Why Does It Exist?

Posts Tagged ‘FeBURTuary’

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Podcast #48: Malone (1987)

In Podcasts on February 24, 2013 at 5:44 pm
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This is what drew us to Malone in the first place. Note the puffy, Lego-like hair.

A half-assed attempt to put Burt Reynolds in another iconic franchise role, Malone has The Mustachioed One traipsing around the Pacific Northwest with his shirt half-buttoned while attempting to take down a vaguely Mitt Romney-esque villain (played by Uncle Ben from the first Spider-Man movie, Cliff Robertson) with vague nefarious plans. He drives to and fro, sometimes getting into altercations. Suffice to say that this was not enough to make Malone a household name. Comedian and journalist Walter Lyng (of Go Plug Yourself) joins me for a short and sweet  analysis of a movie with very little plot, lots of hair and at least one gross underage kiss from Burt.

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Music this week provided by Dany Laj & The Looks. The song Take It Away off their EP Telepathic Voices can be found here. You can catch them tonight at Barfly in Montreal and at 3030 Dundas St. W in Toronto on March 29th, 2013.

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Podcast #47: Crazy Six (1997)

In Podcasts on February 7, 2013 at 1:59 pm
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Reminder that this is a sci-fi thriller, not a dusty Western.

The hallowed tradition of FeBURTuary seems as good as time as any to return from the will-they-won’t-they hiatus of the last few months. We are back with a rig that doesn’t sound like a lawnmower and a bevy of Burt movies for your listening pleasure. First up is Crazy Six, a post-apocalyptic (in name only) science-fiction (in name only) thriller in which a shabby junkie (played by Rob Lowe at a very confusing time in his life) is pitted between a couple of European monarch gangsters (played by Ice T and a flamboyantly pimped out Mario van Peebles, who speaks most of his lines in French).

Burt appears throughout as a good-ol’-boy cowboy/cop who’s somehow found his way to a job in bombed-out Eastern Europe. It sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Well, if you were thinking ‘I really wish that a boring junkie movie like Candy was set in a vague science-fiction dystopia’, have I got a movie for you.

Returning as a guest this week is Cult MTL’s screen editor, Malcolm Fraser.

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Music this week courtesy of Karneef. The track ‘Space’ off the album In Error can be found on Karneef’s Bandcamp page. Many apologies to Karneef for taking a hiatus in the middle of saying I would play the song.

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Podcast #12: Forget About It (2006)

In Podcasts on February 19, 2012 at 8:35 pm

Mickey, Alex and Dan: The Twilight Years

Infamous for the batshit-crazy story about how its crazy Belushi-impersonating, would-be gangster lead embezzled its budget and eventually landed in jail (and the improbable lawsuit that ensued in which an online film critic was taken to court over a negative review), Forget About It is a dumb mix of Grumpy Old Men and Analyze That that manages to be hilarious mostly because it sticks to the tried-and-true formula of old men doing silly dances and making boner jokes. Burt plays the taciturn leader of a pack of old coots who find a briefcase full of money that has been stolen from the mob by a low-level hustler (the aforementioned Michael Paloma). Raquel Welch shows up to dance around, Phyllis Diller makes out with a guy decked out in assless chaps, Richard Grieco emerges from whatever depths he was hiding in and hilarity ensues.

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Our guest this week is Mickey T. O’Narey, a musician, graphic designer and  former video store manager who just so happens to have employed Dan and Alex in the formative years of Why Does It Exist? His band The Hot Showers are currently prepping their second album.

Music this week is courtesy of our friends at Arbutus Records. The track ‘Change the Subject’ by Paula featuring Cadence Weapon appears on Paula’s latest album, Relaxed Fit.

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Cloud 9 (2006)

In Reviews on February 16, 2012 at 12:14 am

Little known fact, Burt Reynolds has a sailor costume written into each and every contract.

One of the major talking points of the buzz surrounding Boogie Nights upon release was that Paul Thomas Anderson had pulled Burt Reynolds from his career doldrums and shown the world that, yes, Burt was still alive. When you actually look at the arc of Burt’s career, though, it looks a little more like Anderson fucked it forever. Sure, Reynolds was no longer the A-list star he had once been, but few 60-year-olds are. He’d been racking up credits in critically-acclaimed indies (Citizen Ruth), television shows that have yet to enter the pop-cultural subconscious (Evening Shade) and critically-panned, though mainstream Hollywood films (Striptease, Bean). Compare this stagnating-though-decent output with everything that came after it: when the highest profile roles you can get are a supporting role in a remake of your own movie and playing Boss Hogg in a highly-inessential Dukes of Hazzard movie, it looks more like life-support than a resurrection.

It’s in this period that one predictably finds the most inexplicable work of Burt’s career. From last week’s incomprehensible Not Another Not Another Movie to the Uwe Boll juggernaut In the Name of the King, Burt’s post-1997 career offers some real gems but a curious absence of real Burt movies, ones where he plays swaggering macho men who are equal parts Casanova and rapscallion. As its Wikipedia entry helpfully points out, however, Cloud 9 happens to be ‘the last comedy in which Reynolds reprised and updated his role as the charming rascal made legendary in films like The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit.’ Those who thought that Burt has been reduced to the wheezing, sputtering King of In the Name of the King can finally rejoice! Also important to mention that, for all intents and purposes, Cloud 9 is a movie about strippers playing beach volleyball. With Burt Reynolds in it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Podcast #11: Not Another Not Another Movie (2011)

In Podcasts on February 12, 2012 at 5:56 pm

I know you wanted a picture of Burt. I wanted a picture of Burt too. But life's not always fair like that.

You know what’s ripe for parody? The concept of parody. This seems to be the general idea behind Not Another Not Another Movie, an ill-conceived collaboration between some struggling sketch comedians and that portion of Hollywood that’s game for whatever (namely Vinnie Jones, Michael Madsen, Chevy Chase and our man Burt) that fails to even fulfill its (skimpy as fuck) central concept. Cue lots of people falling down, our doughy lead in various states of undress throughout, a lead actress that does a bang-up job of being Anna Faris without being Anna Faris and a less-clever-than-you-thought cameo appearance by Richard Tyson. While this is technically part of FeBURTuary since Burt does actually appear in this movie, it’s probably not as Burt-centric as we would have hoped. Even Dan’s regular optimism was whittled away by the concept of Not Another Not Another Movie, which is why we had to bring in our VERY FIRST GUEST.

Roxane Hudon is a film critic and journalist for the Montreal Mirror as well as a blogger for Ballz Montreal. She graciously accepted our invitation (she actually called dibs on Not Another Not Another Movie) and took the bull by the horns. You can follow Roxane on Twitter, if you’re so inclined, at @Roxanesballz.

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Music this week is provided by Montreal’s own First You Get The Sugar. The track Scavengers (and not, as I first called it on the show, Renegades) is available on First You Get The Sugar’s self-title album here. They will be performing as part of Canadian Music Week in Toronto on March 21st.

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Podcast #10: 100 Rifles (1969) FEBURTUARY CELEBRATIONS BEGIN!

In Uncategorized on February 5, 2012 at 3:42 pm

As promised, here's the poster that makes this movie look more awesome than it is.

FeBURTuary opens with a bang (or rather one hundred bangs) with 100 Rifles, a 1969 semi-Eurowestern that stars Jim Brown, Raquel Welch and mustache menace Burton Milo Reynolds himself as loveable scamp Yahqui Joe. They dick around trying to get a revolution started, or possibly stop a revolution. Lots of things explode, Raquel gets sort of naked but not really and at one point they trip a horse with a chain.

It sounds super awesome, looks super awesome and, well… It nonetheless offers a good starting point for our month-long study of all things Burt, including chest hair, lip hair, head hair, overly-tanned and leathery skin as well as other less important details like body of work, biographical information and studies of Reynolds’ acting style. In this movie, it seems to mostly revolve around falling off things.

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Music this week is ‘All this Culture is Killing Me’ by Wind-Up People. You can find them here.