YouTube is great, really — certainly as a waste of time, but also as a canny means of cultural distillation. Despite no small amount of admiration for each of them, I didn’t catch last fall’s Nicolas Cage/Neil LaBute remake of The Wicker Man, though I did a DVD review of the
special edition original when it came out late last year. Now, thanks to this inspired, two-and-a-half-minute YouTube mash-up, I’ll never have to see the the re-up.
I personally loved the roundhouse kick to the face and the bear bitch-slap.
For what it’s worth, it really seems like Cage’s performance is modeled somewhat
closely after Edward Woodward’s from the original film, except with general irritation
replacing a moral stodginess. Madly bubbling-over frustration is part of what The Wicker Man is about, and here, in the remake, it just seems amped up a bit, though I (want to) believe the hill-tumble exclamations of, “The bees, the bees… not the bees!” might be overdubbed or laid in.
Not explicitly movie-related per se, but it sure reads like one… albeit a very familiar one. The Boston Celtics have cut ties with 21-year-old point guard Sebastian Telfair, the erstwhile subject of Jonathan Hock’s documentaryThrough the Fire, who was arrested early Friday after police in
Yonkers, New York, stopped him for speeding and found a loaded handgun
under a seat in his SUV. Telfair did not have a valid license, and police said he and his passenger told them they knew nothing about the gun.
Last October, meanwhile, police questioned Telfair about the shooting of rapper
Fabolous after a $50,000 necklace was stolen from Telfair at the same
club the night Fabolous was shot. Telfair said he wasn’t there at the
time of the shooting.
A bit short on authorial insightfulness, Through the Fire is kind of interesting in spite of itself, but it takes on some additional import now, given Telfair’s troubles, and the fact that hereportedly supports an extended web of 21 family members with his NBA salary. Not surprisingly, that’s a far cry from the tight-knit, single-parent home we see in the film. Hangers-on love the smell of someone else’s green…
