Inside Man

Inside Man is a film I watched quite some time ago. I have no idea how it fell through the cracks, but I saw it a few weeks ago. I recommend it, as it's a well-done slick little Spike Lee film that's only a little about race. It's more about forgiveness and messing with the audience in as many ways as Spike Lee can figure it out. There is at least one serious problem with it, like how old is Christopher Plummer's character? Old enough to be evil in World War II, but still be fairly spry? Seems a little off. However, the cast is universally excellent. Clive Owen is an actor I find ultimately completely watchable, and I've seen many of his films (even dreck like King Arthur and Beyond Borders). He's the reason the BMW films were so watchable, and when he was killed off in The Bourne Identity, I was extremely disappointed. He could have made a superb Bond, but I haven't seen Casino Royale yet, just waiting for me to break down and purchase a 1080p HDTV. Anyway, if you suspend disbelief about a few things in the film, then you should enjoy it.

Half Nelson, Gray's Anatomy, & Boudu Saved from Drowning

Half Nelson is depressing. And I was extremely tired. Not the best combination for enjoying a film. Every time you think he's hit rock bottom, he lights up the crack rock and keeps going downhill. It's a good film, but man, I really, really, really got frustrated with Dan Dunne, as well-portrayed by Ryan Gosling. Just made bad choice after bad choice. Good choices? Casting. Also, in a serious way: the soundtrack. Broken Social Scene has a lot of songs in it, but the thing that made me sit up and think, "HOLY GOD", was Billy Bragg's A New England. Without a doubt, one of the best songs of... the electro-anti-folk... post-punk-ish... lefty-awesomeness. You completely owe it to yourself to listen to the song.

Gray's Anatomy is just Spalding Gray talking to the camera with brief bits of horribly disgusting eye injuries or diseases. But Soderbergh (and/or Gray, I'm not sure but I'm mainly guessing Soderbergh) mess with colors and backdrops and music, making it far more interesting cinematically than a filmed monologue would suggest. And it's funny and touching. It's not for everyone, especially if you have a fear of eye injury, but I liked it.

Boudu Saved from Drowning just goes to prove that the bourgeois were just as stupid then about thinking they can do everything as they are now. And that it's not funny at all. If you want a not funny movie about an antisocial bum who just spends the movie being an ass and probably raping a woman, then this is a movie. I could see this movie being remade today... Oh, man, just imagine if Rob Schneider got his hands on this. Ugh. Renoir is clearly capable of far better films than this one. This one is just an hour and a half of not funny. The interactive map of Paris was by far the best thing on the DVD, which is actually the entire reason I got the DVD. It was recommended and neat. If only I liked the film at all.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, What Time Is It There?, The Wedding Banquet, & Slither

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is a movie that gets referenced quite a bit, and is pretty famous, although it's extremely depressing. It's about a large group of people who enter a dance marathon in 1932, and the evil people who run it and manipulate those desperate people involved. Jane Fonda, Susannah York, Gig Young, Bruce Dern, and Al "Grandpa Munster" Lewis were all quite good, but the film itself was just an extreme downer.

What Time Is It There? is the first film in what is currently a trilogy by Tsai Ming-Liang, with The Skywalk Is Gone as the second film, about a watch salesman, his mom who's still in love with her dead husband, and the woman who buys his watch and then goes to Paris. But it has Jean-Pierre Léaud as himself and constantly references The 400 Blows, so I can't entirely say the movie is worthless. It's like his other films, and I think may even have a scene set in the same theater from Goodbye, Dragon Inn, with lots of very long shots, very little dialogue, and some slightly strange sexual aspects. This one has less focus on a water shortage than the later two films, but it has the star pissing into not only a water bottle but also a plastic bag. I don't know. I didn't know there was going to be pissing. Or the two main characters not sharing more than about five minutes on screen together.

The Wedding Banquet is Ang Lee's second film, another one about interracial relationships and family issues. And apparently it was a strange coincidence to go with the previous film as a Taiwan filmini festival. It works very well, considering the cliché of a gay couple has to hide their relationship from his traditional parents plot, but it's the acting of the parents and Wei-Wei, story, and nuances that make the film far more than that plot description would suggest. It's a little depressing for me, but that's again my interest in watching good films always tends to lead to watching movies that reminds me of sad things from my past. Sigh. The film itself made me laugh many times, and it was heartwarming, along with positive portrayals of both gays and interracial relationships, both of which I support immensely. Especially if you want the world to look like a better place.

Slither is far smarter than a low budget horror film deserves to be. It's really frickin' funny, and it has a pretty interesting cast, with Nathan "Captain Tightpants" Fillion, Michael Rooker, Gregg "Mitchum Huntsburger" Henry, Rob Zombie, and Jenna Fischer. And James Gunn directed it, who is Sean Gunn's brother (from Gilmore Girls along with my favorite first season episode of Angel, She), and um, responsible for writing and directing a bunch of Troma films, and writing both Scooby Doo films and the Dawn of the Dead remake. But the best thing about the film, besides the zombie/alien aspects of it, is the cursing, which is very well done (and I need to know where all the Ginese come from...). As is the special effects and gore. And you have karaoke The Crying Game, which means I will enjoy it, and you know that Air Supply is hilarious.

Thumbsucker & Oliver Twist

Thumbsucker has an interesting cast, with Tilda Swinton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Vince Vaughn, Benjamin Bratt, and somehow Keanu Reeves. Yeah, he's actually not bad, and may actually be one of the better things in the film. But the best thing in the film is Elliott Smith's cover of Thirteen, and the rest of the soundtrack by Elliott Smith and The Polyphonic Spree. The film itself is not deep at all, and what teacher would allow their kids to do some of the things Justin was allowed to do. I wonder, though, what the disturbing image was. Was it the thing pulled out of Benjamin Bratt's ass, because that was sort of disturbing. But it could have been anything like Vince Vaughn attempting to be serious or four teenagers in a hotel room and just shocking each other while drunk. Is that how debate actually works in high school? They're allowed to just toss it to random people and question in the middle of a round? That isn't like what I've seen in other movies and television shows about debate competitions. I'm sure everything in media I've seen is right, but what happens when it disagrees with other things in media. You're confusing me vast liberal homosexual gay Hollywood conspiracy!

Oliver Twist is the Polanski version, and thus is very well-made. However, I can't get past the antisemitism of Fagin. And there aren't any particularly interesting aspects to the film. It's just well done, but not great. It's the best version of Oliver Twist I've seen, but I vastly prefer other Dickens.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

So this past weekend, I was reading a little Lolita (I've been doing so for quite longer than I feel entirely comfortable discussing, but it's been a while, due to the wordplay and endnotes, and that I rarely read unless I'm on the metro), but I got Maria stuck in my head (the Sound of Music one, not the West Side Story or Blondie or Green Day ones), and I just couldn't get it out, which led to me singing Maria in my head while reading Lolita. In case you happen to be familiar with the Sound of Music, sing along to the parts that I decided were somewhat appropriate to my version of Lolita. Which is even funnier if you imagine nuns singing it. The first couple verses didn't work well for my version, but I'm actually fairly happy with the parts that are there. And I'm not a pedophile. Repeat, I am not a pedophile.

I'd like to say a word on her behalf:
Lolita makes me laugh.

How do you rate a novel like Lolita?
How do you read the book and pin her down?
How do you write a description of Lolita?
A flibbertigibbet! A will-o'-the-wisp! A clown!

Many a thing I know I'd like to tell you.
Many a thing you ought to understand.
But how do I make you stay,
And listen to me all day,
How don't you keep the book in your hand?

Oh, how do you rate a novel like Lolita?
How do you hold the nymphet in your hand?

When I read her, I'm confused,
Read the endnotes then amused,
And I then know exactly where I am.
Unpredictable as weather,
She's as flighty as a feather!
She's a darling! She's a demon! She's a lamb!

She'd out-pester any pest.
Drive a hornet from its nest.
She could throw a whirling dervish out of whirl.
She is gentle! She is wild!
She's a riddle! She's a child!
She's a headache! She's an angel!
She's a girl!

How do you rate a novel like Lolita?
How do you read the book and pin her down?
How do you write a description of Lolita?
A flibbertigibbet! A will-o'-the-wisp! A clown!

Many a thing I know I'd like to tell you.
Many a thing you ought to understand.
But how do I make you stay,
And listen to me all day,
How don't you keep the book in your hand?

Oh, how do you rate a novel like Lolita?
How do you hold the nymphet in your hand?

If you weren't lucky enough to know me in college, you wouldn't know just how much I love writing bad poetry, and coming up with slightly altered lyrics to bad songs for my own edification goes hand in hand with that. But now you're the one with that song in your head, not me!

Ivan the Terrible

Ivan the Terrible is a two part movie, filmed towards the end of World War II, but the second part wasn't released until 1958 due to it being awesome. Or, alternately, being anti-crazy ruler consolidating power through fear and the secret police. Funny how that wasn't popular with Stalin. The first film was a crappy DVD (Netflix didn't have the Criterion version?), with almost illegible subtitles (not as bad as Green Snake's supremely unwatchable DVD, which pisses me off, since I am an enormous Maggie Cheung fan, although it just brings up a really bad mental connection for me), but the second film was the second film I've watched from my Janus films box. I did watch one of the films before, but that still leaves somewhere around half the box I haven't seen. They're just sitting there, in the box, not being watched because I can watch them at any point. Like when I get the first part of Ivan the Terrible and want to watch the second one. Anyway, the first one was just sort of a normal film about the rise of a clearly unstable leader to great power. And then it just sort of is an eh film, nothing particularly noteworthy about it. But Part II... Well, I understand now why it's not a big deal not having the first part in the Janus films box. Because the second one starts with Kurbsky meeting with King Sigismund of Poland in an enormous set with checkerboard flooring and many ridiculous ruffles, surrendering his sword and then kissing it, and just becomes more and more insane, leading to a blue and red tinted scene at a party that is just outstanding. Along the way, there's decapitations, poisonings, back story, and plain awesomeness. Everything is exaggerated to an extreme, with posing that specifically apes Lenin and Christ, at different points. Or same point, depending on just how commie you are. But the entire thing is a sort of anti-bourgeois rant by a crazy authoritarian leader who leads through fear and his secret police. I really wonder just why Stalin didn't like it? Was it just that the bourgeois killed his mom and that lead to the Army purges in the 30s? If so, they were a little late in killing his mom.

Margaret Cho: Assassin & Early Summer

Margaret Cho: Assassin is the most recent Cho stand-up movie, far more politically obsessed than her earlier ones. I found it pretty funny, and a couple of times laughed out loud. Which doesn't always happen when I'm watching something that I know is funny. I did think that her comedy moving from more personal to more political meant that I, as a straight, white male, am somewhat more in tune with the comedy. Enjoyable, but ultimately, I have to appreciate her more for the concept and what she does for other people rather than me. It's good she exists, but I don't belong in her fanclub.

Early Summer is sort of a companion piece to Late Spring, another film by Ozu, written by Kôgo Noda, with Setsuko Hara as a late 20s woman named Noriko who her family wants to get married, and also with Chishu Ryu. But they're not sequels. And they're not related to any of his other season related films, except in the same structure and point as every other Ozu film. Meaning that you'll see people from low angles and static camera work. I discussed it more here. Setsuko Hara was one of the biggest stars of Japan at the time, and seeing her, I instantly recognized her as the star of The Idiot and the aforementioned Tokyo Story, and she was very good in this. The film is also about the changing face of Japan post-war, but also the changing face of a family that will be torn apart by the requirement of society that Noriko get married. Everyone in the film knows she must get married, but the family knows that they can't live without her income. That inevitable breaking of the family's living conditions really puts a bitter edge on the film. However, all negatives about the film, and Ozu's style in general, really would show your ignorance of his films. They may be alike, but they're extremely well-made and even enjoyable.

Prerelease Challengers

I preordered The New Pornographers new album on the special preorder website (let me know if you're going to preorder and I can add your email address and get entered into a contest for presumably amazing prizes). And I listened to the prerelease stream of the new album. And it's really, really prefreakin' good. So very good. Entering White Cecilia with its easy shuffling rhythm? Dan Bejar is quite awesome and I don't regret picking up almost the entire Destroyer discography based almost entirely on a presupposition that it would be as good as his work with the New Pornos. Failsafe, the tremolo guitar song, works very well, referencing Monster-era R.E.M., although I will presumptuously go out on a limb and suggest that this will never end up being the most popular used cd in any record store. The track, The Spirit of Giving, predone as a Destroyer track, shows that the song was good enough to survive the higher production values. And the rest of the tracks are not bad at all. Too bad their preannounced tour dates are not on the East Coast. I just wanted to point out that you could preorder the album, and that I'm ready to pretentatively place it up with the previous three The New Pornographers albums as preeminent present-day pop classics. And make a bunch of prepuns. None of which I pregret.

iTunes Meme in the Third Dimension

Two years in, and I'm apparently still going somewhat strong. So I'm redoing the iTunes meme, and noting that I only saw 293 films this year (total of 3328 films), meaning I didn't even make one a day. Stupid election, purchasing of PS3, and having somewhat more of a social life. Restricting my movie watching, damnit!

How many total songs?
19259, that's 49 days, 2 hours, and 3 seconds or 79 GB. That's 4413 more songs than last year, although by when I added current iterations of tracks, there are 4743 more tracks.

Sort by Song Title - first and last?
'(none)' from Ted Leo & the Pharmacists's Tej Leo (?), Rx/Pharmacists
Zürich Is Stained from Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Deluxe
Zürich Is Stained is the same, but the acquiring of Tej Leo led to a bunch of junk by an otherwise amazing band.

Sort by Artist - first and last?
!!!
ZZ Top
Stupid Guitar Hero. If it weren't for that, it would have been Zumpano, a far superior way to end it.

Sort by Time - first and last?
Bonus Track from Ani DiFranco's Not a Pretty Girl
Symphony no. 9 from the BBC Philharmonic's Beethoven's Symphonies
Same as last year. It's hard to go shorter than 4 seconds and longer than 67 minutes.

Sort by Album - first and last?
! from Dismemberment Plan
Zooropa from U2
Same, although iTunes has some new sorting ways that I just discovered and are neat.

Top Five Played Songs:
Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama) from Superchunk's Here's to Shutting Up
Some Small History from Portastatic on Old Enough To Know Better
Kicks in the Schoolyard from the Rosebuds' The Rosebuds Make Out
Tomorrow Never Knows from The Beatles's Revolver
No Cars Go from Arcade Fire's Neon Bible
Last year didn't have Tomorrow Never Knows or No Cars Go, but getting another version of No Cars Go, along with the awesome concert just made me listen to it more.

Ten Last Played
Two Characters in Search of a Country Song from The Magnetic Fields's The Charm of the Highway Strip
Be Mine from Robyn's Robyn
My Downtown Friends from The Rosebuds's TheRosebudsMakeOut
I'm Shipping up to Boston from The Dropkick Murphys's The Warrior's Code
Buggin' from The Flaming Lips's The Soft Bulletin
Cars Pass in Cold Blood from The Faint's Blank Wave Arcade
You're the One I Want from Jets to Brazil's Perfecting Loneliness
Satellite of Love from Lou Reed's Transformer
Pink Clouds (acoustic) from Superchunk's Hello Hawk
Another Morning Stoner from And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's Source Tags & Codes

Find "sex," how many songs show up? 116 (by track is 43, and Song against Sex at 6, and most of the songs are from The Essex Green)
Find "death," how many songs show up? 131 (by track is 39 as well, and no song has more than 2)
Find "love," how many songs show up? 973 (by track is 619, with 14 Love Will Tear Us Apart's winning)
Find "peace," how many songs show up? 24, (by track is 21, (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding? winning this one at 6)
Find "rain," how many songs show up? 298, with 158 by track, having Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head winning with 5, although these numbers include things like train and brain and drain and rainbows and woodgrain
Find "sun," how many songs show up? 274, with 182 by track, and Island in the Sun winning with 5
Find "you," how many songs show up? 2187, with 1483 by track and I Wanna Be Your Dog, Here Comes Your Man, Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me, I Summon You, and Anything You Want with 6, although I have 9 songs named I Love You, although it's four different songs
Find "home," how many songs show up? 129, with 90 by track and Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) with 4
Find "boy," how many songs show up? 545, with 193 by track and Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone? with 11
Find "girl," how many songs show up? 417, with 244 by track and I Wanna Know Girls with 6
Find "hate," how many songs show up? 77, with 44 by track and Don't Become the Thing You Hated at 3
Find "wish," how many songs show up? 59, with 39 by track and I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine at 4

Killer of Sheep, The Fly, The Fly II, & From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China

Killer of Sheep was a movie that pretty much became famous through normal people not watching it. At only 83 minutes long, I was hating myself for spending $9.50 on it. The scene where Stan and his wife are dancing was just about the only thing that seemed remotely worth watching. Every other scene required people who were clearly not actors to emote at least a little, and they certainly couldn't come close to showing human emotion. Maybe if something had happened or the couple of middle aged women next to me hadn't been constantly trying to guess what would happen next and then conferring and saying things like "Oh no!" and "Don't do that!" and "EWWW!", I might have been less inclined to dislike the film. But aside from that scene of dancing (one of Those Scenes that Wong Kar-Wai is so good at), the film was just boring. I am not enough of a film nerd to enjoy it.

The Fly I and II come on one DVD, which meant a back-to-back watching, and realizing that it's really, really obvious that it's not Geena Davis in the opening scene of Fly II. If you can't get the hair color right, try harder. The special effects in I are far better than II, and that Cronenberg is a better director than the guy who did the special effects in I and never directed before just makes the difference between Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis and Eric Stoltz and Daphne Zuniga even more pronounced.

From Mao to Mozart is an Oscar winning documentary about Isaac Stern's trip to China in 1979, three years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, at the invitation of the government. As a somewhat inadvertent companion piece to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, it's interesting to see that in just three years, some of the damage from that closing of China has been fixed, but that it has seriously harmed some parts of Chinese society irreparably. Does it hurt my classical music cred when I say that I got Isaac Stern confused with Itzhak Perlman before watching the film? And how much?

Aeon Flux, Red Eye, The American Way, & Kiss of Death

Aeon Flux is a little show from MTV in the 90s. I know I'd seen probably most of the shorts, but I certainly didn't recall much of anything except the outfits and the dying. I am pretty sure I had given up on MTV by the time the half-hour episodes had started to air, so I don't think I ever saw them. I certainly don't recall anyone speaking on them. It's quite an interesting show, if you don't care for... sensical plots, reasonable characters, anatomically possible characters, or... umm... non-sexual references. Because there are lots of all of those in there. I do want to complain about the fact that the series is three discs, and the first two are the 10 half-hour episodes, and the last one is the pilot episode and the shorts, meaning that renting them and watching them in order just made me annoyed. Why couldn't they just put the first stuff on the first disc and the second stuff on the second disc and the third stuff on the third disc? Why must you make this into a DVD box set of lies?

Red Eye is a quick and effective little thriller from Wes Craven, with Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy (with able support from Brian Cox) as two people who meet cute and then it turns out one of them runs a hotel that the other one wants to kill someone in, so they have to go running around the plane, the airport, and a house to stop/cause some mayhem. I actually thought it was quite well done, and the people who recommended it to me were right. I also like that Kyle Gallner was in it, because it allowed me to scream "THE BEAV!!" and only feel silly afterwards. Man, I miss Veronica Mars already.

The American Way is sort of a The Watchmen but set in the early 60s rather than the late 80s. It's drawn by Georges Jeanty, who has drawn all the issues of Buffy Season 8 so far, so I saw his name and I was all, I know him! I'm turning into a comic geek! AHHHHH! Or something. It's not nearly as good as the Watchmen, because it's far less about deconstructing the motives and history of comics, and far more about a fairly simple comic book story of trying to integrate a collection of sort of superheros working for the American government, and then the southern group doesn't like that. It's good, but man, I really hate that I've basically ruined these sort of stories for me, by reading what is probably the best underwear perverts comic ever. Nothing can really compete.

Kiss of Death has the great line: "Dames are no good if you wanna have some fun." Apparently, someone has a different definition of fun than I do. Or maybe the guy who said it was just a typically closeted gay man in Hays code Hollywood. And the film has a woman in a wheelchair rolled down the stairs. It's notable mainly for Richard Widmark's strong performance as a crazy hitman. He does pretty well as a crazy person. The rest of the film is notable mainly for being a Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht script, the two men behind His Girl Friday, one of the best movies of all time.

Smoosh & The Pipettes at Black Cat 6/2

Introduction (they've used that same bit before previous shows)
Don't Forget Me
Because It's Not Love (But It's Still a Feeling)
Why Did You Stay
Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me
Your Love for Me
It Hurts To See You Dance So Well
Tell Me What You Want
Baby Don't Leave Me
Really That Bad
The Burning Ambition of Early Diuretics
True Love Waits Patiently for a Miracle
I Love You
Guess Who Ran off with the Milkman?
By My Side
Judy
One Night Stand
Dirty Mind
Pull Shapes
-------------------
ABC
We Are the Pipettes

So no Simon Says, Sex, Magician Man, Kitchen Sink, KFC, or A Winter's Sky. Yes, and no I Like a Boy in Uniform (School Uniform), quite possibly their most catchy song, but they have said that they're trying to move to a more mature sound. Or something. Something to get away from playing that song. Which is of course a damn shame. All the songs they did play were great though. And The Burning Ambition of Early Diuretics just goes to show that their sense of humor is awesome for smart people.

Anyway, Monster Bobby was just him, a guitar, and a somewhat hated programmed keyboardy thingy. I am not that familiar with it, but it used disks to play preprogrammed beats. As the man sort of behind the goofy Pipettes, his songs were bizarre and hilarious, and he was quite funny as well, in that British way that I like to think of myself as. He started with Let's Check into a Hospital Together and then into The Closest Experience to That of Being with You Is the Experience of Taking Drugs which are the only songs I would have known before the show. He did also play 3 Days, 14 Hours, I Am a Pedestrian, and 23 Seconds, which were either funny or good or both, and also from the new album. He was quite fun, and I certainly will try to find more of his music. And he finished with a song called My Band, which was full of excuses by various band members for not showing up at a practice, but it ends up with a lot of ridiculous instruments. And is funny. And he ended the show by cursing his keyboardy thingy. Which caused the idiot next to me to laugh his annoying donkey laugh (he had been laughing many times before) and say, "He called his keyboard a cunt!" Wow, thanks, I didn't hear him scream that at his keyboard. You're a douche.

Smoosh were a lot of fun as well. I ended up with a lot of cash after buying tickets for a bunch of people (I just got them and allowed other people to figure out who was actually going to use them). So I ended up buying The Pipettes EP (all good songs, but I knew that already), and then I walked back to my friends and then was talked into buying the two Smoosh albums, which I did from the drummer, Chloe, who seemed a little surprised. I considered buying a shirt, but I figured I had spent enough. They brought along their younger sister Maia to play bass. Asya's vocals were not quite as strong in the mix as I would have wanted, but they were quite competent, and Chloe was bopping her head and clearly enjoying the show immensely. And Find a Way is just such a great song that even if the rest of the set wasn't as good as it was, they would have been worth seeing for it. There's just something about a drop out early in the song that I have to enjoy. And they were good beyond just their collective age being around mine. Well, if you just count Asya and Chloe.

There wasn't much of a lull between Monster Bobby and Smoosh, but there was quite a long one before The Pipettes. Over half an hour, which meant that I was getting really antsy. But there was the audio system, which played Killer Queen (Guitar Hero is good for some things, apparently), Kung Fu Fighting (I got that based on the first couple notes as well), and Sweet Caroline, which had pretty much the entire crowd singing along. Which... um... included me. Damnit, it's a song that requires singing along.

Finally the Pipettes came out, after the little intro bit, running out to a pretty full stage (all the male members of The Pipettes, aka The Cassettes), and launching directly into Don't Forget Me (something like this). I really enjoyed the entire set, from a musical standpoint, and also from an aesthetic standpoint. Synchronized dancing to awesome music makes everything better, and synchronized dancing to awesome music from three very attractive women is just immense fun, and anyone who says they suck just is an idiot. There were quite a few discussions about which one was the most attractive. I came down on the Rosay side, although I bet RiotBecki would be the most entertaining from a conversational standpoint, with her dissertation on porn and her goofy faces during the show. And Gwenno is clearly the most "traditionally" attractive. I think it was one of the best shows I've been to in a long time. And it was all over in just under an hour. Short songs are awesome.

Anyway, I wanted to complain about the group of people near me (sometimes far too near me). If you know me, I am not entirely comfortable actually coming in contact with people I know, and certainly not people I don't. There was a hippy girl along with a couple girls in polka dots near me for the beginning of the set who were all screaming about how all men are evil and that they needed to sing more songs about evil boyfriends. I'd normally complain on behalf of all nice guys out there, but screw them. The hippy girl had a shoulder bag and it kept hitting me because she was thrashing around like a crazy person. After a while, a couple of guys started yelling at them about how they'd come from very far away to see the show, and so they were shouting for a while, but I stopped paying attention because somehow these two very tall men in handmade Pull Shapes (in red sparkly lettering) had moved in front of me. Too close in front of me. In my attempt to keep the setlist and, you know, clap, I ended up touching him almost every time I moved more than a couple inches forward. I couldn't move that far back either. During Pull Shapes, I got both kicked in the shin and had the entire stage blocked out because he was both jumping and waving his hands in the air. I can understand both the jumping and waving, but he had been bumping into me and then I'd poke him with my Prozac pen (no irony there) or elbow him and he'd apologize, but he just didn't seem to understand that he had been a tremendous ass in moving in front of someone smaller than him in a place that wasn't nearly large enough for his body. Especially if he was going to flail around. Like the spazz he was. So I deem him the biggest douche of the show.

The Edge of the World & An Airman's Letter to His Mother

The Edge of the World is one of the first Michael Powell films that is worth watching, at least according to most people I know. Who know who Michael Powell is. It's fairly reminiscent of I Know Where I'm Going, in that it's about an island off the coast of Scotland, but this one is about the end of life on an island that is no longer worth living on. It was pretty short, but it didn't entirely feel like the classics that so many other Powell films would become, probably because I couldn't understand why they wouldn't have just left knowing how hard life was there. I guess other people just become far more attached to their way of life than I am. Well, ok, I mean far more attached to a more unsustainable way of life than mine. I don't live on an almost uninhabitable island of the coast of Scotland. I probably wouldn't either. Unless I had all the comforts of living in a big city, which isn't likely. They probably wouldn't have a good Ethiopian restaurant there. Also, the DVD's video and sound quality sucked supremely, and, except for the inclusion of extras (none of which I particularly felt like watching), was subpar all around.

I did actually watch one of the extras, An Airman's Letter to His Mother, a brief bit of propaganda based on a letter to the Times of London, narrated by John Gielgud. Nothing too spectacular either way, until the last frames, when it goes into a sky written angel wings, which was just too much. I am not that maudlin.

Shinjuku Triad Society, Rainy Dog, Ley Lines, Lila Says, & Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress

Shinjuku Triad Society, Rainy Dog, and Ley Lines are the three films in Takashi Miike's Black Society Trilogy. They're about the difficulty of Chinese immigrants in Japan. Well, that's mainly the first and last in the trilogy, the second one was mainly about a triad assassin who finds out he has a kid. And lots of violence and pissing and sex. The first one is pretty much junk, the second one is far better, and the last one is quite good. The last one is about a group of three suburban kids who end up selling drugs on the streets of Tokyo, get robbed by a prostitute, and rob a triad boss to get money to stow away on a boat to Brazil. It's quite a touching film of trying to fit in in a society that doesn't particularly want you. Along with a fey Ghanian named Barbie, scratchy censoring of the naughty bits (actually a constant in all three films), and a fairly depressing ending. The three films aren't particularly happy, but you really see that in the few years between the first and the third, Miike learned a hell of a lot.

Lila Says was a short good French film about a brief flirtation between a Polish girl and an Arab boy. I enjoyed it, although it did make me wish I had an attractive French girl who wanted to discuss her strange sexual fantasies. Who enjoyed riding around on her motorized bike with no underwear on and then inspired me to write a great book. I would hope that the ending weren't quite the same, but it was very well made, and who can hate on a girl mooning the guy to the strains of Air? Ziad Doueiri, the writer/director, worked on quite a few films with Quentin Tarantino, and clearly learned how to use a great pop song. And Run is a great pop song. And whoever the hell decided that the original theatrical release would be unedited, but the DVD would be an edited version with Manara's porno Eden-ish comic blurred out, should be punched once, in the thigh, very hard. And then punched there again and again until they apologize. Edited DVDs are crap, Sony.

Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress is just another reason why my prodigious movie watching is probably not good for my mental health. Not for anything about the film itself, just what it causes me to think about. So many bits of pop culture are just pathways into my past that it's amazing I'm still willing to watch things I know are just going to hurt. Although I don't listen to The Green Album nearly as much as I used to... It's a film about two teenagers who are sent to the Three Gorges area for reeducation during the Cultural Revolution and they fall in love with the titular Little Chinese Seamstress while reading Balzac. It's based on the director's autobiographical novel, and it's very depressing to think of how many people went through far worse times in the Down to the Countryside Movement. Well, far worse than transporting human waste in backpacks, working in a coal mine, having your cookbooks burnt because they would allow you to create bourgeois chicken, and then reading an attractive girl banned literature and falling in love with her. At least they were able to leave eventually. And become useful members of society, from a non-Communist standpoint.

Lord of War, Mission: Impossible: III, & Pretty Persuasion

Lord of War was not nearly as good as I was hoping it could be, but not nearly as bad as it could have been. Nic Cage doesn't overact and it's not just a simple black and white story. That helps, but the movie itself relies far too heavily on narration. And almost entirely upon the acting talents of Nic Cage. Which, thankfully, he doesn't ruin. It isn't a great film, by any means, but it was a fairly dark little film. As evidenced by the CGI'd opening sequence of a bullet going from a factory to Africa to end up in a kid's head to the sounds of For What It's Worth.

Mission: Impossible: III needs more colons. Preferably on screen with a little colonoscope action! Somehow, this one was actually just as ridiculous as the first two in the series, but not nearly as annoying for me. Yeah, maybe it was that J.J. Abrams was able to add some actual heart? Or maybe it was the MacGuffin not being explained but given a ridiculous name, The Rabbit Foot. But I'm not the only one who likes this one the most, as it has the highest rating of the trilogy on the IMDB (although M:I:II is better than M:I:I if only because it makes some damn sense (and the twin pistol action)). Normally I am not one to quote IMDB scores as a measure of quality (The Shawshank Redemption is a film for people who haven't seen enough good movies), but I think that it shows it's good to possibly get a director who's known for, you know, actual characters (J.J. Abrams) rather than hacky crap (DePalma) or doves fluttering around guys shooting with twin pistols (Woo). It just felt a lot more like an extremely high budget Alias episode, with a little less estrogen. Just a little, because as we all know, both Jennifer Garner and Tom Cruise both enjoy being penetrated. Also there was a brief quote of music from Lost, which I noticed and said it sounded just like a Michael Giacchino composition. And then it turned out there was a reason: he wrote the music. Sometimes I'm just an enormous film nerd. And other times I'm also a tv nerd.

Pretty Persuasion is all "Boo Nazis". A sentiment I completely agree with. It's also a film about manipulative little girls who threaten sexual harassment. It's a very dark satire with a huge amount of foul language. I am not sure I enjoyed the very ending, because it leavens what would otherwise be a relentlessly black film. It's not quite as bad as I was expecting from Marcos Siega, but it was also darker than I was expecting. Which is a good thing. I am not sure that I needed to see all the reaction shots of oral sex, and I really didn't need the slurping sounds. It's sick twisted, mocking everything and everyone, and I highly recommend it, if just for James Woods. His foul-mouthed, racist electronics magnate really steals every scene he's in.

The Bird People in China & The Twilight Samurai

The Bird People in China takes a lot of the bad taste from Izo out of my mouth, as it's a vastly different Takashi Miike film. And it's actually quite good. It's still sort of strange, but then again, so was Audition, the other "most normal" Miike film I've seen, but it's really still about the same themes that his other films seem to be about: trying to find a place to fit in, usually foreigners in a different land, this time a yakuza and a young office worker traveling to Yunnan, China (the subtitles kept splitting it into Yun Nan, confusing me for a bit, for some unknown reason (both the splitting and my confusion)) looking for a rich vein of jade, but instead finding... well, I don't want to ruin it, except that they do find the Bird People in China. And it's about the danger of bringing technology into an area that doesn't know it. That it's restrained is a nice touch, but that's what's amazing about Miike, because he is actually quite talented, if you can get past the enormous grafted penii, the severed feet, extreme torture, zombie musicals, an assassin who shoot darts from her vagina, and lots of sexual taboos... Wait, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah, Miike's talent. Well, he is quite capable of making a touching film.

The Twilight Samurai made me really sad. Another movie that year better than the shit that was The Barbarian Invasions, and yet somehow lost to it. I know I'm somewhat biased (both towards the Japanese and against the damn French Canadians), but this film was really quite good. The two fight scenes are both filmed extremely well, and the ending one is one of the most depressing fight scenes I can imagine. The Foreign Film Oscars are so much of a joke that it's painful to think of how many great foreign films don't even get nominated let alone win when so much crap wins. Life Is Beautiful still causes me to hate Italy. Well, that and their tendency to dive. So, anyway, pretty much it was a couple of sad but excellent Japanese films for me this weekend.

Christmas in August, Starman, Murderball, & Izo

Christmas in August is a sort of depressing Korean film about a camera shop manager (well, he's the only worker, it seems) who is dying and the parking cop who falls in love with him. It was a great film, though, and it was pretty heartbreaking. But ultimately, it was sort of uplifting with the ending. The stars reunited the next year in the quite good Se7en ripoff, Tell Me Something, which I saw on a big screen years ago, so they both looked fairly familiar. Although since they're Asian, I could have just been thinking of a different set of Asian actors.

Starman is John Carpenter doing the romance thing. Oh, sure it involves an alien and a military conspiracy plus the Rolling Stones. And Karen Allen and Jeff Bridges, along with Charles Martin Smith, one of those guys, were very strong centers. Jeff Bridges was sort of loopy as the alien who takes the body of Karen Allen's husband by taking some hair and then growing a new body. And then the scientist says that the technology is 10,000 years in the future. Heh.

Murderball was pretty short, and it made me feel somewhat uncomfortable thinking about these guys being so violent. It's just one of those films I felt like I should see, even if I knew that it wasn't really for me. The supermacho just make me feel like they're trying to overcome something they lack. In this case, it makes some sense for them to overcome their various ailments or accidents, but I still don't particularly feel comfortable with them. The supermacho, not the handicapped. Made me have Light & Day stuck in my head for a good portion of today.

Izo starts with an impregnation (sex-ed style), and then goes into about a minute of a guy being crucified and run through, repeatedly, with spears. Then it goes into a montage catching up on Japanese history from the end of the shogunate and samurai to the present day, with a heavy focus on violence, sex, and the Westernization of Japan. Where the long dead Samurai is now roaming the streets of Tokyo killing pretty much anyone he can. Oh, and of course it's a Takashi Miike film. There's crazy violence, incestuous sexuality, and a seemingly indestructible killer. Plus, the English subtitles don't match the English dialogue, one of my least favorite things to have. The dubbing is terrible though, which is necessary for a film like this. Not one of Miike's better films. The constant jumping back and forth in time doesn't really serve much of a purpose. It just seems to be bizarre for the sake of bizarrity. I think it's all about hell, but going through a bat guano insane film for two hours with a guy killing everything just is too much. That every scene seems to be a different Japanese pop culture cliche suggests a cultural satire. Or is it as simple as violence begets violence?

The Contender & Happy Endings

The Contender would have been a lot better if the pictures had been real. As it is, and I guess the spoiler alert should be on, if I cared, or you cared, or I recommended anyone see this film, that the pictures were fake just means that it was a waste to argue that the private lives of politicians are worth keeping private. Oh, and an excuse to argue about whether a senator performed in a DP when she was 19. Who really cares? If they didn't, that would be a scandal. Unless the politician was a Republican. And then I'd be surprised if they didn't enjoy having sex with small boys. ZING! Really, the film was all about how Hillary Clinton was a slut in college, but only one that touched a thing, not one who smoked a thing. And by thing I mean penis. It was facile and stupid, and just mindnumbingly naive. Beh to it.

Happy Endings is Don Roos's film about gay people, massages, migrant workers, and abortion. It has quite a good cast, with Lisa Kudrow, Steve Coogan, Jesse Bradford, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tom Arnold, David Sutcliffe, and Laura Dern. Well, ok, I hate Tom Arnold. He sucks. I just thought it didn't go nearly as well as it could have, and the narration (well, intertitles) were just eh. I... whatever. I didn't hate it, and I didn't love it. There were funny bits, there were annoying bits, and it just was eh. But Maggie Gyllenhaal singing was quite good.

The Ladybug Transistor & The Clientele at the Black Cat 5/8

A Tuesday night concert really had to have a band I wanted to see, and this one had two. I knew that The Clientele were not going to be the best live band ever, but I had just seen one of the best last week with Arcade Fire (there apparently is no article there). So a nice quiet evening of good music would be good.

It would have been too, had it not been for you meddling kids, you Positions. They were "horn-driven" indie rock. Aka, music that was trying really hard not to be crappy ska, but never did. And the doors opened at 8, so they didn't go on until 8:45ish, and then play for far too long. Then again, I think any amount of time they played would have been too long. Luckily, there was no one at the show, so I could sit down on the tables at the back. And bitch about how bad they were.

I actually wasn't nearly as familiar with The Ladybug Transistor as with the Essex Green, but I do have the Albermarle Sound, and I do like it a lot. Can't say I know any names of their songs except for Always on the Telephone and Here Comes the Rain from the new album. Well, I couldn't put the name of the song together with the music. But anyway, I enjoyed the set, but it was a little less uptempo than I was expecting. I did get to see a couple of their more uptempo numbers when I saw The Essex Green in January. I liked the set, even if I was getting impatient for The Clientele.

When they did finally get on stage near 10:40, I was already getting sleepy. And they're not exactly the most uptempo band either. I did make it through almost an hour of music before I was just almost constantly yawning, so I had to bail before I heard my favorite song of theirs, (I Want You) More Than Ever, and they probably played it during the encore. I did get to hear Since K Got over Me, the highlight of Strange Geometry, their previous album. I enjoyed the time I got, but I wish they had been able to go on earlier, and that I hadn't been exhausted.

But the best thing about the show was that I got to pick up the new Ladybug Transistor album a full month before I would have preordered it from Merge and for a dollar cheaper too! Which makes me happy. And it means that my next obscenely large order from Merge gets to wait for a while. I got my hands on the new Clientele, which has a couple very nice tracks, but I prefer their earlier stuff a little more, Essex Green's The Long Goodbye, and Camera Obscura's Biggest Blue Hi-Fi and Underachievers Please Try Harder, all of which I had from an ex-girlfriend. But I didn't have legal copies until now! Just kidding, RIAA. You really suck.

Lady Snowblood: Lovesong of Vengeance, All about Lily Chou-Chou, & Saving Face

Lady Snowblood: Lovesong of Vengeance is the sequel to Lady Snowblood, the quite good revenge film that inspired a lot of Kill Bill, especially the fight between The Bride and O-Ren in the snow. Plus, it's just ridiculous. The sequel is more technically proficient, but it doesn't work nearly as well. The first film worked so well because of the desire for vengeance that drove the plot, and you cared whether the bad guys got it in the end. Of course they did, but in this one, without that important reason for its existence, this film just doesn't come together nearly as well. I don't care about the suppression of revolutionary politics in Japan. Well, not much. But I want some kick ass-blood spurting. I got some of that, but the politics got in the way. I'm just kidding, it's actually quite nice to have some anti-authoritarian film with blood spurts, death from the plague, lots of fires, sword slashing, eye gouging, a shotgun that never needs to be reloaded, gratuitous nudity, and severed limbs. I don't think I saw any decapitations, and there should have been some. I enjoyed it, but it's not a classic like the first film.

All about Lily Chou-Chou starts out with a fairly gorgeous shot of a school boy listening to music on a portable cd player while bits of internet forum posts are intertitled, first in a gibberish of crazy ascii text, and then in Japanese along with English subtitles. This kept going for a while, and then the plot, such as it was, started. It's pretty much about a group of middle school kids, some of whom are obsessed with the fictional pop singer Lily Chou-Chou, and others are anti-social misfits. The main characters are the "cool" kid and the nerd who sort of does whatever the cool kid wants. Including pimping one of his schoolmates and being complicit in another one's rape. It's a pretty messed up film, but the music, mostly Debussy and J-rock-y stuff, is quite good. And there's the long bit about a trip to Okinawa that just seems completely unnecessary. I guess it does give some info on the cool kid's character, but it's quite long. Most of the film is quite beautiful, with great colors, and it's ultimately quite heartbreaking, but it could have used some trimming.

Saving Face is an ethnic romantic comedy. And yet, it's actually funny, and somewhat romantic. Of course, it's about Chinese lesbians in New York, which would be more interesting to me if I was like a lot of other heterosexual men and enjoyed that. There was a topless scene, which I had to rewatch with the director's commentary to see what the hell she had to say about it, because it's a woman who had this personal story she wanted to tell for a while. Because it just seemed completely gratuitous. The director said that she didn't want to just cover them up because that would suggest that she was ashamed by the lesbian sex and would make it more about the phone call received rather than the sex. I think it's actually a good point, and the l-shaped sheet is one of the most ridiculous clichés in history. To make it clear that neither character was ashamed of what they were doing, and that they never would have had sex under the sheets, at least not until the phone call, the nudity wasn't exploitative. Listening to that, I actually appreciated both the commentary and the movie more. It's full of all the clichés you want in a lesbian themed romantic comedy, but it's not nearly as bad as a lot of them.