Somm

Four wine experts attempt to pass the difficult test to become Master Sommeliers in this tedious documentary. Amidst cheesy vocal jazz on the soundtrack, literally thousands of grape varieties, flash cards, spit buckets, (and to add insult to injury) geography; brilliant, driven, but pretentious snobs try to outdo each other by pretending to smell the most imaginary aromas in a glass of wine.

If I ordered an extravagant bottle of wine and the selling point was that it had a bouquet of cat urine, rubber hose, or my grandmother's purse, that bottle is going back and I will be quite angry. Can you imagine? If I was eating in a fancy, shmancy restaurant and the waiter presented a bottle of Le Sac De Grandmere 1956 and said it had delicate hints of litter box, I'd laugh right in his face and demand he be fired.

It cracks me up when people pay out the nose for something that has a particular hint of aroma in it, or the suggestion of a flavor element. They think it's sophisticated. If I'm paying $200 for a bottle of wine, it better not have a suggestion. I want to be punched in the mouth with flavor for that price. And no one is going to be impressed if you knock back a mouthful of grape and say, "Why, that has an austere, cliff-edge finish with notes of a well-integrated minerality and a touch of barnyard". Everyone is going to realize you're a douche.

Near the end of this movie, I couldn't contain my curiosity. I poured myself a glass of wine, swirled the liquid around in the glass, and inhaled. I smelled wine. I did not detect notes of vanilla, jasmine, oak, or cat piss, and I tried. It smelled like wine, and I'm almost certain pretty much every wine I've ever smelled smelled like wine. I'm not saying that sommeliers aren't well-trained professionals and don't have well-paid noses and palates, I'm just saying that gullible people often need to reassured in their purchases.

House II: The Second Story

Arye Gross moves into a haunted house, then the corpse of his great-grandfather drives him around in an Alfa Romeo Spider in this dreadful horror-comedy. Being the owner of an Alfa Romeo Spider, I have to say from experience that you'll never get the stench of rotting corpse out of the interior of your Alfa Romeo Spider if you drive your dead great-grandfather in it, even with the top down. It's going to take more than a few squirts of Febreze to freshen that up, let me tell you. If you're going to go on a joy-ride with the wisecracking frontier gibberish-spouting animated corpse of your great-grandfather, take the Kia.

Anyway, back to the movie. There's a poorly rendered crystal skull, a guy in a gorilla suit, a pterodactyl puppet, some unconvincing 80s pop music, and a turquoise bolo tie. House II: The Second Story was awful. Avoid it, if you can.

The Institute

Enigmatic and self-indulgent, The Institute is a documentary about a scavenger hunt that took place in San Francisco, I think. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure. You can trust very little in The Institute. Are the people being interviewed still participating in this surreal, Dadaesque game? Are the film-makers? From what I gather from information on the internet, it does seem over. I had more questions than answers from this film, and if the game is indeed over, that's a shame. Although I would never be a part of a club that would have me as a member, I would be interested in participating in this weird scavenger hunt. It seemed like a bunch of culty, conspiratorial, breakdancey, sasquatchy fun.

Murders In The Rue Morgue

Even on the best day, my handwriting isn't great. Judging from my notes for Murders In The Rue Morgue, I didn't have a great day. My notepad is missing some pages, and most things written in it are mostly just illegible scrawl, so I'll do my best to sort out what my intentions were because I'm not watching this movie again. Here's my attempt to figure out what this movie is about and what I wrote in my notebook in the dark, half-asleep:

In the film Murders In The Rue Morgue, 19th century ladies lie upside-down on chaise lounges in complicated underpants and then get murdered by juleis (sic) wearing capes. Extravagantly costumed, thulen (sic). (I'm not sure what juleis are, and I'm not sure what a thulen is or why the sentence just stops there. Maybe if we keep going, we'll find out.)

The hat budget alone must have cost thousands, as everyone wears a 3-foot tall hat made of feathers at every opportunity. That's the 19th century for you. Anyway, between the capes, the hats, and the ape-man costumes. (Yes, the sentence just ends. There was supposed to be a joke there, obviously. Sadly, I don't recall what it is, because I scribbled the words gauzy nightgowns and can-can over it because that's exactly what needed to happen.)

People get acid splashed in their faces which instantly kills them, and people get buried alive which doesn't. I'm not sure, because I haven't priced a gouleia costume lately. (I have no idea what a gouleia could be. I think this could've been a funny joke, but the likelihood is that two pages that didn't intend to go together ended up accidentally creating some sort of Exquisite Corpse-like sentence. Still, the possibilities are intriguing.) Dream sequences, flashbacks and faintings. (Ah, I remember that were an awful lot of faintings in Murders In The Rue Morgue, but I really don't recall what everyone was fainting about. People fainted a lot in the 19th century. It could've been anything.)

And that's it. Maybe if we watch a trailer, we can figure out what all this was about.

Nope, I still don't know.

Blood For Dracula

Udo Kier plays a pale, aristocratic vampire in search of European virgins in this horror comedy. Udo stars as Count Dracula, and he wanders around Europe in the daytime while casually shielding his face from the rays of the sun with his hat, nonchalantly takes crucifixes down off the walls because he finds them mildly irritating, complains about garlic, eats vegetables, and twitches awkwardly on brass beds; so he doesn't really act an awful lot like Count Dracula. He vomits up blood that he drinks from a bunch of women who claim to be virgins but they aren't, and Joe Dallesandro tries to say the word 'whore' but says 'hoo-ah' instead for some reason. A forlorn oboe plays throughout on the soundtrack, and I sort of expected the Black Knight from Monty Python's Holy Grail to show up at the end and complain that "It's only a flesh wound". He doesn't, unfortunately.

Scatter My Ashes At Bergdorf's

Scatter My Ashes At Bergdorf's is a documentary examining the American Dream, and the American Dream is to be able to afford expensive items no one else can afford. Hey, don't get me wrong, I love expensive items as much as the next billionaire, because having expensive items no one else has is fun. Actually, having an item no one else has is fun regardless of price. Inspiring envy in others is inspiring. I don't necessarily have to spend $6000 on a pair of ugly shoes to feel elitist. I can happily spend $60 on a pair of ugly shoes and feel elitist, because I like ugly shoes no one else would ever wear and if I ever see anyone else wearing apparel I own it's dead to me forever.

If I were to ever go to one of those red carpet movie premieres (and I probably wouldn't) and someone were to ask me what I was wearing (and they probably wouldn't), I would gladly tell them I am wearing my vintage 80s Cocteau Twins t-shirt, my vintage belt with hot dogs on it I bought from Strange Cargo in Chicago, my Cheap Monday jeans with the skulls on the buttons, and my socks from Target with tacos on them. I could guarantee no one would be wearing that outfit, and probably no one would want to.

Anyway, I found one moment in Scatter My Ashes At Bergdorf's to be very ironic, where someone was recounting a story where a bag lady came in to Bergdorf's and was asking about a fur coat. The salesperson tried to be helpful, because if you're making $450,000 a year as a retail salesperson you'd better be helpful, and kept telling the woman that she couldn't afford the coat, and the bag lady reached into her shopping bag and pulled out a fat stack of cash to buy it. The person telling the story said, "You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, because you never can tell if a bag lady is carrying a bag of cash", and I have to call bullcrap on that. Everyone who shops at Bergdorf's WANTS to be judged by their cover, and pays a bag full of cash to have it done.

Necessary Evil: Super Villains Of DC Comics

An exhaustive, tedious look at some of the more well-known super-villains of DC Comics, and by "exhaustive" I really mean that I found the endless interviews of writers and artists exhausting. You know what would've made this documentary about super-villains a bit more interesting? More villainy. Sure, the film-makers include clips of some of the villains, but they would cut right back to someone talking and talking and talking about what makes these characters tick. Instead of talking about villainy, why couldn't we see some of it? The villains take a back seat in a movie about villains, and it's a big pile of meh. Speaking of big pile of meh, Necessary Evil interviews Guillermo Del Toro who directed this summer's Pacific Rim, which is supposed to be a movie about giant robots battling giant monsters but it's really a movie about a bunch of bros who drive giant robots and have a bunch of crybaby feelings and then you hardly ever see the giant monsters. Del Toro was a perfect fit for Necessary Evil, but probably not for the reasons the film-makers thought he was.