size two big for him as he lets his new wife railroad his only daughter. The last time that Julia and Eric went head-to-head like this, "The Expendables" (also a Lionsgate release) completely destroyed "Eat Pray Love" at the box office, so there's got to be a tense sibling rivalry going on here. Fortunately for Julia's leading lady ego, the cards are more stacked in her favor this time around.

After Snow is busted while driving around with some bad kids, evil stepmom McCormick convinces spineless Roberts to have the kid packed off to Camp Allegiance, which looks suspiciously like a public vacation site somewhere in British Columbia. The camp is run by Colonel Hunter (Tim Abell) from a command center that resembles your grandparents' 1980s kitchen remodel. In order to instill respect for authority in Snow and her seven troubled teens, Hunter paces around with a swagger stick, lecturing them on his "12 years as a Navy Seal," and dispensing clichés such as, "This is my world." He also makes the kids sleep in the dirt and rake at leaves—they don't actually rake the leaves, they just rake at them.

Of course, there's the prerequisite legend going around the camp that one of the campers went nuts 20 years earlier and killed a bunch of people. The current teens start turning up dead after they steal away to make out in a kind of lightweight "Friday the 13^th" fashion, only with very little gore. Hunter attempts a really dumb cover-up plot consisting of leaving corpses out in the open on lawn furniture and then acting shocked when people find them. Without giving too much away, there are some really great Maureen McCormick psycho moments by the end of this thing that are almost enough to make "Snow White: A Deadly Summer" into a camp classic if only there were more of them. Yes, this movie needs more Marsha, Marsha Marsha!

Bob Calhoun is the author of the bestselling punk-wrestling memoir, "Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling" (2008, ECW Press). You can follow him on Twitter at @bob_calhoun

Straight-to-DVD: The Naked Nun Revenge Flick for Our Times

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 02:03:31 -0400

_{Sister Sarah deals out righteous vengeance in "Nude Nuns with Big Guns."}

"Nude Nuns with Big Guns" and its 90-minutes of blood soaked blasphemy couldn't have picked a better time to thunder onto Netflix. With the Catholic Church losing its collective mind over the thought of millions of free range vaginas and Rick Santorum condemning nonbelievers like Torquemada in a sweater vest, the sight of a lesbian nun blowing away dope-pushing priests becomes downright comforting and sadly believable. The Catholic hierarchy seems willing to kick women to the curb over universal healthcare, so why not go the extra mile and make nuns process piles of cocaine all day in the buff (except for their habits of course) like something out of a cross between "New Jack City" and "The Flying Nun"? It's not like the church hasn't covered up worse things recently.

Surprisingly, this isn't the first time that "Nude Nuns with Big Guns" has been endowed with a significance beyond the scope of its $85 thousand budget. Last year, Camelot Films (the same people who were nice enough to send me this screener) filed a mass lawsuit against the 5,865 Internet users who'd already managed to torrent the movie even though it hadn't been released yet. The suit quickly came to resemble the kind of shakedown cooked up by the corrupt cardinals in NNWBG as the downloaders were offered the opportunity to settle out of court for $2,000-$5,000 or risk mounting legal costs and being exposed in open court as the kind of perv who freeloads naked nun flicks. After the Electronic Frontier Foundation got involved on behalf of the multiple defendants, Camelot dismissed the case in May 2011 rather than face escalating court costs of its own.

Now that we can watch NNWBG in the privacy of our own homes without fear of being sued for it, I can say that it definitely lives up to its title. The film delivers plenty of nude nuns and big guns all wrapped up in your standard revenge plot and taped together with a noodling wah-pedal guitar soundtrack. Sister Sarah (Asun Ortega) is caught trying to smuggle a package of product in her vestments during an exchange between drug trafficking priests and a biker gang called Los Muertos. As punishment, the priests pimp her out to the bikers who shoot up full of so much heroin that she develops one hell of a Joan of Arc complex. When an aging heroin cooker named Mr. Foo (Maxie J. Santillan Jr.) cleans her up and gives her two shiny pistols, she thanks him by shooting him in the back.

"I have to show no mercy," she explains, "even to those who show mercy on me." As the film's tagline says, "This sister is one bad mother."

I know that fans of Robert Rodriquez's "Machete" (2010) are thinking you've seen all this before, but you wouldn't be quite right. Sure, Rodriguez may play with going to hell by dressing Lindsay Lohan up like a pistol-packing nun in his Mex-Tex grindhouse romp, but he still gives us Cheech Marin as a wisecracking warrior priest that probably even Mel Gibson can approve of (if not Rick Santorum). NNWBG director/co-writer Joseph Guzman displays a much bleaker view of our Mother the Church where the priests are more conniving than the bikers (who at least do their own dirty work) and the nuns are nothing more than sheepish slave labor. After so many priests, mother superiors and oppressed sisters are slaughtered during Sister Sarah's killing spree, NNWBG makes that scene where Danny Trejo escapes out a window by sliding down a large intestine look like family-friendly entertainment.

NNWBG takes the depravities hinted at by that sleazy motel scene in Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" (1958) and raps you across the knuckles with them like an overzealous Catholic school teacher in almost every frame. Guzman directs his bloody revenge flick with a style resembling a zero-budget "Kill Bill" digitally filtered through an episode of "Spartacus: Blood and Sand," and style is definitely something lacking in most of the straight-to-DVD releases that come my way. However, Guzman has learned the lessons of such ultra-gory 1970s revenge flicks such as the original "I Spit on Your Grave" (1978) or "Last House on the Left" (1972) perhaps a little too well, and I'm just not sure that so many rape scenes can be balanced out by comically fake looking bloody penises.

I definitely reached an over-saturation point here where I didn't want to see any more nude nuns, naked strippers or papal carnage. But I fear that it'll only take a few minutes of watching congressional birth control hearings or Rick Santorum campaign events on CSPANN before NNWBG starts making sick sense all over again.

Bob Calhoun is the author of the bestselling punk-wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, which is available through Barnes & Noble . You can follow him on Twitter @bob_calhoun.

I just saw Andrew Breitbart on Saturday

Thu, 1 Mar 2012 13:03:36 -0500

_{Andrew Breitbart standing against the Tea Party Express Bus at the 2010 California Republican Convention in Santa Clara. He actually posed while I snapped this shot.}

The last time I saw Andrew Breitbart was Saturday morning. I'd just pulled into the parking garage of the Burlingame Hyatt for the California Republican Convention to see him spinning away in a small sports car, his large frame filling the small, sleek car's cab. I cracked a smile as I headed to the pressroom, glad to see that Breitbart was in attendance. I hoped that he was going out for lunch or something and wasn't heading back to Southern California.

See, I looked forward to sparring with him again like we did at the 2010 Calif. GOP Con in Santa Clara. He pretty much had me that time too. He was a master provocateur who could manipulate Democrats in high office into cutting funding for ACORN or firing Shirley Sherrod. I was just some former pro-wrestler/movie reviewer. I was in over my head, plain and simple, but Breitbart still kept coming after me, eventually calling me out during a Tea Party Express Rally. At least I had the sense not to get on the stage with him. I got some satisfication out of watching Breitbart as he worked so hard to get me up there. In the end, Breitbart only had the power that we gave to him.

Last Saturday, I hung around the hotel for most of the afternoon, but didn't run into Breitbart again. When I left to go home and work on my story about Newt Gingrich and algae, I figured that there would be future GOP shindigs. I'd get my rematch with Breitbart eventually, I thought. Now that doesn’t look like it's going to be the case. Andrew Brietbart is gone, dead at age 43 of natural causes.

It's a huge blow to the conservative/Tea Party movement to be sure, but it's still a bit sad to those of us on the other side who got so much out of squaring off against him at various conservative events or on Twitter. Breitbart was always out there in the Twitterverse. He could turn up at anytime in an attempt to poke holes in your argument or at least vex the hell out of you. I have to admit that I couldn't help but have the feeling that I'd arrived as a liberal media critic the day that Breitbart started hounding me in 140 characters or less. He actually called me the "master of deceit " or something along those lines (actual Twitter search apps are failing me right now). Coming from him, I couldn't help but take that as a compliment.

And so America loses cyber space's Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper or J. J. Hunsecker (the fictional version of these types played by Burt Lancaster in "Sweet Smell of Success"). We bemoan the outsized influence of such yellow journalists while they're alive, but still miss them when they're gone despite ourselves.

There's a German phrase that puts it best: "Better to have an honest enemy than a false friend." If there's one thing Andrew Breitbart was honest about (and this may be only one thing), it was being your enemy.

Cain + Gingrich = Caingrich

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:02:23 -0500

I was able to get some decent shots of Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich as they were making their way out of the California Republican Convention yesterday. Please appreciate that I don't have one of those long-assed lenses (nor would I know how to use one if I did), so I had to get real close to Newt to get these shots of him.

Click here for my report on Newt's new obsession with algae (he said the word ten times) and how he talks kind of like the Robot Monster.

Young and old alike miss Herman Cain in this race as much as I do (along with Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewert, Bill Maher and just about everyone else with a pulse).

Herman Cain at his most Herman Cain.

More of the Cain Train. Oh how I miss the Cain Train.

Newt Gingrich probably talking about algae. This man loves algae.

Come on Newt! Smile for the camera! Newt: "I am smiling." Um, maybe you shouldn't smile. Note: you can see Calista Gingrich's helmet of hair behind his right shoulder. I should've tried to get a shot of her, but I realized that Herman Cain hadn't left the building.

Okay, this thing needs it's own blog post, but I haven't "read" it yet.