The 2nd MoFo Hall of Infamy : Son of Infamy

It helps to know straight off the bat what Wild 90 is about and what it was meant to be to gain some understanding of what happened and why it's what it is. It started as an acting exercise - three friends pretending to be gangsters. Buzz Farbar, Mickey Knox and Norman Mailer had so much fun, and so much funny banter came out that it was decided on the spot to make a film of the three of them doing just this. By the time these three were at their location - a bare, sparsely furnished room with D.A. Pennebaker set to record them on camera, they were drunk and must have been in a completely different headspace with the pressure on. What we get is 82 minutes of improv that stinks - and just to rub salt in, the sound recording is atrocious. A lot of the time, these guys are just interrupting each other or all talking at once - but even when they do get some clean air, you can hardly make out what they're trying to say. As the film continues, Mailer becomes far too drunk to be understood in any case.

There's no story so the banter just goes nowhere. Mailer spends much of the time grunting and trying desperately to project some kind of primal masculinity. He breaks things and bangs things. He's playing "The Prince" and is the hardest to understand clearly. Nothing he says is clever, and most of what he thinks up is painfully inane. But he's not alone in that department. Buzz Farbar is playing "Cameo" and spends an inordinate amount of his time playing around with a switchblade knife. He seems to be the lowest in the pecking order, and so most of the insults are aimed at him. Mickey Knox plays "Twenty Years", which is possibly the worst or best (I can't tell) name for a character I've ever heard. I can't remember much about him, because my most vivid memory of sitting through this embarrassing improv is Mailer's barking and grunting. Throughout the film these three get various visitors, but these people can't end the pain, and just get sucked into the flailing act which never really gets going.

Yes - embarrassment. It's palpable throughout the entire "performance", and it makes one wonder just why this wasn't scrapped. Perhaps Norman Mailer's ego wouldn't permit an admission of failure, so this had to play out to it's inevitable end. Pennebaker was the one who tried to persuade him to just forget it - the sound glitch was reason enough to not release it, but Mailer insisted. The film received overwhelmingly negative reviews - the only positive notice coming from Mailer himself in Esquire. To sit through and watch it makes for a very painful 82 minutes - the last 10 of which had me counting down on the 'time remaining' counter so I could blissfully be released. If I was forced to say something positive about it, I'd say that it accurately reflects what being sequestered in a room of testosterone-fueled and drunk gangsters for 21 days would be like. We get a very ugly reflection of their world, with the constant need they have to assert their manliness and physical superiority over each other. It's not long before we hate all three characters and wish to be as far away from them as we can possibly be.

The way the three (and others) are filmed, by Pennebaker, isn't overly awful, and serves it's purpose. He stayed very mobile, and was able to adapt to his actors' unpredictable movements and actions. We get sawn-off shotguns, machine guns and pistols as props, along with a cornocopia of various booze bottles - most of which have been emptied. It's bare minimum kind of stuff, but it's there. The only thing that isn't is the ability of our three main performers to think up anything that's worth hearing. Everything they say feels forced - and nobody has even one small moment of inspiration. Buzz Farbar would later recount the fact that the three of them had been very ingenious and funny when doing their gangster thing at a restaurant in New York, but that in the film this wasn't the case. I'm willing to let this film have a little more leeway, for I've seen some arthouse films in my day that can frustrate and cause pain - most notably from Yoko Ono. It was a failed experiment, but experiment is what it is, and the end result was full of obscenity and posturing. This would probably be what three real gangsters are actually like - especially inebriated. They'd be just as stupid and incoherent. It's just that watching Norman Mailer and two of his friends be stupid and incoherent is no fun.

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I thought I already sent my second nom.

LEAP: Rise of the Beast, 2011

They're letting gays and women preach!

Shane (Alexander J. Bonds) is part of a crew of rebellious underground Christians fighting against a Vatican-controlled society in which everyone is microchipped and forced to attend alternate religious masses. A Vatican enforcement squad works to track down Shane's crew to keep them from distributing their street preaching videos on the internet.

It was hard to find a still for this film that doesn't make it look much more exciting than it is. As it was, with a not-awful run time of 75 minutes, I thought that this was pretty funny as a raw look inside the hyperbolic prosecuted Christian complex.

Just to be very clear, I know and love many people who are practicing Christians. And most of them are completely not threatened by the existence of other religions, women, or they gays. But we all know that there exists a subgroup of Christians who genuinely seem to believe that Christians are the most persecuted people in the world. This film was like a demented peek inside what they imagine as the end game of Christians not dominating political and social power.

Probably the best-worst element of this film is the "action". And believe me when I say that those quotes cannot possibly convey the sarcasm I intend. The best shot may simply have been a shot from behind of the four teens (are they teens? early 20-somethings?) running away across a lawn, inspiring absolutely zero faith that they can actually climb walls. The film uses the old bend your knees and say "Oof!" to imply having jumped down off of a building. There is a wonderful awful training montage, including advanced moves about on par with what my fifth grade students do on the playground.

But there also has to be a special note about the acting, which is flatter than a pancake. The bad guys repeatedly refer to the crew as a cult, and frankly their line deliveries make that accusation sound more real. Take the blonde actress's delivery of the line "Anything is possible with God," using a tone more appropriate to observing "It's cloudy outside." Or the strange lack of emotion as Shane relates the story of a child asking about the truth only to be forced underwater by a priest.

Finally, the settings. For a world power, I'm surprised that the Vatican's control room consists of five dudes sitting in front of a corrugated metal wall. And please someone explain why toward the end Shane and the ex-girlfriend were sitting in the most poorly CGI rendered room!

Wait, not finally! Ueno, you sick puppy, this film

Wowza. I can't say I liked anything about this movie, but it did get several laughs out of me.

I am so glad I am not in on this..

Honestly, this time around most of them are falling into "enjoyably bad" territory for me.

Thank goodness! That has got to be a relief.

Did they at least use gold spray paint on the wall? That would enhance the believability by a lot haha.

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LOL, if only.

It looks like they filmed their "operations center" inside of a pre-fab shed or something. But it's really the scene in the CGI "prison cell" that has to be seen to be believed. At first I thought the idea was that they'd put the hero into some sort of virtual reality to extort information from him. Nope.

This scene can be seen at 58:35 below.

Wow, they didn't even try to get the lighting on the actors to fit with the background, or even do some minimal colour correction to make it appear less jarring. I hope they were just being lazy, and didn't genuinely think that looked fine.

It's the clearly drawn door that seals the deal for me. When they "walked out" of that door I was like "BWAAAAAA?!?!?!?".

This morning some missionaries dropped by my house. I should have asked them for a parkour training montage.

The what?!? I didn't watch the whole scene, but now I have to.

The door was indeed very fake and incredibly flat looking, but honestly, I was kind of expecting something like what we got in The Amazing Bulk:

So I watched Leap : Rise of the Beast (2011). This was terrible. The acting is really bad, completely wooden and the lines are delivered in the most stilted and flat way possible. You don't get to know or care about any of the characters. The film is pretty boring for the most part. Score, editing, cinematography, and direction are poor too. I did laugh a few times though. They obviously had a low budget and their intentions were good, but this is terrible.

For sure they didn't spend any of it on a sports bra for that one actress. Every time she was booking it down the street I was like, wow, I can almost hear the chest wall trauma happening right now.

Wild 90, 1968

You don't even know a good tuna sandwich on rye.

A trio of gangster types (Norman Mailer, Buzz Farber, Mickey Knox) are holed up in an apartment where they have apparently been laying low for a while. They have meandering conversations and take a series of visitors including a boxer named Kid Cha-Cha (Jose Torres), two police detectives, and a trio of women.

Can we take a moment to just appreciate that for all of the mocking of Millenials posting Instagram pictures of their breakfast or whatever, this film proves that over 50 years ago, someone still thought that a rambling, incoherent exercise in improvisation would be worthy of viewing?

Part of the fun in this Hall is the different kinds of bad that you get. Some films are just purely incompetent. Others are abrasive. Some are uninteresting failures.

This film is kind of its own breed. Don't get me wrong, it is incompetent, abrasive, and uninteresting. But it's kind of---in theory---interesting as a warning about the perils of ego. The nerve, the absolute nerve, that it takes to ramble through a mostly-unstructured improvisation is pretty staggering. And because it's so poorly executed, even the motivation stays obscured. Is this meant to be funny? Like, a parody of tough guys? Is this meant to be actually interesting and dramatic?

I will say that the level of ineptitude on display here does keep it from being actually offensive. In fact, weirdly it almost serves as a useful exhibit for why they find a certain kind of person/artist intolerable.

I did get a few laughs out of this one. The accidental glances into the camera. That one part where they close a door and a stack of cardboard slowly falls down one piece at a time. And the trainwreck element that the people in this movie even for a minute thought that what they were doing was entertaining enough to put in front of an audience.

Wild 90 is a great movie for those who can't stand Norman Mailer, but also can't help watching him continually embarrass himself.



Dreariness and self-importance have never been more closely entwined in one human being. The worst thing that ever happened to Norman Mailer is that someone told him he was a great intellectual. And he never forgot it, applying it to every god awful stupid and unfunny thing that ever came out of his mouth.


The end of his Maidstone though is still one of the great moments in cinema history, a moment that nearly completely erases the line between documentary and fiction. And that is bloodily satisfying and horrifying in equal measure.

There's a certain subset of people---some of them talented, some of them not---who have come to believe that everything they say is worth sharing out loud. And this film is a cautionary tale for those people.

Mailer's Naked and Dead and The Executioner's Song are both brilliant books.



If only he had learned to never speak in public. I recently watched the Penebaker documentary about him debating women's rights with Germaine Greer, and I don't think there is one thing he says that can be considered better than what some all-caps second rate internet troll might blurt out.



And he just seems so smugly satisfied when he unleashes one of his zingers, which leave his mouth like so many garbled turds. And almost never make a lick of sense. He's an unbearable twat. And, yes, sadly also very talented. Just not at movies.

Lets get this out right at the start - Airplane Mode is stuffed full of comedic material that is pathetic in it's preening need to elicit laughs from people who love racist and sexist comedy. People from different races and sexual orientations aren't in on the jokes - they're squarely aimed at, and broadside shots are taken in the hope that the sheer deluge of horror and bawdy slime will disguise the fact that they're there. The people that write the material don't do it on purpose. They're under the impression that they're so inclusive that they have license to blast away, while in all actuality they probably have a limited experience beyond their own culture and orientation. Offensive jokes that were never going to be funny anyway, because they just fall flat, kill a person's mood for comedy, and irritate the person watching to the extent that they're at odds with something they need to be in tune with. At least that's the way I see it.

Judging this film, apart from the offensive aspects, feels like watching a collection of Logan Paul YouTube videos one after the other at a fast pace. Once every so often, there's something a little funny - it's unrefined, and hasn't been worked on, but it's funny in the same way your friend's offhand quips might be. Of course, if that friend told you 5 or 6 offensive, disgusting and unfunny things in between every quip, you'd probably keep your distance and they wouldn't be your friend anymore. It might seem amazing, but I've actually seen many comedies that I consider worse than Airplane Mode just by the fact that they fail so consistently at making me laugh. At least here, once in a while, I admired when the film let loose and decided to really trash the culture that made it what it is to begin with. How meta. At times the film is really wild and silly. Of course, not far around the corner there's some awful humour that just ruins the whole mood and reminds us that the people making this don't know what they're doing.

Logan Paul (playing himself) has an Australian girlfriend, and has to conquer his fear of flying if he's to meet her in person and be physically intimate with her. When all of his friends decide to attend a "Hashtagacon" in Australia, Paul and a large group of influencers find themselves on a Koalair flight with serial prankster Vitaly Zdorovetskiy (playing himself). Unfortunately for the pilots, when they ask all of the passengers to switch their mobile phones to "airplane mode" they all refuse to do so and actually go crazy using them to blog, take selfies and post picture of themselves. This fries the cockpit, kills the both pilots and leaves the plane in the hands of Zdorovetskiy, who relishes the chance to rid himself of the various internet personalities he hates. Logan Paul has to conquer his fears and try to land the plane himself, all the while fighting the prankster and winning the admiration of the girl he ended up being seated next to in first class, Jenna (Chloe Bridges). Meanwhile, his "foreign exchange brother" Juanpa (Juanpa Zurita) frantically tries to lose his virginity before the plane crashes and they all die.

Airplane Mode is what would have happened if you had contacted a guy of around 13 years of age in high school, and had given him a budget, crew and ability to make any film he wanted. It immediately goes for masturbation - and I was kind of amused at the film for not including much of a preamble or setting. Crude. From there on out it juggles pot shots, gross-out humour, call-outs, racist jokes, sexist jokes and quite a few references to Airplane! I was interested in how well qualified the people who made this film from a technical standpoint were. Cinematographer Colt Seman was green, and had worked mostly in television. Editor Mitch Rosin had been second, third or fourth fiddle on many big films like Bridesmaids and Get Him to the Greek, but Airplane Mode was a rare venture as actual editor. Composers Simon Heeger and Christian Vorlander (known as 2WEI) had limited film experience. Special Effects Coordinator Josh Hakian had done good work on big films, such as Coverfield, Logan Lucky and The Last Stand. Production Designer Martina Buckley had been working in the industry since 1996, but only on second-tier type films.

This film had "been in the can" quite a few years before it was eventually released - so what delayed that release? Logan Paul's antics. Before Planeless Pictures could begin to recoup some of what they'd invested in him and this odd film, Paul released a video on his YouTube channel which featured him in Aokigahara (Japan's famed "Suicide Forest") and which also depicted him reacting to an actual suicide victim. Being a step too far, the reaction was negative and did considerable damage to Logan Paul's image. Releasing the film right at that moment was considered pointless, but Paul's image never really improved enough to matter - and Planeless Pictures sued the YouTuber for $3 million, claiming that he'd done it on purpose to try and permanently shelf the movie (which seems to suggest the film's producers admitting that their movie was pretty bad.) Watching it felt like a strange experience. I had the feeling that I was watching a comedy inspired by Airplane! where amateurs were in charge and professionals were doing the work. There didn't seem to have been enough oversight and thought put into Airplane Mode, and it plays about as well as you'd expect.

Oh, and the Australian accents? Perhaps they were as mangled and exaggerated as they were for "comical effect" - but only the voiceover during the credits sounded anything like an Australian.

Here they are - the other half of what we have ahead of us. The deadline is December 31st - good luck everyone!


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I coincidentally watched this two days ago and my prayers are with all of you.

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