Alien: Resurrection - Jean-Pierre Jeunet - 1997

★★-Pretty incredible cast is somewhat wasted on this installment. Not as horrible as I remembered, but pretty not great. 

Gist of this is 200 or so years after Ripley died, she and the queen Xenomorph that was inside her in Alien3 are brought back to life to harvest this bioweapon. Yeah, again with the bioweapon stuff. Now Ripley is upgraded to human/alien hybrid clone status. She basically has Matrix powers. She and a group of space pirates are trapped on a spacecraft with 12 aliens. They are trying to kill everyone so the queen can make it to Earth and do her thing down there. 

Love a good basketball scene out of nowhere, which this film has. Ripley has some fundamentals, can dunk, and has acid blood. At 5'11, I'd take take her in the first round if I were a WNBA GM. I remember seeing an interview with Sigourney Weaver and she claimed she made that shot she threw behind her head from 30 feet out on the first take. Looked it up and apparently true, which shocked Ron Perlman, causing him to lose it. 

From Bloody Disgusting: “I watched her training for this sequence, and they were rehearsing this little thing for a month. She never made it once. The camera’s rolling. I’m in the shot where she’s walking away and it goes in.” It indeed would be shocking, I'm sure. However, they were able to cut his reaction out and the shot was able to stay in the movie without being faked. 

Here's the cast...  We've got Sigourney Weaver back from the dead as Ripley. Winona Ryder as the smaller, whinier droid version of Ripley (more or less). The always fantastic Ron Perlman. Perlman plays a great pervy creep. This was sort of his modus operandi back then. One-on-one banter during basketball, then, at one point, Ripley asks, “Who do I have to fuck to get off this boat?” He replies, “I'll get you off... maybe not the boat.” So naughty!

Others include Brad Dourif (you know, Chucky), one Kim Flowers who is there to show off her remarkable ass (I think), the guy that played Tuco Salamanca, Leland Orser who I mostly think of from this and Se7en as the guy that kills a prostitute with a switchblade dildo, Dan Hedaya (Nick Tortelli from Cheers), and Michael Wincott who is sort of having a moment after Nope. Also, Gary Dourdan who looks like this buddy of mine I went to high school with. He's mostly known for the role Warrick Brown on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Finally, one J. E. Freeman as the main evil scientist. He was often a bastard, notably like in the role of mobster Marcello Santos in the David Lynch movie Wild at Heart with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern and as a henchman in the Coen bros dope flick Miller's Crossing. 1990 was a big year for him. 

This movie has a few feels, believe it or not. First we have this horrible bit where the scientists put the eggs in front of these miners to impregnate them with the Xenomorph embryos. Cold blooded. 

This flick also features the saddest of the aliens. Again, they aren't asking for any of this. Born into this bullshit like livestock. Smarter than your average Xenomorph because of the human intelligence it has. Plus it feels a little emotion. It doesn't just want to kill. Then it dies horribly and slowly in excruciating pain after being betrayed during a tender moment with it's chosen mother. Fuck, man. 

This version of Ripley, by the by, is completely different from previous portrayals and is pretty interesting. Sigourney Weaver's performance was widely praised. Her allegiance is questioned because she birthed the queen when they brought her back. Has a connection or whatever. Do you fucking know who she is? Exterminating Xenomorphs is all she does!

When she sees the failed clones is another one of those shockingly moving bits from this franchise. It's kind of surprising that Sigourney Weaver came back for this and put in such a stellar performance. She is a great actress and all. Criminally underrated even. This is sort of trash, yeah, but without her would have been embarrassing, probably. 

In the bad column we've got some “hacking the mainframe” bullshit. They even say it at one point. “I have to hack the mainframe manually. I destroyed my modem.” “I have a neuro-processor that allows me to dream.” Little of that shit. We also get more lazy anti-corporation stuff. The corporate guys, of course, are comically terrible. They are always worse than the aliens, ya know. I think this series did more to hate corporate empires than anything else really, other than what they do in real life, of course. 

The film also ends on a weak note with Ripley finally getting back to Earth. This should have been cool after four movies, a Christ-like death with resurrection, and countless dead aliens, but is sort of like, look at that, Earth, cool, I guess. See what this is about, why not. Bill Bryson must have had this scene in mind when he wrote I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes from a Big Country in 1998. 

The film also has a lot of potential that wasn't fully realized. 

Like Ripley, the queen too is an alien/human mismash and at the end starts giving birth to more hybrids instead of eggs. Cutting out the middleman. An exceptional cool concept that does not deliver in the end. 

This is probably something that has potential to explore, the birthed hybrid killing the queen, it's mother, then taking to Ripley, it's grandmother, who ultimately kills it. But this is too crazy to put that much thought into. 

Overall, it had good pacing and was pretty entertaining. Larger cast than most of the Alien movies, these extras are mostly there to raise the body count. There are some good moments like the underwater alien chase scene that goes on for like several minutes and nearly resulted in actors actually drowning. Then when they finally get out, the facehuggers are there waiting for them. The Xenomorphs look like they would be great in water. The biggest problem with the movie, IMO, is that the tone is all over the place. You have Nick Tortelli here and Chucky yucking it up, then Ripley damn near makes you cry. Likely more too many people giving too much input, like with Alien3. I feel like it could have been really good, but it tries to do too much and fails. 

Alien3 – David Fincher - 1992

★★★-“The Bitch is Back.” Another kick ass tagline. Saw this in the theater with my dad and brother while my sister and mom watched Sister Act. At the time, I thought this movie was pretty great. Rewatched in junior high school and changed my opinion to meh. This viewing I'm watching the Special Edition also known as the Assembly Cut (which David Fincher refused to be involved in [more on that later]). It's 30 minutes longer than the theatrical version. I'll call it a mixed bag. Kind of dumb, but has some potential. Feel like it was a good flick for director David Fincher to get his start and figure out what he wanted from the rest of his career. This, obviously, wasn't it. 

One change of note in this version, I had always been reluctant to rewatch this because it's a dog in the theatrical cut that get implanted by the facehugger. A brutal animal in pain scene I wasn't about. In this version, the alien burst out of a yak like animal that they farm for meat outside of the prison. The dog was part of the studios considerable recutting, which was a weird one. Thankfully, didn't have to watch that shit. 

Back to the basics on this one. One solitary Xenomorph picking off unarmed prisoners that don't stand a chance. In this installment, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the only survivor from Aliens after the ship crash lands on Fiorina 161, a wasteland inhabited by former inmates housed on this maximum security prison planet. After, again facing skepticism, Ripley leads the men into battle against the alien. 

Cast includes Holt McCallany who plays Bill Tench in Fincher's incredible Netflix show Mindhunter, Charles Dance who was Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones, Charles S. Dutton (title character from the show Roc among other things [bought a lot of stock in that guy]), Paul McGann from Withnail and I, Lance Henriksen (again), and Pete Postlethwaite (Keyser Söze's lawyer, Mr. Kobayashi, in The Usual Suspects). Ripley and the eldest Lannister go to pound town, which is a weird way to introduce sexual encounters into the universe. 

Ripley, among all these rapist and murderers (who have all taken a religious vow of celibacy), is repeatedly told not to go around the prisoners. The warden guy basically says that she will be raped and murdered if she goes around these guys. First chance she gets, she waltzes into the mess hall, trying to show them she's not afraid, I guess, maybe that she is just one of the guys, I don't know. Not a good situation for her or the prison, ya know. When she walks in, the first guy she engages with says, “You don't want to know me, lady. I'm a murderer and rapist of women.” She's like, “alright, well, I'm just going to sit here with you and the other sexual deviants and enjoy my meal like one of the guys.” It's never a woman's fault, but maybe in this very dangerous situation, try to be chill is all I'm saying. 

Which brings me to this fucked up attempted rape scene. This is by far the darkest of all of the films in the series and like all Fincher's work with a few exceptions features psychopaths capable of anything. Though fucked up, I sort liked this aspect of the film. I was all in early... but the movie starts to fall apart in the last third. 

It all starts when Ripley is all, we have to kill it, they can't take the alien and use it as a weapon. You know this speech because she makes it in every movie. Charles Dutton is like, why not? Fuck them, but really, why should we should we volunteer to die here when there is a lot worse shit out there already. He has a point, but then the point is mute because some idiot lets it out because he thinks it's cool or whatever which is my biggest beef with the movie. Really, it's not terrible. At times it's nearly great. But this is so unforgivably dumb. They have it trapped, neutralized. And then no. I don't recall if it is the same in the theatrical version. But I would have really hated this in junior high and it would have ruined the movie. 

Also, dumb and irritating is after Ripley finds out that she has an alien in her chest, she is like everyone has to die now. Call off the medivac team and nuke the bitch. You know, Ripley, this is her one plan for every situation. Now that she is going to die, might as well take everyone else with me. The guy in charge is like, uh, fuck that. Sorry you're going to die, but no. Pretty fucked up on Ripley's part, to be honest.

Then after this weird scene where Ripley goes to kill it and mistakes a pipe for the alien head, she asks Dutton to kill her. But Dutton is like, fuck you, how about you help. She goes, makes her speech again and rallies the troops with an anti-corporate rant with Dutton throwing out some god stuff and they're all on board. 

It kind of comes back around and is exciting at least with a lot of chasing and murdering which culminates in an alien covered in molten lead. When they turn the sprinklers on it, it dies in a satisfying explosion. Spoiler. 

But then it ends on some dumb shit with the return of Lance Henriksen, the designer of the droid that looks like him, who spouts some corporate nonsense and tries to convince Ripley to let them take the queen out of her. It then descends into self-sacrificing nonsense and Henriksen saying shit like “it's a beautiful specimen! You're throwing away the chance of a lifetime.” And Ripley Christ's herself into the fire. The end. I remember the chestburster popping out as she fell, but that doesn't happen in this version. 

So let's get into the production... 

Can't really talk about this movie without acknowledging the legendarily troubled production. Fox, the studio behind the flick, kept pushing the film back and making changes. Supposedly there were something like ten different writers for the film and Fincher was not the first director. Then at some point in1991 they released a teaser that simply stated “In 1979, we discovered, in space, no one can hear you scream. In 1992, we will discover, on Earth, everyone can hear you scream.” Incredible teaser. 

I remember being more than a little intrigued, hence seeing it in the theater at age 10 (my parents didn't discourage the horror/film stuff my brother and I were into and now I'm a sort of successful, sort of well adjusted adult, love you mom and dad). If you haven't seen it, uh, don't get too excited. This trailer came out before the script was finished and as anyone who's seen the movie knows, this shit ain't on Earth. 

Almost immediately Fincher started distancing himself, leaving the project before the final edit was in the can. That summer he said “If I go on to make 10 great ones, this'll probably be looked upon as my first bungled masterpiece.” In 2009 he told The Guardian that “no one hated it more than me; to this day, no one hates it more than me.” When he made the film he was 29-year-old music video director getting his first picture. Fox more or less had no faith in him and breathed down his neck the whole time, demanding recuts and reshoots throughout. You can read more about it on Film Stories. 

The 10 great ones/bungled masterpiece thing is pretty much exactly what happened as he has 10 more under his belt here in 2023 and most of them are indeed considered great. 

What's nuts is Fincher nearly left the industry after this experience, going back to music videos and refusing to read scripts until Se7en wound up in his lap. Thank fuck he stuck with that shit as he is one of the all-time greats. In my opinion he has three movies in the top 10 of this century in The Social Network (behind only There Will Be Blood for best movies of my lifetime), Zodiac, and Gone Girl. Mank and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ain't bad either. I haven't even mentioned his best two either in Se7en and Fight Club. I wrote papers in college about both of those. Hell, Fight Clubbasically turned me woke when I saw it 1999. It completely changed the ways I look at consumerism and contemporary masculinity. 

Despite all the issues between Fincher and the studio, a lot of the actors working on the film were impressed enough to keep working with him. 

Dance, the love interest in the film, said that while it wasn't the nightmare it's been characterized as, it still wasn't an easy shoot. He explained that the executives back in Hollywood, the film was shot in England, phoned Fincher at all hours of the night, ignoring the time change, just basically fucking with him. For what it's worth, Dance said doesn't regret that he was a part of it and that he'd like to work with Fincher again, whom he considers a genius. “The minute David Fincher first walked onto the set I thought, 'My god, this guy is going to go far.' He was fantastic,” he said. Talk all that for what you will. He later did work on another Fincher film with Mank, playing William Randolph Hurst. 

One of the prisoners (a lot of them sort of blend together) Christopher John Fields is in four Fincher films, Holt McCallany was a henchman in Fight Club and has since gone on to star in Fincher's Netflix show Mindhunter, and Charles S. Dutton also appeared in Se7en. Then again, there are several actors who won't work with him again for what sounds like pretty good reasons. Notably Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal, and maybe Mark Ruffalo. Dude is tough to work for, for sure. 

Final thoughts...

My parting words here. This is easily the cutest little alien of the series. Nicknamed it “Bambi”. Running around on all fours. They used a dog in a suit at one point. Not sure it it made it into this cut, but it's pretty adorbs. Just a little guy. Aw. People went wild when Sigourney Weaver buzzed her head. Good look on her. I've historically been kind of into that. And, finally, while not perfect and near the bottom of his films, it does have it's moments, and shows more than a few glimpses of the promise of Fincher's later work. Overall, highly underrated. 

Aliens - James Cameron - 1986

★★★★★-Might be the greatest sequel of all time. Takes the world/premise of the first movie and dials it way up. Plus, no one is better at subtly shitting on corporations than James Cameron. All of his movies are a soulless corporate entity focused on profits to the extreme, causing preventable death to completely innocent people (or aliens or whatever) on a massive level. My kind of dude. With this flick, he goes all out with it and when in doubt, throws a couple exploding aliens in there. Incredible. 

To hammer this home, the first half hour of this movie is the most brutal shit a character has ever had to endure mentally. After floating in space in stasis for close to 60 years instead of the eight weeks she was expecting, Ripley wakes up to find her daughter got old and died. She is then forced to explain why she destroyed company property and gets fired and her space license revoked. They treat her like a criminal and even talk jail time. Then, when she suggests they check out the planet, a suit tells here that there are people there now! 60–70 families. “No complaints from them.” She immediately knows they are all going to die. Some real heavy shit to wake up to. Just put me back into stasis, Jesus fuck. 

Wrote a paper in college about this movie for a religion in film course I took. We all had to present on a couple of the predetermined movies. No one wanted this one because it took real work to make something of it. Intellectually confident as I was by senior year, I took this on by choice. Back as a stupid freshman, I dated a girl that was more or less identical to Ripley in this flick after the haircut. We did not have a good breakup and I harbored let's say dislike (she broke up with me because she thought I was a shitty writer, which has like always been MY thing, don't ya know, so I hated her) and I kind of held it against Ripley. So my take was siding with the Xenomorphs, which fucking killed. “They didn't ask to be born killing machines, they aren't the evil ones, they are just following their instincts in fighting this hostile group encroaching on their territory.” Lot of stuff like that with a bunch of digs on Bill Paxton. When I graduated, the professor from that class, one of only two classes I got A+s in, wrote me a letter saying he hopes I continue being a voice for “the other,” which was one of the best compliments I've ever gotten, and I think about often. I feel this way with damn near every creature feature I watch these days. Down with the status quo, I say! Rip that guy's head off, Cocaine Bear!

Admittedly, the Ripley-Newt relationship is surprisingly touching though, which makes it hard to all out root for their deaths, though I managed. She's sweet for a feral child, she won the “Citizenship Award” for her second grade class. I, too, won the citizenship award in second grade. I was opinionated and still loathed everyone, but I was much quieter about all that back then. It wasn't until high school that I realized I was also hilarious and developed my barbed wit and general gift of gab. So, yeah, on a related note, I've been in my fair share of tussles since ye olde citizen boy award of 1989 with that combination. The most terrifying part of the movie is when Newt is in the like sewage system or whatever with chest level water and the inevitable happens. Spoiler. Also, back to the movie, I thought Newt was the same feral child in Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior until adulthood. 

Remember them being in space a lot more. Most of the movie takes place on the ground with this nuclear disaster looming with blue lightning and everything. What this series is pretty much. Trying to get out and kill the aliens before wherever they are explodes. Anywho, this is why the marines can't use guns at one point, which is eventually ignored. Plot science at its finest, “you can't fire bullets, you're inside a nuclear reactor!” So it's basically go in there and die, which they do. 

It was probably crazy to see a bunch of aliens back when this came out. But I saw this before the original and was sort of surprised and let down the first time I saw the Ridley Scott movie as a kid with it just being the one. Something nuts, Cameron only had six Xenomorph costumes. It looks like there are hundreds. I shit you negative on this. Plus, we get the first queen, which is just amazing. 

Cast is nuts. Stars Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, of course. As an athlete, I love critiquing running form in film. And not a good runner, Sigourney Weaver. Form is beyond terrible. Worse than Harrison Ford's old man run in The Temple of Doom. Still looks great in underpants and a tank top though. Also get Bill Paxton, Michael Biehn from The Terminator and Tombstone, Paul Reiser from Mad About You, Lance Henriksen from Pumpkinhead who is probably most remembered from this flick and his character Frank Black from The X-Files its dope spinoff Millennium, and Carrie Henn as Newt. 

A little on Michael Biehn. I pretty much love every movie this guy is in. Bought a lot of stock in him after The Abyss, but it never really happened for him. 

The film, I'm sure everyone knows, has a happy ending. Yay! But then after another crazy long stasis we get bold Ripley in Alien 3 and see that the kid and Biehn died and there were facehuggers all over the ship. Boo. 

The one-two punches that both Ridley Scott and James Cameron had after their first movies in this franchise are unmatched. Scott made Alien and then Blade Runner (a top 10 all time), then Cameron makes The Terminator followed by Aliens. He also wrote the screenplay for Rambo: First Blood Part II during this same period. Fucking sick. 

Alien - Ridley Scott - 1979

★★★★★-One of the all-time great cats in this flick. I love that kitty boy, Jonsey. Save the fucking cat indeed.

Everyone knows and loves this flick. Sigourney Weaver taking on Xenomorphs in her tiny underpants and a tank top. Rock on. 

Ridley Scott's second film. Released in 1979. Written by Dan O'Bannon. Follows the space crew of the Nostromo, just a bunch of working stiff space folk who bring an alien onto the ship to everyone's detriment. The alien was designed by the artist H. R. Giger who is famous for this type of shit. That thing is cool as hell. The film won a bunch of awards but got mixed reviews at the time. Critics really fucked up on this one. 

Super cast with Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright (the little girl from The Birds), my surrogate grandfather Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggens), and Yaphet Kotto. What a crop!

However, there are several plot holes that are distracting. Of course, there is the facehugger getting through the helmet of a space suit and the acid blood. But one really irritates me. 

My beef is this, how the aliens go from being squirrel-sized to Yao Ming is ridiculous. Of the six movies, none allow for any kind of reasonable window for the aliens to grow to full size. One molting cycle, no food, and a half hour, and they are enormous. They really do grow up so fast! No, if you’re going to gain 100 kilos, you’re going to have to eat like a lot of stuff, and you’ve got to molt and shed and shit somewhere. It's fucking physics or biology or whatever, I'm not a scientist. 

Still, the greatest sci-fi/horror movie of all time. A slasher in space, scary as fuck. When it gets Dallas, coming out of nowhere, always scares the shit out of me. How low-energy it seems in the escape pod makes it somehow scarier/realer. When it comes face to face from the girl from The Birds, it basically scares her to death. Hence, the incredible tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

We're the Millers - Rawson Marshall Thurber - 2013

★★★-Movie about chosen family, how skeezy boyfriends can fuck your shit up, and how high level drug dealers are funny as shit. Torture, femicide, beheadings, always good for a chuckle. 

Gist is Jason Sudeikis is a small-time pot deal gets his drugs and money stolen and is in some shit with his college buddy (Ed Helms) whose a kingpin. Forces him to go to Mexico to smuggle a couple tons of weed. Turns out he is actually going down to rip off the cartel. This is a comedy, in case you couldn't tell. To minimize suspicious, Sudeikis gets a massive RV and assembles a fake family consisting of his stripper neighbor played by Jennifer Aniston (who has never looked more attractive, goddamn), homeless Emma Roberts, and this nerd played by Will Poulter from Midsommar and the new Guardians movie. Hijinks ensue. They also meet up with DEA agent Nick Offerman and his wife (Kathryn Hahn from Glass Onion and Bad Words) and kid (Molly C. Quinn from the show Castle), which complicates muling drugs, dontcha know. 

Directed by one Rawson Marshall Thurber who also Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (a personal fave), Central Intelligence, and Red Notice. Get cameos from Ken Marino, Luis Guzman, and Thomas Lennon as well. 

Funniest scene is when the nerdy kid is taught how to make out by his fake mom and sister while the fake dad films it when his love interest inevitably walks in, the chick he wanted to impress with his kissing ability. There is also a not unfunny scene that involves what some people think is a baby getting run over by a semi but it's just drugs. 

There is a scene when the fake fam wants to renegotiate with Sudeikis when they find out how much dude is making on the deal. He ends up leaving them at an RV campground. With the cartel on their asses, I thought that was probably the best thing that could have happened to them. Also, lot of cartel humor in this flick. That's something I've always thought of when thinking of the Mexican drug trade, the humor! No. 

All this said, it was alright although somewhat forgettable. Solid cast whom I mostly enjoy in everything, a couple of good laughs, and never boring fun. 

Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul

Nice, interesting 30 for 30 style Netflix doc on the Tim Donaghy scandal. Donaghy was the NBA referee illegally gambling and influencing the outcomes of games. Tells how through his connections to organized crime, Donaghy made calls to benefit the gamblers he was associated with to cover spreads and what not. 

At one point Donaghy talked about how they'd get told by the league, handed down by Commissioner David Stern, known Indiana Pacer/small market hater, that they need to start calling more of this or that. Carrying or traveling on a certain spin move Jordan was fond of, for example. But when he makes one of those violation on His Airness, unquestionably the greatest player to ever play the game of basketball, Bulls Coach Phil Jackson tells him how it is:

“I started to understand what's within the game in the NBA. I was in Philadelphia and I am refereeing Sixers-Bulls. They were cracking down on the spin move that they wanted the officials to call traveling. Michael Jordan makes the spin move, I make the call. Phil Jackson comes off the bench and he starts giving me shit. I say, 'wait a second, Phil. You know as well as I do that's the spin move they're telling us to call.' And he said, 'while they might want that play called, they certainly don't want it called on him', and he pointed at Jordan who just walked by and stared at me. I got in the locker room, the other referee said, 'they want that call but don't want to on him.”

Yeah, indeed, it is a superstars league and they are treated accordingly. This of course brings into question the fairness of NBA games.

This is further evidence to the conspiracy theory that the NBA was more or less rigged under Stern in favor of the biggest markets and the players that sell the most jersey and if you are Michael Jordan, you get every call. You hear people talk about how when Jordan played the game was so much more physical. That's bullshit. Watch one of those games and you'll see Jordan get every goddamn call. “But the hand check rule!” You hand-check Jordan, you got a foul. Such is the case with all the super-stars. Look at the all time attempts list (Jordan is 11th, by the by). It's big guys who played forever (the Mailman, Wilt, Shaq Moses Malone, Dwight Howard, Kareem) like you'd expect and the guys that NBA protects (LeBron, Kobe, Jordan) with the exceptions of maybe the guys who played in the 60s/70s (Oscar Robertson, Jerry West), I can't say much with confidence about that era. In the playoffs, it is way worse. Jordan is tied for third with Tim Duncan. LeBron with over 100 more games than Jordan is first, he has also got nearly every call throughout his career, with Hack-a-Shaq at number two. The guys ahead of him all have way over 200 playoff games under their belts. Jordan had 179. As far as average per game, among players with 100 playoff games or more, Jordan is third in per game average, behind liabilities Shaq and Wilt.

All this is to say the Pacers should have won game seven of the Eastern Conference Finals in 1998! Small markets Utah vs. Indiana? Nah. Stern was never going to let that happen. This was how it was for most teams that were in cities that don't matter or didn't have one of the three best players in the league.

Anyway, so Donaghy was guilty as shit. Pled guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and transmitting betting information through interstate commerce. Okay. In the doc he admits to providing confidential information about games to the other two guys involved in the scheme, quasi mafia guys Jimmy Battista and Tommy Martino who he went to high school with in Pennsylvania. They all plead guilty, served at least a year in federal prison, and now hate each other. They all also participated in the documentary. 

Not the first of these Netflix Untold docs I've watched. They are worth watching if you like that type of story off the field type stuff, which I fucking love. One of particular interest is how Stern screwed over the Pacers after the Malice in the Palace when Ron Artest went into the stands and started swinging after fan John Green hit him in the face with a beer which caused a riot. Stern suspended the fuck out of my team including Artest for life which was later commuted to the rest of the season. This still makes me mad. Other NBA players that got suspended for a whole season include Latrell Sprewell for choking his coach and threatening him with death, Gilbert Arenas for pulling a gun on a teammate in the locker room. Even they didn't get a lifetime to start with though. 

Snuff - Chuck Palahniuk

A pornstar hosting a 600-man gang bang to the death, an incredible amount of incest, and some child molestation. Novelist Chuck Palahniuk really puts us right there in the porn industry with Snuff, sticky floor and all. Probably not going to win too many readers. This is about a shocking of a read as you're going to find. Needless to say, it has some triggers. 

Palahniuk loves to shock—nearly 100 people (according to Palahniuk) fainted during public readings of his short story “Guts.” I sort of feel that is point with some of his stuff. That's why most people I know love his better stuff and loathe books like this. 

The gist of Snuff is that aged porn actress Cassie Wright, seeks to culminate her film career by breaking the world record for on-camera sexual partners in a 600-man gang bang in what amounts to suicide by sex. The story is told through the four distinctive perspectives. The narrators are referred to as Mr. 72 (a young perv), Mr. 137 (a mainstream actor whose career is finished after it came out that he did male on male many years before), Mr. 600 (exactly the kind of guy you'd imagine a pornstar to be), and Sheila (Cassie's personal assistant). Cassie’s perspective is almost completely missing from the novel. Everyone in this novel is incredibly unlikable. 

Thing I probably enjoyed the most were the “true facts” that Cassie tells porn wrangler Sheila about bygone Hollywood stars. Example: Lon Chaney put an egg membrane in his eye for The Phantom of the Opera to give him a fake cataract. Bacteria developed and he lost sight in the eye. “True fact.” There are lots of these little tidbits, some of which I know to be true. 

Much is made of the many, many porn titles sprinkled in: “Beat Me in St. Louis,” “Chitty Chitty Gang Bang,” “The Da Vinci Load,” “Gropes of Wrath,” “To Drill a Mockingbird,” so forth. It's never funny and happens on nearly every page. I'd say that these were the things I liked the least, and there were things I did not care care for. 

Definitely at the bottom of his that I've read. Of his 19 novels, this was my ninth. Of those, I'd put put this at around eighth or ninth, depending on the day. Down there with Doomed and Pygmy. The others, in ranked order, are Lullaby, Fight Club, Damned, Choke, Haunted, and Tell-All.

As hinted previously, this book on the edge of what I am willing to read from a fucked up perspective. Multiple times whilst reading this book I nearly quit. But I, ugh, pushed through. Palahniuk has done this a few times with his fiction, yet I keep reading him. Those good ones though. They are worth it. 

Influencer - Kurtis David Harder - 2023

★★★★★-You see, this movie is why I don't become a influencer. Incredible movie. The best new horror movie I've seen in 2023. Wow. Available on Shudder, by the by. 

Going to give as little away as possible. But explaining any of the plot is a minor spoiler. 

The flick is centered around social media influencer Madison, played by Emily Tennant of Riverdale. As you often hear about these Instagram people, despite her popularity, she feels lonely and dissatisfied with her life and occupation, which took her on a trip to Thailand. Irritated about how her boyfriend (played by one Rory J. Saper, whom I've never seen) canceled going along, he seems to make Instagramers, she meets a mysterious woman named CW (Cassandra Naud, don't recognize her either), who has a distinctive birthmark on her face and is radically antisocial media. Taking CW up on her offer to explore the most Instagram-worthy spots, she goes about adventuring with her new friend: getting a feel for the local culture, engaging in deep conversations, so forth. However, shit goes off the rails when CW leads Madison to a surprise location—an uninhabited island completely disconnected from the world.

Movie opens with a girl washed up on a beach. The title card is the point we see how she got there. 

One of those “the real movie starts a half hour in” flicks. You can tell because that's when you get the title sequence just as the shocking twist hits home. Somewhat cliché at this point, me thought. I've seen like five movies do this in the last couple of years, but that's the only thing that's cliche. 

I can't believe this doesn't have 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The bad reviews say it was predictable, which is insane. Also shallow. Whatever.

The movie is legit terrifying. The bad is a sociopath that I've never seen before. This person is a predator that kills in a pretty inventive way. Also, like that deep fakes are being used in horror now. Check it out.

Cigar Review - CAO Amazon Basin Extra Anejo

End of a shit week needed something to get my mind right. This cigar wasn’t it. Not drinking at present otherwise would’ve had a really special bourbon. But, again, sober at the moment. Indulging in this instead. Smoking a supposed “great” cigar or drinking a great bourbon to celebrate is one thing. I’m more of the indulging is the experience. Sort of learned that from Virginia Madsen’s character in Sideways. 

Anyway, cold draw tasted of cedar. Lighting up was muy disappointing. Honestly, I found it one dimensional. Basic muted creamy roasted coffee. Minimal tastes of raisins, black and white pepper. It’s well-made, otherwise I would’ve put it out. 

This came highly recommended by multiple people at the cigar store. Dudes that know what they’re talking about. The box sold out in like an hour. But I gotta say, don’t buy the hype. I bought this at price point of like $35 a stick. For that price I could’ve got a Winston Churchill Late Hour or a Padron special release. I’m embarrassed to say I bought four. I would pay like $6 if I could name my price. The story behind it is interesting. 

From the website: “Extra Añejo is the same award-winning Amazon Basin blend you know and love, simply aged for the flavors to rest even develop even more. With a blend grown in the most remote regions of the Amazon Rainforest and meticulously aged for an additional two years, Amazon Basin Extra Añejo is an experience worthy of the wait. 

“Amazon Basin Extra Añejo shares the exact origins of the cigar you already know and love. With tobacco grown and harvested on virgin soil in remote regions of the Amazon rainforest, the blend is then taken by canoe up the Amazon river and delivered to our factory. Extra Añejo is allowed to rest for an additional two years, exposing even more complex flavors from the Bragança leaf and the rest of the five-country blend. 

“The result is a smoking experience worthy of the expedition, born of the jungle and brought to your humidor.” 

Marketing bullshit. Smoked one the day of and wasn’t impressed. Maybe it’ll get better with more age? Apparently needs more age than what I’ve given it, but I swear it’s mellowed. Whatever.

The Second World War: The Gathering Storm - Winston Churchill - 1948

Winston mother fucking Churchill. Deserved that Nobel Prize in Literature, let me tell ya. 

Took a lot of political science in college. I was two classes and a big test/paper shy of a degree in the subject, but I decided to coast second semester senior year, taking art, epic poetry, Anglo-Saxon, and Romanticism instead of busting my ass. Never read anything by Churchill though, which seems like a travesty. 

"The Gathering Storm" is the first book of his six part memoir written about World War II (The Second World War). This volume focuses on the events leading up to the war, providing context for the political climate in Europe during the 1930s. It was fucked, obviously. 

The stuff I was most familiar with is Churchill begins. He basically puts us in the aftermath of World War I with all the economic and political turmoil that ensued. “When Marshal Foch (the French general/military theorist who served as the Supreme Allied Commander during WWI) heard of the signing of the Peace Treaty of Versailles,” Churchill writes, “he observed with singular accuracy: 'This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.'” We then get into the rise of the Nazis and the Furer, Adolf Hitler, and the long, slow rearmament of the German military and their incrementally aggressive foreign policies. 

The book is written from the ultimate insider's perspective, Churchill was the guy sounding the alarm bells on Hitler's intentions, firing shots at dudes who didn't see Nazis as the potential threat they obviously were to global peace/security. Especially scathing is his criticism of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain whose policy of appeasement sought to avoid conflict with Hitler through diplomatic negotiations. Look at how that worked out! Loser. 

Alternatively, Churchill emphasized the need for strong leadership and military preparedness to counter the growing Nazi threat. Churchill believed had Britain and its allies taken a more assertive stance against Hitler's aggression at an early stage, the whole thing might have been avoided. 

“It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, first to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous,” he wrote. 

Also, “If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

Above all, this first book is a reminder of the consequences of failing to confront tyrannical regimes and the importance of vigilance in the face of growing international threats. It's dope. 

Here are some of my favorite quotes, some of which I apply in my daily when I ask “what would Churchill do?”

“Stalin and the Russian nation and its scores of millions were to pay a frightful forfeit. If a government has no moral scruples it often seems to gain great advantages and liberties of action, but ‘All comes out even at the end of the day, and all will come out yet more even when all the days are ended.’”

“It is always more easy to discover and proclaim general principles than to apply them.” 

“It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.”

“One thing is absolutely certain, namely, that victory will never be found by taking the line of least resistance.”

“The worst quarrels only arise when both sides are equally in the right and in the wrong.”

“There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win.”

“Virtuous motives, tramelled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness.”

“We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull’s-eye of disaster.”