fushnicken69

"When I was your age, they would say you could become cops or criminals. What I'm saying is this: When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?" If there is one bit of dialog that encapsulates what this movie is all about, it's this snippet that appears very early in the film. This movie is beyond great. It is the work of a master storyteller in complete control of his craft. While the excesses of the violence may turn off some (I heard more than a few gasps during the final 20 minutes alone), it shouldn't sway you from soaking in the film. Because if you just focus on that, you're cheating yourselves out of one of the most rewarding film experiences I've had in at least 10 years. I challenge anyone to walk out of this movie and not have it swirling around in your head for hours afterwards.

Michael Douglas has always been one of my favorite actors. He deserved his Oscar for Wall Street, commanded every second of screen time he had in Falling Down, and has given some of the most underrated comic performances in history in Romancing the Stone and War of the Roses. But I'd have to give his performance in Wonder Boys as his best. His turn as stoner college professor Grady Tripp is the model for the laid back, totally likeable and loveable protaginist. He's the kind of professor I dream of having in real life.

After watching this movie, I seriously wanted to go and write a book. For any of you blocked writers out there, just pop in Wonder Boys and you have your muse.

For some ungodly reason, I decided to watch this piece of crap on VH1 one uneventful night. I'm a huge fan of the VH1 network. I'm a Behind the Music junkie and the rest of their info-based music shows are pretty damn cool. But when it comes to making TV movies, they downright suck. Their movie on Meatloaf was pretty damn bad but compared to this one, it looks like Citizen Kane.

First off, they portray the band as working class heroes and the saviors of rock music. C'mon. I liked Pyromania as much the next guy, but when it boils down Def Leppard are hardly on the level of bands like Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath, or even Ac/Dc. They were an alright band in a time when rock music pretty much sucked. To devote an entire movie to them is pretty insulting when you could have spent the exact amount of money telling the stories more deserving bands. How about a gritty behind the scenes look at bands like Black Flag or The Ramones. You know, bands that actually changed music instead of following trends.

But my biggest problem with this movie was the schmaltzy sentimentality of it all. They make Steve Clark look like Lou Gherig in Pride of the Yankees. The guy was a fall down drunk! You want me to feel sorry for a guy who knowingly drank himself to death? Not bloody likely. And they don't even show Steve Clark dying. If you wanted to go for emotion, then that would have been the logical place to go. But instead, they show him supposedly sober at the end of the movie ready to rock. It's not until the tidy epilouge that you find out the the soberness didn't take and he wound up dead in a pool of his own vomit a couple years later. Nice.

This movie, if you could call it that, was so terrible it should come with it's own plastic bag so when you throw it out it won't contaminate the rest of the garbage. What's next? A TV movie about Loverboy?