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Jonathan Daniel Brown (center, with glasses) plays real-life pot smuggler Nate Norman in Kid Cannabis.
John Stockwell's Kid Cannabis is a pretty good comedy about the intersection of youth and vice and enterprise and a so-so true-crime movie and a reasonably good coming-of-age flick. It's a lot more than you expect from a film called Kid Cannabis, certainly. Reviewed for The Dissolve.
The same weekend I saw both Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Raid 2 -- prompting this piece for NPR Monkey See -- my pal Glen Weldon showed me the mostly-animated G.I. Joe episode of Community. The show got a lot of mileage out of the fact that nobody ever got killed in that war cartoon, wherein an elite American military unit fought a uniformed army of terrorists to a stalemate every 21 minutes using ray guns.
The G.I. Joe comic book, meanwhile, took a realistic approach to firearms. Characters sometimes got killed, too, although not very often. It didn't get me hooked on guns, thankfully, but it got me hooked on comics. It was also pretty clearly a gateway drug to more sophisticated depictions of violence in movies and TV.
Handle with Care: Cool Hand David Strathairn defuses a package bomb in No God, No Master.
Terry Green's low-budget, high-ambition Prohibition-era conspiracy thriller No God, No Master isn't quite The Untouchables, but then again, what is? I admired the movie's overreach in my review for The Dissolve.
Ray Wise is in the film, too. I met him in 2004 or 2005 when he appeared in a short film directed by a pal of mine. He very kindly indulged my request for Paul Verhoeven stories. Nice guy.
Mike Iveson and Vin Knight in Arguendo, a show that needs more contemporary argu-mojo.(Joan Marcus)
I reviewed Arguendo, Elevator Repair Service's comic treatment of a 1991 Supreme Court case that no longer seems momentous if ever it did, for the Washington City Paper.
Turns out that this bitchin' Camaro, and not any of the film's various CGI flame creatures, is "The Firebreather." Image from Jinn's Instagram feed.
I took one for the team and reviewed the the un-super, non-thrilling supernatural thriller Jinn for The Dissolve. I can't say I didn't have fun, mostly because Rachel Manteuffel came with me.
Footnotes: When I mention Liam Neeson in The Phantom Menace in this review, I cite him by his real name rather than his character name in that movie, Qui Gon... Jinn. It's all connected. Also, I didn't have room or cause to mention that William Atherton also played unctuous TV reporter Dick Thornberg in Die Hard, one of my pantheon films. Or that Faran Tahir, who gets plenty of work but whom I always remember from that great prologue to J.J. Abrams' Star Trek from five years ago, is here, too.
"Vhat did I tell you about those stupid cornrows!" Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joe Manganiello in Sabotage.
Both of Sabotage's prior titles, Ten and Breacher, make more sense than the one it ended up with. Actually, the title is no more nonsensical than the convoluted plot of David Ayer's gruesome, vulgar, throughly disreputable dirty-cop thriller. It's only just barely a Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, which is part of why it's the most satisfying picture he's made in 20 years. I reviewed it for The Village Voice.
Laura C. Harris and Elan Zafir in Tender Napalm (Teresa Wood)
In one of the the shows at Signature Theatre right now, a woman (named "Woman") tells a man ("Man") in precise, step-by-step detail how she plans to sever his penis and scrotum.
In the theater next door, Beaches: The Musical is playing. Six of one...
I review Philip Ridley's Tender Napalm in this week's Washington City Paper. Plus Allyson Currin's The Carolina Layaway Grail, the inaugural production from DC playwriting collective The Welders.
Why yes, I am fairly pleased with the hed, thanks. It's one of the very few times I've ever managed to top my editor (and Heds Will Roll Tumblr proprietr) Jon Fischer's suggestion, which is on Heds Will Roll now though it's far more tasteful than mine. Then he came back and nailed the photo caption, so.
James Franco steals some shaving cream, and 97 minutes of your time, in Maladies.
My review of Maladies, a deeply pretentious, long-shelved character study written by director "Carter" for star James Franco, is up on The Dissolve today. Curiously, Alan Cumming gets billing in the opening credits though he's in it for one brief, unmemorable scene. He has less screen time here than he got as the hotel clerk who hits on Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut.
