About five days into Sundance harry sent me a text message saying "Burnt out yet?" at the time I replied "Hell no, not yet." Well I can now say that I am officially burnt out, I am looking forward to getting back to Austin soon and for the first time in three weeks not be at a film festival. I'd like to apologize to the two people that were actually looking for my Sundance wrap-up, but it just feels redundant to finish it now that every single movie in it has been covered three times or more. I think the only slightly different opinions I would have expressed in it would have said Justin Lin's Finishing the Game is good, but I was expecting better, Jake Paltrow's The Good Night is absolutely Delightful, and contrary to popular belief the cut of John August's The Nines that screened at Sundance was absolute crap, but maybe after reshoots and re-edits he can make that movie work. There's Sundance its done now, back to Santa Barbara nonsense.

Today I'm going to review A Very British Gangster and most of the Dakota Fanning rape movie most formally known as Hounddog. That's right, even though we are at Santa Barbara we're still watching Sundance movies.

The Dakota Fanning Rape Movie -- Written and Directed by Some Retarded Individual

So there are very few movies that I just can't finish sitting through, and this was one of them. At the hour mark I started going through reasons in my head trying to justify why I was still sitting in a room watching this pedophiliac garbage.

At around 78 minutes I finally got the hell out of there. What I did see was a whole hell of a lot of Dakota fanning that I never really did want to see, for most of the film she's walking around in her underwear, right before the world's most overblown rape scene she's dancing around in a wet-t-shirt in the most exploitive manner while a boy seems to be whacking off. This movie is just stupid, I can't for the life of me figure out why the hell Robin Wright Penn, David Morse, and Dakota Fanning signed on to this movie, I sure hope they got a damn good paycheck out of it. Especially David Morse, oh god he is so amazingly bad in this, he's like a redneck I Am Sam except if Sam wanted to hump his daughter, cut his hair to look like her, and ran around town buck naked chanting nonsense. Quint stayed for the last twenty minutes, so im sure he'll tell you all about how Dakota gave him a woody if you want to know more.

A Very British Gangster -- Directed by Donal MacIntyre

I was kicking myself for not seeing this at Sundance, there was universal positive word coming out of that festival about this little documentary. So when it popped up again over in Santa Barbara I was quite happy. The documentary follows a gangster by the name of Dominic Noonan who's from Manchester, his street name is Lattlay Fattfoy. Dominic is a bald brooding fellow who believes in style and has his gang of young boys routinely dress in suit and tie as well as flank him in his old neighborhood streets. Throughout the documentary Dominic is a very charismatic character and very fun to watch as he dances around in conversation avoiding any direct implications to any of the crimes he very obviously is proud of committing. The doco is a very good watch, though at times can be kind of slow. The only real problem I have is at times the film looks too good to the point of feeling staged, in particular one sequence involves a very natural conversation between two neighborhood kids then the camera starts pulling back and doing an overhead shot then into a full crane-shot totally taking anyone out of the scene and totally making one wonder how staged the other sequences are. Nonetheless its still a hell of a lot of fun and I recommend it.

Alright I'm off to go watch Taxidermia now.

-Rav

Write me if you want the details I can't share with the public about my wild birthday party with strippers this past Friday!!!