On the trail of more film noir, I picked up “Out of the Past,” which was a more traditional treatment, though certainly not a cookie-cutter approach, than my last foray into the genre with “The Long Goodbye.” There were no humping Mexican dogs in this one, and I, for one, did not miss their absence.

Our main character is a former private detective who, after a case tracking down a millionaire’s runaway lover, falling in love with her himself, and then general hijinx all around, settles down in a small town as a gas station owner to try and start anew and forget his seedy past.

The essential shot of a black and white romance

But his past catches up with him when a minion of his former employer accidentally stumbles into his gas station one day, and suddenly our hero is blackmailed back into the old familiar routine again, and it’s full of deceit, treachery, and women who are as evil as they are beautiful.

It’s a bit of a slow starter, but it gets really good. At the end there’s a nice surprise with a wonderful dose of ambiguity that people like me get all googly eyed over. Okay, maybe not quite googly eyed, but it’s still a bit of a twist on the familiar ending to these movies.

It’s dark, even for this genre. Everything turns out for the worse, and there isn’t much of an upturn at the end like we’d normally expect. It’s a good change.

It’s a dangerous path to walk when you base half the jokes in a movie on an already overused double entendre.

That brings us to “Balls of Fury.”

In “Balls of Fury,” the main character is a fallen champion of ping-pong who must get into a high stakes tournament where failure means death and success means bringing the organizer of the tournament, Christopher Walken, to justice for his various evildoings.

As I said, they way overused the ball jokes. Some of the movie was funny, but I was most disappointed with Christopher Walken’s character. He’s a really funny guy. Most of the time, I love his stuff. Here, though, his character was just stale. Walken is famous for that deadpan seriousness when he’s playing a really outlandish and bizarre character. They were trying to ride on that for his character here, and it just didn’t work, because it seemed like that was all they had to make the character funny at all. It was boring, and almost the worst part of a really mediocre movie.

Mediocre movies are my least favorite movies to watch. Bad movies are funny because they’re so bad, but mediocre movies aren’t bad enough to be funny and they’re not good enough to be enjoyable for their own merits.

A few months ago, I was hanging out with my friend and his wife at their apartment, and he said, “Dude, you have to see this crazy movie, ‘Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter.’ It’s insane.” He streamed it off Netflix and we watched the first twenty minutes of it before his wife made him turn it off, but I was totally hooked.

So I picked it up to watch myself, as I totally had to see Jesus Christ get down and kick some vampire butts.

There are a whole bunch of awesome things about this movie.

First of all, the sound for the whole thing is dubbed over, and the lips are never quite in synch, nor does the volume gauge appropriately with distance of the character from the camera at all. As a result, it plays out like a badly dubbed kung fu movie.

RAWR! Biblebabble! Jesus approves of Cousin It!

There’s this crazy guy who is covered with hair who is the only character allowed to break the fourth wall. He gets up in the camera’s lens and quotes bible verses with rabid enthusiasm. I’m not quite sure what purpose he’s supposed to serve other than letting the audience know right from the beginning that this movie is low budget, bizarre, and definitely not to be taken seriously.

Jesus Christ has a couple of righteous one-liners. In the first fight scene, he adopts a stance, thumps his chest, and defiantly states, “Body of Christ!” Later on, as he is climbing into a sewer grate to sneak into the lair of the evil vampires, he turns to his sidekick and says, “If I’m not back in five minutes, call the Pope!” It’s so good.

Jesus Christ has an awesome battle with about thirty atheists who all pour out of a Jeep. When he defeats their two leaders, one of them exclaims, “I don’t believe this!” Jesus proceeds to kick her in the shoe, which sends her skidding twenty feet across the grass and up a tree. Kudos, Jesus.

Here we see Christ standing over the broken bodies of the defeated atheists. Note that every one of those atheists poured out of a single jeep. Jesus!

Here we see the Lord in his dessert form. I wish I could find a video of it talking, but you can probably imagine about how it goes.

We learn from this movie that Jesus Christ frequents Hooters. In fact, I don’t think we ever see Jesus eating a meal anywhere other than Hooters. Even more surprising is that the food at Hooters is apparently imbued with God’s will, as Jesus gets lectured by God when he speaks to Jesus through a dessert.

Lesbians are apparently ideal candidates for vampires. In fact, this movie seems to have an obsession with lesbians in general. One of my favorite parts is when Jesus breaks in on the lesbian help workshop that the vampires just crashed. I’m pretty sure they just took a random room, stuck a “But I’m a Cheerleader” poster on the wall, and called it good as a legitimate representation of a lesbian shelter.

There’s an elaborate song and dance routine that catches the viewer totally by surprise. Jesus heads out to the street, and suddenly it’s a show-stopping spectacular involving all the pedestrians around dancing to Jesus’s groovy tune.

Speaking of groovy tunes, the music for the movie is far out. It’s a kind of throwback electronica groove with an electronic voice saying “vampire hunter Jesus” over most of it. It wraps the whole movie package together and completes it.

It’s a campy and hilarious movie that I would recommend to anyone that can enjoy a good laugh at something that wasn’t ever meant to be taken seriously by anyone.

I’ve only a couple things to say about the somewhat recent film adaptation of “Evita” with Antonio Banderas and Madonna.

First of all, I don’t think that musicals that are made into movies should be eligible for movie awards based on music. “Evita” won an Oscar or something for best song or whatever, which just seems awfully lame and stupid to me. The movie does not own the song. As far as I’m concerned, if the music wasn’t new for the movie, it shouldn’t count.

I am Antonio Banderas, and I am so sexy that I can easily sing without breath support or making facial movements. Oh yes, I am a sexy, sexy man!

Second of all, I have a big problem when it’s really obvious that the characters doing a song in a movie are lip synching. I realize they always are, and it’s not a big deal. In “Evita,” though, the characters are always interacting as though they’re talking; they don’t look like they’re singing at all. It really draws you out of the performance when you’re forced to notice that in the middle of a scene, and it’s especially blatant when the characters aren’t doing anything other than talking to the camera, as Banderas’s character often does.

It’s kind of funny that the Argentinian government released a book in response to this movie in order to set the record straight on Eva Peron’s life. Not surprising, but funny that Hollywood has this kind of power to write history. I’ll admit that I’ve no idea about any details of her life other than what was presented here.

But then, who really cares about Argentinian history, anyway?

Yeah!

I had the most brilliant idea ever at that moment.

“I’d make you have a unicycle wheelchair, then. If you don’t keep up the speed, you fall over and can’t get up.”

Unicycle wheelchairs. They’re the wave of the future.

There are a bunch of really bizarre characters at my workplace that all have their special annoying qualities. First of all, I am one of two guys in my department, and all the rest are middle-aged women, so we’re already talking crazy here.

Leech Girl (My mother says I shouldn’t refer to them as girls, but I personally find “lady” and “woman” both to be too formal.) likes charitable donations. She and her husband don’t make much money. He might have even been laid off recently, I sort of remember hearing something about that. That’s fine. I can understand people on hard times.

The problem is that she squanders the money she does make and then gets handouts whenever something is going on. At Christmas and Thanksgiving, she asks for a collection so that she can have holiday dinners and presents for her kids, or they wouldn’t get any. She asks for used clothes because she can’t buy new ones. She didn’t even put in money for the birthday fund to allow for tiny office parties on birthdays with a cake or cookies, though she was totally down for partaking of these things when the events came up, despite the fact she agreed to not participate when she elected not to pay into the fund.

At the same time, she smokes like a chimney, buys in on all the office lotteries, purchases multiple Super Bowl squares for that stupid gambling squares game (I counted $25 in squares last game, which got her nothing of course), and probably the best example is that the rebate check from the government last year went to buying chrome highlights for her husband’s motorcycle. Amazing, eh? She’s got three kids, and as far as I can tell they’re the furthest thing from her mind as far as spending priorities are concerned.

Vacation Girl sits two cubicles down from me. I call her Vacation Girl because it seems like every other word out of her mouth is about vacation. That, on its own, wouldn’t be a problem, but she also has no ability to control the volume of her voice. Loud. All the time. She talks on her cell phone for about three hours every day, and she spends another hour and a half or so talking to one of her friends in the cubicle row ahead of me. It’s like I’m part of the conversation.

If I took notes, I could tell you the square footage of the hotel room they’re getting for their next trip to Florida, the exact location, the places to get food around there, the distance to the nearest beach, and even the exact cost of the toll that you have to pay while you’re driving to that beach. I’m not sure who she’s talking to on the phone, either, because she seems to go over the same details every single day. It’s maddening. I’d have to pump up the volume on my iPod and movies extremely loud to completely block her out. It sucks even more for the person next to me, who isn’t allowed to wear headphones because she has to answer phones. There’s no escape for her.

We can’t even complain because she’s friends with the boss. Someone said something to the boss’s assistant, who is technically supposed to handle disturbances like this, but she literally told us she wasn’t going to clamp down on it because Vacation Girl is the boss’s friend and she’s afraid of reprisal. Neat!

That’s a lot of backstory for what is really just a short little snippet of a story about these two.

Vacation Girl has rabbits, and rabbits did what rabbits tend to do, so now she has six more little rabbits. She was trying to give them away to anybody at work who wanted one.

Only one person took one. Leech Girl, of course. She can’t support her kids, but she’ll take on a rabbit. I realize that it’s not a big expenditure, but I’m talking about principle here.

In my quest to find some other Humphrey Bogart movies, I instead found a movie that’s just based around Humphrey Bogart. “Play it Again, Sam” is a Woody Allen movie about a maladjusted New York Jew (Hey, it’s 90% of the characters Woody Allen plays!) who is obsessed with Humphrey Bogart’s persona, and wants to be that character. After his wife leaves him, his best friends, a married couple, try to hook him up a succession of women whom he completely fails with. Hijinx ensure, there’s some questionable content I don’t think my wife would approve of (of the “infidelity that goes essentially unpunished” kind), and there’s a very satisfying ending.

It’s a good movie. I have a hard time with it, though, because for some reason I have an awfully hard time watching scenes in movies that are embarrassing or uncomfortable for the characters involved, and this movie is absolutely chock full of them. Still, though, it’s a good watch, and there are some wonderfully funny moments.

Bogey gives a stereotypical (for himself) Allen some advice on handling the dames.

The worst part is the Humphrey Bogart impersonator, who periodically shows up to chat with Woody Allen. He’s got the look down, but his voice impersonation is close enough to remind you of Bogart but far enough off to be really noticeable that it’s totally not right. I’m surprised that it’s so bad, since Bogart is, in a way, the most important character in the movie.

My wife was searching online for a quote from “Wayne’s World” the other day, specifically the one where Garth remarks about the new set for Wayne’s World, “It’s like a new pair of underwear, you know? At first it’s constrictive, but after awhile it becomes a part of you!” When she found it, she suggested I take a look back at “Wayne’s World” and “Wayne’s World 2” because, hey, why not?

So I did. Because, hey, why not?

For some reason the random Mike Myers humor works in “Wayne’s World” in the way it didn’t work at all in “The Love Guru.” I think part of it might be that “Wayne’s World” sports a better set of characters. Really, though, I don’t want to get into a comparison of the two, because it’s just an exercise in futility. “Wayne’s World” is a fun movie, and “The Love Guru” is not. End of story.

I think most people know the basic plotline of this movie by now. Evil guy played by Rob Lowe gets a sponsor for Wayne and Garth’s show, then tries to steal Wayne’s hot new girlfriend but then gets foiled in the end.

I have one big problem with the story, though, and I don’t think it’s ever addressed either in the first movie or the second. What is Rob Lowe’s motivation in being evil? He doesn’t stand to gain anything by getting the arcade owner to sponsor “Wayne’s World.” He didn’t know about Cassandra to want to steal her for himself until after he had already gotten involved with the show. When Garth looks at his planner and reads, “Find small public access television show to exploit,” it just makes me wonder how he’s exploiting anything out of them at all.

The second movie is just more of the same. I actually think it’s better, in fact, because it has Christopher Walken, which is amazing even though his character is intentionally unfunny, and also because it has a more cohesive plotline. The first movie sort of wanders around aimlessly in the center without a lot to go on, but “Wayne’s World 2” has a continual focus on Wayne’s attempts to bring together a big performance and bring Cassandra back to Chicago.

It’s a very different treatment of the genre than I’m used to. Now that I think about it, it’s probably more true to the original material, but I was just kind of taken aback by how utterly dirty the movie is. I don’t mean dirty as in it’s got boobs and sex, though it does have that (Our main character lives next door to a all-female nudist dance group that likes to practice, meditate, and get high on their apartment landing), the movie itself just has a grimy finish on it. It’s in sharp contrast to the older black and white detective stories, where the world is very “clean;” everything is metaphorically dirty but physically it’s pristine.

This picture pretty much sums up what I mean about the grimy finish on this movie. On the right, you might be able to see half of our main character. In the center of the shot (the left third is cropped), you might happen to see a pair of Mexican humping dogs. If you look close enough.

The first thing I noticed when I started the movie was the theme song, “The Long Goodbye.” As Marlowe goes about his nightly expedition to get food for his cat, the song plays the entire time, and it switches styles as he moves from place to place. When he’s listening to the radio, he gets a standard arrangement, but when he goes into the store it turns into a more easy listening arrangement without the vocals. I thought that was kind of cool, and made a mental note to give the movie props for what I found to be a rather inventive way to weave the theme song into the opening.

Then I continued watching the movie. The song is omnipresent. The piano player at the diner is trying to pick up a new song. It’s “The Long Goodbye.” When Marlowe goes to a party where there’s a live band, they’re playing a jazzy version of “The Long Goodbye.” I realize that movies like James Bond do the same thing, were the title music is rearranged and reused throughout, but it is much more blunt here simply because it’s not background; the characters themselves are hearing it, too, and when they interact with it, such as by turning on the radio to play it, it really gets the music in your face.

It’s not even a bad song. It just gets on your nerves when you’re subjected to it every four minutes.

The film itself is pretty good. I consider my objections above, even though I’ve gone on at length about them, to be fairly minor. The mystery is everything that I’d expect, and Gould makes a decent Marlowe. Personally, I would prefer the old style with Humphrey Bogart, but he would be completely out of place in the new style that is showcased in the production of “The Long Goodbye.” It’s a different kind of movie even though it features the same character in a similar situation.

“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” is a lot like a darker retelling of “Ducktales,” particularly the pilot episode. Yes, I realize that the movie came first by a long time, but I’m still letting that statement stand. “Gold fever,” excessive competition, and overabundant paranoia are the defining characteristics that link the two.

Maybe that’s a terrible comparison to be making. Maybe it’s unfounded. I’m leaving it anyway, dammit, because I’ve got nothing else to go on here.

Really, though, the movie is good stuff. I have yet to see a Humphrey Bogart movie that I didn’t enjoy. He plays an average guy who is down on his luck and decides to go in with a recent acquaintance and a grizzled veteran on a prospecting expedition for gold. Once they hit it big, the biggest danger turns out to be… themselves!

It’s got a pretty serious turn in the middle that took me by surprise. You get used to Bogart playing a particular kind of character, or at least I have in all of his movies that I’ve seen, and when he suddenly turns on that character type it’s a bit shocking.