First off, I just want to quote the original King of Rants himself, Harlan Ellison, because I read this last night (actually it was around 3 this morning, but why quibble over details) and it put my feelings into words far better than I ever could. Ahem:

How shitty is it, this day on which I sit down to write my column? let me tell you how shitty it is. You know the Gobi Desert? You know all the millions and billions of grains of sand in the Gobi Desert? If the Gobi Desert were divided into a million billion fragments, and each of those million billion fragments were broken into a million billion fragments, and if on each of those million billion fragments of the million billion larger fragments of each of those millions of billions of grains of sand in the Gobi Desert the word SHITTY was carved a million billion tiny times, it would not equal by one-billionth the utter shittiness of this day as I sit down to write my column.

Only it's been all week for me. Again, quoting Ellison, "Don't ask."

So anyway, this morning before going to work I had the TV on, tuned to ABC I believe. On their morning infotainment show, they interviewed a man who...forgive me, I can barely comprehend this...a man promoting his book of photographs, which were taken during the filming of "Saving Private Ryan." The photos were black & white, grainy, blurred, and I believe he said the cameras he used were the same type that photographers used during the war. (WW2, the real one, the war nicely described recently by The Daily Show as being "almost as important as the movie it inspired.")

So the gimmick is, this isn't a book of movie stills, portraits of the actors in loving close-up, behind the scenes shots, documenting how this illusion was created; this is a book of photographs documenting a simulated war. As "realistically" as possible. As if it wasn't an illusion.

Already, I am unnerved.

But it goes on. The hostess interviewing this guy asks him questions about the experience as if he was actually in a real war. And he actually has the astounding ego to respond in kind; he talks about running past explosions, slogging through the mud, hanging on to a boat as it bobs sickeningly up and down in the water--everything that is said makes this guy sound like a real hero, risking life & limb to document this incredible event for posterity. As if there weren't film cameras rolling all the time, as if that weren't in fact the reason all of this contrived chaos was happening in the first place.

And at the end of this clown's extremely undeserved 15 minutes, he mentions that he wants to do more of this type of work. I wish I could remember his phrasing but it was something to the effect that he thought there was a real market for photographs taken during the filming of a movie. Hey genius--here's a bulletin for you: we've got them already. That's what movies ARE.

And you just know that in a few years these photos are going to end up in textbooks and history books, misidentified as actual WW2 photos.

I can't say anything more about it. I can only moan and whimper.

Saw "Disturbing Behavior" last weekend, and since Joe Bob's stopped going to the drive-in, I'm gonna have to step in and review this myself. If you'll indulge me, it's time for "Strega goes to the Sunday matinee."

This week's flick is "Disturbing Behavior," the story of a kid who moves with his family to an idyllic little town to forget their troubled past, only to discover that someone is kidnapping all the troubled punk-rock underachievers and turning them into yogurt-swilling honor students by giving them tidy haircuts and J. Crew sweater-vests. Only apparently all the hair gel does something to their brain, `cause they start smashing skulls every time they think about making the sign of the triple-finned manatee, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Sure, we've seen this before, but have we seen it with William Sadler playing the crazy town rat-catcher and school janitor who reads Slaughterhouse Five so that we'll realize he can't be as dumb as he seems? I don't think so.

Here are those matinee totals:

• Two dead bodies.

• Two breasts.

• Nose ring fu.

• Lead pipe fu.

• Pied Piper fu.

• Mirror fu.

• Neck snapping.

• Multiple fist fights.

• Car plunge over cliff.

• Multiple preppie attacks.

• Gratuitous body piercing.

James Marsden plays Steve, a kid with even more angst than most because something mysterious happened to his brother, who starts going to the small-town high school, where they're not just bussing kids in but ferrying them as well, based on the number of students, and his new loser friends start telling him about the creepy stuff going on in town, but of course he's only paying attention as an excuse to get a close look at Katie Holmes' belly button, at least until one of their pals trades in his ripped jeans for Dockers, and then they find a message he left them on CD-ROM (I guess he was in too much of a rush to just write a note), so they go break into an insane asylum for some reason and find the school psychiatrist's daughter, and meanwhile the janitor is finding exciting new uses for the Acme rat repeller, but they'd better move fast because Steve's little sister is making goo-goo eyes at the J. Crew set, and the whole time the audience is trying to figure out if the dead brother is actually important to the story in any way or just an excuse for some shaky MTV-style camera work whenever he has a flashback.

In other words, there's way too much plot getting in the way of the story. It's one of those movies where the hero has to have somebody explain to him that the kids taking shop and the ones taking honors physics tend to sit at different tables at lunch. Like this is something we might not have ever picked up on in our own lives, so the filmmakers need to make a big point of showing us their insight into teenage life. Luckily most of the time you get the sense that nobody involved was taking any of this too seriously. I give it, oh, two and a half stars. Check it out.

Sunday matinee Academy Award nominations for:

Crystal Cass, as Lorna, who smashes her head into a mirror, attacks Steve with the broken glass, writhes around on the floor, and then suddenly gets up and says, "I have to go home. I have a big physics test tomorrow."

William Sadler, as Dorian, the deus ex rat-catcher, for turning up at the most convenient times and quoting Pink Floyd at a climactic moment.

Bruce Greenwood as the evil Dr. Caldicott, who seems to have watched "A Clockwork Orange" a few too many times, for dismissing his crazy daughter by pointing out that "She was never that smart anyway."

Nick Stahl as Gavin, the justifiably paranoid pot-smoking freak with an albino sidekick, who introduces the romantic leads to each other and then says "Cue the power ballad."

And Jimmy Marsden & Katie Holmes, as our heroes Steve and Rachel, for somehow managing to keep a straight face during this exchange:

"Now what?"
"We go home."
"Where's home?"
"Wherever we are."