S.G. Browne

Set in 1975 in Scotland, PA, with a soundtrack almost exclusively comprised of Bad Company songs and with everyone driving around in muscle cars and sporting bad fashion and long hair, Scotland, PA is a darkly comedic take on Shakespeare’s tragedy MacBeth.

James LeGros (Chad Palomino from Living in Oblivion) plays the title character, only instead of MacBeth, he’s Joe McBeth, an underachieving employee at a fast-food restaurant named Duncan’s, owned by Norm Duncan, who has made his fortune by selling a chain of donut stores. Duncan has repeatedly passed over McBeth for promotion while ignoring McBeth’s ideas for improving the store, including a french fry truck and chicken nuggets with dipping sauces.

At the urging of his wife “Lady” Pat McBeth (Maura Tierny of ER fame), McBeth kills Duncan so that they can take over the restaurant, which, of course, they call McBeth’s. (The similarities to another famous fast food chain are impossible to miss.) But when Lieutenant McDuff (Christopher Walken) shows up to investigate Duncan’s murder and suspicion gradually shifts to them, the McBeths begin to unravel.

Also starring Kevin Corrigan as fry cook Anthony “Banko” Banconi and Amy Smart, Timothy Levitch, and Andy Dick as a trio of gypsy hippie “witches,” Scotland, PA is a smart and amusing social satire on fast-food and the 1970’s. Don’t expect to hear any of Shakespeare’s dialogue (except occasionally playing on the radio in the background). But if you don’t take your Shakespeare seriously and enjoy good dark comedies, then go out and rent this one.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d review a movie about the personal connections that arise from the senseless and painful reality of human existence. And a movie that has the word “heart” in its title.

I Heart Huckabees (2004) is a film that’s difficult to describe. I’m not sure I can do it justice. Even director David O. Russell, in an interview, said he described the film to the people who financed the movie as:

“Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin are existential detectives who you could hire to investigate the meaning of your life. Their clients include Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg. Their nemesis is Isabelle Huppert. Hilarity ensues.”

Jason Schwartzman is a neurotic (surprise!)  environmental advocate fighting against the development of a big-chain department store (Huckabees), for which Jude Law plays a scheming, corporate-ladder-climbing executive, with Naomi Watts, the iconic face and voice of Huckabees, as his live-in girlfriend who has superficial tendencies. As mentioned, Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman are the existential sleuths who attempt to help Schwartzmann solve a coincidence by teaching him about the universal interconnectivity of everything.

Mark Wahlberg (in a great role) is an anti-petroleum, bicycle-riding fireman who believes Tomlin’s and Hoffman’s optimistic approach isn’t working for him. So he teams up with Schwartzmann and the two of them go off on their own to work with Isabelle Huppert, who teaches them that life is meaningless and that they must disconnect from their problems in order to avoid the misery of human existence.

And you thought this was going to be a love story.

This is definitely one of those films that you either love or you hate. Obviously, I fall into the former camp and consider this one of my favorite films. It’s a quirky, playful, intelligent comedy about the meaning of existence with terrific acting, great dialogue, and an original story.

Just don’t expect a whole lot of hearts or romance.

Having just finished up reading Big Machine by Victor Lavalle, which I’ll review next week, I now have the task of picking another book to read from my To-Be-Read pile, which is really more like two piles plus half of a shelf on one of my bookcases, which comes to a grand total of twenty books.  And that doesn’t include a couple of PDF books I have on my computer.

For the sake of fitting what I could into a single picture, here’s a sample of what I have to choose from:

The stack isn’t indicative of the order in which I plan to read all of these, but includes:

Ravens by George Dawes Green
Gator A-Go-Go by Tim Dorsey
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Spook by Mary Roach
Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby
I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells
The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis

It also includes my favorite title of the bunch, The Apocalypse and Satan’s Glory Hole by Timothy Long and Jonathan Moon, which has been on my stack for much too long. (Hangs head in shame.)

So what’s on your stack to read? And can you beat twenty books?

In light of the fact that both The Town and Ben Affleck were left off of the list of 2010 Oscar nominees for Best Picture and Best Director, I’m dedicating this week’s Movie Review Monday to some of the biggest snubs by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences over the past twenty years.

Feel free to agree or disagree…

1990 Best Picture (Goodfellas)
Scorsese had to wait until 2006 to finally get a Best Picture and Best Director win for The Departed, but it should have happened sixteen years earlier with Goodfellas. Instead, it lost out to the painfully long Dances With Wolves. This was probably the most disappointing end to an Academy Awards show I ever watched, second only to…

1997 Best Picture (L.A. Confidential)
When Titanic won for Best Picture, I threw up a little in my mouth. Two-dimensional characters, a predictable ending, and a forbidden romance apparently makes for an Oscar-winning combination. L.A. Confidential was a far superior film on all counts. It shouldn’t have even been close. But the Academy likes its grandiose, epic films with clear cut good guys and bad guys. This is me, giving them the finger.

1999 Best Actor (Jim Carrey)
Being a Kevin Spacey fan, I can’t say I wasn’t happy he won for American Beauty or that he didn’t deserve the award. But the fact that Jim Carrey wasn’t even nominated for his portrayal of Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon was just ridiculous. Even more so than his snub for The Truman Show the year before.

2001 Best Actor (Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce)
I didn’t think Denzel Washington’s portrayal of a villainous cop in Training Day was anything special. Of the five nominees, I felt Russell Crowe deserved to take home the gold for Best Actor in A Beautiful Mind. Considering he nabbed the Golden Globe and the SAG, I’m not the only one who thought Crowe was more deserving. But if you ask me, Guy Pearce should have won for Memento, but he didn’t even get nominated.

Those are just the top few that come to mind and are obviously just one writer’s opinion. What are some of your biggest Oscar snubs?

If you haven’t read any Bizarro fiction or even heard of it, chances are you’re not alone, but it’s a genre that’s been gaining a solid foothold in the publishing world over the past decade.

I have to admit, I’ve only recently been indoctrinated, having read Cursed by Jeremy Shipp and Naked Metamorphosis by Eric Mays last year, both of which were fun, imaginative, and, well, bizarre.

To quote Wikipedia, which we all know is gospel, Bizarro fiction has been described as “literature’s equivalent to the cult section at the video store” and a genre that “strives not only to be strange, but fascinating, thought-provoking, and, above all, fun to read.”

And with titles like The Haunted Vagina, Shatner Quake, and Meat Puppet Cabaret, you know you’re in for a story that’s a little bit different than what you’re going to get in the literature section at Barnes & Noble.

Which brings us to Cameron Pierce’s Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island (Eraserhead Press), a most definite fractured fairy tale.  (And my favorite book title of all time.)

Gaston Glew, a young pickle living on the moribund Pickled Planet, is celebrating his sixteenth Sad Day – the sixteenth anniversary of the saddest day of his life. His birth. But his parents go and one up him by committing suicide, so he decides to build a rocket ship (using his dead parents as fuel) and leave the sadness of Pickled Planet behind to go in search of happiness.

Meanwhile on Pancake Island, which is inhabited by happy pancakes who have never known sadness, lives Fanny Fod, the most beautiful pancake girl in the universe and the epitome of happiness. But Fanny nurses a secret sadness as she guards the origin of all happiness: the mysterious Cuddlywumpus.

When Gaston crash lands on Pancake Island, he starts to spread his briny sadness around in his search for happiness until he meets Fanny Fod and they fall in love. I won’t give away any spoilers, but considering the title, you pretty much know it’s not going to have a happy ending.

If you’re interested in reading more about Bizarro fiction or discovering some additional titles, check out Wikipedia and Eraserhead Press.