Caseus Archivelox: Diabolique, The Importance of Being Earnest, Happy Accidents, & The Two Towers

2002-12-29 - 11:38 p.m.
First off was Diabolique, or as the actual movie called itself, Les Diaboliques. Very Hitchcockian, and it's clear why he wanted to make the movie. There were some things he never would have gotten away with had he made it though: a scene of a preteen diving into a pool in tighty-whiteys and then walking around in them, kids said both f--- and s--- (taboo till the late 60s and certainly not ok for kids), and for most of the last ten minutes, the protagonists nipples were clearly visible through her thin nightdress. There is no way this would have been OK for a Hollywood film in the mid 50s. But beyond these little bits of French-ness, the movie was masterfully tense and there were definite things Hitchcock had to have loved, most dealing with how much of it revolved around the bathrooms and the loud pipes playing a big role. The theme of guilt was great and there was even a last scare that predated slasher films. The Criterion DVD had no extras and had some problems with the picture and the subtitles on my computer were not always legible, but the movie built suspense with minimal music and not much dialogue. Because the filmmakers want me not to spoil it (even having a title card at the end asking viewers not to tell the secrets of the film), I won't, but it predates Hitchcock asking movie theater owners not to seat people after Psycho started. I really recommend it if you like Vertigo, Psycho, and the like.

We watched The Importance of Being Earnest (the new one), which is one of the funniest plays of all time. However, it was cut a lot, but it had most of the funny lines. My dad fell asleep halfway through.

We watched Happy Accidents, sort of a mixture of 12 Monkeys and Sliding Doors, being not as good as either. And it also went back to La Jetee with stills and stutter-y motion for future scenes. Still, it wasn't even close to as bad as I was expecting, and Vincent D'Onofrio and Marisa Tomei were good. And the surprise cameo was hilarious.

2002-12-30 - 11:08 p.m.
I took most of the evening off, and watched The Two Towers. Which kicked the ass of pretty much every other movie out there. Although it isn't fair to compare them, because this is the second 3 (or so, depending on how long the movies extended editions are) hours of the greatest cinematic achievement of my lifetime. F---, another damn year of waiting for the next one. 'Course, I may just have to see it again. No more free ticket though. Maybe I'll just wait until they bring out the 4 minute fan trailer for the next one. They did have a great line though. Which I'm probably misquoting for my title (EDITOR'S NOTE: which was "Well, you are short. You are also smart.").

Caseus Archivelox: Safe, The Rules of Attraction, & Blade II

2002-12-09 - 11:27 p.m.
I just watched Safe, the Todd Haynes film with Julianne Moore. And I can't recommend it highly enough. Very disconcerting movie, (in a good way, unlike Titanic which was disconcertingly long or Armageddon which was disconcertingly suck) and Moore was excellent. It is a great multi-layered film like Haynes's other films, and it makes me want to see Far from Heaven an immense amount. And I still want to see Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story more than any movie ever made. Mainly because it's illegal, but also because Haynes, while frequently frustrating, is one of the most talented directors out there. Anyway, Safe had so many good things that the few things wrong with it were overcome.

2002-12-15 - 11:06 p.m.
Last night I went to see The Rules of Attraction, and have decided that the movie had more style than almost any other movie I've ever seen. The travelogue of Victor's trip to Europe was absolutely stunning. It was pretty well done. A little too snazzy for it to be perfect, but it was easily the best thing that James Van Der Suck has ever done. And it makes me realize that I probably would like Bret Easton Ellis. And I'll get to him at some point.

2002-12-19 - 9:50 p.m.
I got Blade II in the mail today, and it really wasn't as good as the first one. A little too sequel-ly. And then there's always the fact that Del Toro made a much better vampire movie in Cronos. Would have been much better had it been more like that one.

Caseus Archivelox: I Am Trying To Break Your Heart & Baran

2002-12-08 - 10:58 p.m.
I saw I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. It was a really good documentary about Wilco. If you hadn't heard of Wilco, then you probably wouldn't like it. For those who like them, then it's a generally well-done, if unenlightening, look at the band. And the performances are very good. They did play a lot more from Being There than I was expecting. And only one song from Summerteeth. So I was surprised, if not unhappy. And I didn't know that Jeff Tweedy is me as I want to be. In that he's a rock star, and he has migraines. Ok, so I don't want to have migraines, but he gets them, and the camera follows him into the bathroom to watch him puke. Which is just not right. There also wasn't much about Jim O'Rourke. Which isn't cool. And it was a little too "We're sticking it to the man". The music was good enough that I can forgive a lot of problems with the movie. Which is just the opposite of Muriel's Wedding, which was a good enough movie to overcome serious problems with the heavily ABBA soundtrack (EDITOR'S NOTE: I am complaining about Dancing Queen).

Today I watched Baran, which is about as far from an American film as you could imagine. One: it was about Iran. Two: it had, as a main character, Afghanis. Three: both Iranis and Afghanis were portrayed sympathetically. Four: it was in a foreign language. Five: the ending was not a traditional American ending. It was open to debate what would happen at the end. And six: it was slowly paced. But it was very good.

Snow Angels, Taxi to the Dark Side, The Damned United, Sita Sings the Blues, & The Prisoner

Snow Angels is a depressing film by David Gordon Green, director of the excellent George Washington, the less excellent Undertow (the first time I think I'd ever seen Kristen Stewart), and Pineapple Express. This falls much more towards the first two, a look at a divorced couple and their daughter and the boy that the wife used to babysit. It's full of good performances: Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Nicky Katt, Amy Sedaris, Michael Angarano, and hipster-to-be Olivia Thirlby (seriously, just look at the glasses and the camera). I think I wouldn't have liked it as much had there not been as much growth from Michael as the boy, because otherwise it would've been a little too depressing.

Taxi to the Dark Side is another in a long line of documentaries about how messed up Iraq and Afghanistan are/were. Better than some, although not as masterfully frakked as Standard Operating Procedure. Maybe I should check to see if I have any more documentaries about the War on Philosophy and maybe move them much further down in my queue. Possibly even off it entirely. I'm not sure I need to keep watching them.

The Damned United is the story of probably the biggest flameout in sports history. Seriously, it's the stupidest job decision ever. What the hell was the board thinking when they offered Brian Clough the job at Leeds United? And what the hell was Brian thinking when he took it? It's really quite a good film, with strong performances from Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall. It's about a time in English soccer that I really didn't know that much about. Dirty soccer being played with lots of diving and cheap shots? Certainly wouldn't pass in current days, and I imagine the better sports coverage allows for more obvious penalties. Certainly that New Mexico player may have gotten away with it during the game, but the cameras caught everything.

Sita Sings the Blues is an animated film almost entirely done by Nina Paley. It combines the story of her husband leaving her, the story of Sita and Rama (told by people who can't quite agree on what was happening and when), and has musical interludes of Annette Hanshaw songs that comment on the links between the two stories. It's an interesting film, although I wouldn't say it was great. I object immensely to the rights issues that she had to go through to get this film released. Annette Hanshaw stopped recording in the 1930s. This was released last year. The rights holders were asking for $220,000 for a small film that few were going to see? That's utterly ridiculous. These were state laws rather than federal laws, but this is clearly stuff that should be in the public domain, because it's been almost 80 years since some of these recordings were made, and the performer is dead. There's no excuse for this. None.

The Prisoner ends with seriously one of the most messed up finales of all time. It's batguano insane, and although the episodes leading up to it were also pretty messed up (I watched it in the KTEH order, as opposed to the DVD order, which is really annoying, having to change DVDs almost every episode, or at least the order), it's really pretty hard to understand just how messed up it is. I know that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have seen this show, and I have this fear that they're going to go this route with Season 6. But they're at least going to have a little more time to put this together, since there're some weird shifts. I don't want to be more specific, because you should really see this, in order (I almost totally agree with the KTEH order rather than the DVD order, which is what I saw it in college). Lost has been pretty trippy, but I expect an online revolt on the order of the ending of The Sopranos except nerdier (and far less stupid) if the ending is anything like this.

You Don't Mess with the Zohan, Mad Dog and Glory, Knocked Up, & The Rug Cop

You Don't Mess with the Zohan is occasionally very funny. And frequently very stupid. If only hummus could actually solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maybe we need to send Michael Buffer there to unite them in anti-Bufferness. Did you know he's doing the intros for Duke players at Cameron this year? What the hell?

Mad Dog and Glory would have been better had it been cast the way it was planned with Robert DeNiro as the gangster-comic and Bill Murray as the cop-photographer. Uma Thurman can be the moll anytime. Richard Price scripted it for John McNaughton, two talented people, but it didn't work as a comedy or as a drama. I did like seeing Richard Belzer as the MC at the comedy club.

Knocked Up is a movie I'd seen over half of on E! in a censored version, which is probably not the best way to watch it for the first (or, really, any) time. Eh, I'm not really that sure that anything could have made this movie a comedy through and through. Maybe I just shouldn't expect that from a Judd Apatow film, but this bodes poorly for my appreciation of Funny People. I want them to be funnier than they are, and the overly treacly baby montage really just sucked the funny out of the end of the film. Because otherwise, it's a completely unrealistic relationship, but things were pretty funny otherwise. Actually, can anyone, anywhere, remember an actually funny music montage (besides meta-montages like in Team America)? I'm probably being far too hard on the film.

The Rug Cop is by the same guy who did Executive Koala. So it's weird. In this case, it's about a cop who gets dumped because he's bald, and then discovers he can use his toupee as a weapon. He joins a police station with a handsome cop (women commit crimes just to be interrogated by him), an old cop, a fat cop, a short cop, a young female police officer, and a cop nicknamed Big Dick, who uses his enormous penis as a weapon when he gets aroused. Normal cop film otherwise, really: cop discovers terrorist plot, and then through a series of investigations and random coincidences, solves everything, and ends up with a happy ending. The musical interlude was way too long, causing the film to feel much longer than the short 80 minute running time. The best scene in the movie, though, is the first one, where the Rug Cop foils a bank robbery using only his toupee. Oh, and the most important thing about the robbery is that the robber is the ventriloquist dummy. Not the ventriloquist. It's delightfully low budget. Not as good as Executive Koala. See that one first, and if you want more weirdness, see this.

The Serpent's Egg, The Last Laugh, Inglourious Basterds, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, & Star Trek

The Serpent's Egg is just depressing. David Carradine is a Jewish trapeze artist whose brother kills himself and whose sister-in-law starts to break down, and this is all against the backdrop of 1923 Weimar Germany. And there's lots of foreshadowing of the rise of Nazism and the horrors of the Holocaust. Ingmar Bergman moved out of his comfort zone and just whiffed on this one.

The Last Laugh is one of the most famous silent films of all time, mainly due to there being no intertitles. Well, there's one, and honestly, I would have liked the movie much more had the entire ending not been there. When you have the movie just come out and say "I've added a happy ending because I don't want you to be depressed", that's just crap, although the coming out and telling you just how cynical the ending was made it clear that Murnau never would have done it without being forced. Before that point, it's a depressing look at a doorman, played by Emil Jannings, who is fired basically for being old, and he starts to be ignored by everyone and spirals into horribleness. Technically masterful, definitely a worthwhile silent film.

Inglourious Basterds has Emil Jannings appear, who was in real life a huge Nazi. I think that was just the topping on the cake that was the most satisfying WWII film I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot. Really, the film has a Jew beating on a Nazi with a baseball bat (what can you do?). Besides that, it has Quentin Tarantino being ridiculously awesome with his dialogue and full of hilarious film references. There's just so much awesome in it that it's hard for me to remotely objective. Samuel L. Jackson as the narrator of the story of Til Schweiger as the Nazi-hating German, B.J. Novak in the interrogation scene, Michael Fassbender's explanation for his accent, everything that Christoph Waltz does in the entire film (especially the strudel), and Brad Pitt. Just the way he says "Oblige him" is worth the movie. I also loved the switching fonts in the credits and the words not translated in the subtitles. Just all the bits of the film that call attention to the filmness of it just made me love it more. The few references to the original Inlgorious Bastards were minor, and really completely secondary to my enjoyment. Except that it's clear that if you want a great movie, you need actual talent involved.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is... utterly unnecessary. Even if it did finally give people something to say other than Jump the Shark. Nuke the fridge is only one of the many ridiculous things involved in this film, including ripping off better things from earlier Indiana Jones films, and is just... eh. Honestly, if the film were worse I'd have some kind of interest in mocking it, but it's really just not good enough to praise or bad enough to mock. Just eh.

Star Trek is the flip-side: big budget filmmaking that works pretty much unreservedly. Sure the lens flares were annoying, but when that's the biggest complaint you have about a film, that's not too bad at all. Everyone was just about right, the story was exciting, the call backs to Star Treks before were quite clever, and I am curious to know if this new timeline also has an extremely annoying Wesley Crusher? Actually, I really haven't seen any of the shows (an episode here and there), but I've seen 2-6, plus the first two Next Generation movies (so that's 7-8?). So I'm not a hard core Trekkie, but I am familiar enough with the Internet to know memes when they exist, and I've picked up quite a bit of Trek knowledge from my friends. But the film works quite well as an action movie.

More Gen-Y Cops

I'm not sure that I fully expressed the terribleness that is Gen-Y Cops in my review of it. As such, I think you need to go here and watch that video. Seriously. I'll wait.

Is that not amazing?

Link found due to the awesomeness that is Paul Rudd's obsession with Mac & Me, and the AV Club's obsession with covering everything that is awesomely terrible with this My Year of Flops entry. I remember watching and liking it when I was 9, but I don't remember the dance scene at the McDonald's or the Buccaneers participating in it (although their dancing explains why they suck). I do remember being insanely happy when Paul Rudd would do Conan and pull out that clip (which I did remember from the movie, because it's horrifying). My favorite part of the Rudd clip from MYOF entry? THE ENTIRE THING!

Big Trouble, Butte, America: The Saga of a Hard Rock Mining Town, and video games

Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas is about the murder of Frank Steunenberg, probably by members of the Western Federation of Miners in Caldwell, Idaho in 1905. Throughout the awesome book, he weaves in Ethyl Barrymore, Walter Johnson, Clarence Darrow, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, William Borah, and many more well-known people of the time, all of whom had some connection to the trial. Really, it's an amazingly well-researched book, and it's a shame that Lukas committed suicide before the book was published. I am a huge fan of sprawling historical epics, about society at the time as much as the "plot". This one has sections on theatre agents, detective agencies, baseball, lawyering, labor strife, forestry, the Spanish American War, racial strife, journalism, and... well... it really just covers so much. It may be a huge book, and it took me a few months to read it (with breaks for comics), but it's really good. I saw that PBS's Independent Lens was going to air a documentary about Butte, Montana and the mining industry there. Butte, America was only an hour long, and it focused much more on more recent labor troubles rather than the labor troubles that lead to Steunenberg's assassination, so I wasn't as into it as I thought. I wanted it to be much better than I got. Not to say it wasn't good, but I felt like it didn't go very deep at all. Ugh. Terrible pun.

Well, in the last three months, I've purchased five video games for the PS3 (The Beatles: Rock Band, Katamari Forever, Fallout 3, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, and Lego Rock Band) and one for the PC (Torchlight). Apparently, I do have too much money. I am singlehandedly keeping the video game industry alive. Well, at least I haven't purchased Dragon Age: Origins or Assassin's Creed II or any other games I've been tempted by, because my games are certainly taking up more than enough of my time as it is. Because that's why it was so long between posts. I am enjoying all of the games, and regret none of the purchases. Well, except for their effect on my ability to do anything else.

A Death in Tehran, TV Funhouse, Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 7, Bored To Death, & Andy Barker, P.I.

A Death in Tehran is a Frontline episode about Neda Agha Soltan's murder at the hands of the government militia in Iran. Everytime I think about Iran, all I can think about is the Twittervolution, which is just one of the many times that I feel like technology could be something really important, and yet, it can't do everything alone. I appreciate that so many people tried to do things from outside Iran, but a lot of it isn't going to make any real difference without government support both inside and outside the revolution. But it also feels like a revolution without a great deal of support outside of the middle and upper classes. Which hasn't been enough for a revolution since... well, I can't think of one. It's normally the other way around.

TV Funhouse is the short run series from Robert Smigel with lots of puppets doing very dirty things. I don't remember if I saw all of them when they first aired, but it is an occasionally funny show. Curb Your Enthusiasm's seventh season has the Seinfeld reunion that will never happen in real life, but worked very well as about 15 minutes of material (repeated in various forms) within the normal craziness that is Curb. I am not sure that bits of episodes worked as well as previous seasons, but the overarching plot was about the same quality as expected. I miss Seinfeld, but that is the greatest reunion show episode ever. Bored to Death is probably a little too pot-hipster-y. Which for some reason I don't really care for? It was ok, great cast, and could be good in the future if it comes back and figures out that it's a comedic film noir, and not just a film noir. Plus, I've rewatched the new DVD of Andy Barker, P.I. and concur with my previous estimation. Of both that and American Idol (with the added note that it's not just Since U Been Gone, it's all of Kelly Clarkson's output).

The Small Back Room, An American Crime, & Prick Up Your Ears

The Small Back Room is about a drunk bomb expert with a metal leg doing his thing in WWII Britain. As such, it really isn't all that interesting, but it's a Powell & Pressburger film, so I watched it. It's melodramatic to a fault that their other films never approached.

An American Crime has Ellen Page, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, and James Franco in a small role. It's about the true story of a woman who has her children and neighborhood kids torture a boarder in 1965 Indiana. Eesh. Miserable film, especially with the Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge ending. That this is based on a true story makes me wonder how people can do this sort of thing to other people.

Prick Up Your Ears is the story of Joe Orton, a gay British playwright in the 1960s, who was murdered by his lover. Stephen Frears directed, Alan Bennett wrote it, Gary Oldman, Alfred Molina, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Walters, and Wallace Shawn are in it. So it's really extremely good. Maybe a little depressing, but man, Gary Oldman is great.

Outsourced, Perhaps Love, & Wristcutters: A Love Story

Outsourced comes up with a fake Kama Sutra position: Monkey Pulls the Turnip. What could the turnip signify? I need to know, but since it's not real, I got nothing. The film itself is a fairly typical plotted romantic comedy, although this did have the added bonus of Indians in cheese-heads. And some kind of idea of cultural critique of outsourcing and ridiculous Americanness. The lead female had huge eyes, and was in a Doctor Who episode and Attack of the Clones. And there was a poop joke, pretty early on. So, recommend or no? If you see one film about outsourcing leading to a cheesy George Washington commemorative plate wearing a third eye, see this one. It really all depends if you want to see a non-offensive romantic comedy in there.

Perhaps Love is a big budget, for China, musical. It's about a director and actor fighting over the same woman, making a musical about two men fighting over the same woman. I think it's trying to say something, but I didn't enjoy the musical numbers and I didn't enjoy the film. Eh to it all.

Wristcutters: A Love Story stars Patrick Fugit as a guy who commits suicide (SPOILER ALERT!) in the first scene, and goes to a sort of halfway world of no smiles, weirdness, and little color. He meets a family of suicides and starts to wander around, picks up a hitchhiking Shannyn Sossamon, has to search for Tom Waits's dog, and watches Will Arnett be wacky. It's full of Gogol Bordello songs (and other great music) and Eastern European names, along with some strange ideas about what the afterlife would be like. But I enjoyed the film, and even though it's a little cheesy, it's an enjoyable film.

Day of Wrath, Alexander Nevsky, Love in the Time of Hysteria, Quartet for the End of Time, & Wedding Night

Day of Wrath was made by Carl Theodor Dreyer during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. And as such, it's a not-all-that-subtle attack on the Nazi occupation. A young wife falls for her older husband's young son (something that Bergman also dealt with, in much funnier fashion, in Smiles of a Summer Night), and when he dies, she's accused of witchcraft. But basically, it's using 17th century witchcraft and the craziness that came with it to comment on Nazism.

Alexander Nevsky is an anti-German Eisenstein film, with a remarkably wooden performance from Nikolai Cherkasov as the titular character. It isn't a film as much as an excuse for Russians to kill Germans. In the 13th century, which they're very careful to point out a few times. But really, Eisenstein definitely made better films, and the suppression of it after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact may not have been all that bad. It really is just a horribly anti-German and Christian film. Also, the DVD is crap, with barely legible subtitles.

Love in the Time of Hysteria is an early Almodovar-esque sex farce, but made by Alfonso Cuaron (consequently much less gay sex), as the film that made him famous. And it's beautifully filmed with lots and lots of greens, as Cuaron is wont to do. And funny, but oh so wrong. A cad, who enjoys running down to get his paper in the nude, sleeps with his nurse, who gets very offended when he ends up having sex with a different woman in the next apartment basically at the same time, fakes tests so that he thinks he has AIDS. And then learns life lessons as he unwittingly sexually harasses his neighbor, a flight attendant. And there's a luchador and a conquistador in a bizarre dream sequence. And an American who microwaved her poodle is a running joke.

Also on that DVD are two short films, one from Alfonso, and the other from his brother. Alfonso's Quartet for the End of Time is about a loner. It doesn't work at all, but it's one of his earliest films, and as such, has a built in excuse. Carlos Cuaron's Wedding Night, on the other hand, shows his brother's focus on sex and comedy is a family trait, and is pretty funny.

Doomsday, Gen-Y Cops, & La Vie en Rose

Doomsday is a mess of a film, mixing 28 Days Later, Mad Max, and Reign of Fire together and getting a film that is much, much, much less than the sum of those parts. Bob Hoskins is fun, but Malcolm McDowell was utterly worthless, and Rhona Mitra is not a particularly good actress. Not a good movie, and makes me start to rethink my likes of Dog Soldiers and The Descent. Really, there's actual car stunts, decapitations, and crazy amounts of violence in this film, and I still hated it.

Gen-Y Cops is terrible. Paul Rudd, however, is in a Hong Kong action film where he helps to fight a robot. And, yet, reread that first sentence.

La Vie en Rose has some odd stylistic choices, like not one, but two newspaper montages, a completely gratuitous topless shot, and a wordless montage of Edith Piaf's big performance. The film was really just a mess. It could have been better, but it wasn't very good at all. Marion Cotillard was good, I guess, but I definitely do not think this movie was for me at all.

Charlie Bartlett, Smart People, & Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

Charlie Bartlett is directed by a guy who has an impressively bad collection of editing credits (note that I'm not including Cabin Boy as a bad movie in it, just pretty much every other editing job and honestly, the editing in Cabin Boy wasn't all that hot either), but it also has Robert Downey Jr. as an alcoholic principal. Basically that's his role now, isn't it? He just tries to find people with addictions and just be extremely awesome in those roles? Anton Yelchin and Kat Dennings (I'm not sure what to say about this head/chest shot) are charming enough, but pretty much everything that wasn't completely related to those three characters and their interpersonal relationships just didn't work well. The writer also wrote Youth in Revolt, which is coming out soon with Michael Cera being a badass. Or something to that effect.

Smart People got no reason, smart people got no reason, smart people got no reason to exist. And this film really, really makes that argument. I like Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church, and Dennis Quaid, who've all done some good work occasionally, but Sarah Jessica Parker really is terrible. It's not particularly good, it's not horrible enough to laugh at, so it's just there. I guess having Ellen Page be an overachieving Young Republican is an interesting choice, but that's about it. If I'm going to see one film about a misanthropic writer learning life lessons in Pennsylvania, I'm certainly just going to rewatch Wonder Boys.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay starts with a fantasy sequence that is interrupted by a real-life White House staffer leaving a disgustingly loud poop. Which should give you an idea of the humor level of the movie. Disgustingly huge pubic hair on a dude? Yep (although that was in the middle of a many merkined bottomless party). Disgustingly stereotyped everyone in the movie? Yep. Disgustingly homophobic prison scenes? Yep. Disgustingly huge tits (on Tits Hemingway, who also likes the only Hemingway book that I think is remotely worth reading, A Moveable Feast)? Yep. All that said, I liked it, but it wasn't nearly as good as the first, since that one seemed to just be crazy pot humor, as opposed to some awkward political satire on top of pot humor. Neil Patrick Harris is great, in everything he does, and I now fully get the NPH on a unicorn in front of a rainbow reference I've seen online for the last couple years. Yay? It was fitfully funny, frequently stupid, and extremely disrespectful to Republicans and their ilk. One last thing, has anyone ever heard of anyone actually interrupting a wedding and having it end happily for anyone? It happens all the time in pop culture, but I have never once heard of it even happening in real life, let alone with a happy ending?

Hana, Maiko Haaaan!!!, The Eagle Shooting Heroes, & Ashes of Time Redux

Hana is a samurai film from Hirokazu Koreeda, who also made the amazingly good Afterlife. This one wasn't all that, but an interesting tale of a young man plotting revenge against his father's murderer. He falls for a woman with a young son and starts to teach writing and math to the local kids. And he has to decide what's more important to himself, revenge or living his own life. Of course, it's a subtle attack on the desire for revenge above all, and one of the things that I like: pointing out ridiculousness in history that generally gets ignored by most period movies. I liked it, but it's definitely not Koreeda's best, and not as good as Mabrosi, either.

Maiko Haaaan!!! is a slapstick comedy about a noodle bowl company worker who is obsessed with Geisha, to the point of ignoring his girlfriend and taking a job in Kyoto so he can meet Geisha. And then the girlfriend starts to become one, and he starts fighting in real life with someone flaming his Geisha website. And... well, it just gets far too ridiculous and stupid. The lead was distractingly over the top in a film with almost entirely real-seaming characters (some of the things they are able to do are silly, but they undeniably live in a real world, while the lead just doesn't exist in any reality remotely near ours), there are musical numbers, and the entire movie revolves around strip baseball, which I am pretty sure is just an extremely bad translation. There were no strip grand slams that I could figure out. Boo.

The Eagle Shooting Heroes is a slapstick wuxia film made at the same time as Ashes of Time (which, although I definitely watched when I had a blog, I never actually wrote up when I saw it in November of 2002, and was, in fact, my first ever movie from Netflix). This is horrible Hong Kong slapstick, full of mistaken identities, cross dressing, gay "humor", ridiculous wirework, fake sets, and just general crappiness. It's strange to see so many extremely talented actors (really, it's almost every famous Hong Kong star of the 90s except for Chow Yun-Fat) just horribly waste their talent in service of this crap. This was a perfect excuse to watch my Ashes of Time Redux DVD, though. As it has been about 7 years since I saw the original version of the movie, and it was a particularly crappy DVD, I can't quite say how much better this version was than the original. But I almost was able to follow the plot this time. Just kidding.

Outrage, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, & Monty Python Almost the Truth

Outrage is all about Gay Republicans being outed. As such, there wasn't all that much I didn't know about. Although I was heartened to see just how much there was about Charlie Crist being a big homo. Because he is. Seriously. He did have the best dirty trick against himself though: he leaked that he had an illegitimate child. Brilliant. No gay person could have ever had a child with his beard. Kirby Dick actually made a much less sensationalistic film than I was expecting, dialing back on the worst part of This Film Is Not Yet Rated (the PIs tracking the MPAA ratings board members). I also got to see one of the few local politicians I have ever voted for to win (didn't happen a lot in Cincinnati) in David Catania. That was nice. Basically everyone interviewed in it, short of Andrew Sullivan and Barney Frank came off as supportive of the outing, and it's more that Barney was a little ambivalent. After the Maine election being supported strongly by the Catholic church, however, he seems to have changed his tune.

Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl is not as good a collection of Python bits as And Now for Something Completely Different, and the shots of the crowd just reminded me of how much drugs were probably being consumed and were going through the bloodstreams of the audience. At only 77 minutes long, it also strangely felt padded with unfunny songs from the post-show career that just aren't nearly as good as anything done on the show. So pretty much frustrating, but full of funny bits. Just stick with watching the TV show.

Monty Python: Almost the Truth is the six part documentary about the history of the Monty Python troupe. It's funny, full of clips, interviews (can someone please tell me how Russell Brand is liked by anyone?), and behind the scenes tidbits. If you like Python, it's pretty interesting.

The Spirit of the Beehive, City of Men, & The Counterfeiters

The Spirit of the Beehive is the film that Pan's Labyrinth was clearly very influenced by. Except this one has a lot less Pan or Labyrinth, and much more Spanish Civil War is bad. I actually watched this... back last semester with Sally Albright, for her Spanish class. I seem to have not written up a review myself though. Because I own the DVD and didn't remember to list it when I was writing up stuff. Let's see... the main character is obsessed after watching the original Frankenstein, and seems to think that a deserter is actually Frankenstein's monster. Is this really all it's about? It's a metaphor for what happened in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War, and yet it was still made under Franco's rule, it's a beautiful film about death, and most importantly, it's a masterful film. Even if it weren't amazing, that it inspired Guillermo del Toro to make Pan's Labyrinth, it would deserve a place in film history.

City of Men is the movie finale (maybe?) to the stories started in the absolutely brilliant City of God, and slightly less good City of Men tv show. This follows that trajectory. I'm not sure that we needed to spend more time with them, although the ending was quite a bit more Hollywood than I was expecting. It's weird to have seen this so soon after watching Rio be awarded the Olympic games and the high-profile anti-gang violence in the favelas that followed. Definitely seems like Rio and Brazil may have a struggle to stop things like this movie happening and possibly involving some Olympic athletes.

The Counterfeiters won the Oscar for best foreign language film. Up against a bunch of other films I haven't seen, I can't judge whether it deserved the award, but it covered a part of the Holocaust (and WWII) that I didn't know about: the German attempt to destabilize the English Pound and American Dollar by producing huge amounts of counterfeit money and dropping them over enemy lines. You'd think that with all of my knowledge of Jews and the Holocaust, I would have seen something about this, but nope. I am a sucker for a good Holocaust film, though, and this was really good, with a great performance from Karl Markovics as the slimy titular counterfeiter.

The Inglorious Bastards, Kiss of the Spider Woman, & Cars

The Inglorious Bastards is the correctly spelled original, not the Tarantino reusing of the title. Still haven't seen that. This is... a mess, has the least realistic five guys go around and kill everyone with just a few shots, never reload and never get hit gunfights outside of a John Woo film. But at least there, they're filmed well. It's a late 70s war film with stupid characters, unlikely plot twists, a love story that's completely unnecessary, Fred Williamson there almost entirely so that the Nazis would never believe them as Germans, people throwing themselves off a train, and just general silliness. It's racist, misogynistic, and all the things you'd expect from a cheesy 70s film. It reminded me of the movies I used to watch back when I would watch anything about war. And it reminded me of that one scene in Commando where they burst into the next room in the motel just so you can see some tits. But this time it's naked women firing machine guns, sure to get any red-blooded American male hard.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is really good, and it led to thic conversation:
me: watching kiss of the spider woman
Sally Albright: that sounds terrible.
me: imdb it
me: it's really good
Sally Albright: not what I was expecting from the title
Basically, William Hurt puts forward one of the most impressive roles of the 80s, as an imprisoned gay man, sharing a cell with a political prisoner played by Raul Julia (shortly after his triumphant role in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank), and their brief time sharing a cell. It's a very simple plot, except that there's many layers, with Hurt telling the story of a half-remembered Nazi movie that touchingly reflects upon the action of the film. Definitely see this film.

Cars is... amazingly bad for a Pixar film. I have loved every Pixar film I have seen (although when A Bug's Life and Antz came out, I preferred Antz, but now see one as a somewhat enjoyable film and another as great), and their non-Cars films have been better and better going through WALL-E, but this was just offensive. And not funny or good in any way. There's the hippy who sells organic fuel, the sassy black woman, the Italian who sells tires and is obsessed with Ferraris, the Hispanic who has a low-rider and a bodypainting place, Larry the Cable Guy is in it... I mean, how much more offensive do you need to go? But really, the worst thing is that it is a completely non-funny spin of Doc Hollywood (still one of my favorite PG-13 topless scenes, everyone!). And I made it about two minutes before I tried to figure out how the world worked, and realized that there were no humans at all, but somehow they're able to use phones with dialpads, cars have headsets, cars have tongues, and the thing that bothers me is that helicopters don't have pilots. Basically the movie was one long "Make CV really annoyed". I made it through about an hour of it before others were not interested in going on, and I realized I was only watching it to see if it could possibly either be much worse or somehow get better. But it didn't seem like it was going to change, and watching extremely disappointing films is nowhere near as fun as watching films I know are going to be remotely good. And... um... I couldn't stop wondering how more cars are made? Is there car sex in this reality?

Caseus Archivelox: Firelight, The Best Man, Exodus, Harvard Man, & Time of Favor

2002-11-02 - 12:05 a.m.
The first one was Firelight. A sort of Romance novel filmed. With a crappy female fantasy of finding a rich man who is willing to pay for her and then kill his wife for her. Yeah. Really predictable, and any skill shown by Sophie Marceau or the director is wasted in a completely by the book movie. Except for the nudity. There was no time at which I didn't know what was going to happen really. I sort of expected a slightly happier ending, but eh, sadder ending was not any better. Title (Won't bend down. Wig'll fall off.) is something their butler said a couple times, which, while funny, was certainly not something you'd expect from a traditional film, showing a little too much self-reflexive humor for the movie.

2002-11-03 - 12:27 a.m.
The Best Man, an Italian movie from 1998. It was boring as f---. That's really boring. I didn't like any of the characters, it was slow, the dialogue was bland, and it was probably the worst Italian film I have ever seen. That I can remember. And I've seen Italian lesbian vampire films. So you know it's gotta suck. Maybe the last film will be better. I'll let you know when I see it. Oh, and this one has the stupidest opening scrawl and it has the stupidest last line. I think it was the title. I honestly was bored out of my mind for most of the movie, so I can't really remember if it was it or not. But it was set on New Years Eve, 1900. It just sucked.

2002-11-03 - 10:36 p.m.
The movie was Exodus, a special 40th Anniversary remastered version. And for a remastered version of a film, it was in the worst shape I've ever seen. There were lots of scratches, bad sound (sometimes even unsynchronized with the video), and there were scenes edited out. And the film didn't end, it broke. Can't anyone get a good print of a movie? The movie was still pretty good, if long, and a little too 60s for a movie set in the 40s. The movie was at the local big nice theater, and it was full of Jews. At least they had an intermission. They did give out a nice ticket and booklet full of stories from the production of the movie. It was nice.

2002-11-06 - 10:31 p.m.
I watched Harvard Man this evening. One quick thing to mention, would someone explain to me why it says that Ray Allen died in 2000 on the IMDB? I want to point that out before I tell them it's wrong. But it does say that he died on September 15, 2000 in Milwaukee. What's up with that? (EDITOR'S NOTE: This has since been changed.) It was good, nothing too special, except for the absolutely hilarious cameo in the middle of the film. Honestly, it's funnier if you don't expect it, so if you don't want to be spoiled, don't read anymore of this paragraph. I mean it. It won't be as funny if you know. Ok, so Alan took lots of LSD and was running around campus, and he runs into Al Franken and his erstwhile Duke student daughter, Thomasin. It was funny because he really wanted her to go to Harvard, but she mentioned Duke. Which is funny because she went to Duke for a year and then transferred to Harvard. And I saw a naked picture of her. Which is what, I'm convinced, caused her to want to leave Duke. In the movie, he said that she gets too easily embarrassed.

2002-11-13 - 10:41 p.m.
I went to see Time of Favor tonight. It was probably the best Israeli film I've seen. I really highly recommend it. I didn't know enough Hebrew to pick up a lot of the lines, but there were subtitles, even if they were plain white ones, the movie was generally dark enough that I only didn't see one word, and then the camera angle changed, so it was all good. The actors in it were all really good as well, even if the main guy looked like Liev Schreiber, the main girl looked like Amber Benson, the other guy looked like Alan Cumming. And that wasn't all, but I'll let you try to figure them out. Well, except for one, Mookie looked like 1955 Biff from Back to the Future. That should be fun. I can just picture you seeing it now thinking: What is Tara doing going for Cotton Weary? She should be going for Willow. And isn't Alan Cumming gay?

Caseus Archivelox: Insomnia & Last Orders

2002-10-31 - 11:23 p.m.
I just realized that I had forgotten to mention what I did Sunday night to require the taping of Alias. I watched the remake of Insomnia. Now, it's too easy to say that the remake is weaker than the original, but it really was. The acting wasn't noticeably better, and the script left a lot less to the imagination. One of the strong points of the original film was that it was difficult to tell why and whether Dormer (or whatever his name was in the original) killed his partner. And the fact that it all occurs during the bright daytime makes the dark aspects work better. The remake explains too much and the lack of darkness isn't as important. Chris Nolan is an obviously talented director (see Memento), but, in this case, he is working from a lackluster script and he gets bogged down trying to do too much with his cast. And Pacino was coasting. He plays the tired cop too well. That's not to say it wasn't a good movie, but it definitely doesn't compare favorably with the original Norwegian film.

What reminded me of that was that we watched Last Orders tonight. That and Gosford Park basically had every single famous English actor currently working. This one had Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, David Hemmings, Ray Winstone, and Helen Mirren (also in Gosford Park, and Caligula, which I haven't seen, because I haven't found it in a video store in the uncut version). It was weird to see David Hemmings as a large man with huge eyebrows, one week after seeing him as the young, dashing Thomas in Blow-Up. I'd say it was weird to see Tom Courtenay again, but I'd only seen two movies he was in: Doctor Zhivago (which was so long I can't remember his character) and Leonard Part 6, of which I thankfully can't remember any. Bob Hoskins, Michael Caine, and Ray Winstone all made movies more recently, and the only major problem I had with Helen Mirren was that she didn't look 70 (the age of her character). That's obviously a backhanded compliment, because she looked her age, which was 55 or 56 when it was made. She was good, just I think it was weird that she had a 50 year old daughter in the film, because it didn't seem physically possible. The movie was excellent, and it makes me want to read Graham Swift's novel. I loved Waterland very much when I read it in 12th grade, and it made me want to go see the fens of England. Here's a hint: think of the flattest land you've ever seen, and then picture it ten times flatter, and you'd get some idea of the fens. There was also a terrible traffic jam when my mom and bro and I were there. We did stop off and see Ely (pronounced EE-lee) Cathedral, which stuck out like a sore thumb. Cambridge is also near there, but there was literally no hills, no nothing for miles around. I have a picture of myself on the side of the road, and I gave it to my English teacher to show her what the fens were like, and she put it up on the wall in the classroom. I doubt it's still up there, but that area was totally flat. Back to the movie: the skipping back and forth in time would be Tarantinoesque if it hadn't been done before, or if it weren't how Swift writes. Another little problem with the film was that they were speaking in heavy working class accents, which made it hard to understand, so we turned on the subtitles. Score another point for DVDs.

The stuff about Last Orders was already posted here, but I figured I'd just repost everything.

Caseus Archivelox: The Piano Teacher, Blow-Up, The Magnificent Ambersons, Happy Together, Fallen Angels, Kissing Jessica Stein, & Tape

2002-10-27 - 10:11 p.m.
I then went off to Griffith to watch The Piano Teacher. What the f--- is it with the French and pretentiousness films about sex? Baise Moi, Romance, Fat Girl, and The Piano Teacher. I've only seen Romance and The Piano Teacher, and neither were worth my time. Although now I can say that I've seen an Italian porn star's penis. That's not really something that I am proud of though. I just don't see the point in a movie about a sado-masochistic pianist who lives with her mother. And it didn't have an ending that made much sense. I don't see why the French make pretentious sex movies. And then they get praise or notoriety because of said stuff. I guess we Americans aren't completely immune, as we make a hell of a lot of porn each year and percentages say that some has to be pretentious. Hell, some softcore porn I've seen would fit into that category. As in, it tries to have some deep meaning, but it's really just an excuse to see silicone on screen. But at least most wasn't being raised to some lofty height and being suggested that it said something deep about the human condition. The movie was about Schubert and S&M, nothing more.

I went with Blow-Up and The Magnificent Ambersons. Both excellent movies. Blow-Up would've been better had Antonioni used the Velvet Underground as originally planned, because all I could think of when I saw the Yardbirds was how much cooler it would have been with the VU. Mime tennis is also bizarre. Magnificent Ambersons had my new reply when someone asks me what I want to do with my life: a yachtsman. That sounds like a fun job. Neither movie was particularly happy (I choose to ignore the ending added without Welles's blessing).

I checked the online catalog and went with two Wong Kar-Wai films: Happy Together and Fallen Angels. I started with Happy Together, and it's a very gay movie. Lots of shots of the two main characters in tighty whiteys. It is full of wonderfully Wong Kar-Wai touches: fast-mo, slo-mo, freeze frames in the middle of shots, changing grains, going from black and white to color (much better than in the early version of 13 Days I saw), handheld shots, shakycam, very good use of music, lots of overexposure and very bright shots. I was just thinking that the major problem I had with The Piano Teacher was the masochism. I'm not a masochist, at least not a physical one, and I don't like pain, so I just felt incredibly uncomfortable, and I didn't like when she couldn't suppress her gag reflex. I do, however, seem to pick women who are likely to cause me pain. That's not really relevant to anything though. It was just a great movie. Wong Kar-Wai really knows what he's doing, and Chris Doyle is a perfect complement to his skills. I just checked and he also cinematographer for Liberty Heights (a beautiful movie) and for the as-yet unreleased The Quiet American. I really want to see that.

After that, I watched Fallen Angels, originally to be the 3rd part of Chungking Express. The DVD video quality was much worse than for Happy Together, with lots of obvious grain. The gunfights are staged to be as outlandishly over-the-top as John Woo's, but the plot is much more affecting. And the scene where He falls in love with Charlie is one very cool scene. And it hurts all the more afterwards. I mean, it was such a sad and beautiful movie. So if you're wondering what makes me cry: Fallen Angels. That is just a great movie.

I then went to see Kissing Jessica Stein at Griffith. I guess it was good but my friends and I all saw parts of our families on screen, but we also saw almost every plot twist telegraphed. One reason is that we've seen too many movies, but more likely it's that the movie (with the exception of the lesbian angle and the occasionally unnecessary jump cuts and other weird editing and handheld camera choices) was a fairly run of the mill romantic comedy: two neurotic New Yorkers meet, have some immediate attraction, and then have a series of humorous misunderstandings leading to eventual relationship difficulties and an eventual happy ending for all concerned. The only reason this got so much press (mostly good) was that the two stars wrote it and instead of a male and female lead, it was two women, showing that lesbian chic (postmodernly referenced in the movie by the two boorish men before finally driving Jessica into Helena's arms showing beyond a reasonable doubt (as in beyond the clichéd bad date montage) that men are pigs and that's why many women are driven to lesbianism) is still popular. I'll check and see whether I've put my lesbian vs. gay theory here, but I haven't, so here's the short version: anal sex=dirty, oral sex=clean. Thus, gay men are dirty and lesbians are clean. That and the whole having sex with two women at once thing, but if it doesn't concern the man as a threat to his masculinity and male dominance to have a woman probably pleasuring the other woman more than he can, than they are either supremely gifted or supremely deluded. Anyway, that's part of my rant about gays and lesbians. Also, what was with the hardcore rap song when Jessica and Helena were going at it? That attempt to be edgy worked as well as the bickering gay couple (BGC). Although for different reasons: rap didn't fit the film at all, and the BGC is so clichéd that it has its own sitcom.

I saw he had Tape and wanted to see that more, so we watched the little DV film Linklater did while waiting on the long postproduction for Waking Life. Ethan Hawke was excellent, Robert Sean Leonard (whom I saw on Broadway with Billy Crudup in Arcadia, one of the best performances of a play I've ever seen) was also good, while Uma Thurman was the weak link, if mainly for the fact that her character is strangely distant. There were also a lot of shots of the soles of their shoes. It's not a good idea to drink, smoke pot, and snort cocaine, because it really messes with your judgment. And the DV looked very impressive, with only some problems tracking quick movements betraying the DV rather than film.

Caseus Archivelox: The Lion in Winter

2002-09-30 - 10:07 p.m.
I also watched The Lion in Winter this evening. It has so many, many, many good lines. And such a treat to watch it in letterboxed format. Sweet.

Henry II, King of England: The day those stout hearts band together is the day that pigs get wings.
Eleanor of Aquitaine: There'll be pork in the treetops come morning.

Prince John: Poor John. Who says poor John? Don't everybody sob at once! My God, if I went up in flames there's not a living soul who'd pee on me to put the fire out!
Prince Richard: Let's strike a flint and see.

Let's see Akiva "I hate to disappoint you but my rubber lips are immune to your charms" Goldsman write lines like that.

Caseus Archivelox: Pride and Prejudice

2002-09-29 - 10:51 p.m.
I watched Pride and Prejudice (Editor's note: 1940 version) this afternoon, and was surprised with how much I liked it, especially considering how much I generally despise movies that try to condense books into two hour long movies. However, this was great, although not as good as the 90s miniseries with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth (quite simply one of my favorite actors currently working), it was very good, not the least because of the acting of one of the greatest actors of all time, Laurence Olivier. Weird bit of trivia about the movie: screenplay partially by Aldous Huxley. And one line in the movie references the battle of Waterloo, which didn't take place until two years after the book was written. That is, not one, but two weird.

Caseus Archivelox: Anatomy & Maybe Baby

2002-09-21 - 11:44 p.m.
I also watched Anatomy this morning, and have I told anyone that Franka Potente is my favorite German actress since Marlene Dietrich? Well, she is. The movie was really disturbing, because of the large amount of partially dissected bodies on display. Then again, it was a sort of by-the-book slasher film. Still, it was a good by-the-book slasher film, so I recommend it to anyone who likes reading, slasher films, or anatomy.

This evening, we watched Maybe Baby. And I have to say that I fully disagree with what most people on the IMDB say, as it was a very funny movie about a completely inappropriate topic. Not a movie about an inappropriate topic. Rowan Atkinson was hilarious, but when he started to brandish the gynecological instruments, all I could think of was Jeremy Irons doing the same thing in Dead Ringers. Which is sooooo not what you want to think of in a comedy. But it was funny, and I recommend it to anyone who can handle a British comedy about a couple who can't conceive a baby.

Caseus Archivelox: About Adam

2002-09-20 - 10:44 p.m.
I watched About Adam tonight. Kate Hudson wasn't too good. Frances O'Connor was the girl I would have gone for. Stu Townsend not only can't spell Townshend, he picked Kate Hudson over Frances O'Connor. Which is bad. Who wouldn't go after some grad student who's writing a dissertation that probably has very little interest? The movie itself wasn't too bad, nothing too good, but enjoyable, I guess. Movie Addition was About Adam = Belle Epoque + Pulp Fiction, set in The Snapper's Dublin. Which proves that a movie can be much less than the sum of its parts. There was a somewhat short riff on Victorianism and Vampirism, something I touched on somewhat in my Lesbian Vampire paper. I appreciated that.

Cashback, The Last Winter, Winter Soldier, No End in Sight, Night and Fog, Tokyo-Ga, & Paper Dolls

Cashback is the extended feature length version of the short I saw a couple years ago. Now, I don't normally see the short film that longer films are based on first, but I have to say that the film works quite well as an extended version of the short, with added bits not detracting all that much. I thought some of them worked quite well, but really, it's just your typical boy loses girl, boy can't sleep, boy stops time, boy gets job at a supermarket on the night shift, boy falls for checkout girl, boy loses a soccer game 26-0, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy stops time, boy gets girl with creepy stalkery art exhibit, boy stops time with girl. You know, old school romance. But I still liked it. Of course, some of the more explicit shots of female genitalia are darkened in the feature length version, but if you want to see vaginas, the short is also on the DVD, but more importantly, there's this little thing called the internet. Which, as far as I can tell, is for porn.

The Last Winter moves toward the documentary theme that the rest of the movies I've seen in the last couple weeks fit in. It's not a documentary, but it's an environmental horror film, starring Ron Perlman. There are other people in the movie, but who really cares? Global warming has been thawing out permafrost releasing something that starts driving people crazy. Problem is that it takes forever to actually go anywhere. It's just not a particularly effective thriller or anything. Ron Perlman can't save it.

Winter Soldier just makes me more and more annoyed about Vietnam. Seriously, people, if we didn't have Vietnam, this country would be even more messed up, but that doesn't excuse, I don't know, cutting women open for no reason, skinning people, shooting people for no reason, and more atrocities. John Kerry was right, Republicans were wrong, blah blah blah. Look, Americans aren't perfect, hell, for many years, we've been horribly wrong on a lot of things, so stop acting like we're better than everyone else (except maybe at Football). Vietnam was a mess, but we learned valuable lessons that some people in the Bush administration didn't bother to remember when it came to Iraq.

No End in Sight, is of course, one of the best examples of how we didn't learn anything. Not listening to reasonable people, allowing for decisions to be made without any experience on the ground, supporting corrupt people... hmmm, sounds just like Vietnam, eh? It's frustrating to watch people be completely oblivious (or plain lying) about their decisions and how they have led to the current mess in Iraq (and Afghanistan, for that matter). It's even more frustrating to have been right about it ahead of time. As a civilian, I certainly was right about going into Iraq being a terrible thing (you're lucky I'm only reposting my movie reviews from my last blog, because I was full of great vengeance and furious anger throughout most of 2002 and 2003 and 2004 about Bush), but it must feel even worse to have been a member of the administration and not been able to tell your superiors that they're fraking stupid without them just ignoring you.

Night and Fog is a 30-minute-long look at Auschwitz (and other concentration camps) during the war and in 1955. As it's only 30 minutes long, it glosses over things, makes generalizations and the like, but it does have extremely powerful footage and narration about the actual structure of the death camps, and who was responsible. I had no idea it was that short (even after looking at the Netflix envelope), and was extremely confused when it just seemed to end. The lack of in-depth... anything, really, means that it would work perfectly for classroom viewing, but there have to be better ways to cover the Holocaust. Although the enormous amount of documentaries and movies may put the lie to that.

Tokyo-Ga is Wim Wenders (doing his best Werner Herzog impression (and they do sound exactly the same)) going to Tokyo to try to figure out what made Yasujiro Ozu tick but mainly just pointing out how odd Japan was in the 80s. Driving ranges, pachinko parlors, and Japanese people with feathered hair mix with Chishu Ryu talking about his experience with Ozu, Wenders filming kids playing baseball in a cemetary, and, in the strangest scene, a rockabily dance off on the streets. There's also bits where he meets Chris Marker (of La Jetee and Sans Soleil fame) and visits a wax food factory (which was wild). But ultimately, as with most Herzog documentaries, this is less about the ostensible subjects of the film and more about Wenders. I can't recommend it to anyone who isn't a fan of Wenders, Ozu, AND Japan in the 80s, so that really limits people's interest in this film.

Paper Dolls is about a group of people I never knew existed: transsexual Filipino(a?)s who came to Israel to fill jobs that Palestinians used to do before the Intifada caused Israel to close the borders. And they're as mistreated as guest workers in any other country are: if there are any problems or the patient that they're working as nurses dies, they get deported. It's sick. These transsexuals also spend time dancing and lip synching (horribly) in clubs, and part of the plot is that they're trying to put together a show. It would make a much more Hollywood movie if they were great and took the world by storm, but they kinda sucked. And this caused some problems for them, because it just made some of them depressed.

Caseus Archivelox: CQ

2002-09-15 - 5:26 p.m.
I watched CQ this morning, and I really liked it. Made me want to see Danger: Diabolik. However, since I had seen Barbarella, I was fine on the references to that. Jason Schwartzmann was hilarious, Élodie Bouchez was hot, Angela Lindvall was perfectly cast, and the movie-within-the-movie hit the right notes. And it had Billy f---in Zane. I've expressed my admiration for him before, but he was perfect in this. Billy Zane is the ultimate in self-mocking movie stars. I can't remember the last serious movie I saw him in. I guess it would be Titanic, but he was so over-the-top evil that I consider that another comedic role. Titanic sucked. Jeremy Davies wasn't too bad, but his original last name is Boring. He should have kept it. It would add a whole new level to the reviews of his movies: "Twister boring, not Boring". All in all, a fun light film, with a bunch of neat in-jokes. I do recommend watching Barbarella first though. As it makes Codename: Dragonfly more funny than it would be otherwise. Also a good selection of lesser known French New-Wave films would also probably help. Then the other film becomes more funny.

Caseus Archivelox: 24 Hour Party People & Romance

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Caseus Archivelox: Lady in the Lake

2002-09-08 - 11:28 p.m.
Then I watched Lady in the Lake. The first movie done almost entirely in first person. Sort of good, but mainly good dialogue, but the first person thing was sort of crappy. It's neat to see though, because it makes me not want to do that if I ever make a movie. Too disconcerting, and the mirror tricks and "hidden" cuts were sort of disconcerting. From the comment on the front of the IMDB page on the movie: "The lessons I learned from this movie were 1) Only men can handle guns. 2) Having four thumbs is bad. 3) Never, ever tell anyone the time. 4) If you try hard enough, you can drink whiskey through your eyes." Good to know that someone else has a good sense of humor. Montgomery also does a fairly bad Bogart impression throughout the movie, but that's sort of to be expected since it was made so close to The Big Sleep.

Caseus Archivelox: The Blue Dahlia

2002-09-03 - 9:03 p.m.
I taped The Blue Dahlia this afternoon, and I have to say that while I generally prefer darker hair, I'm certainly willing to make an exception for someone who looks like Veronica Lake. Or Grace Kelly. The Blue Dahlia is a Raymond Chandler penned film. So you know it's a twisty story. Too bad it's under the Hays Code. I want my twisty with a touch of trash. However, the dialogue is top-notch.
Alan Ladd: You oughta have more sense than to take chances with strangers like this.
Veronica Lake: It's funny, but practically all the people I know were strangers when I met them.
Really, the ability to write good hard-boiled dialogue and snappy witticisms has gone way downhill since the 40s.

The Bank Job, Never Forever, The Savages, Joy Division, Honeydripper, & The Fall of Fujimori

The Bank Job basically exists for one scene and one scene only: near the end, Jason Statham kicks ass. Sure, the parts before it are a pretty good based on a true story heist film. It's really not clear how much of it is remotely true, and my suspicion is that vast majorities are not remotely true. It's a slick film from a lot of people who have been in the industry for years, plus, huge amounts of gratuitous nudity. Yay?

Never Forever is a film about an American housewife who is married to a bigshot Korean lawyer, but they can't have kids, so she starts having sex with a Korean immigrant so they can have a kid. Of course, they fall in love and complications ensue. Also, Koreans+religion=crazy religious. Weirdly, abortion is portrayed as an acceptable alternative for the baby. Vera Farmiga is weirdly attractive and is topless in many scenes. Other than that, there's really very little to recommend the film to anyone. It's not a bad film, but it wasn't really worth my time. Should've just looked for the naked video clips online and watched Hiroshima Mon Amour. Which is the top of the five movies tagged with Asian Man White Woman Relationship on IMDB. I've seen three of the other four, but there have to be other movies that need this tag.

The Savages is a depressing film about a teacher and his writer sister whose father is suffering from dementia. Acting is good from everyone and really it's just a little too depressing to enjoy at all.

Joy Division is the documentary counterpart of Control. As such, I really knew so much of what was going to happen, recognized video, and few things were remotely new. Still, it's good to finally get the versions of the stories from the people who lived them. I don't think that I need to explain how much I love Joy Division. I'm happy that I don't have to wallow for another 90 minutes in depression for a little while though.

Honeydripper is John Sayles's latest film. Somehow he's gone two years without releasing a new film. Of course, Silver City wasn't all that good. This one wasn't all that good either, although the soundtrack was full of blues and early rock 'n' roll. It's disappointing to think of how he's such a great director, and to see him just make a not worth much film is worse than if it hadn't been a Sayles film.

The Fall of Fujimori is about the former president of Peru, an agrarian engineer son of Japanese immigrants who ended up serving as president for about ten years until he stepped down due to being horribly corrupt. Well, his family disagrees, but he did some good, taking down the Shining Path. He comes across as a guy who is completely disconnected from the reality of what he has done, using a loophole in Japanese law to hide there until after the release of the documentary. Of course, he's since been arrested in Chile and extradited to Peru where he's serving maybe 40ish years? He's had at least four trials, so I think that's right. He's also had to deal with running against his ex-wife in the 1995 presidential election, and his daughter is currently in congress, with his ex-wife a former member of congress (after she lost her title of First Lady (given by Fujimori to his daughter)). Seriously, just a weird story.

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, Rebels of the Neon God, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, & Homicide

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is a great documentary about him. Starting with his early life, through the 101'ers, the Clash, on to the Mescaleros. Amazing soundtrack (beyond the Clash, there's the Ramones, MC5, Bob Dylan, and more, and I will never tire of hearing Johnny Appleseed), fascinating interviews with famous people (and... Flea... who blames the Clash for creating Red Hot Chili Peppers), and bits of history I never knew (he was dating the drummer from the Slits?), making for a really interesting film, the interviews filmed in front of a campfire, leading to beautifully shot scenes of people talking about how amazing Joe Strummer is. Which, really, if you've ever heard his music, you'd already know.

Rebels of the Neon God and I Don't Want to Sleep Alone are both Ming-liang Tsai films in two different stages in his career. Rebels is his first film, rougher than his much later I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, but honestly, the roughness made me actually enjoy the film much more. Too much of his later films are static shots where nothing much happens. IDWTSA was way too slow, full of shots of people washing dudes who are unable to wash themselves. Rebels, felt fresh, the story of two men rivals for a woman, with a good song played pretty often. It may not be as accomplished a film, but I certainly enjoyed it on a non-intellectual level more than most of his other films.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is probably Cassavetes trying to be somewhat conventional. He fails miserably. It's an odd film, far more concerned with scenes of Ben Gazzara being an awesome strip club owner. Seriously, the film is worth watching if only for the ridiculousness that is the strip club. The rest of it, the gangsters, the gambling, his "black lover", all combine to be a character study of a desperate man driven to extremes, with extra violence. I didn't see the cut version, just watching the original one, but Criterion has both versions in one set.

Homicide is another Criterion DVD, recently released. It's Mamet's third directorial effort, filled with his favorite people, Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, Ricky Jay, J.J. Johnston, Jack Wallace, and Rebecca Pidgeon (in her first appearance in a Mamet film), along with Ving Rhames in a small role. Mantegna is an assimilated Jewish cop, in the midst of trying to capture a dangerous drug dealer and murderer, stumbles into a murder of an old Jewish woman who used to run guns in Israel during the War of Independence. He gets dragged into a secret Jewish underground which distracts from his job as a cop. As it's a David Mamet film, it's twisty and awesome. Really, everything he touches is either amazing or far better than it should be. This one suffers a bit (just a tiny bit) from me not knowing what the point of the Jewish underground was with Mantegna. But why complain when you have Mamet speak and Ricky Jay speaking Hebrew? Worth waiting for the Criterion DVD. Definitely see this film.

Star Wars and Census Geekery

Assume [sic] all over this post.

Ms. Albright: http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/weird/Jedi-Claims-Discrimination-at-Grocery-Store-60020902.html
Ms. Albright: I love our ridiculous world.
me: i believe jedi is an accepted religion in england (Editor's note: There are no accepted religions in England, but it does have a census code.)
Ms. Albright: apparently, the 4th largest. (Editor's note: This is worth it for this press release alone.)
me: more reasonable than catholicism
me: well... neither of them supports pre-marital sex (jedi's don't support any sex, but that isn't something that jedi's would probably acknowledge)
Ms. Albright: no sex? That's terrible.
me: you didn't see the prequels... which is a good thing, but apparently jedi shouldn't form romantic attachments, which is a serious issue since the force is supposedly passed down genetically
me: this all presupposes that the prequels are canon, which I argue is not true
Ms. Albright: Seems pretty ridiculous.
me: describes the prequels perfectly

A few more things

Glee is an odd show. I'm enjoying the trashy high school melodrama bits, but the singing is so earnest that I cringe whenever they start. There's added pain due to the songs... I never needed to hear most of them ever again.

Community is promising, and I have high hopes that it fits in well with The Office and 30 Rock on Thursday nights.

True Blood looks like it's going to a darker place next year (plus, no more Eggs!) with Jessica. Which probably means more Hoyt. Yay!

Also, this is something I should have linked to in my Breakin' review: I am not sorry if you are going to end up singing "My name is Jean-Claude Van Damme. I will dance for you" for the rest of time.

Obsessed, Son of Rambow, Reign of Fire, & TV stuff

Obsessed is a horrendously badtacular movie. Redeeming value? Absolutely none. Cliches abound, bad acting is featured prominently in everyone (even Idris Elba isn't immune), the dialogue is predictable, the final fight scene is telegraphed (wait, what's more obvious than telegraphing... diagrammed) in the first scene. There's one interesting thing in it, Ali Larter roofies Idris, but this never comes up again, even though it would make total sense if she used this to try to prover her insane story. But that would have actually been a good plan, and clearly would have been out of place in this cinematic abortion.

Son of Rambow is about a couple of young kids who try to remake Rambo. There's a weird French exchange student. There's random Brethren action. Jessica Hynes shows up as the main character's mom. It's kinda sweet, but it's not all that good.

Reign of Fire is pretty trashy. It doesn't actually make any sense. Christian Bale is ok, but Matthew McConaughey's beard is terrifying. I like dragons. I don't like this.

The last two podcasts I listened to, This American Life and The Moth, actually have tie-ins to new pop culture events: TAL replayed their story which inspired The Informant! which I really need to see. The Moth played a story from Jonathan Ames, who created Bored To Death which just started on HBO after Curb Your Enthusiasm (which is still funny, but it always takes a bit to get into a new season), and was an odd combination of pot humor and film noir, and just odd enough to keep me interested. Plus, it ended with Halfway Home playing, so good taste.

Batman: Gotham Knight, The Machine Girl, & Rampo Noir

Batman: Gotham Knight is basically a series of short stories about Batman done in an anime style. The first one, Have I Got a Story for You, is a fine story, messing with the Batman mythos, but the animation style is just a very small step above Aeon Flux, distracting me and bugging me until it was over. Crossfire was creepy, and extremely effective. Much better visually, but still not very clear when it comes to plot. This trend is positive, and I liked the rest of them. They're not all particularly good, but they're an interesting twist. I think I'm going to stick with the Paul Dini series when it comes to my animated Batman. I like that this exists.

Rampo Noir is a series of four short films based on stories by Edogawa Rampo, who wrote the stories that Horrors of Malformed Men. These... are pretty much trash. The first one is complete trash, the second less so, the third less so, and the fourth less, but still, why the hell did I sit through the first one? The first story is all silent and has naked wrestling. Completely ridiculous. The second has naked bondage and melty wax sex. Ugh. The third one is about a woman who amputates her husbands arms and legs, puts them in jars, and then has sex with him. Ostensibly this is to keep him out of having to fight in a war. The entire thing somehow was stretched out to 134 minutes. Man, did I regret watching this.

The Machine Girl is a movie with special effects by the guy who did them on Tokyo Gore Police, Suicide Club, Noriko's Dinner Table, and Exte: Hair Extensions. That gives you an idea of how crazy this film is. It's just about halfway between the absolute insanity that is Tokyo Gore Police and Noriko's Dinner Table. Lots of spurting blood, cartoony villains (the main bad guy's wife is comically evil), a tempura arm, drill bra, decapitations, blood soup, a chainsaw foot, many gratuitous panty shots, and the titular Machine Girl who has an arm cut off and replaced with a machine gun. There's a sequel. I need to see it. Along with their new film, RoboGeisha.

Caseus Archivelox: Monster's Ball

2002-08-26 - 9:07 p.m.
I saw a movie that wasn't particularly good tonight. In fact, you might say that it sucked monster's balls. Well, I certainly would. Long, boring, with no characters I cared for. And the sex scene was typical overcutting, out-of or soft-focus crap. If you want an impressive sex scene, watch Bound, the Wachowski brothers' first directorial effort, with an incredible one-shot scene. Anyone can have too much cutting, it takes talent to do an impressive single take. But Billy Bob still sucks, Puff Daddy (oh no, he's going to come and find me and kill me because I used Puff Daddy) can act like I can hammer a six-inch spike through a board with my penis. Not right now, and it's not looking like it's going to happen anytime soon.

Caseus Archivelox: The Road Home

2002-08-11 - 12:00 a.m.
This evening I watched The Road Home directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Zhang Ziyi. Absolutely stunning. And the movie wasn't half bad either. Not a 10 because of having a very thinly stretched plot. At under 90 minutes it shouldn't feel like over two hours, but it did. There was very little action, and there are only so many times I can see Zhang Ziyi run through fields in pig tails. I can't believe I just typed that sentence. I mean, Zhang Ziyi. Pigtails. What the hell was I thinking? Oh well... Maybe it's just bitterness that I've never been the reason for anyone to almost kill themselves trying to see me because I've been taken away for some "political" reason. Maybe.

Caseus Archivelox: The Business of Strangers

2002-08-08 - 10:15 p.m.
I watched The Business of Strangers. Sort of like In the Company of Men after estrogen therapy. I figured out the "plot twists" right after they were set up. Not that they were that hard to figure out. Maybe if I hadn't seen In the Company of Men. One thing that I don't like is showing "porn" in movies that are not porn. It means that it just looks funny (because no porn movie just shows thrusting with no nudity) and is more aural than visual (which is funnier without the visual at all). I fully support the right of people to show more, but I think half-assed porn is silly. Unless it's like Log Jammin' in The Big Lebowski, where they just showed the pre-nudity part of the scene. And then had one of the funniest lines of the movie. "You can imagine where it goes from here." "He fixes the cable?" I need to see that movie again. Damn, that is probably the funniest Coen Brothers movie. I almost ordered a White Russian at the last bar I went to, but I realized I probably wouldn't like it much.

Caseus Archivelox: Signs

2002-08-04 - 11:14 p.m.
I saw (the) Signs. I can't say that I liked The Sixth Sense much, but that may be overhyping. Signs was interesting though. I love alien films, and this was an intelligent alien film. Not perfect, as part of the point of the movie was faith vs. coincidence, and I don't like movies like that much, but I liked the aliens. A little reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead, but with a little more cinematic flair, while NOTLD gets by purely on being perfect in every way. Anyone who has seen both will understand why I link the two, although people who hadn't seen NOTLD would probably need to just realize that people sitting around in a farmhouse waiting for things outside to get them while they watch things on TV happens in both movies.

Another thing is that watching it, I keep wishing that River Phoenix didn't die. He left us with the non-talented, hair-lipped Phoenix. Who I don't like. And he didn't look comfortable swinging that bat. Nor did he look like he could hit a ball 507 feet. And there were other problems with the movie (most of which were with the ending, which I don't want to spoil for anyone), but it was well done, and built tension well, which is why I liked it.

Editor's note: I have since seen Signs again, and it's really not very good.

Patton Oswalt: My Weakness Is Strong, John & Yoko's Year of Peace, & The Beatles: Rock Band

Patton Oswalt: My Weakness Is Strong is funny. Of course it is. It's Patton Oswalt. The censorship from Comedy Central was distracting, and the commercial breaks disrupted the rhythm. Still full of hilarious things.

John & Yoko's Year of Peace is a fairly brief look at John Lennon and Yoko Ono doing crazy things trying to bring peace to the world. Good for them. The movie itself never really gets too in depth, and thus is only of interest for those who need to know lots but little important about John Lennon trying to get some peace.

The Beatles: Rock Band is fun. As an enormous Beatles fan for many years. Most of my earliest memories of sitting and listening to music (LPs!) include things like my dad's folk music, various kids albums (including a certain Sesame Street album with Let It Be on it), and Rubber Soul and Revolver (the American versions because that's what my dad had). My first... well, I probably bought all the Beatles albums before I bought any other CDs, but certainly my first two were Beatles albums. I enjoy playing Rock Band. Therefore, this game was designed for me. Especially because most of the songs are easier than Rock Band itself, so I don't feel as incompetent playing it. It has 45 songs, and only one sucks (I Don't Want You, stupid 7 minute long boring-ass song). So it's 44 songs of awesome. I am looking forward to rebuying even more Beatles music. Because I didn't already do this once. Damnit. At least I could rip my CDs to mp3s so I wouldn't have to rebuy the music then (even if that were possible, which it still isn't). The unheard studio chatter is interesting, the dreamscapes are trippy, and I have more appreciation for some of the less famous Beatles tracks. Not I Want You, because that one still sucks.

The Deal, Persepolis, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, & Redbelt

The Deal is a fascinating look at the rise of New Labor through the pre-Prime Ministerial careers of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Michael Sheen and David Morrissey are outstanding and well worth watching the movie. Maybe not as good of a movie as The Queen, but it was pretty darn good anyway. And for someone who prefers movies about politicians rather than royalty, I gotta say, I know The Queen is a better film, but I would vastly rather rewatch this.

Persepolis is basically the comic in moving picture form. And not like Watchmen, which didn't get the heart of the book, this is true to the comic and is thus as worthwhile. I didn't mention this last year, for some reason, but I did read the comic. It's quite good, an interesting look at the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war from the point of view of a young-ish girl.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a depressing movie about an abortion, but, in this case at least, the abortion itself isn't dangerous. It's the conditions around it, put in place by Nicolae Ceausescu's banning of abortion. All this does is cause pain for the women involved and lead to more crime. Making abortion illegal in order to combat falling birth rates is ridiculous.

Redbelt is a little twisty thriller from David Mamet, but even with an amazing cast (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alice Braga, Emily Mortimer, Ricky Jay, Tim Allen, David Paymer, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon, Jennifer Grey, and basically a cameo from Ed O'Neill), it isn't nearly as good as most Mamet. Well, I'm a huge fan, but I don't think the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is all that good of a basis, compared to his normal crime milieu. Just a little disappointing. I think my problem may have been that it was not nearly as twisty as I like my Mamet (although The Winslow Boy wasn't particularly twisty, and I enjoyed that). And that it ended in a huge fight scene... ugh.

Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee, Noriko's Dinner Table, Heroes of the East

Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee is a nowhere near a good movie. Fitfully funny, more of a commentary on racism in Hollywood than Bruce Lee's death and the finishing of Game of Death. And brief and not really worth watching.

Noriko's Dinner Table is a semi-sequel, prequel, and concurrent to Suicide Club. Like that, it was not really that good. Unlike Sion Sono's later Exte, it wasn't ridiculous enough to enjoy. Their were clearly satirical aspects of the film that went over my head, but the movie just went on too long and I really didn't get the whole brainwashing parts of it. If anything, the film makes me like Suicide Club less. Grafting some sort of explanation on the film doesn't help it. Removing the mystery just makes it a mess of a film. Just like this.

Heroes of the East is a cross-cultural meeting of martial arts, but as it's made in Hong Kong, of course the Chinese beat the Japanese. And the man teaches the woman a lesson about listening to the husband and being meek. There's also the normal awkward and sophomoric humor and ridiculous fights, typical of Shaw Brothers films.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2, & The Taming of the Shrew

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 are basically William Greaves messing with everyone involved in the film. The first one is filmed entirely in 1968, and features a couple breaking up, and the film crew filming them being filmed and everyone getting testy and confused with everything that's going on. Take 2.5 is about half put together from footage left over from 1968, and the other half in 2004ish. Basically, it's a big mindfreak of a film. It's honestly hard to figure out what the hell is remotely real and what is just Greaves messing with you. It reminds me a lot of F for Fake, although neither is as good, mainly because Welles is one of the masters of cinema. There's a lot of split-screening, watching things from multiple cameras, and multiple people play the same characters. The second one is even more about the artifice of filmmaking than the first, but the first works better. Steve Buscemi usually makes everything better, but in this case, the actual film parts (the scenes that are ostensibly being filmed) are much weaker.

The Taming of the Shrew is/was (depending on when you read this) being performed for free at the Sidney Harman hall in Chinatown. It's a modern-set version, but the problem is that it's an inherently retrograde version of women's role in marriage. I enjoyed the play anyway. Back when I lived in Cincinnati and was watching around six plays a year or more, my favorite game before the performance was to read the cast biographies and see how long it took to get to someone who had been in Law and Order. This time it took four actors. Three if you include the SVU or CI spinoffs. Being so close to Baltimore, though, we got three actors from the Wire (one even gets a bio page on the official Wire website!). Even with that talent, the play belonged to Ian Merrill Peakes (Petruchio) and Louis Butelli (Grumio). Butelli channeled the wacky Brad Pitt perfectly, and really knows how to wield a flower bouquet. Peakes was hilarious, able to make his lying ass abusive husband charming, but even more impressively look good in a wedding dress. Ms. Albright and I had arrived way early, since we had no idea how the whole get a free ticket worked if you had a voucher for a ticket. It turns out we were the first there and so they were kind enough to ask us where we wanted to sit. After first being offered the front row (something I'm loathe to take after my unfortunate closeup at Metamorphoses, let alone having to look up for the entire show), I said I'd prefer something like the fifth or sixth row. We were given the end of the fifth row, and I was actually kinda annoyed because we could have gotten a seat in the middle. The end seats were perfectly fine, though, and I got a little bit of audience participation there. During the first wedding (Act 3, scene 2), Petruchio and Grumio show up late, and in this version, in a wedding gown, matching Katharina's (less train, though). They dance down the aisles towards the front, and, since aisle five has lots of leg room, Petruchio moved right in front of me and continued to dance and flashed me. I was shocked and scandalized and I couldn't stop laughing. The first three acts are really not all that bad from a misogyny standpoint, but man, the taming itself and the final speech are pretty offensive. Even with that, Shakespeare, especially free, is extremely enjoyable.

Boarding Gate, I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being, & The Ballad of Narayama

Boarding Gate is dreck. Asia Argento cannot act at all. Michael Madsen isn't all that good either. Kelly Lin is fine, but Kim Gordon is not at all an actor either. Just a miserable film. Olivier Assayas has done some good stuff (Clean, Demonlover (the greatest corporate espionage and hentai porn movie ever), Irma Vep, and convincing Maggie Cheung to marry him), but this one wasn't worth watching at all.

I Live in Fear: Record of a Living Being is a mid-50s Kurosawa movie about an old man who is trying to move his entirely family to Brazil to escape nuclear fallout. It's occasionally played for laughs, but it's also a depressing movie about how much some in Japan were affected by the bomb. Considering Kurosawa's later Rhapsody in August, he is one of those affected and horrified.

The Ballad of Narayama is Shohei Imamura's epic film of sex and a horrible way to treat old people. Let's just say that if there were actual Obama Death Panels proposed to replace what they do to old people here, it would get a lot of support. At least they'd have a chance. One thing I want to say: I never need to see another person slamming their own head into rocks in order to break teeth. Eesh. And the extremely weird sex stuff really freaked me out. As such, the movie is well-made, but I just couldn't get past how rough a time everyone had. Again, eesh.

The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, Control, & The Brave One

The Nine Lives of Marion Barry just makes me miss when our politicians weren't all crooks or sleazebags. Wait, that time didn't exist. Barry used to be a force to improve the lives of blacks in DC. Then he got power and ended up corrupt. This is the normal trend for politicians. He's an embarrassment to all those who don't think that working to break the white power structure in DC makes up for years of corruption, drug use, and various other lying things. The documentary is a little shallow, but it humanizes Barry. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, though.

Control is about Joy Division. And Joy Division is awesome (I really need them to put some songs in Rock Band, specifically Transmission). Arty, fascinating, and well worth the time you put in. Better than the Joy Division segment of 24 Hour Party People. Great non-Joy Division soundtrack as well, and the Joy Division songs were actually performed by the cast. The Killers doing Shadowplay, though, was entirely unnecessary.

The Brave One is Hollywood slick. Sure, it accurately presents that rape and assault are extremely hard to return to normal afterwards. The movie, however, succumbs to Hollywood at the end. It's just too slick to be recommended. It's not all that bad, just eh, and from Neil Jordan, that's a disappointment.

The Last Hayride & random TV notes

The Last Hayride is a book about Edwin Edwards's 1983 campaign for governor in Louisiana. He had first been elected in 1971, re-elected in 75, and since he couldn't run in 79, he basically set everything up for his successor, a technocrat Republican named Dave Treen, to fail so he could win. Edwards was a liar, a womanizer (he is the origin of "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy."), and it's not entirely clear that he was all that good of a governor. However, he made for a fascinating book. John Maginnis does a fairly good job being in the right place at the right time, although towards the end of the campaign, he starts to complain about being there. But his history of Louisiana and the politics explain a good deal that I didn't really know about why they have the strange electoral structure they do (Edwards put it in place to try to kill off the Republican Party there, but, in effect, revitalized it). Quite an interesting book.

The Middleman DVD is great. Epitaph One, the unaired Dollhouse episode, really makes me wonder where the hell the show is going. Seriously, that is a terrifying future. Torchwood: Children of Earth also kinda leaves me wondering where the hell the show is going to go after that. The Doctor Who specials (the Christmas one and the Easter one) were really good. Hung is kind of a mess, but I haven't yet gotten too pissed at it (and it's one of those shows that kinda can't show the penis and I can't complain about the inequality of the nudity since the penis is all things to all women). True Blood is either more enjoyable this season, or my expectations are so low, that I've been enjoying it. Hard Knocks: The Cincinnati Bengals is pretty good, although I hate Mike Brown even more after watching it, and I like Chad Ochocinco more. Shaq Vs. really is about 25 minutes of filler, 20 minutes of commercials, and 15 minutes of Shaq being extremely personable. Should be enjoyable for the next few episodes. Nova Science Now is the most enjoyable and fascinating science show ever made. Neil deGrasse Tyson really needs to be on TV more often.