"Timecrimes"
There was a lot of internet nerd-hype surrounding this one for months before I had a chance to see it, so you can understand why I ended up a little bit disappointed by its deliberate pacing and lack of action. That's not to say it isn't a great film, because it is. I guess I just expected something with more of a cheesy B-movie feel, and not so much the mind-bending array of cerebral nut-punches that this turned out to be. Try to imagine a remake of "Back to the Future," co-written by Ray Bradbury and Franz Kafka and directed by a post-retirement Alfred Hitchcock more interested in pulling off some random ideas than piecing together an impeccable air-tight thriller. Throw in some goofy humor, a cool Darkman-looking mystery character, some truly white-knuckled suspense sequences and one incomprehensibly perfect set of Spanish ta-tas and you've got a solidly entertaining thinking-man's time travel movie that replaces Marty McFly's Huey Lewis obsession with wisely opaque meditations on consequences, regret, and the ultimate bummer of deciding the importance of one human life compared to another. Oh shit, and did I mention those ta-tas?
"Barbarella"
I never saw "Barbarella" as a kid, so I missed out on the obvious Pavlovian response to a PG-rated film featuring lots of intimated sex scenes, brief nipple shots and otherwise lame innuendos. There's no denying that Jane Fonda is a stone cold solid space-fox in this movie and I would certainly pay any amount of space-cash to space-jizz all over her space-boobs. Unfortunately-and remarkably-that's not enough. I came into this film after a childhood of Princess Leia-inspired boners, an adolescence of Marilyn Chambers-based masturbation sessions and an adulthood poisoned by endless waves of soul-souring hardcore pornography (some of which, I might add, has also featured not only space-babes and space-boobs, but space-blowjobs and occasionally space-anal). So the nostalgia-tinged aura of eroticism that probably makes this movie a campy classic for many people my age and a little bit older was pretty much lost on me, leaving little more than shit dialogue, the wispy ghost of a seriously weak plot and one amazingly gay angel. A lot of the set design was cool, and probably mind-blowing for its time. But after it was over I immediately forgot about almost everything that I had just seen and promptly hopped onto the internet to bust a posthumous nut to some classic Marilyn Chambers footage. R.I.P. Marilyn, one of the greatest adult actresses of all time. And R.I.P. "Barbarella," apparently one of the most beloved cult films of all time that I personally diagnosed as D.O.A.
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