T
his Week: Courtney Love on Her Appeal, Guatemala’s Killer Tomatoes, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, Russell Crowe’s Snit-Fit, PollyGrind Film Festival, and more…

Ugly vs. Beautiful Women. Singer Courtney Love says she’s good in bed because she’s unattractive. After claiming on “The Howard Stern Show” she had an affair with Gavin Rossdale (we saw him perform at the VIP grand opening of Haze nightclub at Aria a few weeks ago—Gwen was in the VIP roped-off area) after he married No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani (and she knew about it), Love tells music journalist Toure she’s a love goddess “because I was never pretty. Pretty girls just lie there. Us girls who grew up a little more homely have to try a lot harder. That’s why pretty girls never threaten me—it’s like, yeah, you want to take me on? Take me on. Go for it.” Toure interviewed Love for Fuse’s “On the Record” show. From www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/.

Killer Tomatoes. When we were in Guatemala City our fabulous tour guide took the bravest amongst us on a city bus ride. We were told never to go on the many red city buses called “Killer Tomatoes” (see photo).

This past week this story appeared about Guatemala’s notorious gangs who target those “Killer Tomatoes”:

The president of a transportation cooperative was gunned down as he left his house in a Guatemala City suburb.

Hugo Morales, who was killed last Saturday, had been threatened with death by gang members who extorted money from him every week. Gang members were demanding that Morales pay them $1,875 per week to operate his buses in the area, and the businessman had refused to hand over the money.

Youth gangs often demand that drivers pay a so-called daily “tax” in exchange for being allowed to pass through neighborhoods they control.

A total of 22 drivers, including six from Morales’s cooperative, have been murdered this year in Guatemala. In 2009, 146 bus drivers and 60 assistants were murdered in the Central American country.

Drivers working on the short routes in the capital plan to meet to decide whether to halt service due to the high levels of crime.

PollyGrind Film Festival. The PollyGrind Film Festival got underway this past week. Founder Chad Clinton Freeman, himself a filmmaker, knows how hard it is to get independent works out for the public to see them so he created the Polly Staffle Grindhouse Fest.

The event, which consisted of five days of programming in the tradition of grindhouse theaters with double and triple features each day, got underway May 12 and ran through May 16 at the Sci-Fi Center, 2520 State Street, in Las Vegas.

Thirteen films and more than 31 trailers, music videos and shorts played the PollyGrind. The world premiere of John R. Hand’s sci-fi arthouse film Scars of Youth opened the festival on May 12. It was awful! Hand is the Writer/Producer/Director/Editor/Cinematographer/Star and sings the theme song! Creep Creepersin world premiered his films Vaginal Holocaust, Caged Lesbos A-Go-Go, and Orgy of Blood on May 15.

Greg Lamberson’s Slime City Massacre, Henry Weintraub’s Melvin, Bruce Dickson’s Red Velvet, James Pronath’s Horrid, Jen Soska & Sylvia Soska’s Dead Hooker in a Trunk (wins my vote for best title ever!), Alex Pucci’s Frat House Massacre and the anthology Terror Overload had Las Vegas premieres.

The Argentina import Zombie Apocalypse Now: A Zombie Hunter screened for the first time in the United States.

The film festival handed out more than 14 awards, including the top prize dubbed The Biggest Baddest Mother of the PollyGrind. There was awards for best use of music, nudity/sexuality, violence/gore, and most outrageous. The audience cast ballots each night to pick their favorite feature, short, music video and trailer.

Tickets for the event were $10 per day. For more information for next year’s fest, please email Chad Clinton Freeman at CCF@PollyStaffle.com or call at 702-372-3581. Please also visit grindhousefest.pollystaffle.com/.

Movie This Week. Robin Hood. The cast, production and costumes are terrific. The story is so muddled and lousy it stains Gladiator. Crowe was right to fight—as rumored—with Scott. He looks great.

The New York Post’s Page Six revealed last year that Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott, who were teaming up for the fifth time on ROBIN HOOD, “were not talking to each other costing the $175 million production millions of dollars.”

On June 9, 2009 Page Six said that “Crowe no longer wanted to work with Scott, whom he blamed for their disastrous fourth collaboration, “Body of Lies.”

Then, in January, Page Six reported how the Oscar-winning Crowe “ordered producers to get a new director and demanded script rewrites that devoted more of the plot to him.” Page Six continued: “The delays caused Sienna Miller to drop out, and Crowe had to go on a crash diet to drop 35 pounds because, as one producer noted, “We can’t have Robin Hood looking more like Friar Tuck."

Crowe looks fabulous and even takes his shirt off! After watching the film, I have to side with Crowe if indeed he refused to talk to Scott and demanded script changes—the movie is just lousy and a big disappointment.

Why did Crowe agree to do another bedroom scene between Robin Hood and old patriarch Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow) so identical to the GLADIATOR scene between Maximus and old patriarch Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris)?

How many times is Ridley Scott going to re-play this scene? What does this scene mean in his life? What problem is 73-year-old Scott still working on with his father?* I first saw it in BLADE RUNNER (1982)—the bedroom scene between Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer, pictured) and his creator Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkel).

The old guy always dies in the opulent bedroom. Creepy, huh?

Even the score by Marc Streitenfeld sounds eerily like GLADIATOR’S. Of course, the gladiators—Thank God—didn’t sing! There is too much singing by Robin’s men. They keep breaking into song!

In this prequel to the legend, Robin Hood (Crowe) has nothing to do with the confused and forgettable Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen, pictured). His band of Merry Men numbers three (Scott Grimes, Kevin Durand and Alan Doyle). Lady Marion (Cate Blanchett) is a warrior and tough as nails. Remember “robbing from the rich and giving to the poor”? Not here. Robin could care less about the poor, starving peasants of England.

Maybe the whole forest of Merry Men led by the outlaw Robin Hood looked too gay.

Robin Longstride isn’t even a thief! He’s an archer in Richard the Lionheart’s (Danny Huston) army. After a bloody defeat, Robin and his buddies steal the clothes of dead knights, assume their identities, and escape the battlefield.

A dying soldier asks Robin to take his sword back to his father in Nottingham. It so happens that the man’s old father is Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow). The man married Marion and then immediately—even that night—went to war for ten years. Lady Marion is almost a 35-year-old virgin! (Hence the name change from “Maid Marian” to Lady Marion?)

Sir Walter has a nutty plan to pretend that Robin is his long-lost son so his 5,000 acres does not go back to the king on his death which he thinks is imminent. He’s on “death watch.” And, to boot, Sir Walter knows the real story of Robin’s late father. He was a hero!

There is lots of political intrigue and royal flirting as petulant Prince John (Oscar Isaac) becomes king after Richard the Lionheart’s death and tries to gain control over the war with France. Instead of the infamous villain, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin’s rival is very mean Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong).

I would have liked more seduction between Robin and Marion. Crowe and Blanchett have chemistry and should do another movie together not directed by Scott.

If someone mocked Crowe into losing his BODY OF LIES weight (supposedly Crowe intentionally gained 63 pounds for the part just like De Niro did for RAGING BULL), it worked. He looks powerful and back in peak sexy form.

I loved the entire production which looked authentic. Castle life never looked like this! And Lady Marion milks cows and cleans horse droppings! She also knows how to kill with a bow.

The battle scenes are where Scott (pictured) excels but you know that with Crowe sulking in his trailer and screaming at the producers, Scott had time to indulge his passion for cruel deaths and warcraft.

*According to Wikipedia.org, “Ridley Scott was born in South Shields, in Tyne and Wear, England, Ridley Scott grew up in an Army family, meaning that for most of his early life, his father—an officer in the Royal Engineers—was absent.”

Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood Has An Irish Accent? “Robin Hood” opened the Cannes Film Festival and perhaps the bad reviews got to noted pacifist Crowe. He walked out of a British radio interview after the presenter suggested he had made Robin Hood sound Irish. The clearly-irritated Australian actor’s comments had to be bleeped out on a BBC radio show.

The interviewer then asked about a suggestion he had not wanted to deliver a famous line in his 2000 movie “Gladiator,” Crowe got up to leave.

A new book claims that Crowe threatened to kill “with [his] bare hands” elderly “Gladiator” producer Branko Lustig of “whom he felt was underpaying his staff.” The book, The Men Who Would Be King: An Almost Epic Tale of Moguls, Movies, and a Company called DreamWorks by Nicole Laporte, also reveals Crowe’s reluctance to deliver the film’s most famous line—“And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.”

According to LaPorte, Crowe was a “puffy pain” in the neck who twice walked off the set of Gladiator and threw a wobbly because he didn’t like his famous line at the climax of the film, “And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.”

After being persuaded to deliver it, Crowe is said to have told director Ridley Scott that he still thought it was a “shit” line, adding: “But I’m the greatest actor in the world and I can make even shit sound good.” Read more: www.thefirstpost.co.uk/.

Maximus: My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.