Sexy Cineplexy: Reviews

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Dead Man Walking
(directed by Tim Robbins, 1995)



Sean Penn plays a murderer who gets lethal injection in Dead Man Walking. That's probably a spoiler, since in the film, he tries to escape getting the death penalty, but you know it's coming. He uses the help of Sister Helen Prejean, a nun, played by Susan Sarandon, to try to get him to escape the death penalty. She also serves as his spiritual advisor. Sister Helen Prejean is a real person who writes books about her experiences with being with inmates on death row. She's with them as they are executed. She is apparently very much against the death penalty.



This is a terrific movie. I first saw it back in 1995 when it was in movie theaters and I just now saw it again for a second time, all these years later. It was $5 at Wal-Mart on Blu-ray and I was strangely compelled to watch it again.

Single, virginal, middle aged Sister Helen Prejean is not your ordinary nun -- she doesn't dress up in a nun's habit and all that. Just simple clothes with a cross necklace. One day she gets a letter from Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) begging for help. She drives to the prison he's at and gets to know him. He says he's innocent of the crime he is accused of committing -- murdering two teenagers who were making out in a car one night in the woods and got surprised by Poncelet and a friend, who took them out, raped the woman and killed them both. But is he really innocent?

The film follows Sister Helen Prejean as she has talks with Poncelet, as well as talks with the parents of the victims who were murdered. Her talks with the parents are actually far more interesting and emotional than her talks with Poncelet. Frankly, although the talks with Poncelet are good, I am reminded a little of The Silence of the Lambs with Clarice and Hannibal, but with a killer who is of lower intelligence. The early 1990s seem to have been all about movies featuring sweet, innocent women getting caught up in discussions with criminals. It even seems like there's almost a love subtext going on between Sister Helen Prejean and Poncelet, but maybe it is just spiritual love. That's all I guess it could be. But look at how she reaches out to him as she watches him die while strapped to a table, receiving the lethal injection. In front of the disapproving looks of the parents of the victims, who sit near her. This is a virtuoso role for the marvelous Susan Sarandon, who beat out Meryl Streep and even Elisabeth Shue for her Leaving Las Vegas performance at the 68th Academy Awards in 1996.



Flashbacks to the actual murders that Poncelet committed are not really a strong point to the film, in my opinion, but they're passable. Look out for a younger Peter Sarsgaard as the male victim, Walter Delacroix, and I'm sure you'll spot a younger Jack Black as Matthew Poncelet's brother, who has a decent scene visiting him in prison. Gosh, and I didn't even know who Jack Black was when I first saw this movie.



And I must say -- Sean Penn -- I don't care if he's a killer -- dude was hot in this movie. It's sad to watch him die in the end. Do I think he deserved it? Absolutely. Do I think it looks like there's something sick and perverse to the family members of the victims getting pleasure out of watching him die? Absolutely. But he killed their kids and tortured them. An eye for an eye, I say. So long, Matthew Poncelet (who isn't a real person, by the way).



The film even makes room for humor, such as when Sister Helen Prejean is informed about who Matthew Poncelet will be buried next to. She's asked a church to allow Matthew to be buried at their cemetery, and they're allowing it, but he'll have to be buried next to the last person who died with the church -- and that's Sister Celestine -- a celibate nun who was very proud to have never slept with a man in her life. "Now she'll be sleeping next to one for all of eternity," notes Sister Helen Prejean. She and a friend burst into laughter.






Great review Sexy I rally liked this movie and own it
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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
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Miss Vicky's Loyal and Willing Slave
Not seen Dead Man Walking but I did blind buy it a while back. Sounds like I should try and get to it quite soon. Sounds interesting.


You're an excellent reviewer
Well he's no JayDee but yeah he's not bad.



THE WAY
(directed by Emilio Estevez, 2010)



I first heard about The Camino when I read a Shirley MacLaine book years ago called The Camino. It's a long pilgrimage route that people walk along to get to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain. People take this long voyage -- which can take months to finish -- for different reasons, but usually for spiritual reasons. The Way is a film about people walking this route -- called The Camino.

It is not a documentary. It is a story about a father and a son. The son is dead. He's cremated. And he's being carried around by his father as he walks The Camino. The father is played by Martin Sheen and the son is played (in flashbacks) by Emilio Estevez. They are, of course, father and son in real life. Emilio's character, Daniel, started on The Camino by himself, but an accident took his life on his first day on the walk. His father, Tom, hastily flies to France to collect his son's body. He and his son have been kind of estranged since Tom's wife (and Daniel's mom) died.

Realizing he has his son's backpack full of supplies meant for his trip on The Camino, Tom decides to do something on a whim. He asks for his son's body to be creamted in France, and then he sets off on The Camino himself to finish his son's trip, with his son's ashes carried along by him. Along the way, he makes friends -- specifically three friends who tag along with him -- and he sprinkles a little bit of his son's ashes at certain points during the voyage.



The Way
is a very good movie. The four central characters are interesting and deepen the film. The movie is two hours long and the pacing is good -- never does it feel slow. There is a surprising amount of humor and fun sprinkled throughout it. There are a few scary, tense moments that are not typical and they help the story a lot, too. The scenery is great to look at and you feel like you're making the journey with them and that it's exciting and spiritual and authentic. The movie really is very well done and better than you'd probably expect from an indie international film. It feels like it could have been a really terrific popular movie, one that played in many theaters and would make much more money than it did. I definitely recommend it. Make the pilgrimage.

Oh, and speaking of books -- 'cause I mentioned the Shirley MacLaine book, which I DON'T recommend -- I do recommend, though, a dual memoir written by both Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. It is called Along the Way: The Journey of a Father and Son, and it is about the making of The Way, but also about the Sheen/Estevez family, as told by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Very good book. Better than that walking and talking about extraterrestrial aliens Camino book by Shirley MacLaine. It came out last year, so I guess a paperback will be out sometime this year. Maybe. Of course there is Kindle, which it is available on.





Miss Vicky's Loyal and Willing Slave
That poor man! I can only imagine how bemused he must be feeling after exposing himself to the inner workings of your mind! I hope for his sake he didn't read your famous/infamous Drive review!

But seriously well done Sexy. Very cool. Did he happen to mention me? I'm sure if he stumbled across my reviews I can expect a job offer any day now!



Creature from the Black Lagoon
(directed by Jack Arnold, 1954)



I finally saw Creature from the Black Lagoon. All of my life, I've been fascinated by this monster, but I never saw the movie. When I was a kid, I had a little children's book based on the movie -- I still have it, in fact. It contains a bunch of really awesome pictures from all of the Creature from the Black Lagoon movies (there are three -- it's a trilogy). I also had a battery operated 12 inch (or something about that size... and no, I'm not talking about a dildo) figure of the Creature that could move and growl. But I never saw the movie until this week -- it's now on Blu-ray. As are many other classic monster movies -- Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man, Mummy, Phantom of the Opera, Bride of Frankenstein, etc.



The movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon, is, unfortunately, mostly a bore. It takes about a half hour before you first see the monster's face (you do see his hands, however, several times before then). In fact, the first 30-45 minutes of the movie are almost dreadfully boring. A geologist discovers a fossilized creature hand in the Amazon and this leads to a team of marine biologists, including Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson) and his girlfriend Kay Lawrence, taking a boat into the Amazon, where eventually they will discover the creature from the black lagoon, who will start killing them until there aren't many of them left. There's a lovely and interesting opening which is very Biblical and talks about the formation of the Earth and how the creatures on it had to struggle to make their place into the world, but after that, you sleep until the marine biologists are fighting for their lives against the creature.



The underwater scenes -- and there are MANY of them -- with the creature can be very beautiful and alluring to witness. He is a very graceful swimmer and I love the way he hides from people who get near him. He, I think, seems to camouflage himself behind the weeds and seagrass of the black lagoon. One notable scene features the creature swimming along with Kay, whom the creature is always going after -- I guess he needs a woman. It must be lonely in that black lagoon -- we don't see any other creatures with him. I wonder what happened to them. Perhaps he is an orphan. Or maybe he swam away from his family and now lives a single bachelor's kind of life or something. Maybe he needs Queen Latifah and those three other black women from Living Single to move into his black lagoon. It is a black lagoon, afterall.



Dr. David Reed, the leading man of the film, has one hell of an ass, I must say, in his wet, tight swimming trunks. Heterosexual men and lesbians have the beautiful Kay Lawrence to ogle, while I guess bestiality enthusiasts have the Creature, the fish in the lagoon and various other Amazonian critters.



I've watched this movie twice since I bought it, and a third time again soon is not out of the question. It's a great movie to look at, especially in high definition. My Blu-ray also has the option to play in 3-D, but those ********... you can only watch the 3-D if you have a 3-D HD TV, a 3-D Blu-ray player and special 3-D glasses that go with both of those things. I really want to see this film in 3-D. Someday, maybe I'll get the opportunity.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon represents, I think, our unconscious and man's primal nature. He dwells in the deep. He is violent, sexual, primitive, early human, skilled and relentless. A monster of the psyche, a monster within all of us. Dracula and the Mummy and Frankenstein are all dead. The Invisible Man cannot be seen. The Wolf Man can only show up at certain times. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, however, is always present. He is not a man inflicted with a curse he'd rather not have -- he is his own identity. His own self. He is the curse. What you see is what you get. He is a being that, like all of us, must deal with what life bestowed upon him ever since he was born. He was born in the water. He has gills. He can't talk. He can't look and live like a human being, yet he appears to be close in nature to them. And he wants a female creature.

This is a fascinating movie -- one that led to other similar horrors such as Jaws and Freddy Krueger (the Creature's hand and even his stalking tendencies reminded me a lot of Freddy). It's an achievement for 1954, and if they remade it today, it would probably be total crap. But Creature from the Black Lagoon isn't perfect. It is, like all of us, subject to its circumstances.





Badlands
(directed by Terrence Malick, 1973)



The only reason to watch Badlands is to stare at the sex god Martin Sheen. Come, worship, then go.

What a beautiful creature. Him and his son, Emilio Estevez, were both sex gods in their heydays. It is no coincidence that both Badlands and Emilio's famous movie, Repo Man, were both the top selling Criterion Blu-rays this week (at least, they appeared to be that way to me -- ask Nausicaa, she bought both of them this week). These guys were studs in their younger years. They both look alike. They both have the same kind of badass attitude. If I could go back in time and have a threesome with both of them, I would. Hell, I might even go for a threesome in present time. Actually, I know I would. I could use the exercise.

I'm surprised Badlands is so beloved, though. It is, isn't it? This movie is nothing but a more picturesque version of The Doom Generation. Less drugs, more cows. And more depressing. All Martin Sheen does in the movie is kill people by shooting them in the stomach. And frankly, it's Sissy Spacek whom I hate more -- she's the 15 year old girlfriend of Martin Sheen's character, Kit, who took her away from her life in South Dakota with her father (Kit killed him, of course) so they could go and live as criminals on the run. She just lays around and watches as her boyfriend kills person after person. What is she doing with this maniac anyway?



I mean, I understand -- he's gorgeous. He has a sexy voice. He has a nice ass. He has great hair, a pretty face, and he wears a lot of denim. He began the movie working as a trash collector, but so what? I'd f**k him inside a big trash compactor on top of hundreds of dead bodies the Mafia doesn't want you to know about if I had to. I'd get all of my meals out of garbage cans for him -- how could I ever go hungry when I've got a Martin Sheen buffet 24/7? But I'd probably start having problems once he started, ya know, shootin' and killin' every man he came across. I mean, I understand Martin Sheen is a sex god, but to some other woman (or, more likely, a man) those men that are being killed are sex gods to someone else. When you kill a man, you kill a penis. Ain't that right? So, Sissy Spacek, all you do in this movie is condone penis murder while you get to have the best penis around. And what a tramp she is! At the end of this movie, we even find out that the little floozy married the son of her lawyer! Can we spell S-L-U-T? Was she even legal age yet? And another thing about Sissy Spacek -- why can't her parents ever stay alive? In Carrie, she killed her mother. In Badlands, her boyfriend kills her father. Anyone who has a daughter that looks like Sissy Spacek -- 1.) Give her a makeover. 2.) Give her up for adoption. Having that kid is a death sentence! 3.) Burn all the adoption papers. Make sure she never finds you.





I didn't love Badlands. I find it very shallow and one dimensional. It is nothing but a rebel teenager movie with violence and murder. No different -- and not as good, in my opinion -- than something like one of my favorite movies, The Doom Generation, which came out in 1995. Badlands may be pretty and gorgeously filmed, but the only thing about it that really gave me sustenance was Martin Sheen's Greek God beauty. Had an uglier man played Kit, I'd completely despise this film. You CAN get away with a lot of things by just being beautiful. If there's one thing I hope to teach the world before I die, it's that. Being sexy is a privilege. It may be accidental, but so is everything else that happens to you in life (I believe we don't have free will, so that goes with that.)

Martin Sheen makes me horny. In Badlands, at least. I didn't get horny over him in The Way. If Martin Sheen makes you horny, check out Badlands. If Sissy Spacek makes you horny, check out "mental hospitals" in your local phone book (if they even still have phone books).





Whilst I am one of those who loves Badlands, I loved your review as usual, been a while since I have seen a film you've reviewed and this one didn't fail to deliver the usual SC laughs, I can understand why some may not like this film, it is quite one dimensional and simple, but from an artistic level it is beautiful and dreamlike - like Martin Sheen to you

If Sissy Spacek makes you horny, check out "mental hospitals" in your local phone book (if they even still have phone books).