…here is the original poster for the new Yogi Bear movie (starring, brilliantly, Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake), which appears to have been wrestled from the psyche of Bret Easton Ellis at his most addled. An unsettling combination of glassy-eyed cuddly animals, truly irresponsible positioning and grotesque double-entendre leads one to question who could possibly have commissioned it in the first place. It has since been replaced with a less troubling version, thank God. *
[*writer too tired to think up pun involving the word Boo-Boo]
The DVD cover of Deadfall (1993), featuring Nicolas Cage looking NOTHING LIKE HE DOES AT ANY POINT IN THE FUCKING MOVIE! WTF!?
We all love Nicolas Cage. We’ve all seen Nicolas Cage losing his shit. Some of us have seen the wonderful Nicolas Cage matrix. But as far as I’m concerned, much more needs to be made of the one film in that first compilation that I couldn’t put my finger on.
The one where Cage is sporting an oil-slick bowl-cut, McDonalds sunglasses, and Rupert Pupkin moustache. The film that didn’t even make it onto the Nicolas Cage matrix.
The one that is called Deadfall.
All credit here must go to YouTuber (and heroic compiler of the most appalling movie scenes of all time) watercooler who, three or four years ago, must presumably have been able to stop laughing for long enough to cut together a comprehensive record of one of the most profoundly baffling performances in the history of cinema.
As Cage goes from strength to strength, from berserk to berserker, I love to imagine the director (incidentally Christopher Coppola, Francis’ nephew, who proves himself more Jack than Apocalypse Now) sitting in his chair, head in hands, wondering how he might be able to curb the engulfing typhoon of cheese and ham without hurting anyone’s feelings. Equally, I love to imagine that Cage did this on purpose to deliberately ruin Coppola’s career. After all, Cage went on to win an Oscar, Coppola went on to… feature on a Cats 101 episode on Animal Planet with his pet Burmese cat Otto.
Weird, weird, weird. A collection of forgotten 80s and 90s stars line up on a cheaply rendered beach to mime unconvincingly to The Beatles’ ‘Let it Be’ in a Norwegian TV commercial for a show called Gylne Tider/Golden Times (I think). Washed-up too obvious a metaphor?
The mindbending array of random cameos builds at a rapid pace, leaving you scratching your head for the bigger picture. Cheers stalwart George Wendt appears devastated, pink-faced, hands-in-pockets, but manages to pull a half-smile out of the bag before being crudely upstaged by what appears to be the three members of The Big Lebowski’s nihilist electro-pop outfit Autobahn after about 15 years of rich food. When Theo Huxtable turns up, one can only pause the video to take stock.
Neither can you tell whose voice is whose. Ricki Lake appears to have been overdubbed by Boy George, but Paul McKenna (yes, Paul McKenna)’s hypnotically wayward contribution could certainly be of his own doing.
Then there’s disgraced ice-skater Tonya Harding, venomously subtitled ‘Kunstloper i trobbel’. And holy fuck! There’s Allo’ Allo’s Gorden Kaye, superseded by a KanYe-mulleted Carlton Banks. And Judd Nelson, who has turned into Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside.
Its uplifting in the way that David Lynch’s The Elephant Man is uplifting; he has a grotesque appearance, a sad life, and he dies, but at least he gets to have a lie-down at the end.
I’ve said enough. Enjoy it for yourself:
UPDATE!
Just in case you can’t enjoy it, thanks to any pending copyright claim by Sony, check out this equally bizarre effort from the same camp, starring Pat Sharp, Peter Shilton, Limahl, Eddie the Eagle, Louis Gossett Jr. and Lorenzo Lamas (yep, Renegade). Christ on a bike.
* R.I.P. the great Leslie Nielsen, who appears here, with the same level of deadpan gravitas he always had
** This post features no original research whatsoever
It’s been a whopping 13 years since Jim Carrey brought us all to tears in Liar Liar. And a scarcely believable 17 since Robin Williams did the same in Mrs Doubtfire. So we salute you, Mel Gibson, for stepping forward to fill the inadequate-Dad-on-inevitable path-to-rehabilitation-and-reconciliation-movie shaped hole in all our lives with your new film, The Beaver.
Yes, The Beaver, in which an alcoholic loser (Gibson – I’m saying nothing) begins a tentative, and ultimately transformative friendship with a discarded toy beaver, which he wears on his hand. The beaver (voiced by Gibson, in a particularly poor attempt at ventriloquism) sounds like Ray Winstone playing an Australian playing a Cockney.
The whole twisted enterprise looks like a deranged cross between the Mitch Connor episode of South Park, when Cartman’s hand becomes Jennifer Lopez, and the sequence in William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ when a man takes his talented asshole on tour with him as a double act, only for his asshole to get too big for its boots and take over.
The newly-released trailer is below (be warned, your mind will be blown. Blown to the extent that it may never work again in the same way). This gets 10-out-of-10 on the WTF? scale.
Collins with one of Bone Thugs N Harmony, yesterday
One of the oddest phenomenons in recent years must surely be the steepling regard with which fax-machine toting, MOR baldie Phil Collins is held in the higher echelons of the ‘urban music’ world. As Collins has himself recently intoned darkly (in the Daily Mail):
“The greatest surprise for me is how some of my songs have had this amazing afterlife.”
Back in 2001, ‘urban music”s front-benchers (and Ray J) clubbed together to release an a tribute album to Collins entitled Urban Renewal (also, incidentally, the name of a destructive housing process which in mid-20C America led to the ghettoization in slums of thousands of African-Americans, and was dubbed by eminent writer James Baldwin as “negro removal” – nice work guys!).
From Urban Renewal, then, for your inevitable nonplussment*, is late rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard applying his concentration skills to a cover of Collins’ 1985 doggerel-infused wank fantasy ‘Sussudio’. To maximize your enjoyment of this audio debacle, I find it helps to imagine Bastard fast asleep at the mixing desk, and waking with a start every time he has to deliver his lines. The most disappointing thing about the whole endeavour is how month-old-lettuce limp it all is. It had the potential to be a car crash of epic proportions; instead it swings by in a desultory manner, propelled by a set of standard issue New Jack beats, non-sexy diva vocals, and a pathetically slim, inoffensive deployment of everyone’s favourite vocal aid: autotune.
One year later, Collins teamed up with Bone Thugs N Harmony (go on, read that sentence back to yourself) to re-heat his song ‘Take Me Home’. The video (below), which redefines bizarre, sees a black-clad Collins variously skulking around an unfamiliar environment wearing the expression of a smug, yet confused man who has just shat himself, and larking about with (yet unable to disguise his palpable fear of) BTNH. The torpor is only broken in the chorus, when Collins seems to be plaintively demanding that his servants fix his train ticket and get him away from these men. Genuinely, genuinely weird.
Permanent Plastic Helmet 
