In which The Surfer Girl quests after The Big Wave, in order that she might have The Great Sponsorhip and live out a happy life with The Quarterback. OK, OK, so I’m not predisposed to enjoy surfer movies ("How many times," I wondered, "can we watch someone almost catch a wave?"), and the splashy cinematography didn’t knock my socks off (thought it looked kind of dingy, actually, but maybe that was just my screen). I like the fact that the three female protagonists aren’t anybody’s idea of role models — but does the lead character have to be so damned shallow? Sure, Kate Bosworth looks good in tiny shorts and does a reasonably fine job of fleshing out her material, but screenwriter Lizzy Weiss and writer/director John Stockwell ambush her by declining to do anything with her character but yank her to and fro from passion to passion. She must surf! But first she must make love to the football player! And yet she longs for the waves! But she nearly died, just two years ago, in this very spot, when she conked her noggin hard on a reef and nearly drowned. Can she conquer her demons?

There’s some mildly amusing material on the way to the inevitable high-stakes competition, mainly taking place in the hotel rooms occupied by the insufferably rich that the surfing trio clean up for a living. (O-ho, the class struggle!) There’s some really dopey stuff, too. In the end, of course, she returns to the surf at the last possible minute, and the real surfer chicks who show up for multiple cameos in the final reels show just how unlikely that somebody with Kate Bosworth’s Hollywood-pretty looks would get involved in this kind of wrong-side-of-the-tracks scenario. Michelle Rodriguez is more credible in that department, but is here reduced to snarling at her friend from the sidelines about how righteous she used to be before she fell in love and got all girly. She deserves better than this. All of these quibbles would be minor and forgivable if the story held a surprise or two, or the characters threw off any sparks. Sure, you could do a lot worse — but this one shoulda been a real kick.

Here’s an interesting thread at Mobius about a movie guide that was published by HBO and gave its very lowest rating to stuff like 8 ½, The Exterminating Angel and Rules of the Game while showering Crocodile Dundee and Rocky with five-star hosannas. Turns out that, if you read the fine print, HBO claims to have come up with these star ratings by surveying viewers of HBO and Cinemax! So you’re really getting a look into the mindset of your typical cable-TV viewer, circa the mid-1980s. No wonder the movie channels all run to the lowbrow these days. At any rate, I got the first hints of a serious film education from sitting up late at night watching HBO and Cinemax in my bedroom. From the Life of the Marionettes may have been the first foreign film I ever saw. Either that or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Anyway, enough about me. Here’s the real nugget—according to Mark Ferguson, it looks like HBO Latino is running La Comunidad, the most recent horror movie by Alex de la Iglesia, whose El día de la bestia and Muertos de risa are both great fun. The thing is, this one is still undistributed in the U.S. I guess it doesn’t have subtitles, but if you speak Spanish you may want to tune in.

Some unexpected news — the BBFC, which was noted once upon a time for decreeing that certain extremely violent horror movies were "video nasties" that could not be legally released in the U.K., has gone soft on the subject of slasher flicks. Jason X, which required edits in order to get an R rating in the U.S., passed uncut with a 15. Sure seems like a new direction for the Brits. In not entirely unrelated news, some poor schlep in Dallas was just sentenced to six months in jail for selling a comic book. First they come for the comic books, next they’ll came for Fat Girl and Sex and Lucia (the latter of which you already can’t advertise in Seattle’s daily newspapers).

I’m listening to a fairly amazing piece of work right now — Freelance Hellraiser’s "Star Wars vs. Hatiris," which seamlessly meshes "Throne Room and Finale" from the John Williams movie score with something (apparently) called "Space Invader" by someone called Hatiris. No, it’s not as good as the one where he mixes Christina Aguilera and The Strokes and comes up with something far more significant than either. But it’s still quite something. It’s on The Best Bootlegs in the World Ever, available at your nearest dodgy record shop. I suppose it’s fair game to download it, too.

Back to the subject of DVD, it's probably worth pointing out for anyone who doesn't know that Miramax's new version of Heavenly Creatures, due September 24, will be the longer version that was shown in Australia and New Zealand, rather than the shorter version that was edited (with Peter Jackson's blessing, so the story goes) by Miramax for the rest of the world. This is good news for sure, though you've got to figure that enough material exists somewhere for a super-special edition of this title, one of my favorite films of the last decade—Peter Jackson was the guy, after all, who released a four-hour laserdisc documentary about The Frighteners . I want to see Kate Winslet's screen tests!

And, hey, who says Miramax is out of ideas? The geniuses there have cut a deal that will have Coors sponsoring premieres of Miramax films. In return, Characters will be draining cans of Coors in 15 films over the next three years, including A View From the Top and Duplex, according to the AP. (Hey — somebody has to drink that shit.) Miramax joins Nascar, the NFL, Dr. Dre and Kid Rock in the Coors camp. Nice!

The Butcher Boy (Jordan, 1997)
(i remember liking this an inordinate amount in theaters and would appreciate the opportunity to check myself if only warner would release the bloody thing to dvd. was pressed on laserdisc in a tiny quantity and i held one in my hands at the virgin megastore but passed in favor of making rent for the month so my loss i guess)

The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski, 1991)
(though this is a miramax property it is available only from paramount in an ugly pan-and-scan version i mean what kind of idiot pans and scans art films anyway)

Gun Crazy (Ulmer, 1950)
(a low-down low-budget classic and maybe my favorite film noir ever)

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975)
(it's utterly crazy that a movie so revered is so completely unavailable on tape or disc anywhere in the world)

Cold Water (Assayas, 1994)
(ditto, plus the added spectacle of virginie ledoyen at 17)

Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947)
(robert mitchum gives one of the great performances in film history in maybe my favorite film noir ever)

Persona (Bergman, 1966)
(yo mgm: this thing was recently restored for distribution in the u.s. but the only decent video version is almost 10 years old and missing shots from the opening montage so get off your collective ass and do bergman proud before the man dies for christ's sake)

Prospero's Books (Greenaway, 1991)
(the image laserdisc was a terrible botch with a cropped picture and truly bad sound)

Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)
(this was released by fox on laserdisc for about 20 minutes at the end of 1997 when i was poor and couldn't afford to buy it)

Until the End of the World -- super-extended version (Wenders, 1991/6)
(i skipped this when it showed at the director's guild theater in manhattan mainly because i didn't feel like having my ass pinched for five hours, but also because wim wenders told me himself, to my face, more than two years ago, that it was coming out on dvd. thanks bud.)

According to Billboard, Madonna's next film role (following hubby Guy Ritchie's stab at a remake of Lina Wertmüller's Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August) will be in Peter Greenaway's forthcoming The Tulse Luper Suitcase. Also slated to appear, per a page dedicated to the multi-media project at petergreenaway.co.uk, are Debbie Harry, Vincent Gallo, Don Johnson, Isabella Rossellini, Fairuza Balk, Ewan McGregor, Franka Potente and fucking Molly Ringwald. (No word yet on how many of them will be naked.) How can you not want to see this?

Fans of documentary style won't find much to admire in Westway to the World, a whatyacall nonfiction film about the rise and fall of The Clash. Shot by band confidante Don Letts, it's a standard-issue, band-sanctioned reminiscence that juxtaposes current interview footage with a smattering of performance footage and snippets of other Clash-related film and video. (I wondered whether each band member is depicted individually because they'd pound the hell out of each other if they were put in a room together.)

As an 80-minute crash course on the band's history, it certainly serves a function. It's even a bit moving, as when Joe Strummer apparently starts to choke up as he discusses the post-Combat Rock dissolution of the band and has to look away from the camera—but cynics may complain that such behavior smacks of deliberate romantic aggrandizement. No mention is made, for instance, of Strummer and Joe Simonon's ill-fated attempt to revive the band without mate Mick Jones for 1985's Cut the Crap, and the documentary disingenuously presents the band as a stadium-filling act in its final days—the Shea Stadium gig depicted here so triumphantly was actually an opening gig for The Who, and, according to the All Music Guide, they "were routinely booed off the stage on every date of the tour." Engaging yet completely disposable.

The interesting thing about Teenage Caveman is that it yokes a Z-grade post-apocalyptic sci-fi screenplay of no real distinction to the naked-teenaged-orgy sensibility of Larry Clark, the director of Kids and Bully. The resulting film would have been quite something to stumble across on pay cable in the middle of the night.

I'll be damned if, for the first 45 minutes or so, Clark doesn't actually make something of this mess, which has to do with some kids who've been forbidden from having sex by a self-styled Messiah who really wants the nubile young girls all to himself. An old dude's been impaled on a "No Skateboarding" sign before the credits finished rolling, and the centerpiece of the film is a tour de force that begins with all of the characters stripping off their clothes and getting into a hot tub and culminates in one of the most disgusting (and terribly funny) sequences I've seen lately. It could best be described as "explosive." If this sounds like the sort of thing you'd enjoy, then it probably is (you sick little twist, you).

The main problem is that Teenage Caveman shoots its wad fairly early and then goes straight downhill, falling into that trap of no-budget SF-horror outings -- it becomes a gabfest, with characters standing around talking about their dastardly histories and their nefarious plans for the future. Like a real trouper, Tara Subkoff gets naked again in an attempt to save the final reel, but despite some special effects that probably chewed up half the film's budget, it just dies on the screen.