Category: Movies

It occurs to me that I would have liked Sin City better if they had made all the comic’s monologue boxes into subtitles instead of voice-overs.

Sin City

Yeah, I saw it already, because I’m better than you.

And I gotta tell you… man, there’s a great movie in that footage, but that wasn’t it. It was a decent movie, an extraordinarily pretty one, and resolutely faithful to the original (as everyone’s pointed out). Cut all the voice-over monologues, I mean all of them, and you’d have a good movie. Cut the length of every shot in half, shrink Michael Madsen’s speaking parts (why, Michael, why? He sounded, as Maria pointed out, like community theatre), lose the stiff wire work and actually put the music from the trailers on the soundtrack–then you’d have a fucking magnificent balls-out bug-eyed noir-fu motion picture. I would watch that movie every night.

I hope there’s a director’s cut, or an editor’s cut, or a pirate renegade interweb cut, or something; I don’t think I’ve seen anything that needed it worse. Last night people were giggling when they should have been gasping, and all it would take to fix that would be a sharp knife and time.

I like movies. Sometimes, I hate movies, because I realize that hundreds of people spent a year of their lives each, along with tens of millions of dollars, making Son of the Mask. But I really do like them in general, even the kind of movies that wins Oscars. If I was in high school and Mr. Munson took two days out of Multicultural Literature (it was a great class, title notwithstanding) to have us watch Hotel Rwanda, I would be moved by it. I would tell my friends about it and do research to find out more about the situation. I would value the experience.

But if I’m sitting at home with nothing to do and I’m like “hey, let’s rent or go to a movie,” there’s no way I’m going to pick Hotel Rwanda. I just don’t hate myself that much. As a result, I never watch great movies and David Clark embarrasses me in Team Movie Pong.

Since my solution to many of my personal flaws is rigorous scheduling, here’s my idea: Sad And Happy Movie Day. Maybe one or two Saturdays a month, I’d get together with other humans (assuming I could trick anybody else into it) and two movies. One would be a great, depressing film about human nature, like Hotel Rwanda or Dancer in the Dark* or Boys Don’t Cry or The Mission. The other would be a goofy big-Hollywood popcorn flick, like Ocean’s Twelve or The Scorpion King. Maybe something chop-socky like Ong Bak, or something happy-indie like Garden State. Maybe Hackers, the foremost cinematic achievement of all time.

We would watch the sad movie first, and sit there slumped over, realizing that all human hope is a doomed, brief match-flare against the endless dark. We’d take a half-hour break to make popcorn and go get some Sourpatch Kids. We’d walk it off a little. Then we’d pop in the happy movie, laugh and ooh, karate-chop the couch and go home feeling generally not suicidal.

This is not something I will likely start soon, and if it does start I probably wouldn’t be able to host it myself. Still, would anybody else be up for it?

* Actually I am immune to Dancer in the Dark now, thanks to Jon, but I can still inflict it on other people.

Dear everybody who loved Sideways so much

Didn’t you guys see it the first time? When it was called Swingers?

I liked the movie okay, and of course the cast members–especially Thomas Haden Church–did their jobs with pinhead spot-on laser accuracy. But to what purpose? How many books and movies are there in which a pessimistic, divorced English teacher writes a book that’s too long so he goes out with his immature, more handsome friend and ends up finding some kind of unresolved redemption with a woman who blah blah blah. I saw Wonder Boys too. I guess this one had wine in it, which is great, if you like wine.

The funny thing is that The Matrix Reloaded was not called Matrix2, because that would actually make sense–matrix multiplication is a perfectly normal algebraic operation. Yet Alien³ and the Hackers² (and ³!) quasi-soundtracks were exponentially notified, which makes no sense at all!

While I’m grouching, I’m fine with IMDB, but I really need to find a better book / music linkdump than Amazon. I have nothing against them personally, I’d just like having a database that’s less explicitly commercial, and I’d like to avoid contributing to Google’s shopping bias. I tried the Library of Congress, but they’re really useless in terms of context. Anybody else have a better idea?

Oh, and yeah, I own Hackers². I’m weak.

I went with Jon, Amanda, Amanda’s sister Kelly and the one and only Artdrey to a Legends game on Friday, then to see Spirited Away on Sunday, and in between…

There are apparently a lot of Beaux Arts Balls thrown by architecture departments all over the country, but the one in Lexington is the biggest, or so they tell me. People put on costumes and go underground and get physically rearranged by the music, and then there’s girls in fashion… things, and after that there are guys who are pretending to be girls.

I’d never been to a drag show before (although I have watched To Wong Foo several times), but I wasn’t really surprised. There were a couple of ladies who were definitely men, and then there was one who was fairly androgynous, and then… there was Jenna.

Jenna was beautiful.

Jenna is my soulmate.

Jenna, if you’re out there, know that I’m out here too, and no, I’m not single, but dammit I could be.

Next topic! I should emphasize more that this was a costume party, as in Halloween costumes, only in April, so with more skin. There were some intricate and pretty ones there, and then the size-over-intricacy ones (meet Mister Pez Dispenser!) and then there were just people out to make their fetishes public.

I came to the conclusion, that night, that costume parties exist to let people show off the way they really want other people to see them. The dude with the tux and the wolf mask wants to sweep you away; the girl with the angel wings and garter belt wants to be touched and untouchable; the guy with that much metal in his face… he’s just doin’ his thing, man.

So if this is the case, I find it terribly appropriate that Audrey and I wore brightly colored rayon old-person jogging suits. They were worth more than a few compliments from other partygoers, and they were the most comfortable things I’ve ever had the eye-grinding displeasure of wearing–the Secret of the Mallwalkers! They were also two terribly comfortable outfits on two terribly comfortable personalities. Even if, um, they did hurt to look at. The analogy breaks down there, I guess.

Part of me wanted to come back in jewelry and a big hat and my soon-to-be patchy pants, sure, but mostly I just had a great time in an elastic waistband, hovering next to my girl and being lifted bodily by the bass. Times that great in pants that swishy are few and far between.

(I’d like to cap off this entry by talking about Spirited Away, but really, can I say anything that hasn’t been said?)

The Handmaid’s Tale was everything I expected plus three. I mostly remember it as being one of the choices of summer assignments for Mr. Munson’s junior AP English, and even though my choices were good (Ordinary People and Catcher in the Rye), I can’t help but be impressed that he gave it to unproven high schoolers to read.

I’ve been trying to articulate this thought for like fifteen minutes now, and it’s not coming. It’s something like this: But. The fact that he had the balls to give rising juniors books like Handmaid’s Tale isn’t as impressive, really, as the fact that under him we read them and enjoyed them and understood them. Reason number five hundred sixteen I won’t be a teacher–I could never live up to that.

Anyway. The Truth was even fluffier than I expected it to be, actually, but still not bad. I’m most of the way through Enchantment now, and Card’s books are only getting talkier and I don’t like it. He wrote a book called Character and Viewpoint a long time ago, and while I still consider it one of the best books on writing I’ve ever read, he’s stopped listening to his own advice. I wish he’d show me what his characters are doing instead of telling me what they’re thinking. Ender’s Game works so well because it strikes a balance between those two. Enchantment is close, but no cigar. (Children of the Mind missed the whole damn booth.)

And Minority Report was really good, yadda yadda. I just wish, in a fashion oddly reminiscent of Vanilla Sky, that I hadn’t had to pee so bad for so much of it.