Driving Lessons (guest)

MOVIE:  Driving Lessons

GUEST:  ScotWest

NUTSHELL:  Rupert Grint is a repressed young man with the soul of a poet and the head of Carrot Top. Under the tutelage of a has-been soap star with a mania for drunken camping (Julie Walters), Rupert escapes his uptight, adulterous, pajama-fancying evangelical Christian mother, discovers a love of booze and tents and oversexed, helium-voiced Scottish women, drives around on a lot of two-lane roads, looks extremely pissed and pucker-mouthed while wearing a eucalyptus tree costume, tells a teen supermodel to “fuck off,” writes some crappy poetry, and looks pensive as he handles the ignition key of a Volvo moments after it was evacuated from the bowels of a septuagenarian.

GOOD THINGS:  The music, Julie Walters, Rupert’s ability to use his fish-like lips to express various forms of angst, the rustic scenery, the shots of Edinburgh, British people being amusingly repressed

BAD THINGS:  A little too much repression, Julie Walters with puke in her hair, the elderly, non-verbal transvestite, the whole scene where Julie arouses religious ecstasy in a church full of women by “talking” the lyrics of various popular songs like William Shatner on the “Transformed Man” album.

FEATURES:  Birdcalls, kilts, sheep, pajamas, camping equipment, gardening, bicycles, tree costumes, bible pageants, repression, attempted assassination by car, vaguely implied adultery, strongly implied deflowering, and lots and lots of close-ups of Rupert’s orange, puckered head

UNCOMFORTABLE MOMENTS:  Mom (Laura Linney) and her frequent habit of hanging around her son’s room in her pajamas, the old man eating squash, a couple of moments that look like they’re going to veer uncomfortably close to “Harold and Maude” territory before backing off.

NOTABLE:  Rupert actually manages to carry his half of the movie. But he’s got a face made to look stupefied, morose, or pissed-off, so he’s either going to have to pick his projects very carefully, or learn three or four new facial expressions.

BEST PART:  Sadly, I can’t think of any. I did laugh at a number of lines that nobody else in the theater seemed to think was funny, but I think it was less the lines and more the repressed way they were said.

BEST LINE:  The poem Rupert insists on reading to the evangelical teen supermodel, because it’s not often that you hear a tender love sonnet dedicated to a freakishly tall girl climax with the poet talking about his “meat.” Also, it’s the least repressed moment in the film that didn’t involve puking, vicars lustily reproducing birdsong, or running someone over with a car.

CROWNS:  3 out of 5

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (guest)

MOVIE: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

GUEST: ScotWest

NUTSHELL: Botched sexual reassignment surgery meets Germanic pessimism in the toe-tappin’est, finger-snappin’est musical comedy spectacular of the post-Cold War era.

GOOD THINGS: John Cameron Mitchell, the score, songs about wigs, first movie since 1945 to feature a title character named “Hedwig.”

BAD THINGS: Graphic descriptions of unsuccessful vaginification.

FEATURES: Beehives on men, beards on women, helpful tips for laundering a bra, loud glam rock concert during the Early Bird Special at the Sizzler.

UNCOMFORTABLE MOMENTS: Implied child molestation, Andrea Martin in the Tony Hendra role from Spinal Tap.

NOTABLE: Most successful fake rock act from the Fatherland since The Scorpions.

BEST PART: Jazzy Vegas-style show-stopping number staged in a single-wide mobile home. What “Earth Girls Are Easy” could have been if it had only had less Geena Davis and more drag queens.

BEST LINE: I’m GOING to Guam!

CROWNS: 4 out of 5

Star Woids (guest)

MOVIE: Star Woids

GUEST: ScotWest

NUTSHELL: An intrepid documentarian chronicles the agonies, the ecstasies, and the lividity-riddled buttocks of the fans who lined up for a month waiting for tickets to “Phantom Menace.” Sort of an uber-Geek Ironman Triathalon, except it only featured one event, and that pretty much involved sitting on your ass.

GOOD THINGS: Videotaped highlights from Peninsula High School’s production of “Star Wars: The Musical.” A street person complaining that encamped geeks were taking over homeless peoples’ spots, while musing on the ouevre of George Lucas, and concluding that it suffers by comparison to the work of Stanley Kubrick. The collector who hikes into Death Valley in 120 degree heat to re-enact key scenes from Stars Wars with 6-inch action figures.

BAD THINGS: The profusion of throbbing pustules that popped out on the faces of the geeks as their vigil took a visible toll on an already tenuous committment to personal hygiene.

FEATURES: A show-stopping production number from the Mos Eisley Saloon scene in “Star Wars: The Musical” when the entire company sings and dances and does that hand jive after Han Solo kills Greedo.

UNCOMFORTABLE MOMENTS: The paunchy, middle-aged ex-Jawa singing at a science fiction convention. The epilogue, when we see that the overweight and engagingly voluble uber-fanboy who headed the line in Westood has dropped 40 pounds and gone Hollywood. It was like opening Eddie Murphy’s fat suit from “The Nutty Professor” and finding Dr. Smith from “Lost in Space” inside.

NOTABLE: The organizer of the Chinese Theater line was an Australian, proving that we can’t even keep them from starring in our DOCUMENTARIES anymore.

BEST PART: The interview with the guy in the Jawa costume whose orange bicycle reflector eyes kept falling off.

BEST LINE: I thought I’d make a good Boba Fett.

CROWNS: 3 out of 5

7th Heaven (guest)

MOVIE:  7th Heaven

GUEST:  Scot West

NUTSHELL:  An egotistical freelance sewer worker who spends his days hauling piss-soaked rags out of the effluvia with a stick meets a self-critical guttersnipe who whores around and gets regularly whipped with a quirt by her Femdom, absinthe-addict sister. Co-dependency, crane shots, blindness, and World War I ensues.

GOOD THINGS:  Freaking unbelievable seven-story crane shot. Janet Gaynor stripping down to her unmentionables. Discovery Channel-like documentary segments on the elaborate pressure-washing equipment used by fin de siecle Parisian streetsweepers to hose rubbish, horse dung, and Janet Gaynor out of the gutter.

BAD THINGS:  The guy playing “Rat,” who perfectly filled the niche of Early Twentieth Century John Leguizamo, which I’m not convinced is a niche that really demanded to be filled. The way the wistful little love story about two of life’s downtrodden suddenly stopped cold so the director could shoehorn in a four-reel-long recreation of the Battle of the Marne, complete with massive artillery, miles of trenches, thousands of extras, and a bunch of Matchbox cars. The way the hero promises to die, then reneges, then goes blind, then suddenly turns into Daredevil, the Man Without Fear, able to navigate his way at high speed through the massive Armistice Day crowds thronging the twisting backstreets of Paris with the unerring instinct of a bat.

FEATURES:  Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, women choking and whipping each other, cohabitation without benefit of clergy, sunken-eyed blondes with a jones for absinthe, the Western Front, characters dunked in the sewer and showered with the contents of chamberpots, the maiming of various sanitation workers, and (per Laura) “the hero’s frightening Kramer hair.”

UNCOMFORTABLE MOMENTS:  Well, it’s over two hours long, and I saw it at the Silent Movie Theater, so after the first hour or so I was pretty much constantly uncomfortable, but I think that was due less to the content of the film, and more to an increasing lividity in the nether regions. Although I was kind of disturbed by the one part when the Huns are marching on Paris, and the hero’s friend confesses that he’s been keeping the fact there’s a World War on from his wife.

NOTABLE:  This movie amazingly predicted the whole Internet porn thing, since the first five minutes contained virtually every fetish on Persian Kitty: upskirt shots, voyeurs, Femdom, BDSM, drunken sluts, golden showers (the chamberpot thing), small-breasted petites, whores, erotic asphyixia, etc.

BEST PART:  When Janet’s sister chokes her out and she lays unconscious in the gutter for half an hour while nearby freelance sewer workers complain that her incontinence is putting them off their feed.

BEST LINE:  Nothing can keep Chico blind for long!

CROWNS:  3 out of 5