Movie Review: Drive Angry

A lot of people told Nicholas Cage not to take up this movie. They said: “Nick, this is a controversial movie. People don’t like seeing movies that glorify road rage. This might be a no-go.”

To which our hero Nicholas Cage stated:

“Hey, I’m not getting any younger. Madoff took all my money. I need money. I’ve definitely appeared in worse. Plus, I can relate to the plot line.”

In ‘Drive Angry’, our hero (creatively named Milton after Nicholas Cage’s admiration for Milton Friedman’s work in the field of economics) escapes from Hell which was his last film “Season of the Witch”. Apparently hell is a fairly easy place to get out of and Milton leaves with little fuss. 

Once he leaves, he is pursued by one of Hell’s most prominent minions, Bob from Accounting (played by David Cross). Bob has worked in accounting since Lucifer rebelled against God. Responsible for purchasing office supplies for the 5^th, 6^th and 7^th rings of hell, he’s angered by Milton’s actions. For, unknown to Milton, Bob was about to help all of the offices in Hell go green to receive a tax benefit. So with Milton’s departure, all hell has broken loose. Now Bob’s going to have to fill out the necessary paperwork all over again and get Satan (played by Billy Bob Thornton) to help out. In multiple close-ups of his face, he shows his dissatisfaction with his wife of eleven centuries (played by Danny Devito). Has their marriage grown boring, their sex routine stale? It is implied Milton’s escape has impeded their efforts at reconciliation, for which Milton allegedly will pay. 

                Milton has important work up on the surface. Upon arriving on Earth in Camden, New Jersey (known as ‘Hell’s Anus’) he manages to hotwire a car sitting in an Arby’s parking lot, stopping momentarily to get a delicious Mocha shake. Driving quite angrily, he makes it to the US-Manitoba border. A vicious motorcycle gang-cult is intent on creating a World War to usher in a new era without technology, so they may be one with nature yet again. Somehow this plan involves murdering his infant daughter. They’d already murdered one of Milton’s daughters, which he was cool with, but murdering another one of his children felt like a bit much.

                Winnipeg translates to ‘a frozen shithole’ in the original Norse. That fact is not lost on Milton who realizes just what a hell-like situation he’s created. Finally understanding if he dies he goes back to hell, he tries to live a healthier life by biking in the afternoon and becoming a vegan. He also helps his situation by having vast quantities of sex with naked women and disemboweling his enemies. Disemboweling sets off Bob’s tracker as he drives past a seedy Motel.

                Leaving just in time, Milton avoids the cruel hand of Bob’s wrath for now. Satan is getting angry, getting upset at Bob’s inability to find Milton and bring him to justice. Also, Satan drops hints that he might be demoted or might lose his dental plan. Bob’s feeling the pressure now, and works with the motorcycle-gang cult headed by Seth, the God of War (played by Will Ferrell). 

                Together the two of them begin working to thwart Milton. Citing the practice of Synergy, they come up with a few plans. First, they try to trap Milton by inviting him to a whorehouse. As Milton will get turned on, they time how long it will take Milton to finish. Off of this, they’ve created a device which will grind him up. Unknown to either of them, Milton is poor as hell and usually picks up women off of dating sites of ill-repute. He’d never fall for their plan.

                Using Milton’s penchant for driving angry, they try to capture him by creating a traffic jam. Knowing how angry Milton gets at being stuck in traffic, they figure he will lose his mind, driving in a rampage and get shot by a couple of heavily armed Canadian Mounties. Right as Milton is about to lose it, he remembers he needs to stay calm to save his daughter hoping she doesn’t get totally murdered.

                Finally confronting the motorcycle-cult biker gang, he successfully defeats them. Milton is brought back to hell, but under the assurance his infant daughter will be protected by Satan. Satan, true to his word, raises Lucy as if he was his own daughter, later sending her to art school in Manhattan, even paying most of her tuition. 

                This movie makes one question the fight between good and evil. Directed by Tommy Wiseau, it has an inordinate amount of sex scenes. Some of them rank as his best sex scenes, and they inspire all of us to aim for greater things in life, like having more sex. For fans of Nicholas Cage, I’m sorry to inform you that a ‘stunt penis’ has been used for all of the sex scenes. 

 I’m still moved by some of the exquisitely shot landscapes of Manitoba, which has since seen an increase in tourism. Nickelback’s soundtrack works wonders and instills a truly timeless quality to the film.  Please see this movie if you want to see our generation’s Ronald Reagan (via awful actor who will later become our President).

Mollom: Will it ruin millions of Spammers careers?

Mollom runs its business under the premise that you don’t want spam clogging up your website. Naturally you’ll only want the very best commenters so you can “have more time and energy to interact with your community”. They claim to have a 99.91% success rate in this field. But really, are they thinking about the little guy?

The little guy might enjoy your writing. But the little guy might like it so much that they must tell you about heavily discounted Viagra or getting better protection for your computer. Without this information, what will you do? How can your computer be protected against nasty viruses, and how can you sexually satisfy your significant other. 

Perhaps your writing attracts a certain loner, ready and willing to bring you the best in online advertising.  Maybe your website is the only way they can interact with humanity, since they suffer badly from agoraphobia. But Mollom doesn’t care about this individual. No, instead they are using the worst of internet etiquette against your very readership. In fact, they even bluntly state that they “kill unwanted content”. Honestly though, who doesn’t want to help out a member of royalty get their money out of their bank account for only a small fee? They even state that you’ll get a piece of the action, so Mollom just ruins that chance for you. 

Your readership has a right to explain how important their rights are as your faithful followers. Online spam advertising brings in billions of dollars of revenue, lifting thousands of people out of poverty every day. Of course, these heartless Belgians couldn’t care less. And isn’t it ironic that Belgians want you to be closer to your community, despite the very fact that their country is being torn apart by indifference to the concept of the nation state. Maybe they should stick to what they are good at, making waffles and being Europe’s Canada. 

 Benjamin Schrauwen appears to be the ringleader, having grown in the demo scene, a sick perverse underworld of nerdom so extreme I can’t even explain in here on a music blog, which in itself is extremely nerdy. Oh, he says he has a blog, but you can’t even follow the link. Some computer programmer this guy must be. Each morning when he wakes up he paraglides over the drab, featureless Belgian landscape, wondering why he hasn’t moved to a more physically appealing country. Maybe a country that has trees or anything resembling “soul”. As he is up there, he looks for the .09% of spammers he hasn’t caught, and, when he finds them, he immediately hits them with a dart containing a deadly combination of Nutella and rattlesnake venom. Every time a spammer on the internet can no longer make pointless posts about pharmaceutical products for cheap, Ben gets a new pair of wings (gliders).

If Ben is the ‘bad cop’, spying on others from far above, Dries Buytaert presents a more positive face to the unsuspecting public. For one, his blog actually works. There you see his inner most workings reveled, like the international conspiracy to rid the internet of spam, delicious, barely relevant spam. And you see how an amateur photographer works, very immaturely.

Together they have their pictures up on Mollum’s website with the requisite sunglasses. Sunglasses are needed to cover their eyes, since it has been said that “eyes are the window to your soul”. Rather than expose their true evil, these Antwerps hide their true colors. They talk about “spambots” as if they weren’t living things, complete with emotions, grammatical errors and misspellings. So heavy is their sheer gall that they even call desirable content ‘ham’ with little to no concern about vegans who may operate websites and may take offense to such harshly worded language.

Spambots are needed. People need to feed themselves off of Spam, not everybody has access to high quality food products like some Western European populations. And they don’t charge, but they say “you MAY never have to pay for our service”. By using the word may instead of will, they open you up to potential gouging, all the while hiding behind obtuse European laws. The laws which are so absolutely boring that even the Europeans who wrote them don’t care.  

They’ve already begun to charge. “Only 1 Euro per day” their site proclaims, but in US dollars that comes out to an unreasonable sum of money (via the collapse of the US dollar in foreign exchanges). Concern about the American way doesn’t end there. When asked if their system jeopardizes freedom of speech, they’re all like “Hells yeah it does, but it was like that when we got here”. Obviously this is an affront to the joy of speaking about offensive topics, like pornography or Nickelback. Falling back on an established way of doing things through the internet isn’t enough.

 America is number one at Spam making, so perhaps Europe just wanted a little piece of the spam pie. Mollum will allow our Spam making competitors to beat us. I mean, we’re literally light years ahead of Iceland’s spam making abilities (1 spam attack) or Norway’s (3). That’s pitiful. We need to continue being number one at this, so our economy can grow more robustly. It is the roughest economic downturn that America has faced since the Great Depression. Please Mollum, let us have this one, not just for me, but for my future children, who yearn to tell you about discounted pharmaceuticals and offensive images. Thank you.

Mollom