I love the net you can try 2 buy or sell just about any thing and most of the time it works. As a result I proudly introduce the George W. Bush Talking Action Figure.

“Freedom itself was attacked by faceless cowards, and freedom will be defended.”
“I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation.”
“The presidency is more than an honor, it is more than an office, it is a charge to keep and I will give it my all.”
and my favourate: “I come from Texas!”

All this for only $29.95 Batteries included I cant wait.

The U.S and Australian navies raking hordes of starving boat people with machine-gun fire, Holland’s capital under water by 2007, Germany developing the A-bomb and Britain suffering Siberian winters within 15 years. Check out this nightmareish Pentagon commissioned scenario, shiver and load up on canned goods and shotgun pellets. Via the Observer.

VH1 2003
Directed by Robert Mandel
Starring Charles Mansetti as Michael Bolton

This is an interesting subject for this VH1 produced dramatization; tracing Michael Bolton’s journey from the wrong side of the tracks to the middle of the road and back.

We begin in rural Wisconsin with the 9 year old Michael Bolotin, singing into his hairbrush in front of his bathroom mirror. His dad, an unemployed steel worker, interrupts by coming in and giving him the first of an endless array of beatings that continue throughout the film.

Although the young Michael is practically illiterate, he excels in two fields that would later define him - music and the art of love. When his first band Boltthrower play their debut gig, the front of the stage is lined with screaming 15 year old girls, weak at the knees at the sight of what would become his trademark mullet-mane.

At home however, things continue to slide. Even though the young Bolotin has grown into a buff figure some six foot high and his father’s health is failing - the beatings continue, even when Michael Snr. becomes restricted to a wheelchair.

So, Boltthrower make the move to Minneapolis and begin playing their B grade power metal to mid-sized venues. The band receive their first break in the late 70’s when Polydor sign them under the name Blackjack. The rest of the bands animosity towards the now superstud Bolotin is barely concealed and the band dissolves in 1980.

This brings us to one of the high points of this feature, the fateful meeting with Joe Cocker in a St Paul nightclub. Seeing something of himself in the youthful Boltotin, he advises Michael to switch his metal yelps for a soulful croon. The use of the subsequent metamorphic montage should be hammy, but the transformation from spandex to satin, from skull chains to crucifix and Boltotin to Bolton is both swift and slick.

It’s 1983 and Cocker’s intervention and the name change bring instant dividends and his career begins an unstoppable uptick (illustrated by yet another masterful montage) that climaxes with his 1989 top ten album, Soul Provider. By now, Bolton’s life is an endless chain of parties, sex and champagne. But the cracks are beginning to show.

Backstage at the 1993 Grammys, a confused Bolton enters into an angry tirade against Billy Ray Cyrus accusing him of stealing his act, his voice and his haircut. He wins a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, for “When a Man Loves a Woman,” however when Irving Gordon wins the Song of the Year award for “Unforgettable” he pointedly attacks singers who “have a hernia” when they sing.

Which brings us to 1997’s All That Matters when he has his first flop in over 15 years. He immediately responds with My Secret Passion, a collection of opera and arias. Bolton, desperately seeking a new identity in a mist of tranquilizers and booze, bizarrely takes to wearing Georgian dress and powdered wigs both on and offstage. Meanwhile, his finances have taken a battering; his reluctance to release self-penned songs in his career meant there was no gravy train of constant royalties rolling in.

And he sinks lower still. In one of the most beautiful scenes this writer has ever witnessed, a weeping bewigged Bolton comes to his father’s deathbed. His father’s feeble attempts to throttle his “faggot son” are especially poignant as are the wild cries turned hysterical laughs of Bolton when his father finally expires.

The movie ends on a positive note. His therapist tells him all his dysfunction was due to his ogre of a father and with Michael Snr out of the picture, he is free to live his life again. A brief fling with lifelong fan Britney Spears leads Bolton to a record deal with Jive records and he acquires a renewed sense of vigour.

Rating
Movie: 8/10 – Very good, Mandel’s best work since Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story.

O.K., first off we better determine what actually constitutes as a ’stoner movie’ first. You can’t say that it has to do with a movie being better while high, because that’s most or all comedies or unusually visual movies right there. It’s a very difficult thing to pin down, but silliness of the intentional or unintentional kind, is key so…

Transformers The Movie - Well this is my own personal list, you don’t have to agree with it but everyone should watch this movie. Preferably while high, because this movie is so weird! I think this movie may have been the first thing to introduce me to the idea of real death. Seeing Optimus Prime die TORE ME UP! A disturbing and melancholy movie at points. I honestly can’t think of another children’s film that shows so much suffering and death. I think in part the impact has to do with the fact that the tv show wasn’t like that at all - it was mostly pretty light hearted if I remember correctly. So this movie, with the first scene being the destruction of an entire civilization, really took you to another place entirely. You also have Orson Welles’ swan song as a massive planet-eating planet which if nothing else, proves Welles had a sense of humour about himself. What about the bit when Ironhide is at Megatron’s feet begging for mercy and Megatron blows his face off? That’s pretty hardcore for a kid’s film. Also the Decepticon gangfucking of Arcee was a bit extreme. O.K. the last bit I made up. There’s a wonderfully over-the-top soundtrack too.

Up in smoke/Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie - “Up in smoke” is a good natured farce. I could understand antipathy towards them if you’ve never seen them before and some stoned stewdent is muttering to you about how they’re SO funny. “And they get stoned again!”. “…next movie” is v. under-rated and what’s interesting is that the comedy of the first one is replaced by all out nihilistic class warfare vicousness. Everything’s squalid, totally unsympathetic charachters (Chong brags about fooling his Parole Officer with urine stolen from his pregnant sister) and sexual humiliation is also an ongoing theme. The drug taking is less sugar-coated and it’s completely relentless in this one. Sweet bud is replaced by coke. But I’m a sucker for anything that refers to the rapacious greed of the Me Generation\drug-hangover from the 60’s. Oh yeah, a spindly Pee Wee Herman gets battered to within an inch of his life by the cops too. Hear him squeeeaal!

2001: A Space Odessey - Possibly at blame for the creation of Prog Rock (introduces stoned hippies to ‘proper’ classical muzak and then gives birth to Genesis, ELP etc.) I don’t think I’ve ever watched the whole movie but I’ve always been under some intoxicants while watching some of it. Some apes potter about and throw bones. People walk upside down in space stations etc. Gives ample opportunity for red-eyes to check out the amazing visuals. Man. Also gives the opportunity to bullshit on about it yet have no clue what it’s aboot. Very stoner that. Oh yeah, does the end sequence make more sense on acid or E?

Vanishing Point - Panders blatantly to potheads (and Primal Scream) with it’s counter-culture sock-it-to-the-man-isms. Also has no real plot as such and lots of driving driving driving…

Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - Gene Wilder plays Willy Wonka as an evil-childhating-recluse to the hilt. There’s always a touch of menace about it that still stays with me whenever I watch it again (see also Nic Roeg’s incredibly weird avant-garde kid’s movie “Walkabout”…alright it’s nothing like this but kid’s movies could be downright strange in the seventies). There’s everlasting gobstoppers, candy trees, chocolate rivers and rude kids meet ignominious ends. The part of the film where they go through the tunnel is just plain odd too…..Oompah Loompahs = psychedelic pygmies. Apparently it’s all about drugs. Go ask Marylin Manson. Tim Burton will fucking ruin it with the remake I feel.

Wizard of Oz - I have never watched it stoned. Do you get stoned at your parents for Xmas while this is on? But I’m including it for the whole “play Dark Side of the moon and listen to Wizard of Oz at the same time” thing. Which must make it the king of all stoner movies.

Body Double - This movie makes no sense. It kinda operates on it’s own logic. Well it did last time I watched it anyway. Dripping with Eighties soft porn sleaze from De Palma (see also Scarface, but you knew that). A climactic kissing scene lasts for what feels like ten minutes while the camera spins round and round and round. Unforgettable image that’s been imprinted on my brain forever since. Must watch again ‘cos I really don’t have the foggiest what it was all about.

American Splendor is a biopic/ comic book adaptation/ documentary/ love story/ “sick” flick with a touch of ‘Mr. Deeds goes to town’ little guy taking on the world and earning a score draw.

It tells the story of Harvey Pekar, a twice divorced file clerk, who appears to be about to be crushed by the weight of his own ordinariness until a moment’s inspiration sees him transform his averageness into his art. Have befriended underground comic artist Robert Crumb (himself subject of a notable documentary, Crumb) some years earlier, Pekar, shows him stories he has written detailing the perils of queuing behind old ladies at supermarkets and other everyday frustrations. Crumb ‘digs it’ and they produce a comic book without superheroes or special powers, just the day to day occurrences in the life of Joe Smo.

While the essential story of American Splendor is ordinary – so ordinary in fact it is quite novel for a Hollywood film – the manner of it’s telling is not. We see harvey’s life being told through comic squares and thought bubbles, we see Harvey’s first date with wife number three, then we see them watching a play re-enacting their first date, reminding you you’ve just seen it re-enacted in a film and Harvey’s been to see that too. Blurring the lines between the lived life and the dramatization of it further the real Harvey Pekar does the narration to the film, which breaks off to ask him how’s he’s finding it so far to which he protests that Paul Giamatti “looks nothing like me.”

Regardless, Giamatti possesses one the most wondrously expressive faces I’ve seen in film for a long, long time. His Pekar is slouched, head slung low, bug eyed with a paunch that’s apologizing to no-one. He is simultaneously deferential and belligerent, unwilling to make direct eye contact and yet ready to lash out at any minor annoyance.

Pekar’s comics earn him critical acclaim as the ‘blue collar Mark Twain’ and bring a modicum of fame to him and his social outcast friends, with Pekar making regular appearances on the David Letterman show and uber-nerd Tobey Radloff featuring on MTV. These appearances are shown in the film adding another discipline of media to the mix, but as soon as it becomes apparent to Pekar they are only there to be laughed at, he bites back sending letterman scurrying for an ad break.

A bout with cancer becomes the subject of an award winning graphic novel and the Pekars adopt a friend’s daughter as Harvey meanders toward old age and retirement.

American Splendor is a remarkably fresh, vibrant and funny look at the heroic in the everyday and manages to be uplifting and life affirming without ever trying to be. Go see it.