Recent Viewing

Since the holidays, I’ve seen a lot of movies. Here’s a capsule rundown of all the ones I can remember.

Tarnation by Jonathan Caouette. This is famous for having been made in iMovies for a few hundred dollars. It might well be the first feature film produced like a videoblog. It’s a harrowing documentary of his mother and himself. His mother had received shock treatment in her teens and was never the same afterwards. This movie is an examination of her mom and her upbringing, his relationship with her and the grandparents that raised him, and his coming to grips with his own homosexuality. Because he is young enough to have come of age in the camcorder age, there is footage of him and that he shot from his very early teens up to present day. At one point, while he was 13 years old he performs a monologue as the character of an abused wife. It was downright disturbing, as were big chunks of the film. However, the overall effect was kind of uplifting as his love for his mother continued unabated despite her issues and some actions that are pretty unlovable. Highly recommended.

Metropolitan. This was a recommendation from Reel Reviews. I taped it and watched it right at XMas time. It was not a poorly done film, but I never connected with it the same way Mike Geoghegan seemed to have. Part of it has to do with the fact that the upper class New Yorker characters were so far from me in both status and geography that I couldn’t quite hang with it. The poor kid protagonist who gets adopted by the group is the only one I could really empathize with. I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t love it. Neutral.

The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou. I expected to love this movie. I’ve seen all the Wes Anderson films and I think each one got better than the previous one. This one breaks that pattern. I think it’s the worst of the four. I really desperately wanted to love it. All the 70’s nostalgia touches in his films pull me right in, and I used to watch the Cousteau documentaries and recognized a lot of the esthetic in the set design. I love most of the actors in it, and yet the whole thing never quite gelled into anything more than some isolated funny set pieces. In fact, the trailer basically contained all the same laughs as the film in a lot less time. Pass on this one unless you are completist, but revise your expectations way downward.

Man in the Sand. This was a documentary about Billy Bragg and Wilco making the original Mermaid Avenue album, where they took unfinished lyrics from the Woodie Guthrie collection and wrote music to complete them. This project yielded my favorite Wilco song of their career, “California Stars.” It was an engaging film, with some interesting behind the scenes actions with Bragg and Tweedy. I’ve been listening to the Billy Bragg podcast, which I find quite interesting. This kind of fills out some of what I’m hearing on it, as well as a lot of stuff about Woodie Guthrie that I didn’t know. Most of it isn’t very good, the way he up and abandoned multiple sets of wives and children. As Bragg says in some concert footage “I’ve learned not to make any excuses for Woodie.” If you care about Bragg, Wilco or Guthrie this movie is worth watching.

The Beguiled. I’d never seen this film although I remember Dave Sim referring to it in Cerebus 20 odd years ago as the only kind of Clint Eastwood film he would be interested in. The premise is that a wounded Yankee soldier during the Civil War is rescued and taken in by the ladies at a southern girls boarding school. This film is an excercise in creepy tension and has way more actual suspense than the torture porn of the Saw franchise and all films of that scumbaggy ilk. In a lot of ways, this is a perfect counterbalance to his more macho roles of roughly the same time period, the later spagghetti westerns and the early Dirty Harry films. Rather than shooting his way out of trouble, he has to try to manipulate everyone around him which does with mixed results. Highly recommended.

The White Balloon. When I was at University of Louisiana Lafayette, they did a thing called Bayou Bijou where once a week they would show foreign and independent films. It skewed heavily towards french language films for obvious reasons. One of the ones they showed and I wanted to see but just missed was this film. It’s got about the thinnest plot you can imagine occupying an entire movie. A little girl on the eve of the Persian new year festival wants to buy a goldfish and drops her money. Seriously, that’s it. It’s really more of a long vignette than an actual film, but it does a great job of capturing the characters of modern day Tehran. For similar reasons to why I love Marjane Satrapi’s Persopolis series, it’s very good to see these tales of ordinary Iranians living their lives. In the USA we are supposed to have an opinion of Iran as a whole based on almost no actual knowledge of the place. Like Satrapi said in her lecture here, “If you understood that we laugh and cry for all the same reasons you do, maybe you will find it harder to drop bombs on our heads.” Seeing the customs and silliness and the stuff of sheer Persian mundanity is highly exotic to me and I loved every second. Highly recommended.

Wizard of Speed and Time

Mike Jittlov has made his movie Wizard of Speed and Time available via bittorrent. At the time of this posting, I’m one of the seeders of that torrent. I got the files, and using the DVD burner from my work laptop I made my first actual playable-in-a-player movie DVD from a Linux system. Instead of the FBI warning at the beginning is a “karma statement” that as long as you aren’t profiting it, you are free to make a few copies for your friends.

I can remember Jittlov attending at least one of the Atlanta conventions I was at as a young science fiction fan. He was treated like a star and everyone knew about his movie but probably 2% of us or fewer had actually seen it. They probably screened the flick at these conventions, but I’ve never once in 20 years watched any lengthy video at any con. There’s always too much socializing to do to sit in the video room and watch movies. Thus, it makes me happy to have the DVD in my hands ready for me to watch it. As I gather from reading about it, the main villain of the piece is the big machine film industry so that’s right in my philosophical pocket for sure.

This is another case where it makes perfect sense to give away a movie. Jittlov is hoping to get enough attention from this to get some donations. If he builds up a little capital he then wants to redo some of the special effects and remaster it for a commercial DVD release. If all this comes to pass, the most obvious market to buy a spiffed up DVD are the people who downloaded the original release for free. If only he made this release “registerware”, with a request up front to register your email address with him then he’d be building up a catalog of people interested in his work. See how this ecology almost creates itself? The enemy isn’t the people who experience your work without paying the toll, the enemy is time and obscurity and an attention-starved world. I’d love to see Jittlov pull this off, get the mindshare and money and then release a killer definitive DVD. For us SF loving children of the 70s and 80s, this is a very cool blast from the past.

If you are at all interested, grab that torrent while it is hot.

John Waters Top Ten Films of 2006

Here’s John Waters’ picks for the best films of 2006. I like these capsule reviews, such as this:

Sherrybaby (Laurie Collyer)
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays an ex-convict drug addict (the kind I see in Baltimore every day), and the film is so depressing and great that I wish I could see it with an all-female prison audience.

That’s pretty much all you need to hear. If I ever get elected Prime Minister of the USA, I’m appointing John Waters as Minister of Culture. He and Gilberto Gil can form an alliance of the Americas. I can’t wait.

Insomnia Film Festival

Apple is sponsoring a contest for college students to create a film in 24 hours called the Insomnia Film Festival. The grand prize is a copy of Final Cut Pro and an 80G video iPod. I went to look at the terms and conditions to see how odious they were, expecting the worst. I was surprised in that Apple is not asserting full ownership of the work and waiver of all your rights, but does specify that you grant them a free license to redisplay and redistribute it in perpetuity. So, Apple preserves the right to do things with it at their will, but doesn’t subtract that right from you. That’s a step up from typical in this sort of thing.

If you look in the fine print, you have to be a current student of an accredited college and the film has to be made on a Mac. I’m eliminated by the first rule or I might think about doing. The basic idea seems to owe a lot to the 24 Hour comic book format, pioneered (I think) by Scott McCloud and popularized by Dave Sim who reprinted many in the back of Cerebus. It’s also a little bit Iron Chef, because when the contest begins they’ll publish the three elements to be included and then the film is due 24 hours later. Presumably, they’ll be elements that would be difficult to just drop in to prepared scripts and films, but we’ll see.

Overall, it sounds interesting. If I were in college, I’d probably do it. For videobloggers, this should be a cakewalk. I’d love to see a prominent vlogger take this. Even better would be if a team from the Carolinas takes first. Paging Mark Welker!

DIG!

We finally watched DIG! tonight. It was as good as my friend Chris led me to believe. I’ve always liked the Brian Jonestown Massacre when I’ve heard their music although I’ve never bought any of their records. I like the whole retro sparse Velvet Underground drone thing, so they are right in that pocket. I didn’t know any of the backstory of their crazy reputation or anything about Anton Newcombe. The movie makes him seem a lot like a cracked genius, but as much as I enjoyed the film it was immediately suspect on its balance. When your film is a narrative about the artistic tension between two people and one of them narrates the movie, that’s an issue.

Anton, as one might could predict, disavows the film. Most of what he says in there makes sense, so maybe he has some valid points. Whatever happened between the making of the film and now, it couldn’t have been too traumatic for relations between BJM and the Dandy Warhols because they played together in PDX and Seattle yesterday and the day before. I’ve always liked the Dandy Warhols music as well, even if they lack the raw mad genius of BJM.

I do give Anton the credit for being the kind of person who sits down and gets it done in the studio. He and his band have been freakishly prolific over the last decade. I do also see how the filmmakers have to cut something together out of their 1500 hours of footage, and it helps if a narrative emerges. It’s a little unfair to criticize them for making choices – that’s what everyone has to do to make a movie or an album or whatever. It seems like Newcombe would be one of those guys that would be horrible to have as a friend or colleague. As a Dandy said in the film (my paraphrase), “I’m not sharing a dressing room with them, I don’t want to be around them, but I’ll keep buying their records.”

Labor Day Cinema

Over the weekend we had quite the cinematic weekend. We went to a movie, and watched several saved on the DVR as well. Here are capsule reviews of what we saw.

Little Miss Sunshine was the one we saw in the theater. Short answer: I loved it. If I had to pick another movie that it reminded me of in tone, it would be The Royal Tennenbaums. Quirky family gets together, bonds through crises, exposes their various damages and makes us love them despite their deep flaws. It worked for me. I particularly liked how unrepentant and unapologetic the characters were about who and what they were, and how little was actually resolved. Towards the end, I feared a neat Hollywood ending would tie things up in a bow, but blessedly that was not the case. Greg Kinnear was wonderful as the hapless motivational speaker wannabe (somewhat addressing the question of “Where do these bonerods come from anyway?”). Steve Carrel did a great job of underacting as the suicidal gay brother, the disgraced former preeminent American Proust scholar. I’ve always loved Alan Arkin, and his turn as the heroin-snorting horndog grandfather was terrific. Best of all was Abigail Breslin as Olive, the goodhearted little girl whose unrealistic dream of being a beauty pageant star are a capsule summary of everyone else’s failures. She sells the picture, because if you don’t buy her you don’t buy any of the subsequent shenanigans. All in all, one of the best movies I’ve seen in quite a while.

I first heard of the movie Young Adam from Hugh McLeod’s blog. I’ve had it taped on the DVR since March, and finally sat down and watched it. I have to say that I disliked this movie. Aimless drifter of a failed writer wrecks a number of lives in ways large and larger, has a lot of creepy sex and ultimately makes some really craven choices. This is one of those films you have to call an “amorality tale.” I really like Ewan McGregor in almost everything, but here I just didn’t care for him or anything else, really. There was really no one to like in the film, not much interesting going on, nothing much enjoyable about any of the sex or nudity, and in the end just a big emptiness and two hours gone. I don’t recommend this film.

We also watched a pair of music films. If we had made it to watching DIG!, we could have made it a trifecta. If we’d then gone on to Be Here to Love Me about Townes Van Zandt we could have hit for the cycle. Only running out of time prevented this. Maybe next long weekend.

The first was Fearless Freaks, a documentary about the Flaming Lips. I’ve been wanting to see this for a long time, and last week it came on the Sundance Channel so that was perfect. This was a really interesting documentary, and considering the closeness of the filmmaker personally to the band was not as kissyface as I expected. It was shockingly frank about Steven Drozd’s drug use, going so far as to show him doing heroin (not the actual injection, but the setup and post effects.) It also did not soft-pedal the fact that Wayne Coyne is an appropriater of the ideas of others, not necessarily so much the mad visionary he is depicted as. I like that they had Gibby Haynes talking about how much stuff that the Lips lifted from the Butthole Surfers followed immediately by a montage demonstrating the truth of what Gibby said. I do get the feeling that in his day to day life, Coyne is highly driven to be weird just for the sake of it, choosing to live in his boyhood neighborhood in Oklahama City (not a particularly nice area) as much for the novelty as anything else. It was funny to see him walking around and realizing that few if any of his neighbors have any clue who he is. Maybe that’s the big factor for him.

There were a lot of interesting facts, like that Wayne continued to work his day job at Long John Silver’s until 1988, well after they were national recording and touring artists. He’d get off tour and go right back to being a fry cook. I enjoyed watching his DIY efforts in his Christmas on Mars film, with him building the sets and toting equipment around. One of my favorite quotes of the film from him: “People say that I’m crazy for filming a movie in my backyard. Well, technically this is my driveway.” (Favorite quote from a non-Lip was Gibby Haynes, answering the question “What is Wayne’s biggest asset?” with “Steven.”) Another interesting facet was realizing how common drug use and jail were in both the Coyne and Drozd families. By succeeding at what they do, Wayne and Steven seem the anomolies in both of their families. The more common fate seemed to be a life of getting in trouble and barely getting by, so that adds a special poignance to the achievements of the Lips as a band. Overall, I give this a strong recommendation, whether you care about the Flaming Lips music or not.

The other movie film was The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years. I should point out that I’ve never seen Parts 1 or 3, so this was the first Spheeris documentary I’d watched. I suspect that Part 1 is more my speed. Part 2 seemed littered with the disposable detritus of LA glam bands, with only a few acts of any historical note included. I was in fact a metal head at this time, and I’d never heard of half of these bands. There was only one group, Megadeth, that I would have considered true practitioners of the form back when I was 21. Unrepresented were Anthrax, Metallica, Slayer, Exodus, Flotsam and Jetsam, Mercyful Fate/King Diamond, Savage Grace, Sacred Reich and any number of bands I actually saw back in the day. It was kind of fun and ironic to watch these bands who were completely full of shit be so cocksure that they’d make it to the top, and I took a certain schadenfreude in knowing that they didn’t. It was funny watching Ozzy Osbourne make breakfast, but in the era after the Osbournes TV show not so essential. I liked the bit where musicians were talking about people stealing bits from them. Only Alice Cooper defied the logic that “we all steal from someone, so who am I to talk ill of it.” I love Alice and he was an innovator, but for example, he didn’t cite Screaming Jay Hawkins as a forebearer of macabre rock and roll, so be careful where you aim that thing because you’ll put your eye out. All in all, it is fun for the irony factor but for insight it is low. I marginally recommend this film, but think I need to see Part 1 more than I needed to see this.

Watching both those films in short order have a special perspective. At the same time as all those bands were running around LA trying to look cool and hit the Record Label Lottery, there was a lot of great music happening in other areas. The Flaming Lips, of course, but this is also the period in which the Butthole Surfers, the Pixies, Camper Van Beethoven, Janes Addiction, Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth, Glass Eye, Pylon and many others were doing fantastic work and not worrying so much about their hair. Then as now, a lot of the most interesting work is not the splashy stuff that the big labels are dumping their payola money into.

Whew, lots of cinema. If we had a little more gumption, we might have gone to see Pirates of the Carribean yesterday, but I chose not to. As long as the movie is, that would chew up a very large chunk of the day and I didn’t feel like committing that much time to it. Maybe next weekend.

Supporting Nerd Documentaries

One thing I’ve tried to be good about is financially supporting nerdly documentaries. I’ve got the money to do so, and I truly love to see members of the tribe creating them so I want to encourage more of them. I talked with the Open Roadtrip guys recently, which was a hoot. I don’t know if they are going to release a salable product or only a download, but if it is available for sale I’ll buy it.

I just got the email that the fan documentary of Firefly/Serenity called Done the Impossible is shipping next week. I can’t even remember when I pre-ordered but it was so long ago that I forgot that I did it. (According to the email, it was February.) This looks to be packed with features, and at $16.95 is quite economical. I haven’t seen it yet so I can’t vouch for the final product, but I’m excited about it.

I got the Jason Scott film BBS: The Documentary a while back. I was planning on buying it anyway, so I went ahead and joined the adventurer’s club. By doing this, I was purchasing BBS and pre-purchasing his next documentary. He used this money to upgrade his video equipment. It seemed like a neat enough idea that I just joined up on impulse. I see now that he has closed the club to new members, so I must have got in at the right time. My first deep connection to computers was calling local BBS lines from Augusta GA at a friends house on his Commodore 64 with an acoustic coupler modem. Actually hearing people tell the stories of these wacky systems was really fun. I’m looking foward to GET LAMP, which will be about text adventure games. I played some of them on that same C-64. It would be almost a decade after that before I owned my own computer, and by then the world had moved on from the genre.

Are there any other projects of this ilk that I should know about and be supporting?

Nacho Libre

I’m actually a fan of lucha libre to the point I’ve considered getting the Spanish language tier on our cable so that I can watch it on Galavision on Saturdays. I own on VHS and DVD El Santo movies. I have my own mask, boots and tights. I also really like Jack Black. Basically, you can’t find a more receptive audience for Nacho Libre than me. And I didn’t really like the movie. I didn’t hate it, but it was just ehhh. At 89 minutes, it felt long. It wasn’t over the top and ridiculous enough to be crazy fun, it didn’t have enough wrestling in it and just didn’t have enough of anything. It dragged along being not very funny, spending a lot of time in the dull monastery and not that much time in the ring. I can’t recommend this film. It had all the ingredients to be hilarious, and just never seemed to try that hard to get there.

On the upside, when it was done I went for a walk on the beach since I was already most of the way there. That part was fun.

V For Vendetta

Last night I went to the beach to see V For Vendetta. I had really wanted to see this in the theater before it left, and was surprised to find not only that it was still showing in my area but was in the IMAX format. I’ve been a fan of the story since I was a teenager, and was enough of a geek to have read the incomplete story in the British Warrior comic magazine and waited for years to have the story finished by DC Comics.

I thought the movie was very very good. Visually it looked fantastic and did a great job of capturing this morally slippery story in all its complexity. I’m especially glad that they didn’t feel a need to “Hollywood” up the story. My worry was that they would shim in some sort of bolted-on resolution about who V actually was, which would cut the heart out of it. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who he was and that’s the point of the whole thing. The bits of philosophizing about the difference between the tangible and the symbolic were highly interesting and sufficient as they were, without some sort of phony “aha” moment about the identity. The “aha” moment was entirely about the actions.

The original story was a reaction against the Thatcher government of the 80s but it certainly has a lot of resonance in today’s American political climate. Watching Stephen Rae’s powerful performance as Finch, investigating the wrongdoing of his government while getting enormous political pressure to drop it certainly has a different set of baggage brought to it today than it would have a few years ago.

All in all, great movie and I’m glad I saw it on a screen large enough to park a battleship on.

High and Low

Tonight we went on an impromptu evening dog walk at the beach. Man, do I love living in a place where that is possible. When we came home, we had some Qdoba burritos and then watched the oldest movie taped on our DVR – Requiem for a Dream. It’s been on there since last October and finally we got to it.

It was definitely a good, well made film and entirely a downer. It wasn’t really unlike what I was expecting, but was even a little more extreme in the final act. I think this would be a good movie to show to kids to straighten them up. It was way more effective than any anti-drug PSA I’ve ever seen.

Angry

We saw The Upside of Anger last night, and I have to say that I thought it was a more enjoyable and downright better movie than Crash. They made sympathetic characters of a lot of people who were working hard to screw up their lives and engaging in very bad behavior. Plus, while full of human insight it was really funny. I like that.

Crash

Last night we watched Crash (Haggis 2005, not Cronenberg 1996). I’ve been hearing effusive praise about it for so long, and then it won the Oscar so I was expecting a great movie. What I saw, I wouldn’t even classify as good. I found it didactic, heavy-handed, ham-fisted, manipulative, and just impossible to maintain suspension of disbelief. For all that I expected a contemplative meditation on race relations, what I saw was a bunch of unpleasant cartoon characters spouting epithets and conducting soliloquies.

Honestly, modern American racism would be easier to deal with if everyone operated as transparently as they do in this film, showing their biases in the first 15 seconds of every conversation. Real racism isn’t this obvious and proud, it is mostly manifested in whispers and sidelong glances and small furtive movements. Real racism usually leaves you with the feeling it is there but not the surety. It is in codewords dropped in the conversations you have with someone that you know but didn’t know was a racist until they felt comfortable enough to let you into their dirty cracker circle. Real racism is destructive and painful when you can’t quite tell if it is there, making you doubt yourself and wonder if you are the one with the problem.

There were maybe three scenes of that level of subtlety for 10 minutes of the two hour run time. By the middle, I was getting awfully tired of being beaten with the stick of brutal obviousness. It was entirely too pat, where a character sins one evening and gets redeemed the next morning, where a city of millions seems to consist entirely of the same few dozen people running in to each other in coincidences more absurd than the zaniest episodes of Seinfeld. At multiple points, I shouted “Give me a break!” at the turns of events. Worse, I always felt the author of the material, dragging me by the ear from one object lesson to the next. I could hear the gears of the irony wheel engaging, see the strings being pulled. I never for one second felt like these were real people with real issues. While the actors were consistently good at doing what was asked of them, the script sold them all out and us too.

I walked in wanting to like this film. I was prepared for and desired a serious treatment of racism. What I got failed the seriousness of the topic by being so facile with an important subject. For a far superior treatment of this same kind of material, I recommend John Sayles’ City of Hope. It is a better treatise on interconnectedness and race relations that won’t insult your intelligence. Crash gets an unrecommendation from me. I wouldn’t have called it a “best picture of 2005.” It’s not even the best movie with that title in the last decade.

The Aristocrats

We watched The Aristocrats last night, and as predicted I found it hilarious. After the onslaught of this foul joke over and over, the parts that I really thought were funny were the asides. By the time halfway through that Fred Willard came on in his jacket with a cravat and his pipe, talking psuedo-intellectual mumbo jumbo, I was in stitches.

There were a few versions that really disturbed me, but they weren’t the sexual or scatological ones, it was the violence. When Steven Wright did a telling where the act only involved beating a series of people, I found that troubling. That this is his telling says a lot about Wright and that it bothered me says a lot about me.

Wild Bunch

I’ve had The Wild Bunch taped on my DVR since June and I frequently think about sitting down and watching it. The only thing is that I want to give it my full attention, and most of my TV watching is about 60% attention with my laptop in hand. Lately, there is no chance so I’ve just been thinking about watching but skipping, over and over. This morning, I heard on Reel Reviews that his next cinephile series show will be on The Wild Bunch. Sometime in the next few weeks I need to find 2 and a half hours of uninterrupted attention to dump into that movie so I’m prepared for Mikey G’s insight.

Bore of the Worlds

While in Raleigh, we watched War of the Worlds on TV. Set aside the fact that the story made no particular sense or that it was yet another Spielbergian opus of a family in jeopardy. I would have found it impossible to believe that something with so much mayhem and so many explosions could be so completely and thoroughly boring. Wow.

Spirited Wicker

My grump against fantasy movies continued on Sunday, when we also watched Spirited Away. That’s a film I’ve never heard a bad word about, and it just didn’t do much for me. I nodded off at points, I was uninvolved at all points and I just was under-charmed by the parts I could tell I was supposed to find charming. Hard to tell if my fantasy senses were dulled or I really don’t care much for this and the Harry Potter.

At the other extreme, last night we watched The Wicker Man, which as been sitting on our DVR since around Halloween. I thought this was a fantastic film. I don’t know exactly which cut this was, but it wasn’t one of the really butchered short American ones. I think it was the 99 minute one. It was every bit as creepy as I’ve heard it was. Even knowing the basic outline of the story, I didn’t see where it was going until right before it got there. There were little nice touches, like the fact that when Christopher Lee’s fantastic early 70’s haircut and sideburns are windblown, he looks just like the John Barleycorn icon that is so prevalent in the movie. The juxtaposition of the Christian and pagan imagery was quite cool and very effective. It bugged me that the actor playing Sgt. Howie seemed familiar but I couldn’t place him. By looking at IMDB I realized that hey, that was the Equalizer!

All in all, I highly recommend The Wicker Man and am ho-hum on Spirited Away and Harry Potter #2.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Boredom

I’m sitting here watching a Harry Potter movie on ABC family (I’m not the one choosing the viewing). I know that approximately 98% of the people in the world love Harry Potter but I believe that I’m immune to the charms of this series. Kind of like that dreadful movie Love Actually, it’s odd to see actors I like so much (Alan Rickman, Richard Harris, Robbie Coletrane) doing work I find so non-compelling.

I just can’t say umpteen books/movies of British boarding school politics holds much interest for me, whether or not it contains a bunch of twee magicky crap. I’m watching a monster chase Harry through sewers and know there is no chance it will eat him, so I guess rooting for the monster is futile. This stuff is just not my bag. I’m sure they’ll do fine without me. Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is the closest I’ve been to caring about this kind of stuff and I can’t imagine anyone else ever getting me to care about it again.

Me and Tura Satana

A while ago I posted my comment to the Reel Reviews Radio show notes about Faster Pussycat Kill Kill in which I tell the silly story of my meeting with the women from that movie. In an odd thing to happen on Thanksgiving, Tura Satana herself left a response saying that she remembers that day. Crazy, daddyo! I’d be surprised if my friend Suzie remembered it. Luckily, I only had nice things to say about Tura , who was the nice one who was very sweet that day. It was the other two that seemed like they hated me.

This is an object lesson in handling our modern information age. Assume anything you say, even about the Russ Meyer girls in a comment thread, will be read by anyone that you reference. This post-Google/Technorati/Feedster world is highly Kibo-esque.

Movie Roundup

Here’s some bullet reviews of movies I’ve seen recently. Only one was in the theater, the rest were rentals.

  • Meet the Fockers: Bleh. I wish I had slept through it.
  • Spanglish: Fantastic film with a warm human story.
  • Ocean’s Twelve: Loved the first one (rare remake far superior to the original), thought this sequel was a waste of time and way too wrapped up in cutesiness.
  • Napoleon Dynamite: I might be the last person to see this film, but I loved it. I will be quoting silly lines from this film for the rest of my days.
  • Anchorman: Couldn’t be stupider and I loved it for it.
  • Batman Begins: Holy crap, this rocked!