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Custodies [Nov. 6th, 2008|11:42 pm]
They drug them, you know. Like racehorses.

Presidents.

And the gladhanded hopefuls.

They jack them full of seething highballs: uppers to keep their eyes as wide as a Disney rodent's and their jack-o-lantern grins as tight as drums, downers to dull the bitter sniggering poisons and razor-wit barbs of the jackal press, and hallucinogens so they can get through another day of being Macy's balloons pumped full of lies and propaganda dangled on strings by ancient vampire powermongers before an unending herd of buffalo Americans.

We know what to expect now from the freakshows and headcases who seek the nation's highest office.

Regardless of what kind of men they were before they sought the Grail, they are transfigured by their quest. Glassy-eyed with drugs, pockets stuffed with Krugerrands and promises, they stumble into darkened cells underneath the Pentagon and learn the Rules before they shake their first hand in Iowa.

Rule #1, established 1797: A President-to-be must have a lust for power that overwhelms honor, friendships, and once-treasured principles. You can always recant on your deathbed.

Rule #2, established 1881: Lie as much as you must. A lie is not a lie if it's told about your opponent, your beliefs, or the future. The Fourth Estate will admire your will to power, and the people will accept the lie as a truth for as long as they need to, a period beginning when you print your first derogatory pamphlet and ending when they pull the vote lever.

Rule #3, established 1913: Wars will always pique the American lust for blood and treasure, but only to a point. If the entire world is in crisis, promise to keep Americans free and content until involvement becomes unavoidable, at which point you must emphasize your desire to fight like a proud screaming eagle and bring justice to foreign shores.
Addendum A, established 1960: If there is no global crisis to gun-butter American voters with, one will be created for you.

Rule #4, established 1933: Reach the widest audience possible, infect the culture. When you reach voters through their favorite opiates, they become even easier to sway. It's easier to say memorable things when they're recorded and repeated ad infinitum. And it's easier for the handlers to spike you full of drugs in a studio than at a whistlestop.
Addendum B, established 1960: The revolution will be televised.

Rule #5, established 1969: The better man is the one who walks away with the loser's testicles crushed in his hand. There are no rules of conduct; no truth, no future, no mercy. There is the prize to win, and the dimwits who must be herded into voting booths with your name branded on their forebrains in order to win it.
Addendum C, established 2000: If some waterhead weakling is going to win with some sort of mythical "popular" vote and a slate of reasonable ideas, have your family get the fix in.

... and that's what they do. They scrap like pitbulls and shoot ludicrous adrenochrome cocktails between their toes and snarl through grins smeared with shit and Vaseline and totter around the country until their brows are furrowed like beet fields with their honest concerns over the plights of egg farmers, paperhangers, and oil heirs.

That's how the Game is played.

But this guy ...

This guy cheated.

I don't know how Obama managed to do this. I've been watching the Game get nastier and edgier every year since I've been old enough to vote, a spooky bitter feeling like walking in on a game of Life just as it becomes a game of Russian-Roulette Clue. But he walked into a situation where he should've been eaten alive and came out riding an incredibly unlikely landslide.

I don't know how he managed to make me feel hopeful and proud of American democracy for the first time since I was old enough to pronounce the word "Nixon".

I know the fact that he never, ever talked down to me is part of it.

And the fact that he seems to smile like he knows exactly what he's getting into.

And the fact that Tatsuya Ishida loves him.

But no matter how smitten I might be with this political juggernaut of hope, I'll be keeping an eye on him.

Vruba said that even if Obama turns out to be just another grinning drug-addled scumbag, he'll have made the great contribution to American politics of treating voters like human beings.

But that's not good enough for me.

If Obama turns out to be part of the machine, I'm going to feel god-damn betrayed for the first time since I started voting. And that sting is one that I won't take lightly. I'll make the furious spiders of Mirkwood look like god-damn Zen Buddhists if I get stung like that.

The children of the Revolution are watching you, Obama.

Oh, yes.

You've made us watch you with your glamours of hope and Canaanical promises of change.

So we'll watch you.

There's enough of us watching that we can watch you all day every day for the next eight years.

Yes, we can.
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No, I won't not never forget nothin'. [Jul. 12th, 2008|03:03 am]
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word...

"UNLESS."

Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn't guess.

That was long, long ago ...
.. but each day since that day
I've sat here and worried
and worried away.

Through the years,
while my buildings
have fallen
apart,

I've worried about it -
- with all of my heart.
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Seven Things You Can Say About George Carlin [Jun. 23rd, 2008|03:12 am]
Shit - "Edgy" comedians ain't got shit on you, George.
Piss - It pisses me off that you die and Dick Cheney gets kept alive with unholy machines.
Fuck - Fuck you, world.
Cunt - If God's a she, She's a real cunt.
Cocksucker - I can't believe that you had to get your first obituary from that cocksucker on Entertainment Tonight.
Motherfucker - You and Hunter have both left us here alone, like rats from a sinking ship, you motherfuckers.
Tits - But if I can get back to that cocksucker for a moment, at least the girl I heard fake-frowning her way through a halfwit report on your untimely death had nice tits.

That was a man who left nothing to apologize for.
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Reel of Fish X - Video Killed the Radio Star [May. 2nd, 2008|02:57 am]
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Reel of Fish IX (somewhat belated) [Apr. 29th, 2008|11:25 pm]
Seriously, you guys are the worst audience ever. I can barely even keep track of what day it is aside from the little scraps of paper I keep by my bed with my schedule written on them so I know when I'm supposed to stagger to my feet and wake [info]suicidesame to drive me to work, and no one reminded me that I'm now an extremely impressive 8 weeks behind in my totally arbitrary quest to review 51 movies. Weak, audience. TOTALLY weak. I even SAW movies, and haven't gotten around to reviewing them because I thought I was one or two weeks behind. I don't know WHY I thought that. I assume it was the same coping mechanism that allowed me to ignore stressful papers and burdensome tests until a few short hours before they were due/scheduled.

How am I supposed to deal with this kind of neglect? Is it by attempting to write 6 half-assed reviews in a single week to get most of the way caught up before the world's most awesome movie premieres Friday? I think it is.

Week 9 of 51 - Doomsday
Director: Neil Marshall, brought to you by the letter D.
Starring: Sexy Imperial halfbreed Rhona Mitra, tattooed stuntwoman Lee Ann Liebenberg, motivational speaker Craig Conway, grizzled private eye Bob Hoskins, and Malcolm McDowell, that was Alex.

What It Is - The year is 2037. The world has become a tattered patchwork of warring corporations and magical nation-states, ruled by dragons, elves, and men with robotic arms, each making use of dark, street-weary mercenaries known as Shadowrunners to ...

... wait, wrong timeline. The year is 2037, though, and it's been 30 years since a lethal strain of skin rash broke out in Scotland and killed nearly everyone in as gory and blood-vomitous a way as possible while those who weren't quite dead fought to be gunned down by stolid British border guards in adorable berets. After the carnage, the rocky Highlands have been sealed away and forgotten, and the United Kingdom has gotten on with its business of becoming a decaying and crippled world power. Now the virus has shown up again during an everyday heavy-armor police raid on some anonymous homeless encampment near Picadilly, and the Prime Ministry has decided to lock up and flood all of central London, killing however many million Cockney chimneysweeps live there, to contain the disease. However, hope springs eternal, as ubiquitous movie satellites have spotted living people in the contaminated zone of Glasgow. A team is sent to capture these lost Scots and find their secret for surviving the dramatically-named Reaper virus.

What follows is an methamphetamine-soaked homage to Mad Max, Escape from New York (two of the soldiers in the movie are named Miller and Carpenter, after the directors of both films), 28 Days Later, Highlander, Outbreak, and any number of Hammer horror films. Our cyber-eyed heroine is a tough-as-nails Scottish orphan raised by Bob Hoskins and the Met, and willing to do whatever it takes for Queen and Country. She is accompanied by an exceedingly tall dusky sergeant with a sharp sense of humor and a bunch of vanilla London boys in tactical armor who get brushed out of the way in the first few minutes after their arrival in scenic post-Apocalyptic Glasgow.

Their first target is a creepy abandoned hospital where a mysterious doctor was performing experiments up until the final days. Naturally, the entire hospital is crammed full of mohawked cannibal rejects from the Thunder Dome, and the whole party of loyal Beefeaters are driven apart and hacked to pieces and set aflame, leaving just a few plucky ones to figure out what's going on. They fall into the hands of Sol, a charismatic lunatic who looks like Sid Vicious on steroids and is the spiritual heir apparent to The Warrior's Cyrus. He finds the incursion of the British to be proof of his crackpot theory that there's life on the other side of the robot guns that guard the Scottish border.

Various homicidal hijinks and the devouring of human flesh ensue, and our heroes escape with the help of two gentle Narnian hippies and find the other community of Scottish survivors, living under the cold imperious silver-bearded rule of noted droogie Malcom McDowell at a year-round Renaissance faire castle and wearing doublets and carrying crossbows they picked up from the Medieval Times gift shop, firing upon our doughty English virus-hunters like angry Northerners upon the Deadites. Truly, Scotland is a warm and welcoming a tourist paradise in the searing aftermath of viral holocaust as it is today.

They manage to escape to an underground military warehouse where the Scottish Ark of the Covenant was no doubt stored, along with the corpse of the Faerie Queene,the Gae Bolga, and Sean Connery's head. Also stored there is a pristine Bentley, a moment that would be the best anachronistic product placement since Demolition Man if Bentley actually did product placements (instead, the producers just bought three of them for a cool $150K apiece), which they use to escape onto the main roads back towards Britain, becoming involved in the best car chase since Bullitt. Explosions that would leave Mad Max goggle-eyed rock the landscape, headless bodies fly hither and yon, and eventually everything reaches a tender denouement where evil is hypothetically served its just desserts and the protagonist goes to live in the rubbly virus-ridden hotbed of Glasgow with her new army of fanatical cannibal followers.

Comment il Rouler - Doomsday is not a movie to see if you are now, or have ever been, made even slightly squeamish at the sight of, say, luau pork or extremely rare steaks, or the bloated corpse of a dog exploding in the mid-day sun. For while most of the killshots in the movie are quite graphic - nail-riddled board to the face, arrow to the eye, horrific exploding car - they're not too far over the limit if you've been exposed to modern cinema or even the good old-fashioned gore-fests of the grindhouse era. One thing Neil Marshall DID push the limits on was the most over-the-top horrific depiction of cannibalism I've ever seen. Some old British scientist is burned alive and then his roasted flesh is sliced and torn off the bone by eager hands, and in some way that's even worse than the way David's organs are ripped out of his stomach in Shaun of the Dead or the delicately horrible manner in which Ray Liotta's brain is prepared in the exquisitely underrated Hannibal. This is really raw, vicious stuff. I don't know what they used for the cooked human body - I would assume some kind of treated pork, but it looks stomach-churningly awesome as they rip off and devour hunks of it. Just an FYI before you rush out and buy a copy.

If you can live with that kind of carnal feasting, though, you SHOULD rush out and buy a copy, especially if you've ever enjoyed a John Carpenter movie. This is over-the-top chainsaw madness of the old school, a nonsensical headlong rush through a storyline which makes only the smallest amount of logical sense while providing almost limitless opportunities for absurd shots of crudely-built rock and roll stages, cannibal go-go girls, escape locomotives and Malcolm McDowell in velvet tights. There's not a lot to be said for the acting chops that are laid on the platter - even the usually ebullient Bob Hoskins can only struggle against a script this stilted and absurd. But you don't come to a movie with a soundtrack by Robert Zombie expecting writing by Robert Altman.

The movie is an homage to the destructive sugar-rush madness of the 1980s and the creeping bio-horror that's so in vogue now. It's an homage to driving a stolen car at a zillion miles an hour down an abandoned road and smashing through an exploding bus. It takes our vague fears of government-created plagues and makes a cartoon mockery of them, splattering V for Vendetta imagery across the walls with a wet crack like a sledgehammer hitting a watermelon or a zombie skull. Man's innate talent for savagery is writ large across the face of this boldly obvious film. It's no quiet noir crackle in the dark; it's an exploding helicopter of alienism, portraying the downfall of society as a Technicolor Hanna-Barbera Lafflympics race where everyone gets decapitated. "Subtle" isn't even the dictionary that the two-dimensional characters in this movie use to bludgeon each other to death - but that doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun.

Incidentally, Malcolm McDowell? Extremely underrated as a character actor. He has all the gravitas and cold menace of Christopher Lee with the chilly aloof arrogance of Ian McKellen and the well-trimmed Van Dyke of Ian Holm. Even when he looks like he's hanging out by the turkey leg vendor in a muddy field outside Tampa,

Endgame - The product placements aren't even product placements, the rock and roll atmosphere is marred by the grimmest cannibalism scene this side of Rob Zombie's seder, the heroine is a girl but she never has a proper sex scene, and almost every shot is an homage, adapted, a sly reference to, or outright stolen from another film. And it takes place in Scotland, which has about as much claim to fame as an action movie haven as Hong Kong has to Victorian fog operas.

But for all that, it's worth 9 bucks.
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Reel of Fish VIII [Mar. 16th, 2008|02:29 am]
The hell? It's March 16th already? That doesn't make any sense! How can it possibly be that far into the year? I've barely even had time to think about the vast, horrific gulf of time spreads like a pool of nothingness between the beginning and end of time in which man and all his useless works are but the flutter of a dying hummingbird! I've hardly meditated at all on the feeble pointlessness of human life and the hollow emotions they lay claim to and the tintype souls to which we cling so desperately as to baffle the gods when the things are hardly worth the ectoplasm they're printed on! I haven't even mastered the Soldier's rocket jump in Team Fortress 2! And here it's already St. Patrick's Weekend. Which means I have to start thinking about dying my underwear green and how to get cans of Guinness into the Apple Store.

Well, one thing you can be sure of, children of the Revolution, and that's that there'll be a fresh edition of Reel of Fish every week and that I'll be drunk as hell tomorrow.

Two. Two things you can be sure of.

Well, okay, I might be a week or two behind in my Reels, so I guess I was right the first time. But that's one more thing to rely on than any church, lover or government can offer, baby.

So here we are at number 8, slowly catching up to the elusive, arbitrary goal I set for myself. And what better way to celebrate than by reviewing a movie that I spent 12 months swearing before God and Heaven and any saints who had a moment to spare that I would never see? But that's what happens when you're out on the town, cruising scenic West Palm Beach in the cool dappled midnight, driving around in a retrofitted police cruiser with a half-mad Army veteran and a Puerto Rican with a transplanted heart. It's either catch the midnight show at the Regal 18 or go to the Monkey Bar. But I wouldn't want to go to the Monkey Bar unless I was drinking banana daiquiris. And contrary to what you might be led to expect by their name, their banana daiquiris are TERRIBLE. Actually, I don't like most banana daiquiris. If I am to be honest with myself (always an exceedingly dangerous proposition), I think what I really want when I order a daiquiri is the Banana Kong that TGI Friday's used to serve, which was basically a banana milkshake with a tankard of rum poured in.

And this week, the midnight show at the luxurious and neon-laden Regal 18 (which is, if you'll go back a few sentences, what we're talking about) was none other than the much-heralded instant classic:

( This one's a bit flashier than the last seven. )
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Reel of Fish VII [Mar. 9th, 2008|09:50 pm]
Why, children of the Revolution, do you make me hit you?

I don't want to hit you. I love you! But you MAKE me hit you when you do this to me!

You let me get all lazy and useless. You let me go THREE WEEKS without a single prodding comment about missing Reel of Fish! You know, Reel of Fish? The light of your life, the hop in your step, the maltodextrose in your coffee, the motivator of your turntable, your raisin de otter?! Instead I just play video games and collect interesting new wireless mice and go drinking with my no-good tech support buddies. And no one says a THING to me about how you're not up-to-date on the latest flicks, the realest reels, the movingest movies, the sinful cinema brought to you by your host with the most. This is why I gotta hit you, baby.

Now let's talk turkey. And then you can go make me a sandwich.

In re: my life, nothing of consequence has really occurred. I'm still employed at Apple and have a nice mid-day schedule and a few peons to boss around ("Go ring up that guy who wants a nano, tell Dane he can take his 15 after that phone call, and chop some more lumber so we can build another ogre ship." "Zug zug!"). I'm currently taking a full-system antibiotic to kill a minor ear infection I've been unable to rid myself of - and we're talking here of drugs so strong that I can't go out in direct sunlight for long periods of time or eat too much iron or anything terribly hard to digest, since all the organisms that help process those vitamins and minerals and nutrients have been killed in the pharmacological genocide I've inflicted on my own gentle person in an effort to make my ear stop itching. That's how medicine works. At least it was free. Anyone who says America has no socialized health care has never been to Publix, where you can get locally-made generic drugs on the cheap and free antibiotics as well as really good fried chicken and orange blossom honey and Double Stuf Oreos and Tide and meat thermometers.

In re: the cinema, you've all caught up on the Oscars and read my earth-shattering revelations from the last edition of Reel of Fish, and are thus now all fully aware of my prognosticative (prognosticatonal? prognosticateral? progsis?) powers, and will tremble in fear at the truths and mysteries I will reveal to you. Sadly, I cannot stop (except for a couple of weeks at a time, whereupon I gotta hit you, baby), as I am, like Destiny, chained to my fate, doomed to read the future and then post it with links to IMDB.com. Unlike Cassandra, however, people listen to me. Like Cassandra, however, none of you ever comment on my freakin' LiveJournal entries.

Not that I'm bitter. I'm sweet. Sweet like beet sugar. And I'll beat you, sugar, if you don't shut your big yap and let me get back to Reel of Fish:

( And where the hell is my sandwich? )

Well, that was fun. Now I'm tired. This Cipro I'm on reacts with beer to make you really, really sleepy and spin-headed, so I went ahead and had two Sam Adams Winter Ales (mmm, gingery), so it's actually a bit hard to see the keyboard now, but y'know, still fun.

Now, to clarify, I saw Vantage Point a bit over a week ago, and I saw another one this week. Tomorrow I'll watch one more and then post both reviews to get caught up to last week. Then this Friday you get the star-spangled tenth edition of Reel of Fish! AWESOME. EXALTEDLY AWESOME.

Don't lie. You know you're excited. I can sense your arousal from here.

Be sure to tune in tomorrow as we go back in time to Saturday when I saw a movie I was meant to see the Friday before - and review the ridiculously overhyped 10,000 BC!

Be there - or be sacrificed to the God King!


* We've all failed our saving throws vs. Heartbreak with the loss of GG, and deal with it whatever way we can.
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Reel of Fish VI [Feb. 25th, 2008|02:05 am]
Wow, it's almost like I don't write anything BUT these movie reviews, and they're always later than I promised they'd be! It's almost like my life is a laughable failure! Ha ha ha! Ahhh. Ha.

Anyway. How about those Oscars? (Yes, that's why I'm about a week late. The Oscars. It's all part of my Grand Design. You can't be expected to understand the Grand Design. You don't have the drugs for it.) It was very important that I watch the Oscars, which I definitely did. It's not I like I lay in bed all night watching [info]suicide_sam_e play Team Fortress 2 and eating a Brooklyn pizza from Domino's and then read the Oscar results online later. No. I put on a tuxedo and drank a glass of overpriced champagne and politely applauded for the Lifetime Achievement awards and other such bullshit and when I got up to use the can I paid my brother a buck to fill my seat. That's how serious I was about the Oscars. And do you know why? Well, let's go back to my last illustrious and critically-lauded edition of Reel of Fish, where I said - more or less:
No Country for Old Men is definitely going to win a ton of Oscars, including Best Direction, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, and Best Supporting Lunatic for Javier Bardem. If these things are not true, may God strike me down with a thousand bolts of vengeful lightning, and may he do the same for my enemies if these things do come to pass, as they must, so it is written, forever and ever, amen. Also, on a seemingly unrelated note, Daniel Day Lewis will get another Oscar, this time for his role as a Timothy Dalton impersonator in what I think is some sort of B-movie horror flick called There Will Be Blood.

And everything I predicted has come to be, putting me into the same category as Mother Shipton and her horseless carriages, the Mayans and the end of the world in 2012, and Nostradamus and the famous worldwide war waged by the forces of good against the evil of Hister.

So clearly, my dedication to the Silver Screen has granted me some kind of SUPER POWERS. And that is why today I will tell you about a movie that I can tell you - concretely, such that you could place money on it - will go down history as the finest movie about midgets and death since Time Bandits.

Week 6 of 51 - In Bruges
Director: Martin "Doc" McDonagh
Starring: Colin "Dopey" Farrell, Ralph "Grumpy" Fiennes, Brendan "Sleepy" Gleeson, Clémence "Whose Line Is It Anyway? Jokes Are Only Funny For So Long" Poésy, and the extremely underrated Jordan "Howard T. Duck" Prentice, who also played a Giant Bag of Weed in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, thus launching him into immediate contention with Warwick Davis for the illustrious title of my favorite Hollywood lilliputian.

What It Is - Boy, that's a tough one.

In Bruges is rather like three totally disparate movies jammed into 107 minutes. There's an eccentric British crime comedy, along the lines of a Guy Ritchie picture; there's a surrealist Gonzo piece, full of drug-addled sequences, long mindbending camera swoops, and dwarves in Eton schoolboy caps; and a black-grin, twisty study of the dark-sweet lure of suicide and the horrors of dramatic irony.

Colin Farrell, for whom I have gained an enormous new respect after years of relative indifference bordering on dislike (viz: Miami Vice, Alexander and Daredevil), plays the highly emotional and thoroughly Gaelic hitman Ray, freshly off his very first and badly-botched job for the British mob run by the half-East End half-Klingon Boss Harry, played ably by the thoroughly insane Ralph Fiennes. Brendan Gleeson plays the mob's conscience, scholarly mob heavy Ken. Ken and Ray are in hiding in Bruges, Belgium's most well-preserved and famously boring city, until the heat goes off them for a bad hit. While touring the city they meet the lovely narco-nymph Chloë and the bitter dwarf actor Jimmy, and have an astonishing amount of madcap misadventures, illegal drugs, and violent psychological traumas until Harry shows up to kill everyone.

Comment il Rouler - In Bruges is a movie that brings us the basest Irish humor and the most delightfully imbecilic fat jokes coupled with painfully honest studies of what in life is worth dying for. It's a movie that celebrates cocaine and Belgian beers. It's a fairy tale and an urban legend and an O. Henry twist. It celebrates and belittles the eerily beautiful city of its namesake. It's a lazy, smoke-scented mid-morning dream and the slick gleaming barrel of a pistol across the face, shattering your teeth. It's got quite a lot of midgets in. I've written before on the subject of midgets in cinema - it's a subject I feel quite strongly about, and is central to the plot here.

Colin Farrell, to his everlasting credit, embodies my strange love of the little people with his combination of outright admiration, morbid fascination, and doofy grinning when he's in the presence of such an honored personage as Jordan Prentice (who, lest we forget, played Howard the Freakin' Duck). There's just something fascinating about a midget in a movie, and writer/director McDonagh ever-so-cleverly places the midget in this movie as a midget in a movie (or did I just blow your mind?). For his part, Prentice perfectly plays the arrogant American actor and insecure paranoiac dwarf, and provides some of the most memorable hilarity in the movie, as exemplified in every trailer for the movie ever played anywhere ever ("You don't know karate - UGH!" "You just gotta know where to look for 'em. Brothels are good.").

Hilarity abounds in the movie. The polarized Odd Couple banter between Ken and Ray crackles and wanders far afield. Fiennes is nothing short of genius in his role as the psychotically honorable family man/London capo Harry, smashing the scenery so he can chew it more readily. There's snapping, vicious wit and delightfully humorous bouts of ultraviolence (I particularly enjoyed it when Ray blinded a skinhead by shooting a blank in his face), and wry sarcasm and dry European humor and a whole smorgasbord of lightly blackened laffs. The bit where jowly avuncular Ken takes a gram of cocaine off of Ray and goes to the bathroom, only to return and peer at little Jimmy over Ray's shoulder, both of them with eyes like gimlets, makes me giggle even when I think about it now.

Of course, parceled with all that high-quality British jesting, you get the vast bitter ocean of dramatic irony, the "black" part of the black humor (the black humor, you no doubt remember from your various Classics courses, being black bile, or melancholy, of "and the Infinite Sadness" fame), and an awful lot of grim, gory, fantastically unpleasant deaths for a lot of very nice people. See, I picked In Bruges because I was hoping to break the trend of the last 6 movies I've reviewed, all of which featured the usually-nasty deaths of 85-100% of the involved protagonists by the final reels. "Ah, good," I mused to myself as I lazed over my eggs (côté ensoleillé vers le haut) and sirloin (medium rare with a light balsamic glaze) one bright morning, paging through the New York Times movie section, "A light-hearted Snatch-esque criminal romp featuring Voldemort, Mad-Eye Moody, AND a drunk midget! This should be a delight!"

And it was, don't mistake me! The movie had me larfing hard enough to spew Sprite (I'm on diet soda every day of my life now, for which my teeth have graciously thanked me, but I need lemon-lime at the movies and they just don't serve it Diet. I'm going to have to start packing flasks of illicit Diet 7-Up) through my nostrils. It had some genuinely heartwarming bits and, as I may or may not have mentioned, a hilarious dwarf (he played Howard the Duck). But it was, sadly, the Seventh Seal in the long line of movies where - alarma del interceptor aerodinámico - every-god-damn-body dies.

Although to its credit, In Bruges kills everyone as part of what is actually a pretty clever joke. Looking back over the movie, it almost seems like McDonagh was sitting in a pub and suddenly had an idea (spoiler alert again - the idea was about midgets) that was so funny he had to sit down and write a movie about it, a movie which kept growing more and more absurd and twisted as he forewent sleep and inhaled massive doses of powdered acid washed down with absolute gallons of stout, but which was ultimately building towards the one moment of purely Euripidean tragic irony.

To be even fairer, not everyone dies, maybe, although the ending is one of those vague fade-to-black-with-vague-narrative ones that sometimes make me want to gnaw the armrests of my theater seat, glazed with ancient buttery topping and the salt of thousands of clammy palms though they may be. But quite a few people die, in ways both beautiful and ugly, symmetrical and jarring ... well, I guess it's all ugly and jarring, but that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful, if you're willing to look at it in that creepy glaze-eyed American Beauty way ... or if it's in Bruges. If nothing else, Martin McDonagh has convinced me to add Bruges to my TTDBID list, my "bucket list" (to borrow a term from a movie I have no intention of seeing without heavy medication). Just as Harry muttered, the city's just like a fuckin' fairy tale.

Endgame - It is safe to say that you will see things you have never seen before In Bruges. You will laugh at jokes you'll wish you'd never heard and you'll see some truly unspeakable things happen to some genuinely nice people for no good reason. You'll probably learn some things about bell towers, the Belgian film scene, the dangers of blank rounds, and the consequences of punching Canadians. At the end you'll be left with the faintly uncomfortable sensation that you've just been to a party you weren't invited to; a lingering feeling of unease, a thorough hangover, and your conscience's seersucker coat rumpled with the wallet left in the wrong pocket. It's a movie worth seeing, but it's not all karate chops to midgets and Colin Farrell making jokes about retarded farmboys. You'll laugh 'til it hurts, but there'll be times when you'll want to cover your eyes, to look away, or to just get up and leave. Don't give in. An eternity in Bruges may, as Ray suspects, be what Hell is like, but an hour and forty minutes there can do you a world of good.
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Reel of Fish V [Feb. 15th, 2008|02:17 pm]
[Current Music |"Five Star Motels", The Agoraphobic Cowboy, Rick Moranis]

This is an important edition of Reel of Fish, and it comes only a week late.

Five is a seminal number. A crucial one. A 5 is 2 and 3. A 5 is a hand, a foot, the senses, the circlepoints along the Revealed Man, the mystic pentacle and the dire Pentagon, the eerie Silent E, the elements, vast and mighty Jupiter, and enough weeks spent on a pointless activity to justify some sort of dramatic introduction, with bold text and blatant references to the Principia Discordia.

Five is significant. Five means you're committed. Five is, in this case, just about a tenth of the way there. That's good. That's a round number, and round numbers are heavy. They have weight. Yes. Quitting now would leave a bruise to my vast ego. Not the contusion I would get if I quit at 25 or the crippling neuro-agony I'd get at 40, but certainly a bruise. Five means you've got a whole poker hand in, by gumbo, and you're gonna sit there with yer belly on the felt until the last chip is tossed. Are these poker metaphors working for you? Well, I hate them.

Five. Yes. Mach 5. Five easy pieces. Golden rings.

And what better movie to review than one that has been nominated for five* Academy Awards?

Week 5 of 51 - No Country for Old Men
Directors: Award-winning auteurs the Brothers Coen
Starring: Award-winning cowboy hat enthusiast Tommy lee Jones, award-winning rugbyist Javier Bardem, award-winning Goonie Josh Brolin, award-winning cannabis consumer Woody Harrelson, and award-winning 34B-23-36 Peter Pan Kelly Macdonald.

What It Is: Llewelyn Moss, the Welshiest cowboy in five counties, is out hunting antelope or some damn thing out in the vast endless flat Mordorlands of Texas, strolling across infinite plains under roiling emotional skies when he finds a little circle of trucks and a big heap of dead Mexicans and pitbulls, an imperial ton of movie-grade heroin, and a sinister and moderately-priced black briefcase filled with cash. This leads him on a run away from his rural Rio Grande trailer park to the big shining suburbs, where he hides in a series of crummy motels while his hot Scottish wife goes into hiding with her mom, who looks vaguely like Carol Burnett dressed up as a comical old hag. Llewelyn is fleeing the relentless attentions of hired killer Anton Chigurh, although he doesn't realize that right away, and it's also not terribly clear who's paying Chigurh, if anyone, since he seems to kill everyone he comes into contact with, including his Mob boss/evil corporate/seedy druglord employers. Llewelyn isn't just some weedy clerk, though; he's a gen-yoo-wine cowpoke, with a bunch of guns (although no silenced supersonic shotgun like Chigurh's) and a dead eye, so the game becomes a bit more interesting and a lot of colorful Texans get gunned down in the crossfire as hangdog Sheriff Ed Tom Bell mournfully surveys the various piles of corpses and makes like Sheriff Andy Taylor in a Tarantino flick.

Comment il Rouler: The Coens are clearly taking their shot at the Academy with this one. After a string of offbeat stoner favorites and IFC fodder and the careful construction of a cult of cinematic fame, they're engaged in Serious Business. All cinematic stops are pulled out; vast trackless wastes in the heartland of America, thunderous skies, the crushing realities of the modern world, frighteningly memorable villains and stalwart heroes working an amoral grey area, hyper-consequential violence, philosophies about the transience of life and the significance of death, old men in ruined homes, a script that seems to build to a hugely cinematic climax and then wanders off into meandering no-man's-land, and people enjoying milk. Nothing is held back. The Coens' implication is clear; if they don't walk away with several significant Oscars for this picture, Anton Chigurh will personally limp into the palatial homes of every member of the Academy and murder them in their beds.

The movie is good enough to merit the attentions it has received. Absolutely it is. It's brilliantly shot and framed like Remington art and holds your attention like a rivet to the forehead from the opening sequence. I barely managed to finish my popcorn since I was so busy staring at the silvery phantom genius unreeling in front of me that I could hardly scoop up a handful of greasy golden kernels and shovel them in. Some movies manage to do that, to reach through your skull and seize a handful of your brain, twisting it like a horse's reins to keep your focus on every frame. These movies are the ones that become the immortals, the ones that easily secure a spot in the AFI lists and leave the rest scrabbling in the contender's dirt. There is no doubt in my mind that No Country for Old Men will get a Criterion Master's edition and a shower of the laurels and moistened panties of a thousand critics and accolades in Paris and comparisons to every film about quietly insane hitmen and greedy noble-hearted cowboys that might be shot in the future. It's good. You should see it.

It is not, however, a lot of fun.

This is not to say there were not laffs, even amidst all the gunplay and exploding cars you remember from the trailers. The audience we saw the movie with in the Regal 18 was mostly older folks in nice going-out clothes and a few dating couples, and even they enjoyed the darksome gags about drinking the milk the killer had left out and Moss and "Sugar"'s snarky banter over a Mexican payphone and the half-naked and wounded cowboy staggering into the store where he had earlier bought a pair of Larry boots, clad now only in those boots and a hospital gown, only to be asked by the polite old salesman "How are those Larrys workin' out?".

The Coens' particular genius is creating absurd situations and eccentric, endearing characters and then combining the them in surprising and dramatic ways. They do that here, undoubtedly. From the sad-eyed one-man Greek chorus of Sheriff Bell with his Hamlet-in-the-Mayberry-graveyard wit to the hawk-eyed fierce independence of the desperate Llewelyn Moss to the maddening deadman's smile and relentless guns of the lunatic Chigurh, even the teary-eyed spunk of little Carla Moss and the shit-eating grin of Woody Harrelson's day trader/bounty hunter, these are characters that will stand the test of time. Their situation is unique and perilous and compelling, and the use of plain motels and quiet suburban streets as settings for dire, explosive action is inspired. They put their bold and dangerous and quietly-quipping characters together in these unique settings, and then ...

( Yarrr, here there be spoilers. )

Endgame: There is no doubt in my mind that you should see No Country for Old Men, just as you should see The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Casablanca, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wizard of Oz, The Muppet Movie, Duck Soup, and A Fistful of Dollars. You can't be a proper cinephile without it. Just don't walk in expecting to see the Dude drinking White Russians and George Clooney pattering about Dapper Dan. This movie is Serious Business, and it leaves scars.

But it's worth it.

*Actually, 8, but who's counting?
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Reel of Fish IV, part B [Feb. 13th, 2008|09:45 pm]
Howdy, pardners.

This here's gonna be another whatcha might call truncated piece, bein' as it's t'other half of th' fourth week's reviews, goin' up late under the influence of a whole passel a'leftover poison an' rotgut. Meantimes - an' they're mean times, brother - yer erstwhile hero, has had hisself a reckonin' an' fought through th' night, doin' a bastard's heap o' labours, workin' like a coolie under the whip of ol' Boss Apple.

But now that fat bastard has gone down under the guns-a' this fat bastard, and after a few restful hours o' shut-eye against the warm flank of my ol' dog Trey, I'm back in the saddle, limberin' the timber, makin' heads into canoes, and wonderin' just how long I kin stretch this piece o' dialectical fluff while I review:

Week 4 of 51, part B - 3:10 to Yuma
Director: James Mangold, The Washingtonville Kid
Starring: Russell "Boot Hill" Crowe, Bateye Christian Bale, Alan "Washoe" Tudyk, Ben Death-That-Walks Foster, and Peter Fonda, The Two-Gun Zombie.

What It Is: Bateye Christian Bale makes hisself out to be one Dan Evans, a failin' rancher somewhere out in the wilds o' Arizona, just one more dusty homesteader dyin' in the dirt with his skinny cows and faithful wife an' whipcord pups. He has th' added character flaw o' a missin' foot, left somewhere on th' battlefields o' the Civil War - which, trust me, weren't too damn civil - an' he's stubborn as a gub'mint mule. This becomes increasin'ly relevant as he crosses paths with Ben Wade, po'trayed here by ol' Boot Hill Crowe, the baddest outlaw in the entire-ritty o' th' Wild Wild Westerns. Well, Wade and Evans, bad men both if at varyin' degrees, cross paths, an' what with one thing an' another it ends up that an unlikely group o' cowpokes includin' Evans, Washoe Tudyk the nervous town doc, The Bible-thumpin' Two-Gun Zombie (suckin' chest wound an' all), and the grinnin' henchman o' the town's richest jerk end up haulin' Wade up to a town called Contention to catch th' title o' the film. Along the way, they find thisselves in all sorts o' trials an' travails, includin' encounters with crackshot Injuns, the heathen Chinee, a tobacco-chawin' Luke Wilson - the heartless bastard o' the feared Wilson Boys - various stabbin' implements, an' Evans' son, who looks like th' godless kin a' Christian Slater an' Cillian Murphy. Along the way the posse is exposed to th' rather unique philosophizin's o' the surprisingly deep outlaw poet Wade and is pursued relentless-like by Death-That-Walks Foster, playin' a dapper young maniac named Charlie Prince, an' the rest o' Wade's colorful gang of cutthroats. An' somewhere between Evans' crappy ranch and the dusty Western stunt show town o' Contention, this stupid Western dialect broke a knee and was shot in the back of the head with a Remington.

Sorry, son, it had to be put down.

Comment il Rouler: I think I liked 3:10 to Yuma for two reasons above any other - one is that I haven't seen a Western with so many great lines since Tombstone (although, much as I might have enjoyed this little celebration of America's love affair with train timetables, it ain't no Tombstone). These are some witty, thoughtful, droll fuckin' cowboys. They quote the Proverbs and introspect and say deep and disquieting things about the brief and brutish lives of the outlaw and the starving rancher alike, and then when the time comes they gun motherfuckers down like Samuel L. Jackson on a bender in SIn City. I like that. There's no line with quite the resonant immortal bite of "I'm your huckleberry.", but "Even bad men love their mommas." has a certain enduring beauty to it, and coupled with the sudden brutality of the scene which the line caps, it'll definitely be a keeper.

Secondishly, this movie was a pleasant reminder that just because I've liked Christian Bale's last few movies more than I've liked Russell Crowe's recent batch, that doesn't necessarily mean I like Bale more than I like Crowe. Don't get me wrong - the character of Dan Evans is a case-hardened bad-ass with some wicked lines and a savage Bale glare and an apparently magic Winchester rifle. But Russell Crowe introduces the first outlaw I've fallen in love with since Doc Holliday. He's smart. He's lethal. He's merciless. He's witty. He's cunning. He's dapper. He has a cool hat and a gun named the Hand of God. He draws hawks and leaps rooftops and kills people for being rude. There's nothing about Ben Wade not to like except for the fact that he'll kill you and everyone you care about - but in that, he exemplifies the secret dream of the American West, and provides an intriguing segue for me to explore in this next paragraph.

There are two basic alpha male archetypes that dominate Western thinking; James Bond and Jesse James. James Bond represents the British fantasy - elegant women with nice teeth eager to have filthy but completely sanitary sex with you, all the expensive cocktails you can drink, cars that aren't laughable Minis or puttering Renaults, and the license to kill those who you deem to have trespassed upon the sovereignty of your nation. The latter is very important - Bond is a rogue and a gentleman killer, but he's one that has all the appropriate paperwork and government chitties. A self-reliant killer who can, ultimately, rely on his beneficent government. Jesse James, on the other hand, is just the opposite. He embodies the spirit of the American West - the man who goes out past where the law can reach him and becomes a law unto himself. He wasn't a mad dog killer by any means; that wouldn't fit the fantasy. He killed those who opposed him with the unspoken understanding that any such were cowards, law dogs, or fools. I'm always going to side with Chaos against Law, even when Chaos wears a shiny badge like Wyatt or the Doc's. And that's why I like Ben Wade so much in this movie, and why he could kick James Bond's ass. Except maybe the Daniel Craig Bond.

Coupled with an excellent script and some powerhouse performances by larger-than-Yankeedom characters, 3:10 to Yuma has the added advantage of an excellent linear plot with plenty of tension and a giant train at the end. Combined with a rooftop chase, guest appearances by railroad-pounding Chinese and the aforementioned deadly Indian savages, a gun with a curse on it, and a horse that comes when whistled up, this movie comes perilously close to being the perfect Western, the one Plato would sit down to watch while eating the exemplar of popped corn and sitting in the perfect form of Chair. Sadly, it's still short a dance hall with a fiery blonde saloon girl, a mysterious man with no name, a lightning storm and an axehandle from being completely perfect. The action is sharp and shot with a beautiful Sergio Leone clarity which is a nice change of pace from the hallucinogenic violence of Sunshine and the jittery Handicam terror of Cloverfield. Gunshots are bright and vivid in the bright sunlight, and men die in the dust with true grit and real Hondo bravado. There are some excellent touches to the shooting that have been the hallmark of Mangold's limited but sterling career. Watch Copland and Identity, brilliantly scripted mangum opi that become all the richer thanks to clever shooting and strong direction. It's hard to film a Western that doesn't look like either a knockoff of Gunsmoke or The Magnificent Seven. If there was any one thing 3:10 to Yuma really reminded me of, it was Brisco County Junior, arguably the cleverest Western series ever filmed. Bright, sharp, lots of steady movement and establishing shots, and lots of quiet reflective moments between the bursts of gunfire.

It's by no means perfect, mind you. Some of the characters are kind of annoying, the motivations are a little muddy, and even the brilliant Bale and Crowe's characters seem to act a little impulsively at times as they rush natural interactions to their conclusion in order to catch up with the script as it chugs along. Also there's quite a few loose ends, and some parts of the story don't make any sense unless you watch the DVD special edition and catch all the deleted scenes. It really grinds my gears (Fuck you, Griffin, my name's Wheel and I'll take that phrase if I fucking well want it, you fat animated prick) when directors cut out important bits that leave big gaping bleeding holes in the story - cuts that no director in his right mind would have made 20 years ago - because NOW they know the scenes aren't really gone, they're just going to the DVD. Here's where I turn on Mangold like a drunken cobra; he's a damn good director, but he's fallen prey to the laziness and idle greed of the Special Features menu. There was a time when you had to THINK before you cut a film, knowing that every frame was expensive and every word meant something at the time. Editors were like assassins, hired to kill the right word at the right time, usually in the dead of night when no one could stop them, and serious directors demanded final cut so they knew they'd be able to save their baby on the operating table before it was hacked up by butchers. Now any blind yokel with a Macbook and a copy of Final Cut Pro can slash apart a feature film and let it be released into theaters like a crippled butterfly, and directors let it slide, knowing that their art is all still intact on a million shiny discs, twinkling in the future. This, I think, heralds the end of the movie theater as we know it, the end of quiet dark spaces and greasy popcorn slicks on the unseen floor and previews with green MPAA bars and the soft ratcheting hymn of the projector. In the future, every home will be a theater, and every last man a projectionist.

Endgame: 3:10 to Yuma - it may be a damn good cowboy movie, or it may just be the Antichrist.
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Reel of Fish IV, part A [Feb. 11th, 2008|09:52 pm]
Bonus nachos, my children of the Reelvolution.

After a long and burning stretch of days sodden in rum and Florida water (the sweet-smelling white magic blessing kind, not the sulphorous lead-laden rusty tap kind) and black cherry blues and chili cheese fries and herbal smoke and beignet powder (I'm pretty sure you can be sodden in powder), I'm back on the attack, down with the clown, in like Flynn, here without fear, and awesome like Blossom. New Orleans was as much New Orleans as any one man could be expected to handle. Forunately, I was there with [info]doctorcurare, who is no mere man. He's a Doctor. ("He's a real doctor - from AMERICA.") With his expert advisement, I was able to take more New Orleans in one sitting than anyone not wearing a top hat with a skull in the band. I'm sure at some point I'll talk more extensively about it, possibly when I figure out how to plug this video camera which is full of video taken at Mardi Gras itself into my computer in such a fashion that said video flows from one to the other (I assume I have to suspend the camera from an IV rack of some kind), but for now, to business.

To business! *clink*

You may have noticed that a week drifted by with no word from me. Well, THAT IS TO BE EXPECTED. A man can't party like an a rock star and drink like a fish and eat like a wolf (a wolf who likes beignets) and dress like a beatnik and walk like an Egyptian AND go to the movies. We got NEAR the movies a couple of times, but we never actually went IN. We did, however, manage to take in a couple of flicks at the fabulous Olson Hangover Theater, where the Saltines are always fresh and there's plenty of Sprite and Pepto-Bismol.

Week 4 of 51, part A - Sunshine
Director: Danny Boyle
Starring: The Scarecrow, The Human Torch, Hidden Dragon, Dormé, The Duke of Norfolk as a Kentucky fried zombie, and The Sun

What It Is: A crew of racially-diverse scientists take a hold full of rainforest plants and dangerous latent psychoses aboard their slender spiralling sexy-voiced spaceship on a voyage to the Sun, which is about to go out or is possessed by demons or something. The movie carefully dances around explaining any hard science whatsoever in a way that no doubt has Arthur C. Clarke spinning in his grave fast enough to violate the Pauli exclusion principle, and specializes more in showing what happens when everyone in space goes insane for a variety of reasons from the excellent to the Biblical, and also what happens when you get vaporized by sunlight.

Comment il Rouler: The best things about the movie are the psychiatrist who stares into the sun, the performances (primarily the facial expressions and merciless killing furies, respectively) of Cillian Murphy and Chris Evans, the GlaDOS-sweet voice of Icarus the computer, and Hiroyuki Sanada. The worst things about the movie were trying to understand what the flying fuck just happened and how a man-piloted sun-creating bomb works. Seriously. The movie has some excellent special effects and a few really powerhouse performances, but they all add up to a big heaping unidentifiable wad.

Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of movies where everyone dies. I mean, yes, that's much more realistic and therefore ultimately satisfying to A&E Biography enthusiasts, but I'm gonna need to watch a string of Disney movies just to get through a whole feature without every protagonist biting the bullet (or sucking the sunlight, or meeting the monster, or riding the razor, or examining the extraterrestrial). And, spoiler alerts be damned for a movie that came out back in June, everyone dies in this one. Even the people who don't get any lines until right before they die. Even the imaginary people. Characters somehow manage to wander on-screen in a movie set in a spaceship on its way to the sun, get a psychoanalytic pithy phrase in, and then die horribly, screaming and gouting flame or freon or red red croovy everywhere.

Well, there's a bit more to it than that, but not a heck of a lot. Danny Boyle likes to cut to the chase, in the truest sense of the phrase. He didn't ever explain the zombie plague in 28 Days Later aside from "It came from government chimps." (the hidden link between Project X and 28 Days at last revealed), he doesn't bother explaining why everyone in Scotland is on heroin, and he doesn't ever tell the hapless viewer how future Earthican scientists designed a spaceship that goes into the middle of the sun and then explodes to create a new and better sun. These are things you don't need to explain. You take them as read and get straight to the zombie priest and the Sick Boy Method and viewing Sol at 3.1% intensity, and then let everyone get on with the dying.

The characterization is limited to pretty rough sketches and all the dialogue takes place around and about the movie's big-name star. Sol, who has also appeared under the noms de cinema of Phoebus, Apollo, and Mr. Sun, famed for his appearances in stage, song, the written page, screens big and small, and cereal boxes, commands the audience's attention just as he does the character's, and racks up a higher killcount than even the perfect storm in The Perfect Storm. Shots of the Sun provide excellent filler for the long blank spaces left in the script when writer Alex Garland passed out facefirst into the pages under the influence of a sunlamp and a handful of Xanax before waking up with the screaming night terrors and scribbling out the deaths of a few more characters. But you know it's a serious movie when even the Sun dies.

Endgame: For all its other faults, Sunshine gave me a fuller realization of the tremendous acting talent of Cillian Murphy, who can carry a perfectly silent scene just by screaming in mime, and also helped me remember what a damn crime it was that Chris Evans was so completely wasted in that Fantastic Four tripe. Sure, he was the best part of FF, but that's like being the lead special cowboy in the retard rodeo. He's a fierce and savage bastard in this movie, and does a damn fine job of it. I'd watch Sunshine again, but only if I was in a delirious fever from sun poisoning and needed something to watch while I lay stomach-down on the cot with mentholated ointment all over my back.

Tomorrow! Reel of Fish IV, part B - 3:10 to Yuma! Be there AND BE SQUARE.
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Rocketing over Candyland. [Jan. 31st, 2008|10:20 pm]
[Current Location |George Bush International Airport, Concourse E]
[Current Music |Everybody's Got the Right (To Some Sunshine), by Stephen Sondheim]

I love travelling, but I sometimes suspect that people may be right when they tell me that, much like my love of the hot sauce bar at Tiajuana Flats, it's a masochistic love.

I enjoy going by train and by bus (although I admit the bus is pushing it) and I love a good roadtrip and sometimes I just dig puttin' on my travellin' shoes (from the Walking Company) and goin' somewhere by shanks' mare, but no travel experience has the Zen purity of air travel.

I love how every airport seems to have been designed by the same committee of aliens, influenced by their otherworldly understandings of what humans like, viz: huge arching corridors with colored lights buried in recessed acoustic tiling, long sloping hallways to nowhere, curved metal fixtures wherever there is space to cram them in, and the endless gleam of tile and chrome that makes every step resonate portentously.

I love the artistic flourishes that aeroportologists have tried to apply to make these byways more human, more friendly, but end up making them more like a David Lynch fever-dream. Right now I'm in the Houston airport, where I'll be for the next three hours (Sorry, [info]doctorcurare. I hope you got a good nap in before you came to pick me up), and sitting against the outside wall of the Continental Airlines' President's Club, where you can get decent free wi-fi (right up there with "synergy" in the Gallery of Semantically Meaningless Terms, for my money) as long as you don't mind looking like an infohobo. The designers of Houston's George Bush International Airport, in their wisdom, decided what was needed in the middle of this concourse was a huge 1980s-style bank of televisions in a big overhead loop right at the intersection of the corridors. The TVs light up with random bursts of color and play soft extradimensional music lik Enya on uppers. Occasionally they show distorted shots of hibiscus flowers, fire, or what appears to be part of a proudly-waving American flag played back at super-speed. In the Fort Lauderdale International Airport, which the Portland Krewe (see, I'm ready for Mardis Gras!) no doubt remember very well, there was a hallway that played jungle noises when you triggered motion detectors by walking down the hall, and also a lifelike statue of a fat man sleeping in a chair sealed in a Plexiglass cube. The West Palm Beach Airport has fake waterfalls and metal palm trees, the municipal pride of Sarasota-Bradenton has its vast aquariums towering next to the Burger King and Sbarro's, PDX has an astonishing amount of beaver and salmon sculptures as well as various animal tracks set in bronze in the floor ...

I think I like airports because they're mad. They're mad like Wonderland. Right now the bank of TVs here at the Houston airport are playing an epilepsy-inducing flutter of seraing blue and green lights and washed-out shots of what may be a sundew over a high violin hum, and a bustle of French-Canadian students are walking by unconcernedly while an old man in a 10-gallon hat laboriously selects which of the three cookies left at the Nestle Toll House kiosk he wants and the young and pretty Mexican clerk shifts anxiously on her tired feet, waiting to close up and go home. There's a flight crew dragging their wheeled luggage behind them and pattering a routine of smooth and well-worn banter as they saunter in their archaic Great War uniforms from one gate to the next, one plane to the next, one city to the next.

Everything at airports is out in the open. There's no complications, no expectations. You're leaving one place and going to another. You get through your line of refugees from the world outside, hand in your golden ticket, take off your shoes for the strange satisfactions of the iron-eyed guards in short-sleeved white shirts, and then you're inside. All there is to worry about is point A to point B. You'll never starve or get too hot or too cold or go without TV or iced tea. You're in a perfect bubble of isolation, waiting to get onto your magic bird.

Emotions are stark here, like they are at hospitals and ... well, only train stations, really, and that's rarer now. Everywhere else there's hidden agendas and unspoken thoughts and broken promises. Here there's warm greetings and tearful goodbyes - final farewells, long-missed hellos, the ends of some things and the beginnings of others. There's the single-serving friends expounded on so eloquently by Chuck Palhaniuk and there's corridors to drag your luggage down and chairs to collapse into and screens to watch and windows through which you can wash the sun dive into the sea in a riot of pink and gold and purple and searing orange. There's the ready availability of a tumbler of any liquor that can afford a sponsorship and any food-bourne drug from caffeine to corn syrup that you might want to narcotize yourself wi -

- wow, that stewardess has nice legs. Are they still allowed to wear black silk stockings with uniforms that daringly short? Is she visiting from the 1950s? Damn.

... anyway. Yes. Airports are mad, and gleaming, and bustling with hubbub and huggger-mugger, but they're also serene inside. Quiet. You know where you came from and you know where you're going. Simplicity itself.

And I love being on airplanes. A lot of people I know hate it. Julia loathed it. Man, she hated airplanes. Airplanes (and airports) were the only times I ever saw her shift restlessly, uncomfortably, unable to concentrate on her books or kraftwerk, like a cat on its way to the vet. But in one of the few cases where I disagreed with her completely, I love them. I always try to get a window seat, and my favorite of these is the Shatner seat, right over the wing. You can see the ground fore and aft, which is good, but I love the smooth shining swoop of the wing and the hum of the turbine.

I love the fighting against gravity that the big planes do, roaring like dragons and forcing themselves up with a lurching shove like a drunk rugby player coming off a barstool and swinging a bottle. I love the way they settle on the air like a mad steel duck on an endless invisible pond. I love the tops of clouds and the model cities far below. Day travel is good, because you can pick out little details like moving cars and boats cutting white icing furrows into the blue glass of the bays and lakes and seas, but night time is the best time. At night the world is transformed into a Faerie Queene's kingdom, a Candyland of bright colors on an endless cake of purest black velvet (Black Velvet Cake would be the best name ever for a big country band that covered the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees). In the day the colors wash out, and soon you see that all the world is rich brown, dusty green, and bright blue. At night the nation far below is a handful of bright jewels scattered on the dark, glowing and gleaming and yes, even twinkling. I thought I was hallucinating the twinkling when we were flying over rural Texas en route to Houston, but I realized that the same wind that was gently rocking the plane on its invisible puppet strings was blowing the great trees far below with a rough baby-shaking violence, obscuring the soft lights of home in Pi flutters of branches that looked like the twinkles of stars to the gods far above.

The soft blue curving snakes of suburban roads set more and more commonly with more efficient lights that cut back on light pollution, the snakes all curving towards the bright Spice Roads, the ruler-straight main drags set with their sodium lights, and the occasional bright birthday-candle blaze of a shopping center. You can pick out odd things from far above - the house with red lights, lonely traffic signals in the middle of unlit farm roads, a dock bar carefully picked out in a great T warm orange lights against the deeper black of the bay. You can imagine anything you want down there.

And then the landing, jostling and scraping, the Superman whoosh of the wind as the plane fights to bring itself to a standstill, trying to convince Newton that it's come to a stop when all logic dictates that it's actually just bounced along a vast smooth stretch of concrete at approximately two zillion miles per hour.

Hell, the only peanuts I've ever enjoyed eating were on a plane. Sky Chef Butter-Toffee Peanuts. I remember them well.

So here I sit, cross-legged like a Buddha in the middle of Houston, sucking on a red cup full of Diet Coke-flavored ice and watching a bank of lunatic screens play color-saturated shots of wind-flickered car dealership streamers. 1,000 people have walked by me as I've sat here, criss-crossing the world in the dead of night, and though I'll be here for another two hours yet, probably finishing Quartered Safe Out Here, I am content. I am serene like a firefly. And I've come to, I think, a realization. I would come to hate airports as much as much of the civilized world seems to if I were to ever end up, through an extremely unlikely set of bizarre circumstances, with a white-collar job that required frequent air travel for business.

Because as I said, emotions are purer at airports, and while the goodbyes are always sad, there's always been someone I want to see on the other end.
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Reel of Fish III [Jan. 27th, 2008|12:43 am]
Welcome, ladles and gentlespoons, chilled hens of all ages, to the newly-christened and totally-improved Reel of Fish. Tell me that's not a cool name. I'll call you a damned liar and glass you.

The brilliant title of my 51-part columnar opus came about as a result of a conversation with [info]sagan_fox, who's always good for pinging ideas. [info]vruba and [info]pseudomammal took halfhearted stabs at brilliance but nothing that tops my headline.

And while we're on the subject of cool names, notice how I spent $15 bucks I received as a tip from an eccentric Brazilian lady for pushing her cart full of laptops out to the parking lot on a Rename Token from the good people here at LiveJournal. No longer will I pervert my chosen online handle with some Hindu mumbo-jumbo! Now and forever, you will read Reel of Fish at wheeloffish! Wheel lives, baby!

And you're in for a treat, boils and ghouls, for your humble reviewer and taker of cinematic silver screen bullets has thrown himself upon a whole new grenade this time. No more science fictiony horrors or creeping abominations or unknown B-list actors, for now we delve into the slithering slick of slumming celebrities sneered at for their sanguinary singing.

We bring you:

Week 3 of 51 - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Wormtail, some moppets, and a bunch of corpses.
Songster: Stephen Sondheim

What It Is: London barber Benjamin Barker is wrongfully accused of an imaginary crime by bewigged judge and catamite enthusiast Judge Turpin, and sent away for 15 years while is wife is ravished and takes poison and his child is adopted by the cruel judge. He comes back as a ravening, singing maniac who has a plan to tunefully slaughter his enemies, assisted by the fright-wigged Fleet Street meat pie witch and professional gin sot Mrs. Lovett. Also some foppish young sailor falls in love with Barker's Alice Liddell-lookin' daughter and concocts an unnecessarily elaborate plan to free her from her wardship to the Judge. And Wormtail is there.

Comment il Rouler: You can tell not even 5 minutes in that this is a movie Tim Burton has been waiting to do since he was a nerdy art school student. This is a well-loved and worn-at-the-edges story; the musical was first produced in 1979 and based on a play written 6 years earlier which was in turn based on penny dreadfuls written 80 years before that which in turn were based on illustrated broadsheets which came from street chatter that had been going on for a hundred years about the urban legend of a London barber who slashed people's throats, and a woman named Marjorie, Sarah, Nellie, Shirley, or Claudette (but always Mrs. Lovett) who helps him by baking his victims into tasty pies. Every shot is framed with loving aforethought and most are even framed with a gentle shadowbox that is faintly reminiscent of old silent films but also gives you the perspective of the mind's eye. These are all scenes that played inside young dorky black-clad Tim Burton's head for years before he swelled up with fame (and pies) and started doing cult films and terrible adaptations of Planet of the Apes (hint: Wheel really, really hates the remake of Planet of the Apes. This will become abundantly clear as the year wears on).

To a certain extent, of course, he relies on the old tropes he's developed over the years, most notably the casting of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, but also bits like a CGI credit sequence that's practically a parody of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's opener, and the long stares out the window (everyone in Burton's movies stare out the windows all the damn time). There's also a few scenes, particularly a long accelerated CGI-enhanced travel shot through London's seedy streets and the use of bright glaring Technicolor costumes against a drab background, that feel like an homage to or a pickpocket lift from Moulin Rouge - which, might I add, would make a smashing double feature with this penny ($8.00) dreadful. But what make Sweeney Todd into a real scene are the songs.

Stephen Sondheim is a god. I'm going to lay that out there right now so you know where I'm coming from. I found the soundtrack to Assassins on Amazon.com back when it was a much smaller site and I was looking for a book on the hashishin, ordered it on a whim with some of my ever-dwindling scholarship fund, and have not stopped listening to it for seven years. The man is a genius, and it's particularly interesting to hear some of the little twinkles and flourishes he'd use years later in Assassins in Sweeney Todd - the soft call and response of a man and woman talking to each other by talking to themselves, slow clarinet burbles filling in the soft spaces, and the gently increasing whisper of a madman working himself into a tuneful rage ... these are all familiar to someone who's heard "The Ballad of Guiteau" and "I Am Unworthy Of Your Love" several hundred times. But back when he wrote about the Demon Barber, he was still breaking new ground and getting his feet under them, and while his songs are the meat of the movie's pie, it's Burton's shiny crust that make the thing worth trying.

Many of you are familiar with my rabid man-crush on Johnny Depp. As far as I am concerned, he is the greatest actor in the history of ever and even the terrible movies he's been in have been made better by his presence. Fortunately, Sweeney Todd is not a terrible movie - it's quite a good one, unique and darkly fun, and even more fortunately, Depp's got a set of pipes on him. I was watching the movie at the Silver Screen Cinema tonight, rather than my usual haunt at neon-bedecked art-deco glamour-hall that is the Regal 18. The Silver Screen is notable for being the only movie theater in Palm Beach county that serves food and liquor, much like the beloved Bagdad back in Portland. Unlike the Bagdad, however, the Silver Screen has a god-awful sound system from the early 1980s, with big clunky speakers panelled in fake wood hung on the wall with nails and run with aging wires. The sound is muddy, crackly, and heavy on the tremolo - this becomes less of a problem as the movie progresses and the lovely waitresses keep bringing you pints of Guinness, but it does make a musical a bit of a chore. I didn't know what half the songs in Hairspray were about until I downloaded the soundtrack. Fortunately, Depp's voice came through clear and menacing and desperate, matched in purity only by Alan Rickman, so I'll only have to download Helena Bonham Carter's songs from the iTunes store to find out what the line she was muttering after "worst pies in London" was

Johnny's character was an intriguing mash-up of the pallid, hollow-eyed blade aficionado from Edward Scissorhands and the grinning East End lunacy of Captain Jack Sparrow, both beloved characters mixed together and baked into one new and terrifying meat pie. In fact, it was bloody difficult not to think of Captain Jack every time Depp was talking, because for all his graces as an actor, he really only has the one British accent - but heck, it's a good one.

I don't think Sweeney Todd will necessarily surmount Edward, Jack, the Doc, the freakish man-child Willy Wonka, and Dean Corso* in the annals of Depp's unforgettable characters, but he was well-put together. Depp had a great dead-eyed stare and a neat sneering snarl, not to mention a deft flick of the wrist when slashing a throat and a really nifty set of razors.

Helena Bonham Carter is increasingly an enigma to me; I faintly remember her from a couple of Merchant Ivory pictures as a forgettable talent with a graceful back and a silvery cultured voice. Then she was in Fight Club and then she moved into some sort of (Pee Wee's) playhouse with Tim Burton and since then she's been playing the same weird-haired hollow-eyed seedy sex kitten character at least once a year, mostly for Timmy's cameras. Her singing didn't blow my mind but she hit some lovely silvery notes when she wasn't muttering into aitch-dropping poor-gel accent, and her practical character had some real moments made all the better by Carter's sardonic grace. One of my favorite bits in the whole movie was her song about living on the shore with Sweeney Todd, a scene admittedly made much funnier by Johnny Depp in a striped 19th-century bathing costume sitting hunched on a blanket and staring off into space.

Endgame: Between Depp and Carter, two Harry Potter alums and Cohen (the merry prankster of cinema, who's absolutely brilliant in his role here, sadly cut short**), the cast list reads like a fan-fic of epic proportions, some sort of culture-savvy Goth fantasy combining all of the darksome best of Hollywood within a flaky crust into one succulent, gleaming - damn, I really got stuck on this meat pie metaphor at some point. But the whole thing does hang together beautifully. Sondheim's songs are familiar and tell a very old story indeed, but it's still a good story and they're still great songs, acted and sung by performers who can reach into your brain and tweak the right neurons and Burton's joyful slaughterhouse opera is just as warm and satisfying as a ...

... is anyone else hungry?

* The amoral book collector from The Ninth Gate, as you no doubt know, with your Dean Corso action figure on the bookshelf.
** Get it?
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Reel of Fish II [Jan. 18th, 2008|02:13 am]
"For Godzilla was, even in its bowdlerized 'King of the Monsters' incarnation, an obvious -- gigantic, unsubtle, grimly purposeful -- metaphor for the atomic bomb." - New York Times drunken Irish film critic Terrence Rafferty, The Monster That Morphed Into a Metaphor

“We all stand together to help each other and to help those who need our help in the future. We remember forever all the brothers and sisters that we lost on that day.” - Noted binder of branches and exterminator of the homeless Rudolph Giuliani, regarding the one topic in which he has any interest.

(There. Now you don't have to click on the tempting, tantalizing spoiler link to understand my awesomely insightful hypothesis about this flick.)

(It is an intriguing LJ-cut, though.)

(The jolly, CANDY-like spoiler-laden link ...)

Week 2 of 51 - Cloverfield
Director: Matt Reeves
Starring: Michael Stahl-David, T.J. Miller, Jessica Lucas, a screaming horde, the bravest soldiers since Hamburger Hill, and the scariest damn monster ever.

What It Is: A famously mysterious monster attacks New York City in a series of uncannily familiar sequences of destruction. A cast of genuinely interesting modernists and trendsetters are forced to stop filming the witty romantic comedy that had begun in their ungodly-huge apartment and instead flee screaming from an ever-embiggening symphony of horror. They have only their own cracking wills and quavering wisecracks and the occasional product-placed Mountain Dew and Aquafina to sustain them. Throughout the film, there is no hope but whatever the resilient human heart can conjure - and the government-issue Limited-Scope Future-Oriented Expectations provided by the limitless might of the United States Armed Forces and their high-quality explosive ordnance! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

( Surrender all hope of avoiding spoilers, all ye who etc. )

And so, astonishingly, the monster is Voltron, Gamera, AND Cthulhu. I was just as surprised as you are, trust me. But it all comes together beautifully. And it's nice to see that the Internet was right, even about the stuff that contradicted the other stuff.

Endgame: The people at Bad Robot Pictures* told me not to say this, but screw it - I realize it's been only 18 days and 2 cinematic jaunts this year, but I'm pretty comfortable calling this THE BEST FUCKING MOVIE ... EVER. Seriously. If you can take the shots to the viscera and the creepy non-Euclidean beasties jabbing you with their jabs and the eerie roars and the constant explosions and the heartbreak and the sad but true laughter, then go. RDWTS, I'll call it. Run, Don't Walk, To See. That's my highest rating to date, and also the first acronym I've cranked out that I think has a shot over at Urban Dictionary. It's well-made, well-acted, unique, interesting and downright savage. Missing it would be more than a crime against cinema - it would be f'ing UNAMERICAN.

* Incidentally, [info]suicide_sam_e points out that Bad Robot Pictures is clearly run by Wall-E.
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I also do memes. [Jan. 16th, 2008|03:43 am]
I'm a jack of all trades. In addition to gimmicky numbered posts that are basically just an excuse to write something puerile and impersonal and also to go to the movies and gorge myself on greasy corn and bubbly corn syrup every week, I also, as the title implies, do memes ("In, as you say, the mud.")

This particular gem was pickaxed from the living brain of [info]whetherwoman

1. The title of the first article that pops up is the name of your band.

2. The last four words of the last quote on the page is the title of your album.

3. The third picture on the page, no matter how ridiculous, is your album's cover art.



Market Cross is a blues-heavy rock band, full of Southern grace and grit, with a strong strain of whiskey-addled folk tempered by a steely love of electricity. With their latest effort (and therefore) Imminent Downfall, they've taken something of a post-modern bent, with violin prodigy Kennedy standing in for ailing bowman Flax-Eye Phineas on the electric fiddle and production by Jane's Addiction's Dave Navarro, the Market Cross boys are bringing their dirty-rock sound into the near future with cuts such as "Spark the Chrome" and "Circling Squares". Lead singer Canaan Bonaparte growls his stately drawl with a new vibratory edge, supported by the blazing battle-tank guitar of Hard Road Roman and the deep throaty bass of the mysterious Bassist X, they've created a sound that drags the band of edgy good ol' boys kicking and drinking into the 22nd century.
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Reel of Fish [Jan. 11th, 2008|01:09 am]
[Current Music |"Hungry Like The Wolf", Duran Duran]

With a new year dawning, I've realized that I have absolutely nothing of interest to say.

I do, however, have a Regal Crown Club card and a job that provides me with a reasonably steady source of income and practically unlimited access to a variety of computer equipment.

As such, I have decided to undertake what is, for me, an extremely ambitious project.

Once a week, I will take in a movie. Or two. Possibly more. But at least one. And I won't take in a movie at home on DVD unless I'm sick in bed with pneumonia. I'm talkin' here about that hot new drek, the real McCoy, the cinema verité of the masses, the opiates, the celluloid fantasies, the silver dreamstuff.

This is going to be a banner year for movies, and I want to be there live, live, LIVE!

Once a week. Wherever possible (by which I mean whenever I'm so inclined and remember how to do it), I'll throw in pictures, amusing hyperlinks, and possibly even a video if I ever figure out which cable goes wherefore from the remarkable camera [info]pseudomammal and [info]vruba got me or if I bother to turn on my iSight.

So if every week from today is done and done well, you'll have 51 magical mystery tours to look forward to.

And if you're dubious about the whole thing, well, so am I.

NONETHELESS!

Week 1 of 51 - Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
Directors: The Brothers Strause
Starring: Stephen Pasquale and absolutely no one else of consequence aside from the moderately hot Reiko Aylesworth.

What It Is: The natural follow-up to the somewhat successful Alien vs. Predator, dropping references to both Aliens and Predator 2 and throttling up the bloodshed to heretofore unseen levels, this film features the shuttlecraft last seen at the end of the first vs. movie crashing back on Earth minutes later, spreading xenomorphs across the landscape and unleashing the reasonably-horrific but never-seen-in-good-light "Predalien" of fanfiction fame all over a sleepy Colorado town whose predominant features are a vast trackless forest, a cathedral-sized sewer, the scariest hospital in five counties and a populace of drooling idiots.

Comment il Rouler: I'm sure that the Brother Strause have a lot of talents. Perhaps they're excellent jugglers or accomplished zither players. Maybe Colin can make a souffle or Greg can name all the Canadian prime ministers. One thing neither they, nor Daniel Pearl or Dan Zimmerman (look 'em up), can lay claim to is the ability to go more than 1.8 seconds without drastically changing camera angles during an action scene. The movie is a spine-rolly mix of delayed-jab horror scenes with creeping facehugger legs and slithery xenomorphs in the glimmering Technicolor shadows loosely tossed together with blinding-fast fight sequences featuring a few thousand MTV™ jump-cuts apiece. While hard to follow, the fight scenes are at least interesting from what fragments I could see. There are some really unique kill shots as well as callbacks to beloved scenes of ovimplantation and flayed humans hung by their heels. The costumes and set design are excellent, as good as they have been since Aliens, and there is a minimal amount of CGI to the xenos or the Death-That-Walks. In fact, the one real graphical flourish that was added for either species was a bright flash of the Predator's eyes when he cloaked, which I thought was quite cool.

The Predator in this film is a lot more accomplished than his short-bus brothers from the first movie. He wears the mask and carries the armaments of the bad-ass hunter from Predator 2. Unlike the hapless spear-carriers who are quickly impaled, drooled upon and destroyed in AVP 1, this hardy fellow takes out xeno after xeno with the calm grace and action hero (Last Action Hero) cool of the governor of California himself. The only beast that even gives him pause is the hullabalooed hybrid, who, naturally faces him in the climactic and nigh impossible to follow duel.

The human characters are Dixie cups, both forgettable and disposable. There's a James Dean, a Corey Haim, a Generic Concerned Cop, and a Ripley with her own Newt 2.0. There's a Slutty Blonde, some Stoners, and possibly some others, but none of them managed to engage anyone's interest for very long. Even the aliens seemed bored with them, dispatching them in the shortest possible order (except for the women and children, ho ho). They all run around engaging in rambling dialogue and pointless interpersonal developments which are, fortunately, almost always graciously truncated by the inevitable intercession of a Predatory spear or gnashing set of alien jaws. This movie has an ASTONISHING kill count. Practically no one walks on-screen without managing to get bashed, bitten, eaten, implanted, melted, seared, shot, or stabbed. Also it breaks some traditional horror/action taboos and crosses over into the territory of more recent psychotraumatic shockers by showing some graphic damage being done to wee little tots. Fortunately, the people I was with found that just as hilarious as I did.

There's a lot to be said for this movie. For example: "OH, GOD, THERE'S ACID ALL OVER HIS FACE!" and "Where the hell does he keep getting all that blue goo?" and "Why isn't that guy Gary Busey?" and "How fast DO those f'ing aliens mature?". It's not a cinematic masterpiece. It's not a magnum opus. It's not particularly well-directed. The bird's eye sweep was overused, the continuity was a Swiss cheese, and they used CGI fire where 10 bucks worth of gasoline would have worked just fine. But the Predator jams a drive-spear through the back of a xeno's head, there's a shot of the Predator homeworld (they love big square buildings and the their interior designers are from Arakkis), and we learn once again that if you ever come near a big open window at night, something will leap through and devour your face. It's reasonably nerdtacular. So what if it's stupid? It's friggin' aliens fighting the damn Predator from Predator 2 (or his son, I guess. In the the theater I thought that Predator 2 took place after AVP, but now I realize P2 was set in 1997, so this guy must be that Predator's kid or spiritual heir or tribal brother or something). It's got helicopters and energy cannons and dogs warning humans about the onslaught of evil and horrific David Lynch scenes of beasts chewing their way out of pregnant women and facehuggers floating in goo, and in the end, everyone learns a valuable lesson about why America needs a strong nuclear arsenal and well-trained helicopter mechanics.

Endgame: unless you've savored the delights of the 4 Alien films and the 2 Predator flicks AND supped on the heady richness of the first AVP, you're not going to get a lot out of this. But if you can sit back with some good sarcastic friends or shoddily-constructed robots and let your judgement slip the leash for a while, there's a whole lot of fun to be had. I don't know if you'll get 9 bucks out of it, though, so either go with a student ID, catch the matinee, or wait for it to crash into one of the few remaining dollar theaters. And I'd suggest slipping a pint bottle of rum into your pocket. It goes smashingly with Coke and greasy handfuls of popcorn and M&Ms, and and it'll help the pointless dialogue drift by quicker and dull the sharp edges of the jarring jump-cuts. And about half a bottle will make the scene with the hybrid Predalien in the hospital nursery that much funnier.
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(no subject) [Nov. 3rd, 2007|03:35 am]
After an absurd amount of effort, I've managed to condense my huge oversized shelf full of densely packed DVDs into a single indexed, alphabetized box, glimmering with a futuristic aluminum glaze and the sweet lustre of obsessive compulsion.




A thing of beauty, yes? I think so. And now that slim and handsome messenger's case, suitable for deflecting bullets or bashing an unsuspecting and broodingly handsome spy from behind in a curtained compartment of a train roaring below some snow-heaped Alp, holds enough media to watch movies in that quiet compartment non-stop from Zurich to Singapore and back.

That trash heap behind it is not some oracle for felt cave-dwellers, but is in fact the detritus left behind, the mortal coils shed by my DVD collection as they ascended to their anodized heaven. It's a thing of Zen beauty, like dancing skeletons (which are also a thing of Judaic beauty, if you recall your Elijah, and also of Catholic beauty, as you'll no doubt remember from your celebration to[yester]day of El Dia de Los Muertos).

And since I want to feel like I really accomplished something, I tried indexing these things with some useful, meaningful system, but eye strain prevented me from reading the ISBN numbers to enter them at any speed into Library Thing, although I should finish doing my books there some day so that I can have a record of all the books destroyed in Hurricane Cassandra (see what I did there?), and while [info]vruba pointed me towards Delicious Library, the iSight barcode scanner proved to be so persnickety that it was easier for me to just come up with my own gimcrack system.

So I entered the name of every DVD as I shoveled them off the shelf (this was also nice in preference to the automated systems as I own a surprising number of DVDs with no ISBNs, UPCs, or indeed, any sort of legalistic markings on them at all, such as the Mind Trip DVD I had autographed by Daizee Haze at the Florida International Pro show a while back), and then I used the Alphabetizer to sort them out. Then I pulled them out of their cases in alphabetized order and slung them into the little DVD envelopes, hung them them in the case, and proceeded apace. Where necessary, I edited the list to allow 2-disc sets to remain together in a double-sided envelope, and also notated which DVDs had more than one disc in the case, and ALSO which boxed sets I intended to keep intact, and ALSO which DVDs were TV shows and which were movies/documentaries. Quite a piece of work, all told, and now I have a neatly-sorted little metal case of 168 movie discs and 26 television show DVDs fronted by 32 boxed sets comprising 89 discs. With the excess shelf room, I intend to put up the pile of books I've had by my bed so they stop getting knocked over and kicked across the room and stepped on by my dog and having gin dumped all over them by drunken jerks who sit up bellowing obscenities when the alarm goes off for their day of Applemployment and knock over their traditional bedside Mason jar of gin with their pre-conscious flailings.

Also, in case my computer is destroyed when a dog mauls it to death or someone pours gin all over it, and for the edification of my rapt Children of the Revolution, I'll post herein the list of all my movies, television shows, wrestling programs, mockumentaries, documentaries, bonus materials, cartoons, flicks, cinematics, and underground reels narrated by Bela Lugosi.

( The Wheel Memorial Library of Cinematic Excellence and Museum of the Palm d'Awesome )

The WMLCE-MPDA is open to the public anytime anyone drops by with food or booze or an addition to the collection. Contact the Archivist for information on borrowing procedures, and make sure you have access to a copy of your full genetic profile and NSA records.
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"Wheel's Movie: The Movie": The Soundtrack [Oct. 29th, 2007|12:25 am]
This schtick ganked in good faith from [info]the_verb. Just start your MP3 player of preference in Shuffle mode and fill in the appropriate blanks. Bear in mind that cheating becomes obvious after a while, and if I was going to cheat, I'd have fit in Buck-O-Nine's "I'm The Man" somewhere.

OPENING CREDITS: Down To The River To Pray - Alison Krauss, "O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack".

I guess I'm going for kind of an arthouse thing. Maybe some black and white shots, or a slow pan over all the stuff in my house. Gothica font for the titles. Could be classy. And of course I'm ripping off the Coen brothers, which always works.

"O, sinners, let's go down, come on down ..."

WAKING UP: Strong Badia National Anthem - Mrs. Partsmatter's 1st Grade Class, "Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits"

Yeah, okay. Now we're firmly establishing my avant gardesmanship and pop culture cred, with Strong Bad warbling "There's probably lots of chocolate!" as I pull on my Apple shirt. And holster my raygun. And make some chocolate milk. And salute the flag.

"Come to the coolest place I know ..."

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL: Familiar Love - William Shatner, "Has Been"

I have no idea what I'm going for here, unless in this movie I've got a flashback to a schoolboy crush on some hot teacher, ideally played by Lucy Lawless. Yeah. And I've got Shatner and Strong Bad back to back. I'm going home with the Palm d'Or.

"My lady belongs here, and so do I ..."

FALLING IN LOVE: Are We The Waiting - Green Day, "American Idiot"

Apparently my idiot Hollywood editor decided to go for some sort of earthy emoGoth thing for this scene. I don't agree with it at all. This isn't a falling-in-love song, damn it! I just downloaded "Then He Kissed Me" by the Crystals the other day, you stupid MP3 library! This is ... some sort of snow-falling, scarf-wearing, staring-at-girls-with-heavy-eyeshadow-over-the-edge-of-a-Harlan-Ellison-book music. Of course, I do that ...

"The rage and love - the story of my life ..."

FIGHT SONG: SOS - Rick Moranis, "The Agoraphobic Cowboy"

This totally works.

No, seriously. Go download this song and listen to it. Think of a slow-mo choreographed ultraviolent fight scene with government forces who spring out of nowhere set to this. The beautiful synchronicity of it will be STARTLING once you see it from the right angle.

... I'm pleasantly surprised. Also, get this album. It's the best thing since sliced fried gold.

"SOS, CIA, FBI, NSA, CBS, NBC, CNN ..."

BREAKING UP: The Kids Aren't Alright - The Offspring, "The Offspring's Greatest Hits"

I guess we're breaking up because the future isn't so bright any more and the old neighborhood isn't the same. How tragic. Also, Chip committed suicide. That sucks.

Although "longing for 'used to be'" is a line so poignant to me right now that I'm going to go ahead and skip to the next entry since this Offspring song just started making me sad and I'm doing this meme to distract myself from being sad.

"What the hell is goin' on? Cruelest dream: reality ..."

PROM: The District Sleeps Alone Tonight - The Postal Service, "Give Up"

This song has stuck with me since it first appeared. We played it at Barnes and Noble all quarter long when the album debuted and now it's playing at Apple - and "Give Up" got more play on Gog-Magog's dusty old copy of MacAmp than any other album when I lived in Portland.

This is a VERY hipster-friendly movie I'm filming here. I'm totally the John Hughes of the Oughties.

"I am finally seeing why I was the one worth leaving ..."

LIFE: Technologic - Daft Punk, "Musique, Vol. 1"

If there's ever been a better song for an everyday life montage not written by Simon and/or Garfunkel, I've never come across it. This scene alone wins me two Golden Globes. All that, and of course it segues beautifully into the next scene ...

"Buy it, use it, break it, fix it,
Crash it, change it, melt - upgrade it ..."

MENTAL BREAKDOWN: Completely Pleased - Semisonic, "Feeling Strangely Fine"

The album name is quite appropriate, but I'm going to have to get some next-level drunk-scene-in-Dumbo shit going on here if this song is going to be sold as a mental breakdown piece. This is the peppiest piece on a largely depressing (and very underrated) album from a band who was sadly relegated to one-hit-wonder status.

"Oh - you broke it. Now - you bought it. So - you might as well use it while you got it ..."

DRIVING: It's Five O'Clock Somewhere - Jimmy Buffett and Alan Jackson, "Greatest Hits, Volume II"

All right. The last scene was almost too hard, but this one's almost too easy. I might not be driving myself in this scene, but that's better, since you shouldn't drink Hurricanes while you're driving - but you shouldn't listen to Jimmy without drinking Hurricanes.

And damn, I'm getting my brother's big fuzzy ass into the driver's seat and packing up some booze for a drive down Seven-Mile Bridge. There's nothing better after severe psychological trauma then a long drunken drive and the stylings of the King of the Beach Bums.

"I'm gettin' paid by the hour, but older by the minute ..."

FLASHBACK: All That You Dream - Little Feat, "Waiting for Columbus"

Psychedelic rock from the greatest bunch of greasy Dixie rollers. This is ideal. I don't know what I'm flashing back TO, exactly, but it's damn sure filmed with a wavery filter and maybe some color-saturation. This is a song with flashback built into every chord. Perfect for a review of the sad and perilous life of a drunken and broken-hearted rebel who's the target of a vast government conspiracy. Also some scenes with hookahs and orgies.

"I've been down, but not like this before ..."

WEDDING: Feel Good Inc. - The Gorillaz, "Demon Days"

Oh, now that's just commercial. This makes less sense than the 146 ways Hollywood found to use "All Star" when that song came out. How the hell can you waltz to the Gorillaz?

Well, screw it. I hate weddings now, anyway.

"Don't shout, shit it, get it, we are your captains in it ..."

BIRTH OF CHILD: Another Bag Of Bricks - Flogging Molly, "Drunken Lullabies"

I can already hear the cackles of delighted laughter. It's true. It's DAMN true.

While the act of childbirth and the subsequent upraising of said maggot might not be PRECISELY equivalent to the social struggles of desperate Irish laborers, I think we can all understand what iTunes is trying to say about the needless jagged burden such a child provides. Although Flogging Molly does provide some extremely useful tips about disciplining your squalling kits.

"Dragged around your whippin' tree, a scourge you can't command ..."

FINAL BATTLE: Groove Is In The Heart - Deee-Lite, "World Clique"

While I could toss together another coolwhip theory about irony and the comedy of the unknown and the validity of shots of exploding cars set against a spritely synth-tune sung by a dulcet girl in a pink bodysuit, I think it's clear what's REALLY happening here.

I'm BREAKDANCE FIGHTING.

"He's not vicious, or malicious, just de-lovely, and de-licious ..."

DEATH SCENE: Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue - The Ramones, "Ramones"

... I can't imagine exactly what happens here. And that's the story I'm sticking with.

And any stories you might've heard about rubber cement and satyr's horns are ENTIRELY untrue.

Yep, this one's a total mystery to me.

"All the kids wanna sniff some glue, all the kids want somethin' to do ..."

FUNERAL SONG: The Safety Dance - Men Without Hats, "Rhythm of Youth"

Dude, that is so fucking awesome. Consider this particular part of this LJ post on this day of October the 29th in the year of our Lord 2 two zeroes and a 7 to be an honest-to-whatzit funereal request. I expect this song to be played over my hands-folded grinning corpse, and you're all going to have to do the Safety Dance in your black-tie garb and the festive fruit hats that will be handed out at the door.

"Because your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance, well, they're no friends of mine ..."

END CREDITS: Monster Mash - Hayseed Dixie, "You Wanna See Something Really Scary?"

My sound editor and music choreographer are never going to work in this town again, but I see no reason why we can't go from my safety-dancing funeral straight to a Plymptoon-style animation of me and all the other characters drawn as monsters and doing a big ol' hoe-down around the scrolling Rocky Horror-font credits.

"Opened the lid, shook his fist, and said 'Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?'"

Take that bag of popcorn with you, there's still plenty. Throw that giant cup of ice and syrup away. And don't forget your cellphone.
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The Hallow never ends. [Oct. 23rd, 2007|12:11 pm]
So, these days I'm working at Apple as a Mac Specialist. It's a dangerous and sexy trade. We get black shirts and a license to kill pre-conceptions about the OS. We work in tandems to make the world safe for the democracy of sleek little MP3 players. This is our world now ... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud (although frankly, a beautiful lone Bd is almost impossible to see in the wild these days, baud travelling as they do in flocks that dwarf even the passenger pigeon's greatest glories). Also the store is right next to the Earl of Sandwich, which makes a BLT so delicious that it makes me tear up a little just thinking about it.

Be sure to demand your copy of Leopard this Friday, ideally while waving some sort of antique weapon around and bellowing drunkenly. It'll really enrich the whole experience.

In other news, I got the red jumpsuit I intend to gradually transform into a piece of convincing Gizmonic Institute workwear, but since I haven't yet decided whether or not I want a robot with the costume -

(Quandary for my nerdy friends, one so important it gets its own parenthetical paragraph: do I get a robot to go with the Gizmonic jumpsuit? And if so, what kind? If I make one or buy one that looks like Crow or Tom, I might as well just be cosplaying Joel. If I make some other robot, I can claim my own continuity, but it might be confusing. I thought it might be interesting to have NO robot and add a little utility belt of janitorial/maintenance supplies and whomp up a fake laminate from Gizmonic, so I can be just another face in a red jumpsuit whom the bosses DO like, and who is NOT shot into space ... what do you guys think?)

- I might just save it for the next 'con and instead ride out as the Doc again this Halloween. That costume just ... works for me. It calls to me in a siren voice, dripping with honey and rum and the lingering copper tang of many fine drugs. It's also an excellent excuse to carry around a small bag full of alcohol and pills and knives and tape recorders and voodoo dolls and weird little bottles, which are all fine icebreakers.

Now, while Halloween has my brain percolating with chocolate-drenched dark delights and the flickering candle flames of old savage joys, and gainful employment gives me something to do with my time other than stare at my spatulate fingertips and search for ever-more-deviant arthouse photos from postwar Berlin, I'm still suffering from a slowing of the sparkwheels in my mind. My clever generator is winding down, and I need to zazz my thoughts with lightning to get them moving again. I'm thinking I might get myself into a more regular schedule at work (my schedule has been pretty amusing so far since the manager forgot to add my name to the updated schedule, so I have to go in and hold the assistant managers at cutlass-point to get myself pencilled in for the weird fill-in hours that no one else wants) and then use my free time to get into some sort of adult annex class. Maybe a foreign language dealie, or perhaps some sort of beginner's pottery (who doesn't love wheels?) ... ooh! Or creative writing so I can enjoy the dual pleasures of being forced to write something and having a lot of free classroom time to doodle. But any way you slice it, I think it's worth doing.

Now, as to ( pressing business )
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Jack be callin', and O Jack, come quick. [Sep. 25th, 2007|11:13 pm]
So, in August, I saw some of my favorite people in the world on the lush green summer campus of the alma mater I revere in a city that I find unbearably beautiful, and spent the whole time commemorating the death of the first girl I loved.

The weather was warm and still, the bay was blue as her eyes, and there were sleek flashing dolphins when we poured what was left of her into the waves.

I saw people I haven't seen in years and smelled the good rich dust of College Hall and dangled my feet off the dock with the skates and the needlefish darting through the thick autumnal gloom of the mudflats. I climbed up in the Bay Tree and scrunched across the sugar sand and thumbed through the antiquarian stacks at Main Books. And everywhere I went and everyone I saw reminded me of the girl who wasn't there.

We went by the house we rented with our friends, the first time either of us had lived in a home that wasn't owned by our parents or the state. I saw the place I'd first met her and the place I first kissed her and the place where we sat and stared at the stars and I dreamed of a dragon lying where the sky meets the sea, staring at the beach with bright blue eyes like hers. I saw her beauty in her mother and her insight in her brother and her razor mind in her father and I remembered just how much everyone had loved her.

I couldn't have thought of any better way to remember Julia, and I can think of no greater injustice than that we are forced to remember her instead of being with her.

*****

In September, my dad had his birthday and celebrated by not sleeping for days on end in the traditional mystic rite of Price men everywhere. This is an ancient ceremony indeed, going all the way back to the days when we Prices were ap Rhys, the sons of Rhys ap Tewdwr who kept himself from sleep so he would be on the ragged edge of wisdom when the Norman legions came for him in their tattered second-hand panoply. We sleep not, that we might watch the night. We consult the oracles and drink strong drinks and eat things that would kill a mortal man - bratwurst with hot sauce, macaroni and fried garlic, popsicles floated in soda pop, heaping bowls of milk and cinnamon. Then we collapse for a day or five and arise chock full of wisdom. It's an old trick, but it works.

Also in September, the full orange and black blooms of the flowers of Halloween burst through the gleaming white tiles of retail stores everywhere. So far I've bought a set of skull goblets, a laughing and screaming ghoul that hangs on the door and scares the hell out of my brother whenever he comes in, a Hand of Glory candle, a pumpkin candle, and 7-year bulbs in orange and black. I love Halloween. I love the mysticism and the hidden symbology. I love the rites of harvest and the glowing eyes of jack-o-lanterns. I love candy corn and secret cackles. October is the greatest month of the year, for my polished farthing. Not least of all because two weeks before All Hallow's Eve we celebrate the anniversary of my birth. I'll have to remember to stock up on good Anejo rum and a saltshaker full of cocaine for the Rite of Rhys.

Also in September, I finally gave in to the undeniable, persistent wisdom of [info]botanicasbrain and went down to the Apple store at the scenic Wellington Green Mall, where a job faire of some sort was taking place. I showed up late, made some offhand comments, chatted up the managers and filled out some paperwork, and now I might have a job. I dunno, I'll know by this Friday. But if I can earn money by biking 4 miles to sell iPods and I get Apple stock and a thick beefsteak discount along with my paycheck, I'll be the happiest sort of camper you can be in the commercial wonderland of post-modern America. Christmas this year will be a thing of gloss and silver and smooth futuristic curves and slick, responsive buttons. Those overfed Asiatic jerks with their myrrh and their fancy astromancy haven't got nothin' on me.

The reaper man's in the corn and there're weasels in the streets, but for the wise and the blissfully mad there's always a song to be whistled into the chill wind.

And every one of Jack's lanterns shines in the dark to show a spirit the way home.
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