Someone said something about a Vancouver meetup? I'm all for the idea. Unfortunately, seeing as how today has been the first free day I've had in weeks and seeing as how I probably won't get another free day until my Christmas break, I won't be able to make anything before then. There's always the Blenz Christmas party that I do every year. Konrad, totally invited. And bring Don too. Naturally, if any of you other guys will be in the Vancouver area around Christmas, you can come as well.

So, I'm feeling strangely fine considering the events of the past month. Mal, you were right. It was only a matter of time before Ori would break my heart. Yep, Ori left me exactly two weeks ago today. Something about going to college, meeting a bunch of guys in the acting program and suddenly deciding that since she was now eighteen, she could get any guy she wants so why stick with lamp op Ben when she can score a hot, young, up-and-coming actor. She planned it for a while too. Turns out that even though she knew them all for a month before deciding to leave me, she never even told a single one of them that I existed. And now, she doesn't even talk to me when she's around her new friends. People are lame. Oh well, I'm mostly over it now. Sure, it took a week of downing vodka and energy drink mixtures (which led to a lot of vague memories of dancing with girls I didn't even know the names of) and another week of mild to moderate depression in which all I did was count Tylenol and watch zombie movies, but right now, I'm feeling good. Even the college workload has lightened up a bit. Or maybe it just seems that way because I have so much alone time now.

Been spending more time with my kid brother, actually. He's not so bad. Even though he's in Grade 8, he's a pretty cool kid. I've been doing my best to corrupt him with R-rated movies so I recently took him to Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, I showed him Day of the Dead two nights ago and just last night, I introduced him to the world of The Boondock Saints. He gets on my nerves sometimes but he's nowhere near as bad as before. I still have the scars to prove it. Really.

My friends are great too. Started recording with my band again and on November 25th, we'll be playing a show at The Marine Club in Vancouver. It's at 573 Homer Street, if anyone's interested. Meanwhile, I'm going to a drunken bocce tournament tomorrow with some of my film school friends, my chick friend Robin is having her birthday next week, I have a band practice tonight and film projects are likely going to keep me too occupied to even remember who Ori is by the end of December. All that and my buddies, Shannon and Pearce, have been helping me through this immensely. Guess you know who your real friends are when the poop hits the fan.

Oh, and one more thing. As of yesterday, I believe I have made the ultimate transition into film geekdom. With the help of a couple of the guys at my film school, I have now set up my own cutting station at home. Editing software, pro headphones and a 250GB hard drive and I am in business. No more hour-long commutes up into the mountains just to cut together five-minute assignments. It feels great. There's just something about a massive rat's nest of wires streaming out of your computer and onto the floor that makes you feel as though you're accomplishing something. And the best part? It's all 100% portable. The little iBook G4 that I'm typing this out on right now has just enough RAM to run my copy of Final Cut Pro 5.1.1 so if I wanted, I could cut together an entire feature film at the local coffee shop. It's like a new toy though. Even though I finished the editing exercise that I needed to do this morning, a big part of me really just wants to do more. Maybe I'll finally get that MiniDV video camera that I always wanted and cut together weddings or something in my free time. I hear there's a good buck in that racket.

So, NemoX, you never did tell us your little breakup story. I figure it's times like this that we should share. Show me yours and I'll show you mine. I still have plenty more to rant about. She was pretty horrid to me even after it ended.

I love happy reunions. Like good ol' NemoX, who was the very first BBS user to join my OCP group when it was but a young pup. Mind you, that pup's been put down quite a while ago now but I suppose that's how we came to find sanctuary here. Be sure to tell me that girlfriend story, Nemo. I need to know what to expect a year from now with my good lady. (Twenty-one months now with my sex kitten, Ori.) And $750 USD for three weeks isn't too bad at all, Mal. At least it's steady cash. As you know, I get my work and money in little spurts. I could be splurging one week and the next week could be completely dry. Which is kind of what's happened to me now that I'm back in school. Haven't worked since last Tuesday but I've got many, many paychecks on the way. I made $275 CAD for working as a lamp op that one day, I still have $275 coming from helping them do their camera tests, I have $164 coming for being a PA on Good Luck Chuck and I have roughly $225 on the way for the two days I did background work on the set of Hot Rod. It seems like a lot but that's all the money I'm going to be seeing in a while. It's difficult enough having a life and trying to do all my schoolwork at the same time -- I've already had to write four papers on location audio alone and it's only been the first week -- but can you imagine how busy I'd be if I also had to pull two or three 15-hour days a week? Granted, the money would be nice but I'd burn myself out. Still though, maybe one lamp op day call a week would be doable. The lighting crew on that TV show likes me for some reason so it's pretty likely they might get me back for a day or two in future when they're really strapped for people. You know you're in when your boss hands you a beer "for the road" at the end of the day. But what's with those World of Warcraft screenshots, Allison? The chick on the left kinda looks like what you'd get if a parrot blew up on David Bowie.

Well, we all have our little obsessions, don't we. I recently found mine in a rare independent board game from a small gaming company called Twilight Creations Inc. by the name of "Zombies!!!". (Yes, the three exclamation marks are part of the title.) And man, is it ever sweet. Players take turns placing map tiles, playing event cards, slaughtering zombie hordes and screwing over fellow opponents by placing zombies in their path in order to be the first one to reach the Helipad tile to safety. And what's more, expansions to the original game can be bought, adding locales such as an abandoned military base and a shopping mall a la Dawn of the Dead to the mix! I already got myself the Second Edition of the original game and "Zombies!!! 2: Zombie Corps(e)" and "Zombies!!! 3: Mall Walkers"! If I wanted to, I could get five more players together and blow an entire day at it. But yes, this is most definitely an obsession and I'm perfectly aware of it but that won't stop me from spending more of my money on Zombies!!! 3.5, 4 and 5. In fact, I've already reserved them at my local geek store. I haven't been there since I played Magic way back in Grade 9 but now I've got their number programmed into my phone. That, and the fact that I've so far spent $90 of my hard earned cash on "Zombies!!!" paraphernalia should give you an idea as to how nuts this game's made me. I mean, I'm sorry, but this is the first thing I've thoroughly enjoyed in years. There's just something about playing that Chainsaw card that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Check out its Wikipedia page here.

Another distraction I've been keeping myself busy with is an old TV series that I taped in its entirety back in 2000. I really doubt anyone remembers Fox's FreakyLinks, especially seeing as how it was cancelled after only 13 episodes, but I did some digging and it turns out I have the entire first (and only) season of the show on four poorly-labelled VHS tapes. It was my favourite show back when I was a kid and I didn't even realize how profoundly it affected the way I am now until I realized that my cat was named Chloe after one of the characters in the show (even though I didn't know it at the time). Then I realized that my fascination with the occult and all things horror (go, zombies!) was probably borne out of that to some small extent as well and my present involvement with the film industry may have come out of Ethan Embry's frenetic Handicam-waving in the series. Kinda terrifying when you think about it. In any case, if you remember it, great. If not, don't kill yourself. It's just something I occupy my time with when I'm sitting around in my underwear petting my cat. But if you remember FreakyLinks and the Samurai Pizza Cats, you rock my knob and I will seriously mail you a cookie. I mean it.

At 8/25/06 03:55 PM, MALforPresident wrote: sweet deal benny-boy. i've been working as a room service/bussboy/psuedo waiter at a really up scale resteraunt in an extremely ritchy hotel (four dimond resort and spa from AAA) i make about 100 bucks or so a week in hourly pay, and i bring home a few hundred in tips each week as well. its not too bad. and i only work from 4:30pm to 11:00pm...so i can sleep as long as i damn well want
school starts in a week and a half now. sept. 5th. should be cool, i';m taking a few cool courses.

You too, huh? This film school buddy of mine that my chick friend, Shannon, is now dating is working at one of those upscale hotels as well. I think he's a bellboy and a valet or something but he's pulling in a pretty penny. And you know what? So am I. A paycheck just came for me today and it turns out they might have paid me a little more than they were supposed to. See, when I was working on that Axe commercial as a PA, hours didn't matter. There were only two kinds of days; "half days" and "full days". A half day was $100 (and was basically anything that wasn't a full day, so even an hour would count) and a full day was $200. And when I was working for them, I did three full days on location and one half day (read: three hours) helping do some public relations in this little Chinese neighbourhood because I knew how to speak Cantonese. A hundred bucks for three hours ain't too bad, innit? And then I find they paid me for a full day. $200 for three hours work. And after taxes, my four days on that commercial add up to $752.10 CAD in the bank. I've even got one more "half day" paycheck on a Lexus commercial coming my way from the same company.

That, and I finally got a paying professional lamp op day call all by myself. The few paying lamp op gigs I've had before were all scored for me by gaffers or DP's I've worked with in the past. A production called "Blood Ties" just happened to call me up because of a resume I sent them months ago and lo and behold, they needed a lamp operator for a day to help them out with a camera test. At first, the idea of working on an actual TV show intimidated me but it turned out to be nothing I couldn't handle. (Just a bunch of 5k's and one 10k Fresnel.) And you know how much they paid me for a twelve-hour day? Two hundred and seventy-five big ones. Did a PA day call right after that on the set of Good Luck Chuck and I'm laughing all the way to the bank.

As for school, I go back on the 6th. The way my schedule is, I only go three days a week; Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. I'm looking forward to those four day weekends. I took a look at Ori's Costuming schedule though and that thing's deadly. Five days a week and some of those days keep her at the college for 8+ hours, not counting the extra work she'll have to put in on the college theatre productions, 2nd Year film projects, etc. Once again, laughing. And my courses are pretty decent too. Finally, the directing and screenwriting courses I was denied in 1st Year. I went and did the overachieving thing again though. I got a jump on my projects and I already have first drafts of two three-page scripts that I'll have to do eventually for my directing class. And I'm about six pages into "The Gaffer". Writer's block. But I figure I'll have four days a week to polish it up. That, and I actually plan on working a bit doing this whole lamp op deal while going to school. Even though we're really not supposed to. What kinda courses d'you got, Malbot?

Sleep. You said something about sleep, didn't you? That'd be nice. That's the one problem with working in film. They're the longest bloody hours in the world. I got home from Good Luck Chuck at 3 in the morning but even that's not so bad. I've done volunteer nights in mall parking lots trying to shoot night driving scenes and the latest I've gotten home is 7 in the morning. The sun was already up by then. And what was that for? Just so I could add one more day to my resume. Apparently, I've spent almost 50 days of my summer on a film set of some sort. But here's the bad news: I've only been paid for 20 of those. Oh, whatever. I'm sure it all adds up.

At 8/22/06 09:29 PM, LordRobbo wrote: Congratulations on your addition to IMDb, Biteme.
Biteme, I was wondering, what were Miami Vice, The Descent and Snakes on a Plane like?

Update on the IMDb listing: Instead of 'Ben Luk (II)', I requested it be changed to simply Benjamin Luk. There's more to being named #2 than just second place. So I changed it. Heh.

Also, I may have more credits up there soon. I've started to break through a bit in the film lighting world and I'm earning some decent money from it now. At least, for a student. I just got paid for my services on two country music videos I worked on and tomorrow, I'm doing some rigging for a TV series called "Blood Ties", assuming I heard correctly on the phone this morning after being woken up from five hours of crap sleep. Spent all weekend on Under the Sycamore Tree and I didn't get back until four in the morning last night. In any case, all this lighting stuff will have to go on hold pretty soon. I'm back at film school in exactly a week.

So, seeing as how these remaining few days may be the only chance I have to catch up in this thread, I would love to go off a bit on the three movies you mentioned, LordRobbo. And I might as well get started with Miami Vice. Now, I never exactly watched the 80's television series so there's no way I can compare the two, but from what I hear, there's really no way to compare the two anyway. The new Miami Vice is grittier and it even shows up in the cinematography. I personally don't like watching grainy shots -- ever since I got spoiled by DVD quality, I only go back to VHS now to revisit childhood classics (Disney) or the occasional horror flick (like The Ring, as mentioned before) -- but I suppose it's a style choice. I know Dion Beebe, the DOP on Miami Vice, can shoot better. After all, Memoirs of a Geisha was all about the cinematography. So it's Mann, who thinks that if he's going to make a movie that's supposed to be hard-hitting and "realistic", he's going to shoot it like a Cops episode. That was the first thing that bugged me. The second thing that bugged me was that the film also had about as much character depth as the average Cops episode. All we need to know as an audience is that one's white, one's black and they're both badass! So instead of actually caring about either of the characters, you're just stuck there trying to figure out the convoluted plot, which I suppose keeps you occupied enough but why do that when you can just sit back at home and tune in to Cops? (That show's hilarious, by the way. The cameraman's the real hero.) And what's with the student film SPFX in that truck scene? The 1st Year kids in my film program can do that and with less of a budget too. I've been told it's a love-it-or-hate-it flick. I don't hate it just yet but I'm getting there. On to The Descent. Before I get started here, let me just say that I love symbolism. Antonioni's Blowup is a personal favourite. But what I found with this movie was that there was plenty of symbolism and not much of a horror film. A few good jump scenes, about an hour of browsing its IMDb message boards going "Oh, that's kinda clever" every time someone brought up a good point and that was it. Hyped to death but disappointed me personally. I mean, why does everyone love this and call it brilliant when something like Hostel is written off as juvenile? Surely there's something symbolic in that film's theme of the rich and sadistic using sex and power to prey on the unwilling with most everyone else turning -- no pun intended -- a blind eye. Not to mention its bravery in taking Asian horror cinema and transporting it to the mainstream. Ah hell, I'm just ranting now. If none of that makes sense, bug me again and I can explain. I'm probably just desensitized to all hell. As for Snakes on a Plane, I liked it and I didn't. Probably just frustration of expectation, I imagine. More violent and less funny than I thought it would be. But really, what's there to tell? It's bloody snakes on a plane. And yes, it's all cheap laughs. Imagine every place on your body where you'd hate to be bitten, then imagine watching it on a 50' screen. Go see it if you want to but if you were sitting on the fence anyways, I just saved you ten bucks.

I also went to see two other movies since my last post and I'll start with the one out in theatres right now: Accepted. I don't know what it is with my fascination with (supposedly) bad teen comedies as of late -- you're watching Kieslowski, for Fulp's sake -- but I have to say, I very much enjoyed this. Sure, it's got all the story problems of a bargain bin movie, which might prompt the average film-savvy cinephile to ask "Where did these kids get the funds to renovate an entire mental hospital before anyone even showed up with tuition money?" or "What is it about crowd mentality that can have hundreds of people's opinions swayed in the space of two film minutes?", but like Desert Blue, it's so quotable and funny that you just kind of accept it as Hollywood BS and move on. Between Justin Long's almost uncanny charisma and Jonah Hill's improvised lines (that totally make the movie), it's a winner. I love the little nod towards Battle Royale especially. Finally, we have Brick, a neo-noir detective story set in a high school. If you loved 40's film noir and indie experimental filmmaking, it's a must-see. Not for everyone though. It's fairly dialogue heavy and tough to follow, even when it has your full attention, which is often. The single most stylish film this side of Y2K and a film that has you at every frame, even when it's just a static shot of Brendan looking down at the dead body of the one person he got to too late.

I'm told I'm playing with 10k Fresnel lights tomorrow. One hundred times the power of your average household lightbulb. That doesn't worry me. It's the idea of fixing them to a studio ceiling without adequate rigging experience that worries me. Here's hoping I don't brain myself. I'm quite fond of the way I look.

(Scene from "Accepted", 2006)

At 6/20/06 09:02 AM, M-A-R-C-U-S wrote: Way to be on my favourite tv show dude!!
Email me a more recent picture of you with the episode number man, I'll look out for you!!

Let's see. Just going through my pay vouchers, I'm in Episode #3.05 of "Battlestar Galactica", Episode #1.09 of "Blade" (but that one's kind of weird; just look for the episode titled 'End Days') and Episode #3.13 of "Stargate: Atlantis". That's me in the picture next to a guy named Tom, one of the other extras. And yes, we're in costume. We don't just dress like that because we're Canadian. Oh, and I'm everywhere in that episode. If I'm not in the crowd, I'm walking past in the BG. As for "Blade", I'm just opposite the bar when he busts in and fires a warning shot into the ceiling. I'm in a few of the other nightclub scenes as well. I also recently did a day on the set of an SNL movie called Hot Rod, starring Andy Samberg and Bill Hader. That won't be out until next year but it's one of those bleachers shots. You won't even know I'm there.

So I see general craziness has ensued since I was last here. Konrad's off in Hawaii and Mal seems to love himself even more than he used to. Heh. Congrats on the job, Mal. What are you doing these days? I've kind of been working myself as well, though it's nowhere near steady. I take gigs; so far, all having to do with either lamping, PA-ing or being an extra. And more than two-thirds of my lamping gigs are volunteer. Not that it's all bad. I choose my gigs wisely. And got myself on IMDb because of it. I'm listed under Ben Luk (II). Sweet, innit? That, and I recently raked in some great cash being a PA for an Axe commercial, then a Lexus commercial after that. Five days of slack work and I'm up $800 CAD. Also helped lamp two country music videos and I'll be getting paid for that too any day now. And I still have one more day on Hot Rod to go.

Only a few more weeks before I'm off to school again though. My second year in the Motion Picture Production Program at Capilano College (or MP3, as we all refer to it). Not that I'm really looking forward to it. I think I'd much rather be working the way I am now, banking my cash and collecting my contacts. I mean, what's the point of being taught how to direct by people who failed as a director and are now teaching because of it? That, and it's an entire year! I could do so much more in a year than spend it inside a stuffy classroom hearing all about the entire history of Canadian cinema (which is every bit as boring as it sounds). But alas, my grandparents would never understand and there's always the possibility that I could leave 2nd Year with a really kick-ass student film. I'm currently writing a slasher horror-comedy short about a crazed film technician who kills people with lighting equipment. It's called "The Gaffer" and I plan to have it shot and cut by the end of April. If it turns out any good, I'll send you all copies.

Not much in the way of slacking though. Just this one book I've been meaning to finish for about half a year now and of course, my horrendously delayed replies on this here BBS. I blame my lack of time. Lamping always entails long days and it's only because I have an 8 pm call time tonight on the set of Under the Sycamore Tree that I have any time to myself right now. Oh well, whatever keeps me busy. Oriana's away for nine days as a camp leader starting this Saturday.

(Hey, look at me. Now that I'm a lamp op, I have a post icon all to myself!)

Oi. The worst possible thing that could have happened to a member of this club happened to me just a few short weeks ago. I completely lost track of the movies I've seen since my last post here. But is it any wonder? It's been months. And I've actually seen a lot. In fact, much more than I could ever hope to give decent reviews for given the fact that I'm now always busy on set doing one thing or another, whether it be adjusting a 1.2k HMI to light Chloe Sevigny the one day I was a 2nd unit lamp op on the soon-to-be released Sisters or cheering at Andy Samberg's stunt double jumping buses in a motorcycle when I was an extra in next year's Hot Rod.

I mean, I've seen The United States of Leland, The Machinist, Mission: Impossible III, I Am A Sex Addict, Grave of the Fireflies, Hoodwinked, American History X, The Tale of Zatoichi, The Da Vinci Code, X-Men: The Last Stand, Match Point, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Over the Hedge, The Break-Up, the remake of The Omen, Cars, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, She's All That, Dick, Nacho Libre, The Goonies, My Date with Drew, Oldboy, Click, The Guru, Superman Returns, The Devil Wears Prada, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Little Miss Sunshine, Clerks II, Lady in the Water, Miami Vice, The Descent and Snakes on a Plane! And those are just the ones I wrote down. There's no hope. The best I can do is get you guys to tell me which ones you'd like to hear more about, whether it be what I thought or what it even is and knowing me, I'll get back to you in a couple of weeks. I've been ridiculously busy lately but it does come with its benefits. For instance, I recently landed myself on IMDb as Ben Luk (II) for lamping a TV movie called Under the Sycamore Tree. I'm actually off to set later today to do my job well into the night.

So without any real desire to start plugging away at reviewing the movies I've seen since last (made only the more difficult by the fact that the earlier ones I mentioned are now a good three months off in my memory banks), I'm just going to respond to some of what you guys have said in your last few posts. Amazing really, that you guys have kept it up as well as you have. LordRobbo and NightCobra, kudos to both of you.

At 7/3/06 08:58 PM, LordRobbo wrote: I've been looking foward to Hard Candy for awhile, but it's been given an R18+ rating here so I'll have to wait until a DVD release before I can see it.

I tried going to this a few months ago but I had the same problem you had. Having only turned 18 less than a month ago, when I went, they turned me away because I didn't have proper government ID that said I was allowed in. Before, I'd been able to get into 18A movies because I somehow conned my way into getting a VIFF membership (which only 18+ cinephiles were allowed to get) and a membership to a local repertory cinema called the Pacific Cinematheque so whenever I was asked, I just flashed one of those memberships and waltzed right in. When I tried getting into Hard Candy though, some new teenaged employee was in the booth and demanded government ID as proof of my age. Not that I blame her -- she was only doing her job -- but it still irks me when I'm kept from seeing the movies I want to see by people who don't even really know what a 1st AD does. Especially when I've already seen much racier films like The Dreamers and Breillat's Anatomy of Hell. Not that that'll be a problem anymore. Been 18 since July 22nd. No one's going to keep me from anything anymore. (I almost miss the challenge.)

At 7/28/06 05:24 PM, NightCobra wrote: Now, biteme has already given a huge overview on The Squid and the Whale, but I had mixed feelings about it that I should write. First off, I agree with what you said about these films falling into the ‘indie’ category easily...

Don't mind me. I was just a wee bit bitter when I wrote that. I think my main problem was with Junebug at the time. Bored me to tears for most of the movie, then tried to make a poignant leap into melodrama near the end. I personally didn't feel that that particular plot point worked with the rest of the film but at the very least, it was well acted. Looking back on it now, I didn't mind The Squid and the Whale that much. I'm also rather fond of the fact that I can name that as one of the few movies where a parking spot isn't always readily available for the principal cast. Heh. Oh, and I mentioned Little Miss Sunshine earlier before and though it's guilty of everything that could have it fall into that godforsaken 'indie' category, it's also one of my favourite films of the year so what does that tell you? I'm a fickle bastard. See that if you can though. If you liked The Squid and the Whale, you'll love Little Miss Sunshine.

I watched The Ring with several people just for the hell of it, as it was just lying around. Now, although there were some high points of mystery to the film, I pretty much despised it overall.

Gosh, film critiquing is subjective. I loved The Ring. I even felt it was an improvement on the original Japanese version. And "dull" though it may be, I found that not injecting jump scenes every ten minutes in the film made the ending that much more climactic. Furthermore, by basing the story not so much around that drowned chick popping out of television sets and more around Rachel and Noah being brought together again after a less than satisfactory separation, it tacked on a much more adult perspective to this particular horror flick than anything else I've seen in a good decade. Not to mention it scared the bejeezus out of me. I own a copy on VHS. That's right: VHS. Any horror film about a cursed videotape would lose all its post-film paranoia on DVD.

All right, guys. I'm out for now. Don't forget to bug me for more specific film reviews. See y'all soon!

(Scene from "Snakes on a Plane", 2006)

I've really got to stop dropping off the face of the Earth like this. With me being around for a week and then buggering off for months at a time, I could get hit by a bus and die without any of you noticing. I've just been busy is all; "busy", of course, being a relative term. Still no steady job but I've actually started making some money with film. Mostly extra work and the occasional day call as a PA but I've got paychecks on the way. You guys just may see me in this season of "Battlestar Galactica" (as a Refugee from Earth, strangely enough) and also in the new "Blade" series set to start up on Spike TV (as a Sexy Clubber, apparently). I'm also being a Villager on "Stargate: Atlantis" next week. I know extra work is kind of a poor excuse for a job seeing as how a bum dragged off the street can basically do what I do but hey, money's money and I don't have to make a certain quota of shifts per week or anything. I just show up, walk in front of the camera a few times in costume, eat all their food and walk away a hundred bucks richer. Sweet deal. And my agency keeps me "working" often enough to keep me happy.

And since we are The Slackers Crew, I figured I might as well drop in and share a little slacking story with you all. None of this "I don't do my homework and my mom yells at me about it" crap; this one's hilarious because I got paid for it. See, there I was on a PA day call for a show called "Masters of Science Fiction" and I was getting twelve bucks an hour to guard a studio door. All I had to do was keep it closed so that things inside the studio would be nice and quiet while the director blocked his actors -- think of it as just setting their positions so the lighting crew knows what to do -- but I also had to let people in when they wanted to enter because the door locked by itself and only one person had the key. So, one mind-numbing hour of doing that later, I notice that the food has arrived for the night and most of the crew and gear is already indoors. I figured that no one would miss me and I was right. I borrowed a strip of gaffer's tape from the lighting crew to tape the bolt down and went and got a sandwich instead. I made twenty-four bucks eating a sandwich and watching a lighting crew set up that night. And I'm still getting calls to come back and work.

The film thing's going great though. I'm slowly creeping towards becoming a paid lamp op. A while ago, I volunteered on -- get this! -- a Punjabi music video that'll eventually air in Bombay, India! If you guys ever see a Punjabi music video for a song called "Karlo Aishan" by the band Signia, that's me swinging the light in the background. The DOP on that gig liked my work too so he might be calling me back for some cash gigs but even if he doesn't, he's still a great reference. He's ISC; Indian Society of Cinematographers. I'll get on IMDb yet! (Oh, and this is totally violating some sort of confidentiality agreement with EyeLine Entertainment but here's a shot I sneaked from one of the sets. Two 1.2k CTB'd PAR lamps behind the sign and three 1000-W globes in a coop light hanging above the set. In the entire video, our most basic interior setup.)

That's what I've been up to. You guys?

At 5/13/06 01:54 AM, NightCobra wrote: I hope some member will pass around soon to read some to all of this stuff I'm writing (on a side note, I'm still not finished writing off every film I've seen to date since I started posting again).

Oh, I've definitely been reading them. I'm just hard-pressed to find time to reply or really to watch many movies on my own. I'm currently trying to find work for the summer and since I've now decided to forgo getting a job somewhere like Rogers Video or HMV in favor of volunteering on set until I can find a paying job, I've been getting calls left and right. I just finished a 6-day gig as the gaffer on a friend's project by the name of "Shampoozled", I did one day as a locations PA on a festival short called "Coffee Diva", I'm gaffer again for two days starting tomorrow on a college project called "Lila" and as soon as those two days are up, I'm on the electrics and lighting crew on a 16mm DGC Film Kickstart short named "L'Oiseau Mort". And here's the kicker: Khene Tan, the LM on "Coffee Diva", thinks there might be a spot for me as a PA on the set of Fantastic Four 2! You guys just might see me in the credits.

So guys, sorry I can't be like NightCobra here and give excellent review after excellent review. Frankly, I have to say that ever since I started spending more time on set, I've become much more interested in filmmaking and film lighting than film-watching. (Or maybe I'm the only one here who gets obscenely excited seeing an 18K HMI for the first time in real life.) In any case, I'm still watching films; I just, in some small way, care less. Which is probably a bad thing. It's just that that might account for me not being here as often as I probably should.

Now for the next slew of movies. Short and sweet, as always. Up first is the post-apocalyptic comedy-thriller, A Boy and His Dog. Going by the movie's tagline -- 'a rather kinky tale of survival' -- I seriously thought it'd be a favourite of mine, but by the end of the movie, after our human and canine protagonists have escaped the Stepford-esque and quite literally underground society that they were running from, the change in aesthetic was too much for me. From Lawrence of Arabia desert shots to brightly and flatly lit Stepford Wives. All that and I was just expecting it to blow me away so much more. I first heard about this movie about four years ago and it's strange in a way, but seeing it almost ruined it for me. Don Johnson plays a fun role though. As does Steve Martin in The Jerk. A cult classic and I can see why, but it's not a favourite of mine. It's such a sporadic story too, but that's not to say that sporadic stories can't be extremely well done. Look at Forrest Gump. Saw Serenity a bit after that and though I'm not a fan of the television lighting -- there I go with the lighting again! -- I actually very much enjoyed it. Not particularly thrilling, but the witty writing won me over in the end. I've also very recently become quite the fan of Nathan Fillion, by the way. I saw him last in Slither. And while we're on Slither, I might as well bring up Shivers, one of Cronenberg's earlier horror films having been made in 1975 about parasitic slugs that enter human hosts by any means necessary and turn them all into sex-crazed maniacs. It's one of the films that Slither references -- the bathtub scene -- but what I'm most interested in here is how Cronenberg has evolved as a filmmaker. Shivers, though in some ways a social commentary, is also just as easily softcore porn. Contrasted with A History of Violence and his refusal to oversaturate that film with an even higher body count and more bloody close-ups to match, I just think it's fascinating to be able to trace a filmmaker's progress into his craft over three decades. Not so for Eli Roth, who has only really been on the horror scene since 2002's Cabin Fever. Yet, I liked Hostel and before you all rip me to shreds for liking Hostel and not Shivers or even The Jerk for that matter, let me tell you why. Japanese horror cinema is years ahead of its time and I'm glad that someone finally recognized that and fearlessly brought it into the American mainstream. What we have here with Hostel is simply an American horror story (chock full of topless women, as the genre demands) with Japanese horror gore conventions. With the second to last death in the film, I was pleasantly reminded of Shion Sono's Suicide Club.

Two that are out in theatres right now that caught my attention were United 93 and Akeelah and the Bee. The former of the two, as I'm sure you've all heard from the critics, was very tastefully done and the unfolding drama was all appropriately understated considering its subject matter. However, the documentary-style camerawork, just like it did in The Bourne Supremacy, annoyed the hell out of me. Indeed, the director of both those films, Paul Greengrass, spent the first ten years of his career working for the documentary series, World in Action. As for Akeelah, it's just a smart, funny family flick. Yes, it's predictable but you have to give it some credit for bringing words like 'appoggiatura' to the surface of the English lexicon. So now, who remembers Jean-Pierre Jeunet? You know, the director of Amélie? I finally got around to watching his 1991 flick, Delicatessen, after knowing about it for years and just like A Boy and His Dog, I was very much disappointed. It's probably no coincidence that both are post-apocalyptic comedy-thrillers about cannibalism either. (The last time I was shocked by anything of the sort was after I finished reading Jonathan Swift way back in Lit 12.) I just found it rather boring really. I knew how it was going to end and neither of those two films went far enough to shake things up for me. I'm desensitized, what can I say?

You know what? I still have another eight films to go before I'm all up-to-date on my posting and I think I'll just put it off for now. There's no way in hell I can cram in another eight films anyways. I'm almost out of room as it is. So in a week, after I'm done with "L'Oiseau Mort", I'll be back to catch you all up on what I've seen and what I've worked on. Until then, God bless.

(Scene from "Serenity", 2005)

At 4/20/06 11:33 PM, MALforPresident wrote: good to hear you're still slacking, and happy to hear you're coming back to us. BTW, i hijacked an old dead forum and made it a new OCP forum.

Signed up last night. I still have yet to update my profile or anything, but I'm not too concerned. You all know who I am. But depending on how things go with my job hunting, there's still the possibility that I may not have as much freedom as I initially thought. More money maybe, but not so much freedom. After finding out this morning that Ori's going to a job interview later today, I realized I might actually want a steady job for the next few months so I kinda caved and decided to go for the Rogers Video job one more time. This'll be my third time applying. I'm sick of filling out the damn application form every time too, so with the one I just filled out, I just photocopied a bunch for the next few times. I mean, the PA gigs and background work would be nice, but I'd end up earning $100 in a day and not work for an entire month. I'd rather be on a steady paycheck.

yep, we passed three months last week. i'm going to college with her, she's a massage therepist and i'm going for a major called "Parks, Recreation and Leisure Facilities Management". two of the colleges that have the major are U of BC and U of Alberta in canada...so who knows, maybe i'll see you all one day.

That's hot. A massage therapist? No wonder Stash told me you two were going at it like bunnies. Maybe she could give me some pointers. I give Ori back rubs every now and again, but aside from shelling out fourteen clams for a bottle of massage oil, I have no idea what I'm doing. As for your course, go to UBC. Hell, you could hang out with Dobio and everything. (He still goes there, right?)

so do you have another year or something of film school left or are you done after May and are left all on your own in the cold hearted world of big time films. you're lucky to be in BC, because a lot of American productions are filmed there because of the likeness to the east coast and west coast all in the same province.

One more year of film school left 'cuz I'm going for the Motion Picture Production diploma and then after that, I plan on taking a course on Film Lighting. Following that, I'll apply for union membership with IATSE 891 for the lighting department and then, I'll just take whatever jobs I can find. If everything goes according to plan, I'll end up a handsomely paid lamp operator in less than five years -- it's hell getting that job because it's a seniority position -- and I'll be raking it in at upwards of fifty bucks an hour working on, like, "X-Men 6". Of course, that's just a pipe dream. I've already accepted the fact that I still don't really know anything about the industry. Film school's like a joke to everyone already working. They have as much respect for one year of film school as I do for a squirrel turd. But hey, we've all got to start somewhere. Oh, and I already know how lucky I am to be living in BC. Check out this list of everything shot here last year. And summer's just around the corner. I'll work one way or another.

hell, i would have gone dude. i'mg oing to europe next summer or the one after with Heather

See, my mom actually invited Ori along to Hong Kong with us, but she said she didn't have the funds. It might be more than that though. I seem to recall a time earlier this year when Ori and her mom were planning a trip to London that now appears to have fallen through. It's just that Ori doesn't really like Chinese food and there wouldn't be much for her to do there. Also, she's a bit of a xenophobe. Oh well, three weeks apart won't be so bad. After all, we've been practically inseparable for the past few months. It won't kill us.

As busy in here as always, eh? Well hopefully, I might be able to pick things up in here a bit. I just finished the last of my film school exams and I've got a clear schedule up until July when my family's dragging me off to China, so I'll probably be spending a good deal of my time in here. Slacking, as it were. Hell, I barely even studied for my finals. I should have, but I didn't. College grades don't really matter, you know? I can get 51% on a course and I'll still be getting my Motion Picture Production certificate at the end.

So Mal, what's been going on? I hear from Stasia that you and your girlfriend are still going strong so that's great. Things on my side aren't that bad either. Been a while since I've dropped by though, so catch me up. Overall, it's been quite the last few months for me. For one, film school's been nuts. Just finished directing a 10-minute short that might as well have been an homage to Clerks II before it was even made (see below), I've been volunteering on student sets wherever I can and recently had to pull an all-nighter to help light a short zombie flick, there's a film program year end party for something like 200 people next Thursday and I found out only a few weeks ago that one of my former classmates is now, no joke, an escaped mental patient. Ah, film school. Hard work, but still infinitely more interesting than my high school days.

I refuse to slack off all summer though. Staying true to my penchant for film, I'm now trying to find work in the Vancouver area involving it. I plan to volunteer on more student films of course, but for now, I'm signed up with the Directors Guild of Canada for some professional PA work and I just dropped off a headshot with a company called Keystone Extras to see if I can do some background work for all this stuff shooting in BC right now. Neither of those are steady jobs though. Whether or not I work is entirely dependent on them calling me. I'd work at a video store like I'd always planned, but that won't help expand my film resume at all. Besides, I just enjoy being on set. Who knows? I might meet someone ready to offer me a better job. Happens all the time around here.

In other news, that trip to London fell through. Seven more people were needed to sign up before we could have gone. Just think: All we needed was a grand total of eight people. I hate the world sometimes. I really do.

And I'm back for one more post. I finally got the chance to read a bit more of what you guys have been up to in here and I'm really sorry, LordRobbo, that you weren't able to enjoy City of God. I guess it's one of those films you have to be in the right mood for. I've still been meaning to watch The Godfather again to see if I'd enjoy it more upon a second viewing. Glad you loved Dear Wendy though. I still need to buy that on DVD. The shootout at the end is seriously one of my all-time favourite moments in cinema. Oh, and just one more note about my short, 'Customer Service'. I'd be glad to send out DVD copies of it to any MVA members interested. Just e-mail me an address and I'll try to get a copy out to you as soon as possible. Keep in mind, it's only a student film so even though I critique films all the time in here, it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm the next François Truffaut. Besides, the faculty hated it. One of my instructors even went so far as to say it was "pathetic". I'll let you guys be the judge. Be honest though. I can take it.

So about those six movies that I didn't get to last time on account of me running out of space, let's kick it right off with The Seven Samurai, a film that I'm sure requires no introduction. I was lucky enough to renew my Pacific Cinémathèque membership just in time for their Samurai! film festival and I am so glad that I actually got to see this on the big screen. A Japanese epic of the highest order, I recently learned that Kurosawa pioneered the use of multiple cameras and the telephoto lens for this film's climactic battle in the rain. (It's probably a bad sign I didn't realize that right away just from watching it after spending so many months in film school.) And even though it clocked in at 208 minutes, I found it much easier to watch than many films half that length. For one, it's just a great action movie, but it's also funny and contains so much history! Only an hour in, it was already obvious to me what George Lucas took from this film to make Star Wars. What was up with the R2-D2 noises when the peasants first start talking about the bandits plundering their village though? I must've missed something. Either way, required viewing. You are not a man until you have seen this film.

Watched The Squid and the Whale with my girlfriend a few days after and though I liked it, it's becoming very apparent to me that I now have a very low tolerance for films that fall too easily into the indie category. Garden State was the first time. Then, Elizabethtown was the same movie, only set in Kentucky. Then came Shopgirl, Napoleon Dynamite and Junebug, another one my girlfriend made me watch. You know, just that whole 'eccentric characters deal with love, life and loss' thing. I'm not saying they're bad movies; I'm just saying that it's this particular decade's answer to the family drama and what comes out at the end is simply a bastardized version of the French New Wave. Melancholy has been replaced with forced quirkiness and ambiguity has been taken over by some bizarre need to teach a life lesson somehow. I just don't like it. Despite my biases, I am still not blind to the fact that these two films were amazingly well acted. To me though, it's a genre with very little new territory to explore. Before I leave Junebug, get this: Chip Signore, the 1st AD on Junebug, was also one of the executive producers on The Janitor. A world of difference between those two films.

Two outright goofy ones now; Ice Age: The Meltdown and Slither. The Meltdown was just great. Classic entertainment for all ages and you'd have to be one hell of a film snob to not enjoy it. Story's as thin as the ice when you compare it to the first one, but there's more Scrat and I haven't laughed this hard in a movie since the ending of Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive. Kids'll love it. As for Slither, I might have to get back to you guys on that just because the entire film is made up of esoteric cult horror film references, none of which I really know about. On its own though, it's been compared to Shaun of the Dead, but it's no match. Think of it as Cronenberg meets the Wayans Brothers. Saw a French romantic comedy called Love Me If You Dare recently as well and I must say I've never been quite so creeped out by a rom-com. Beginning with decidedly unlikable characters and ending in a suicide pact, the middle would probably be romantic if the story weren't quite so jumbled. I liked the film but I just don't really know what to make of it. Leave it to the French, eh?

All that leaves now are Crash (the non-Cronenberg one) and The 400 Blows. I have mixed feelings about both. Even with all I've said in this post alone praising the French New Wave, I must admit that it's not really my bag. Good film, very innovative, but my interest in it doesn't extend beyond the academic. As for Crash, I think it's an excellent film with a very confused message. It upheld far more stereotypes than it sought to break down and I found it very manipulative on the subject of racism. We all know racism exists and showing Matt Dillon molesting a black woman really isn't necessary to get that point across. In a sense, it's just too easy and shouldn't stand in for true social commentary.

That covers it then. You're all up to speed on what I've seen lately. LordRobbo, I'm serious about sending you a DVD of the short. Hell, you could send me some of your stuff and we could get this whole MVA filmmakers network going. Think of how cool that'd be. MVA members' films getting sent all over the world to be critiqued here, right in this thread. Let me know what you think when you get back. And NightCobra? Great to have another dedicated member here. Loving how informative the reviews are. Until next time, boys.

(Scene from "Crash", 2004)

Oh hell. It figures that film school would be the only thing that could tear me away from my movie watching. As of late, I've become so embroiled in making movies that I've barely had any time to watch any. And even though I've been gone for three or four months, I can only claim to have seen 23 new films since New Year's. Really though, I'm terribly sorry for not dropping in earlier, but life gets in the way. I more or less had to put my life on hold for an entire month to squeeze out a ten-minute short with my girlfriend, Oriana. I directed and she did costumes and what came out at the end was 'Customer Service' (see below), a coming-of-age story in the same vein as Clerks or Waiting..., which I'll just review now, just because it's come up first. Don't expect much depth to any of the reviews this time either. It's hard enough cramming 23 reviews into one post, but I'm also trying to do it quickly. It's late and I need to be up at 6:45 tomorrow morning for my first class.

Waiting..., although obviously not a film to be critically acclaimed, is actually a much more intelligent flick than most teen comedies. However, it still doesn't consider itself above penile antics. Walking a fine line between gross-out humour and some actual insight into what it's really like to be stuck somewhere when everyone else you know is moving on to bigger and better things, it's a technical achievement -- watch for all those really subtle camera moves that are always there for a purpose -- and I still think it's hysterical how they took the "coming-of-age" motif to a literal degree with the character of Monty at the end. I watched it as research for 'Customer Service'. But I have no qualms about saying that I enjoyed it. Now, the first film I saw in 2006 turned out to be the painfully trite The Family Stone. Another dysfunctional family does Christmas, and really just a drawn-out, two-hour way of saying "Mother knows best". Just bad, and I disagree with it on moral grounds. I'm not going to go any further into that, but rest assured, it's not because I'm a prude. After all, I'm rather fond of Brokeback Mountain. Story comes off as a bit thin and at times, it was unintentionally hilarious, but it was exceptionally shot. Caught two recent Canadian films shortly after and I'm sad to say that I now know why no one is excited about Canadian film. Don McKellar's latest, Childstar, was a bore to sit through and Nathaniel Geary's 2003 film about Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, On the Corner, was nowhere near as awe-inspiring as people kept telling me it was. On par with a "Say no to drugs!" PSA. I'm all about supporting Canadian film; I just think that these two were grossly overrated. Open Water, though better, falls into the same category.

I think I just have a problem with films that try to be too serious these days. Perhaps it doesn't make sense that I'd be excited to go see Final Destination 3 when I downright hated On the Corner. Or maybe it was just because I knew exactly what I'd be getting: Girls, guts and gore. Sorry fellas, even film aficionados have their vices and mine is that I'm still a horror fan. If any of you guys see it though, that huge hill the truck loses control on and careens down? That's what is known as Suicide Hill here in New West and it's a mere two blocks from where I'm typing this now. Oh, and going back to teen comedies for a moment, the Final Destination franchise is more a comedy than a horror series now. I always find more people laughing than cowering in those flicks. And while we're on teen comedies again, I might as well mention that I also watched Say Anything and 10 Things I Hate About You, both on the recommendation of my girlfriend. Far from favourites, but better than most.

Did anyone watch the Oscars? I'm appalled that Felicity Huffman didn't win Best Actress for Transamerica. Very daring in terms of the subject matter, but it never once came off as heavy-handed. One of the best so far this year. Ditto for Capote. Hoffman deserved that Best Actor Oscar and even though the events in the film are fairly tame by today's standards, Bennett Miller's masterful directing made it "chilling". I quote Oriana, but I wholeheartedly agree. More mindless horror fun with George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, but it's not one of his best. Not even close. To me, a good zombie movie is more often than not cleverly disguised social satire, but to set it in a futuristic sci-fi world makes it too far removed from present day suburbia, thus diminishing its impact. Big budget, but bargain bin quality. Other horror geeks seem to love it though. Seriously, what's up with everyone loving bad movies and panning good ones lately? It's been going on for decades, but in the past few months, it's been outrageous. Robots is actually a pretty good show, Jarhead's 'message' might as well have been "Stories are for high-rises!" and though Flightplan's attempt at a Hitchcockian thriller was honourable, I was too distracted by how irritating Jodie Foster was and how expensive the visual effects must have been to really notice it. By the time they got around to revealing how Peter Sarsgaard's character actually fit into the story, I was already miles away. (Air Miles? Anyone?)

Another recent favourite is Liev Schreiber's directorial debut, Everything Is Illuminated. At first quirky, then ironic, then tragic, it almost falls into the same weird-for-weirdness'-sake category that Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite fall into, but manages to stay right out of it by setting itself in the alien world of the Ukraine. It amazes me that places like that really exist in the world and it's beautiful. Back to horror for a moment with Three... Extremes, a kind of Asian horror anthology featuring three prominent Asian directors, Takashi Miike and Chan-wook Park amongst them. They range from David Lynch-esque ("Cut") to classically artful ("Box"). Worth a rent.

As for the rest -- The Seven Samurai, The Squid and the Whale, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Love Me If You Dare, Slither and Crash -- maybe I'll review them later, maybe I won't. I'm out of room.

Shaddap, Mal. I already told you we were getting ready to fire up Battle Royale.

Three years though, hey? That's still nuts to me. Some of you I've known longer than I've known Ori. I really don't know what to say right now though. I mean, I'm not caught up. I haven't been here since before I started college way back in September. Since then, I just haven't had the time. Stash did the what's-new-in-her-life thing so I'm going to follow suit, just like the college-boy conformist I've been conditioned to become.

First off, well, I'm in college now. Film school's got at least as many idiots in it as high school, if not more, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of things. No longer want to be a director though. I've come to realize I'm a little too lazy to have an entire show hang on the balance of whether or not my alarm clock goes off each morning. So, I'm now looking at becoming a lighting tech who does some screenwriting on the side. No experience yet though. I'm still getting basic certification: FIOP, WHMIS, SHAPE, etc. Also, film school has completely killed my love of movies. I find that I'm no longer paying any attention to the actors (or in the case of certain actresses, their cleavage), and now, I always find myself distracted by the most mundane of technical issues. I can't even watch something like Wedding Crashers without trying to spot the shadow of a C-Stand or a PA or something. (Gorgeously lit movie, by the way.) My friends still get pissed at me when I yell crap like, "Crossing the line!", at the screen and start jumping up and pointing. Ushers don't like me much. Suits me just fine. I don't like Usher much.

What else, what else? Um, I'm thinking about going to London soon. Since movies don't seem to hold the same appeal for me anymore, I've taken a strong liking to live theatre and books. So, I'm thinking of tagging along with Langara College on their 2006 London Theatre Tour. Nine nights in London, six plays. If all goes well, that's where I'll be first week of May. Here's hoping. And yes, I'm actually a film student who does a lot of reading. Finally getting around to "Brave New World" right now. That's one hell of a page-turner. I have a week off college right now 'cuz it's prep week for a project we're shooting and the gaffer -- me -- doesn't need to generate any paperwork during prep. Back to the Bacardi and Huxley then.

Me and Ori are still going strong even though last month got pretty ugly, but we're coming up on fifteen months. Things are pretty sweet. We're finally getting around to doing things we probably should have done a long time ago. We spent an entire day last week visiting old childhood haunts of ours and reminiscing. Do you feel old? I feel old. Nothing quite like trying to swing on the monkey bars of a past playground and ending up with an inch-deep divot in your skull to remind you of the good ol' days. The rum helps. That reminds me actually. I've also become a bit of an alky. My grandmother gave me $50.00 and a bottle of aged rum for Chinese New Year. Gung hay frickin' fat choy, everybody.

I miss Newgrounds. In just nine days, my NG account will be exactly three years old. I remember when being EGSC was something that set you apart from the rest. Now, it's just being one of fifty. Well, I hit it. And I just don't care anymore. The 10,000+ Experience is kind of cool though. No one can just storm in and get that in two months. Heh, who am I to talk? There are people who still hate me for my early posting sprees!

(Woot.)

Wow, I haven't dropped by in two months and we haven't even gained a whole page. I guess us readers are few and far between. I never did get a response to my query about Dickens though, so instead of waiting, I just jumped right into it. And now, "A Tale of Two Cities" may very well be my favourite book. Seeing as how I didn't have much information about the context of the times, not only of Victorian life in 1859 when the novel was written, but also of the French Revolution around which the novel was set, I took to the Net and found some interesting facts about the book. For one, many seem to agree that "A Tale of Two Cities" is probably one of the least, um, Dickensian of his novels in that his need to write within a historical fiction framework kind of mutes his usually outlandish and exaggerated characters. See, I didn't know that. Nor did I know that this novel was also considered a departure from Dickens' usual style of characterization through long passages of dialogue. Instead, in "A Tale of Two Cities", Dickens chooses to establish the character of Sydney Carton when he is in deep thought within himself, wandering the streets alone with no one to talk to.

Now that we're all on the same page, I have to say I very much prefer this style of characterization. Dickens writes like a painter really, with broad strokes, yet covering the most intricate details. I have had many friends who have tried to get through "Two Cities", but just about all of them fell off before the end of the novel because the writing style is so adverse to contemporary literature. Yet, I found the writing to have a certain elegance to it that I was never able to find in either dialogue-driven books ("Tuesdays with Morrie") or stream-of-consciousness literature ("Hey Nostradamus!", "The Catcher in the Rye"). Rather, the Victorian style of writing lends a certain aspect of poetry to the novel which I appreciate greatly, mostly thanks to my days of English Literature 12. Take this excerpt, for example: "In the fair city of [Carton's] vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears." (p. 82). Never before have I read anything that so captured the essence of hopelessness. And if you know the ending, passages like this one early on in the novel make it resonate that much more when you finally put the book down at the end. Now, I could go on, laying quote after quote in front of you, but seeing as how I only have about 3,746 characters remaining at this point before I run out of room in this post, I'll keep this short and sweet. Yes, the characterization is beautiful in this novel for Sydney Carton but many of the other characters seem very shallowly developed by comparison. However, this is a necessity, especially when it comes to dealing with Carton's semi-heroic doppelgänger, Charles Darnay. Dickens has always been one to play his characters to extremes, so how do you accentuate a complex, emotionally-conflicted man with nothing to live for? Give him a character foil who looks exactly like him with a wife, a child and Victorian sophistication to the point of cliché. Dickens knew exactly what he was doing. One of the other things that I also found particularly wonderful about Dickens' writing was how he was able to swap between -- sorry, I couldn't resist -- the best of times to the worst of times so effortlessly. One moment, Darnay is professing his undying love to Lucie Manette and before you know it, the French Revolution is in full swing, Darnay is facing the guillotine for no crime of his own and as bloodthirsty peasant-warriors stop to "dance about Lucie, some ghastly apparition of a dance-figure gone raving mad arose among them." (p. 259-60). From tranquility to madness in a few short chapters. Read it. It's a classic and quite possibly the best book I've ever had the joy of reading.

Look at that. Still 2,325 characters left. All right, that's enough room. In addition to finishing "A Tale of Two Cities" over the past two months, I also finished a small book of plays written by French absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco. "Rhinoceros and Other Plays" contained three short plays of his: 'Rhinoceros' naturally, 'The Chairs' and 'The Lesson'. All three of these plays, as can only be expected from the Theater of the Absurd, have to do with isolation, 'Rhinoceros' even more so for its commentary on political isolationism. (It was Ionesco's response to the rise of Fascism.) But even more than that, all three plays force us to ask ourselves what logic really is, what defines faulty logic and whether or not the individual is even capable of making that distinction. In 'Rhinoceros', the character of Daisy warns us "[t]here's no such thing as absolute right. It's the world that's right" (p. 119), but Dudard tells us that "[e]verything is logical. To understand is to justify." (p. 97). Yet all around them, everyone seems to be turning into rhinoceroses and one man, Berenger, is determined to stand his ground. Obviously a ridiculous phenomenon, all the characters aside from Berenger are so indifferent to what is going on that we can't help but notice that Berenger is fighting a losing battle throughout the entire play. Berenger's actions seem to be the only logical ones in this absurdist world, but what happens when something wholly illogical becomes the status quo? Ionesco's answer? New (so-called) logic. 'The Chairs', on the other hand, has to do with the futility of trying to explain oneself. One of the darkest plays I've ever read, as a matter of fact. About an elderly couple stranded on an island waiting for the arrival of a Godot-like Orator to explain to a host of invisible guests the meaning of life as they see it, this play makes the actual "Waiting For Godot" seem positively cheerful. Thinking about killing yourself but don't think you can go through with it? Read some stuff from the absurdists and you'll have no problem. I had a few problems interpreting 'The Lesson' though, but from what I could tell, it's about the breakdown of communication à la Harold Pinter. About the destructive relationship between a well-meaning Pupil and a predatory Professor, it's every bit as grim.

At 12/25/05 06:01 AM, LordRobbo wrote: I got to make two films this year, a mockumentary on violence in videogames and a children's TV show. The productions of these were the highlights of the school year, so is film school as good as it sounds?

I still have a semester to go, but so far, I think I've had it worse than you. I've had to work on three projects, one of which was a PSA on college safety, and two other minute-long projects with the fatuous at best themes of "You're late!" and "Tell a joke." Nothing I'd be able to take to a festival, and even worse, nothing I could even show my family without a cringe of embarrassment. Next semester looks more promising though. Two five- to seven-minute long projects, and each time, we're given a month to complete them. But even that's not enough for some people. A few friends of mine are starting to take to "off the grid" projects -- that is, projects not associated with the college -- and I'm going to be cutting together something called 'Winter Break' in about a week or so. I'll be sure to let you all know how that turns out.

In other news, I've made my goal. Having seen thirteen new films since my last post, I'm now checking in with 183 movies for 2005 under my belt -- one for every two days of the year -- and a grand total of 155/250 listed films from the IMDb Top 250 List. But since I'm off to a New Year's party in a few, I'll leave it to you guys to use the IMDb to find out more about the movies I'm going to talk about tonight, as opposed to having me rant on about them and wasting our time. Let's begin.

The Horse's Mouth, the 1958 Alec Guinness film about a painter trying to create the perfect realization of his artistic vision, has a lot more to it than meets the eye. Rife with symbolism, a marvelous character study befitting the Joyce Cary novel that this movie was based upon and with the film just as richly detailed as concerns the setting of the film, this is an infinitely rewarding movie if one takes the time to reflect on it after having seen it. In all honesty, right when the movie ended, I didn't like it much, but just like the time I saw La Dolce Vita, the more I thought about it, the more layers I uncovered and by the end of that particular train of thought, I had a much deeper appreciation for the film than I did before. But, moving on, we come to the non-Kubrick 1997 version of the Lolita story. I may want to hold off giving a full review until I've seen the Kubrick version from 1962, but I will say that Jeremy Irons delivered an admirable performance as British professor, Humbert Humbert, and that director, Adrian Lyne, has a very distinct style that I'm quite fond of as well. The new King Kong pounded its way into my head shortly thereafter and although I'm usually quite wary of films that are just a tad overindulgent in the special effects department, I still say that Peter Jackson managed to create a whole new layer of subtext and nuance that wasn't present in the original 1933 classic. Commendable, but let's just say I won't be buying it anytime soon. Mystic River was the flick I watched right after that and it's really just your standard police thriller. Penn and Robbins did a great job though, but we'll let their Oscars speak for themselves. On the other hand, I have a bone to pick with the lighting department. You'd think that a professional lighting crew understands the basics of colour temperature and lighting continuity, so I guess they're not getting paid enough. There's no need to make an entire audience strain themselves this one scene just to figure out that these two people talking are in the same bloody room. Chaplin's City Lights was next on the bill and maybe I'm ignorant or something but I just really didn't like this one. It's supposed to be better than both The Great Dictator and The Gold Rush, but it just bored the living daylights out of me. It seemed to me -- and you can disagree all you want -- that this was the least developed story out of the four Chaplin films I've seen. Another film I didn't like much either was Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman's drag comedy of 1982. Has a few good lines, mostly thanks to Bill Murray, but the story's so predictable and Hoffman's romantic interest is so bland and uninteresting that I stopped caring halfway through and instead occupied myself with counting the ceiling tiles in my girlfriend's basement. (Man, can I see myself getting crucified for saying that.) Dialogue's not too bad though, but every single time, it's the story that makes the movie and Tootsie barely has one. Which brings me to Full Metal Jacket. On the surface, not a lot happens. Grunts get trained, grunts go to Vietnam, grunts get killed. Simple, right? But the real focus of this film is in the characterization. Original characters with real personalities and the fact that all war movie stereotypes are lampooned make this, in my mind, the best war film out there. Endlessly entertaining.

Which is so unlike Braveheart, I don't even know where to begin. First off, the film is a terrible history lesson. Second, the character development's all wrong. And that's only when it exists. The character of William Wallace goes from heroic avenger to bloodthirsty barbarian and back again with no clear motivation in between. That's not a screenplay. That's happy hour. And while I admire the scale of the battle scenes and the cinematography, it falls into the same trap Memoirs of a Geisha does. To the director in both cases, the production design mattered more than the script. On to Eat Drink Man Woman now, I still love this movie despite how it just hands you the metaphor on a silver platter. You usually can't go wrong with Ang Lee. But back to Vietnam for a moment, I have to say, I hated Platoon. Think Full Metal Jacket overacted without the characterization. Stone could have done so much more with that story. I also finally saw The Sea Inside and couldn't help but notice that the filmmakers were very fair to both sides of the euthanasia debate. Look that one up. And finally, we come to Philadelphia. Great film. I've never had a courtroom drama pass by that quickly for me before.

(Scene from "Full Metal Jacket", 1987)

No reply in almost a month now, huh? Sounds like I wasn't the only one completely loaded down with work, school-related or otherwise. Either way, I just got off college for my winter break yesterday and although I'm not sure I can do it, I plan on watching at least thirteen more films before January 1st, 2006. Why thirteen? Well, as geeky as this may sound, I've been keeping track of all the movies I've been watching this year and so far, in 2005, I have seen about 170 films that I had not seen before. Were I to watch thirteen more films, I will have seen a grand total of 183 'new' movies, resulting in an average of me having seen just over one 'new' film for every two days of 2005. Yes, I know I'm a movie nerd, but I'm thinking this will also help make my life easier next semester when I go back to school because of this: FILM 111 - History of Film. You know I've never seen To Kill a Mockingbird? I should really get on that if I have any hope of passing that class. In other news, I'm still at 149/250 Listed films, even though I finally got around to watching a certain Western classic. But we'll get into that in a bit.

Only ten films since my last post this time and the first one up is Epidemic, the 1987 film from Lars von Trier. About two screenwriters who make up a story about a deadly plague ravaging Europe while a real plague is slowly taking hold of the country around them, it sounds like a great idea but the entire film is held together by a very thin thread of a storyline. With wholly irrelevant subplots about toothpaste and hypnotism, not to mention the thoroughly annoying directorial decision to have the film's title burned into the picture frame through the entire movie, none of the movie makes sense until the film's final five minutes. Granted, the ending's quite gripping, but for me, it was too little too late. Next up is Walk the Line, the new Johnny Cash biopic. I knew nothing about Cash's life before I watched this movie, but the film actually made a fan of me. I seriously forgot that Joaquin Phoenix was playing the role and by the end, I was totally engrossed. This may be the best mainstream film in North American theatres right now. Now, about that 'Western classic'. I finally watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Westerns were never really my thing, but I was fairly entertained by this. I just find that most Westerns are of very little depth, character-wise. Then again, Westerns aren't really so much about character development as they are about attitude. Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery was something I found on an old VHS tape shortly thereafter and was that ever a disappointment. Yes, I understand the subtext and I understand what he was trying to get across about married couples getting bored with one another, but really now, you can't keep an audience's attention on one-liners and one-liners alone, especially in a mystery movie. Not only does he give it all away right from the start, there's nary a plot twist you don't see coming a mile away in the film. Likely one of my least favourite flicks. But no worries. Rent made up for it. The new movie adaptation of the Tony Award winning Broadway musical is getting nothing but bad reviews, but that's probably only because the producers of the film didn't bribe all the critics into giving good reviews by sending them away for a weekend to a tropical resort the way Pirates of the Caribbean did. Personally, I loved it. Aside from a few entirely forgivable camera mistakes, Rent was perfect. Even the most jaded moviegoers can expect a tear or two at the end. Beautiful music, evocative lighting and one of the best movie musicals I have ever seen.

Caught Matt Stone and Trey Parker's 1997 porn parody opus, Orgazmo, a few days after and although it had its moments, when your theme song is funnier than the rest of your movie, there's a slight chance that something might be wrong. Yet, considering what a genuinely terrible idea for a movie this is, I'm surprised it worked as well as it did. Troma humour but with much more filmmaking professionalism, I'd still recommend it just because it's a great example of what two close friends who met in film school can do if they really put their sick, twisted minds to it. But really, the theme song's the best part. Watched Suspiria, a 1977 cult horror film about a coven of witches at a dance academy, after that and even though it's been called the most artistic horror film ever made, I don't see it. The part where a girl gets thrown through a stained glass window with a telephone wire noose around her neck, followed by one of the most stylish camera reveals I've ever seen in a horror film is pretty cool, but it takes place so early in the movie, it has little to no relevance by the end of it. My vote for Most Artistic Horror Film still belongs to Hellraiser. There should be a brief review of that a little farther up this page. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the next film I saw and it was really a shame that it was so technically flawed. Directional four-point lighting against a vast green-screened exterior landscape? Please. Someone should have at least tried to soften the light a little. Setting up a silk or a light grid isn't all that difficult. I would know; I've done it. Story was very well paced, however, and those two hours really flew by for me. Actually, come to think of it now, had I never gone to film school and knew how they screwed up -- they crossed the line in the film's first ten minutes, for instance -- I probably would have enjoyed it much more than I did. Then again, I wasn't a huge fan of the child actors either. Somehow also watched Babe in the past few weeks and I was actually a little surprised by how dark it was at times. There's just something about having a protagonist in constant danger of being casually eaten for Christmas dinner that unnerves me a little. In any case, a decent kids' movie. Finally, we come to Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary on the birth of modern skateboarding. It's always surprising for me when I'm let in on a whole secret history to something that's only been around for a few decades. Both entertaining and informative.

(Scene from "Suspiria", 1977)

At 10/30/05 08:47 PM, LordRobbo wrote: As I mentioned in my last post, I was a bit dissapointed with [City Lights] after reading Roger Ebert's Great Movie article on it, but that's not to say it is a bad film. I just didn't think it was as funny as, say, The Marx Brothers for example.
Anyway, the first film I saw was The Yes Men. [Y]ou think you it would be a bit more funny then it is.

I actually find Chaplin much funnier than the Marx Brothers, but that might just be me. I actually saw two Chaplin films since my last post here, but unfortunately, neither of them were City Lights so it's really a shame we can't talk more about it. In time, in time. As for The Yes Men, I saw that ages ago and I have to say, I was disappointed too. I think I really only laughed at the bit with the McDonald's cheeseburgers. By the way, lots of movies to talk about this time, so everything's going to be short and sweet. I'm now up to 149/250 Listed movies too.

Now, this actually goes back about a month, but just before Halloween, I went out by myself and took in Saw II just because I knew everyone would be talking about it. Personally, still being the perpetual horror movie fan that I am, I had a great time with it. But to say that it even comes close to the original Saw would be blasphemy. The first Saw was all about the mind games, but Saw II is all about the almighty cringe factor. Not scary, really, but just imagine for a moment being skinned alive and thrown into a vat of malt vinegar and you'll have an idea of how you'd be feeling after this flick. Shopgirl, on the other hand, is kind of like Garden State for the middle-aged crowd. Based off Steve Martin's novella about the tragedy of miscommunication in romantic relationships, it's fairly well shot but none of the acting was able to really capture all the subtext necessary for the story to achieve its full effect. The book was much, much better. And then we have Chaplin's Modern Times, a searing satire about the working world still as relevant today as it was 70 years ago. Now my favourite out of (a disappointing) three Chaplin movies I've actually seen. And then back to the horror world with Hellraiser. Tame by today's standards, but one of the most artistic horror films I've ever seen. Magnificent editing too, especially in the double scene where Julia Cotton is having a flashback of being raped while the movers are trying to get a mattress up the stairs. Come to think of it, that has to be my favourite edited sequence from a movie.

A sci-fi indie flick called Primer was next in line and even though it was poorly shot -- see the fountain scene -- the writing still stood out. A complex story about time travel, aspiration and ennui, it's simple enough once you get it, but a first-time viewer would require pages of explanation. One of those films that you have to peel back the layers on to get the big picture. Right after that, the so-bad-it's-almost-good indie horror flick, The Janitor. Right from the moment he takes on a job at a local sorority house, you just know where it's going to go; a gratuitously-violent, misogynistic exercise in poor taste (and even poorer Set Dec). Apparently, Tom Fulp knows the guy who produced it. The film was actually advertised here on NG. It's just the kind of thing to appeal to the average NG user, but not so much for people like us. My girlfriend took me out to Chicken Little a bit after that and although I enjoyed it for the most part, the oversaturation of bad 90's music ruined it for me. Just when I thought I was done with that stage of my life for good, the Spice Girls come back and cram themselves down my throat like so many Harry Reems movies. Still though, not as bad as you might think and surprisingly emotional in the film's first half hour. The CGI characters were actually better actors than half of the current population of LA. And then, I finally rounded off my Kevin Smith collection by picking up the 10th Anniversary Special Edition Mallrats DVD for just under twenty bucks. I watched it twice in under 24 hours. Everyone else seems to hate it, but I find it hysterical. Very little art involved in the filmmaking, but just a fun, funny movie to watch with friends.

But then we come to Reefer Madness, the cult "classic" from 1936 about the so-called dangers of marijuana use. Everyone else seems to find it hysterical, but I hate it. Sure, the over-the-top acting is laughable, but there's a difference between that and true humour. That, and the story really isn't that funny. Watching an innocent girl getting shot doesn't exactly tickle my funny bone. This one's strictly for the stoners. I took in Chaplin's The Great Dictator a while after that and it's really nothing like his earlier films. Sadly, his tackling of such a serious subject doesn't yield many laugh-out-loud moments -- although I did crack up at his faux German -- and personally, I found it a little heavy-handed. It's all well and good to talk about having the Jewish people fight back against their oppressors, but if they're just going to get killed doing it, how many laughs can you get out of it if you actually think about the futility of it all? It's a good film; I just prefer the earlier Chaplin. Most recently, I watched the Danish Dogme film, The Idiots, with Oriana. It's about a small group of people who lash out against middle-class complacency by pretending to be mentally-challenged. Quite provocative really, and some of the best acting I've seen in a good long while. I suppose we have von Trier to thank for that. Oh, and of course, I also saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Aside from the extremely-rushed first half hour, I had no qualms with any of it. Acting was better than in any of the previous films, it's visually stunning and the special effects dwarf anything I could have imagined. Just a quick note if you haven't seen it yet: Keep your eye on the backgrounds. There are hundreds of little visual jokes -- many of them very suggestive -- that most people will not notice.

And sorry about the video store thing. I should have known. Canadian films are even hard to find here in Canada!

(Scene from "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", 2005)

At 11/4/05 09:30 AM, -Superman- wrote: I've slowly moved onto Mark Twain... I'm currently reading "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court", and i'm trying to get my hands on "Letters from the Earth"... All are brilliant books, maybe i'll post something on Mr. Twain a little bit later...

I'm planning on doing some Dickens myself. It's always nice to go back to the classics. I mean, I tried reading Chuck Palahniuk's "Haunted" a while ago, but I just couldn't get into it. Which is why I'm planning on reading "A Tale of Two Cities" next. It's kind of a shame that I've put it off until now, but seeing as how I'm sure someone in here has read it before, can anyone tell me a little more about it? Thanks to my college workload, I don't think I'll be able to start it until this weekend, but it'd be good to know that, say, I should do my research into that time period's vernacular or I'm going to be hopelessly lost. Things like that. Any information would be appreciated. Also, this is kind of embarrassing, but I've never picked up any other Dickens before either. Should I start small and work my way up?

The novel I'm here to talk about today though was penned sometime in the last five years. Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" is a story of a young, autistic boy trying to catch the murderer of a neighbour's poodle across the street. The boy, Christopher, has no understanding of human emotion and takes everything at face value however. But just before the novel's halfway point, the clues that Christopher gathers lead him deeper into a seemingly-unrelated mystery altogether; a mystery concerning him, his father and his mother whom Christopher long thought dead. Sounds like a good movie, don't it? Well, one's in the works. And the book will almost undoubtedly be better. But just how good is the book anyway? If you listen to the critics, it's a 'superb achievement'. But to me, it's one of the most overrated books I've read all year, second only to "Tuesdays with Morrie". First of all, let me just say that I found the writing too simplistic for my tastes. Yes, I know that Haddon was trying to create a distinct voice for his autistic narrator and yes, I believe he achieved this admirably, but when I read something, I like to think that it's helping me in some indirect way to become a better writer. Reading sentence after commaless sentence that turn the two words, 'and a', into some sort of bloody mantra is not my idea of a phenomenal time to spend 226 pages. But what Haddon lacks in poetic prose, he makes up for in wit. Part of the reason that "Curious Incident" is as funny as it is stems from the fact that young Christopher does not know that he is funny. Take an early chapter where Christopher is talking about his decision to make all the book's chapter numbers prime numbers: "Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living." (p. 12). Or even later on in the story, when Christopher is busy listing off all the contents of his father's room while searching for clues and finds "7 shoes and a comb with lots of hair in it and a piece of copper pipe and a chocolate biscuit and a porn magazine called Fiesta and a dead bee" (p. 93). Throughout the novel, Christopher just gives the facts as he sees them. And because he does not understand emotion, he takes everything literally. He doesn't understand metaphor and believes that a metaphor "should be called a lie" (p. 15) because, for instance, people don't really have skeletons in their closets. He also never uses any dialogue attribution, but since the dialogue is so well written and the reader always understands how a certain line is being said, the writing isn't bland. And you'd think that a novel with no metaphors to break up the minutiae would be boring, but it isn't. Haddon cheats a little here and allows Christopher the use of similes. That having now been noted however, the minutiae comes in copious quantities here. Hardly a chapter goes by without some only marginally relevant digression breaking up the pace of the story and while it works well at times -- like when he goes off on a tangent about The Monty Hall Problem and uses it to turn math into a metaphor for his life (but without realizing it) -- most of the time, it's just irritating. Coupled with the lack of vocabularistic variety, it just seems like a children's book that's all over the place. So even though I read it over the course of two weeks, it felt extremely short and rather shallow. I've heard from an outside source that a Grade 6 class in my neighbourhood started teaching it in their Language Arts program. That doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is that "Curious Incident" makes the Adult Fiction shelves at my local library. I would have expected Teen Fiction. On the other hand, it's no "Gossip Girl". Really, it's a smart book. It's just that it's more trouble than it's worth to figure that out.

And just for the record, 'vocabularistic' isn't a word. What can I say, I'm a sucker for alliteration. Natch.

Taking a complete detour from the predominantly masculine worlds of both baseball and poker, I figured I'd drop by to talk about my latest literary conquest: "The Edible Woman" by Margaret Atwood, a decidedly feminist novel and in fact, her very first. Sorry to steer so far from the current topic of discussion, but if past occurrences are any indication, it's probably a safe bet that this post will remain unread either way. But to begin, I'm sure that there were times for all of you here when you read a certain piece of mediocre fiction that, in an instant, made you appreciate all the good fiction you'd read at that point much, much more. Such is what I experienced two days ago when, after three weeks of reading -- amongst other things, since school is keeping me so busy -- I put down "The Edible Woman", wholly disappointed by the lacklustre ending.

Now don't get me wrong. I love Atwood to death and I'm not saying for a moment that I can write better than her. All I can offer is a comparison between her first novel, "The Edible Woman", and her latest novel, "Oryx and Crake", which I read over the summer. And, as is usually the case in such comparisons, it should be obvious which novel came out on top. To start out with though, Atwood has been a good writer ever since she started pumping out stuff in the early 60's. But that was all poetry and well, fiction is a completely different world. "The Edible Woman", published in 1969, was her first foray into the whole new genre of fiction, and although the result is far from perfect, her talent for creating emotionally complex characters is already well evident. There is a character in "The Edible Woman" by the name of Leonard Slank, for instance, who happens to be a bit of a skirt-chaser. Lusting after young women -- women too young, as a matter of fact -- was Len's modus operandi but he could never actually bring himself to follow through with his dubious desires. "The supposedly pure, the unobtainable, was attractive to the idealist in him; but as soon as it had been obtained, the cynic viewed it as spoiled and threw it away." (p. 97), was how Atwood pictured him in her mind. In a word, wow. It takes decades of acute observance to gain that level of insight into human psychology. And yet, it makes perfect sense to me. To take a complex idea like that and shape it so that a relative plebeian such as myself can grasp it is a mark of brilliance. But just three chapters later, Atwood begins to falter. She begins to write in confusing run-on sentences in attempts at eloquence and what's worse, she starts using nonsensical and inconsistent metaphors. Sure, Marian -- not the librarian -- "could feel time eddying and curling almost visibly around her feet, rising around her, lifting her body in the office chair and bearing her, slowly and circuitously but with the inevitability of water moving downhill" (p. 131), but really now, using "rising" and "downhill" in the same metaphor, no matter how extended, is a poor move. Later on, Atwood makes the same faux pas when she writes about Marian walking by her old university. The university buildings "radiated a faint hostility towards her through the cold air, a hostility she recognized as coming from herself" (p. 198). Say it with me: Huh? Of course, Atwood masters metaphor a few books later in her career, but it's little details like that that threw me right off "The Edible Woman". Oh, and clunky sentence structure -- "By now they had gone up the stairs and were at the door of the apartment, which was opened before Duncan had touched the handle by Trevor." (p. 225) -- and a need to spell out the leitmotifs of her novel didn't help either. Having characters yell lines like "You're rejecting your femininity!" (p. 321) is not only pointless; it also brings down the quality of the work substantially. But perhaps I've been too vicious. Only Atwood can take the minutiae of cups and crumbs on a green arborite-surfaced table and turn them into the "remnants of the courageous breakfasters who had pioneered earlier into the morning when the arborite surface was innocent as a wilderness, untouched by the knife and fork of man" (p. 300). That kind of writing takes work. And there's something about that tongue-in-cheek juxtaposition of consumerist arborite and Romantic wilderness that I can't help but fall in love with. Yes, "The Edible Woman" has its moments, but overall and especially in the ending, it was a letdown. The title itself brings to mind horrific Cronenbergesque images of a human being being consumed, and in many ways, that was kind of the appeal for me. As a Canadian film buff, I kind of grew up on Cronenberg and from what I'd heard of "The Edible Woman", I was expecting the same kind of 'body horror' that he suddenly made so famous. (And for all of you who think me comparing Atwood and Cronenberg is weird, watch Videodrome, then read "Oryx and Crake". Also, they're both Canadian.) But aside from a few semi-grotesque food analogies that really aren't any worse than anything PETA could come up with, the novel is very minimalist in style. Just another story about women overcoming adversity, only with food serving as a metaphor for us in our present day consumerist society. Not the worst book I've ever read, but far from the best. I think I'll be sticking to more recent Atwood from now on. I'll let you boys get back to your poker and baseball.

So, no one got the Music Man reference, did they?

At 10/25/05 07:36 AM, LordRobbo wrote: Firstly, City Lights, the first Chaplin movie I have seen. And after the great write up Roger Ebert gave it in his Great Movies book, I was a little dissapointed. I mean, it was a good, solid movie and all, but some of it was just not as impressive as I had hoped.
That is all from me, but I would like to hear more about Dear Wendy.

As long as I'm telling you more about Dear Wendy, you're going to have to tell me more about City Lights. I think I have a copy sitting in the film library at my college though, so when I get the chance, I'll probably check it out anyways, just because I'm severely lacking in my knowledge of old Chaplin films. But about Dear Wendy, it's a nice fresh take on the causes of gun violence. The movie starts out with loner, Dick, who buys what he thinks is a toy gun at a local toy store. Soon enough though, he finds that what he thought was a toy is in actuality an antique revolver. He considers himself a pacifist, but eventually begins to carry his revolver around everywhere because he feels that it gives him a confidence in himself he never had before. His friends are soon let in on the secret and a club is formed. Pacifists with guns: You can just tell it isn't going to have a happy ending. Either way, instead of blaming the media or violent video games for the protagonists' actions, von Trier speculates in the subtext of the script that the root of gun violence may actually be in the fetishistic eroticism surrounding gun ownership. The title of the movie, Dear Wendy, actually refers to Dick's naming of his own weapon. His gun is named Wendy and he treats "her" as a partner. But instead of wandering about in Freudian territory here, let's just say that it's difficult to explain if you haven't seen the movie. Even what I've written out here isn't a very accurate description of what to expect because the film itself has a very unique style, not dissimilar to a beautifully illustrated graphic novel. Like I said though, one of my favourite films now. Besides, you trust my judgment. Heh.

So, I've seen eight more movies since Dear Wendy, but because of time constraints yet again and because of my own fading memories of them, I don't think I'll be able to talk about many of these with any real level of depth. That, and I would think that Network for instance, requires far more than just one viewing to appreciate. From what I watched though, Network was a great satire. It reminds me a little of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" actually, in that the characters in Network seemed to have a vague idea that they were really in a movie/play just a little over halfway through. Theatre critics call that style of play 'metatheatre'; essentially 'theatre about theatre'. Beats me what they call it in a movie. Anyway, Network's a very subtle film with very few laugh-out-loud moments. Yet for the entire duration of the film, a cynical smirk at what was taking place onscreen was firmly glued to my face. A very cerebral black comedy. Also, watch for the lighting changes from beginning to end. The lights tell a story in themselves. I followed Network up with a recently released chick flick called Elizabethtown that my girlfriend dragged me to and I was actually quite surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Kinda like Garden State for the Southern palate, yet somehow, better. Garden State was a tighter film though, whereas Elizabethtown kind of sprawled, but the latter really felt like it was building up towards something. It's just a shame that Dunst was so annoying in it. Watched The Usual Suspects after that -- finally. -- and was actually a bit disappointed in it. Of course, I knew the twist and all, but I was expecting it to be so much more intelligent than any other action movie just because of what I'd heard about it. Personally, as far as psychological thrillers go, I still prefer Se7en. Saw the claymation Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit after all that, and well, I've been a fan of W&G ever since I saw The Wrong Trousers on TV when I was a kid. Biased opinion here, but I loved it.

I took El Mariachi out of the college film library a few days after and, wow. The physical film quality blew, but man, the stunts Rodriguez was able to put together on a $7,000 budget were awesome. The graininess of the film and the somewhat dubious editing style never allowed me to get sucked into the story, however. It seems to me more a pedagogical guide to low-budget filmmaking than anything else. Or, at least, that's the way they're selling it over at the Film Department. Crazy film teachers. Took in John Waters' latest, A Dirty Shame almost right after and that movie alone has really made me realize the difference between a movie with no plot and a movie with a really bad plot. A Dirty Shame is a movie with a bad plot. All the characters turn in one-note performances as sex fiends and honestly, I've seen Family Circus cartoons that are funnier. I get the point that Waters was going for -- the end of tolerance, the extremity of sexual behaviour, etc. -- but without any character development at all, I couldn't care less what kind of message Waters is trying to stuff down my throat. Someone's going to have to do a lot of convincing before I become a Waters fan. It won't take any convincing for me to turn into a Don McKellar fan though. Got Last Night out of the film library also and that's in my Top 10 now. More a movie about human desperation than the end of the world, Last Night is about the last six hours on Earth. Patrick is too wrapped up in his own grief over the death of a loved one to care, Sandra wants to find her husband, Duncan places work above all else, Menzies wants to go out a concert pianist and Craig just wants to have sex with everything in the city. All different people, but all linked. Magnolia meets Deep Impact and right up there with the very best Canadian films. LordRobbo, I command you to visit a video store tonight. Oh, and I just saw High Noon this morning. Not an action-packed Western like you would expect, but cool in the fact that it can be viewed in real time. Annoying music though. Oscar-winning song, my ass.

(Scene from "Last Night", 1998)

There's a very good chance that no one in here remembers who I am, but on the other hand, I haven't contributed much to this thread and I still haven't picked up a Discworld novel so it's not as if I'm anyone of consequence. Besides, like I said in my last post here, college is eating up all of my time so I really don't post here that often. The last time I posted must have been over a month ago. And even though no one reads my posts anyways, I figured I'd at least say something about the last two books I've read just so I might have something to look back on if, say, in the future I were called upon to discuss a piece of literature that I hadn't read in some time. But to be sure, remember when I said that I wouldn't be reviewing textbooks? Well, I'm kind of going against that. No, I'm not going to review "Final Cut Pro HD". I'm going to talk about the first nonfiction book I've read since that Kinsey bio I read last year: "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer.

So, has anyone here ever had one of those courses that you really couldn't figure out the purpose of? Like, no matter what you did in that class, it was never actually benefiting you in any way? Well, I thought that Film 101 would be more helpful than it is, but so far, the only purpose of my Film Crafts course that I can see is just to have another class to heap just a little more work on us. Which would be where "Into Thin Air" comes in. All the instructors in my class have this analogy about filmmaking being a lot like climbing a mountain, so naturally, they just had to get us to read a personal account of the disastrous 1996 Everest season in order to demonstrate, and I quote, 'good and bad team or leadership behavior'. I can see the point of it, really. I just think there are better ways we could have spent our time. However, I must admit that the book was a very pleasant change of pace after having to read so many manuals and screenplays. Krakauer is a very readable author as well, and truth be told, I believe that this was my first foray into narrative nonfiction, and I enjoyed myself immensely. One of the reasons I enjoyed this piece of writing so much was mostly because, as this was a personal account, Krakauer didn't decide to simply pummel us with fact after fact after fact. While still remaining objective, he treats each of his team members fairly, criticizing only their decisions and never the person. For example, during the 1996 Everest season in which twelve climbers died, an Anatoli Boukreev decided to descend from the summit hours ahead of his teammates despite the fact that he was serving as a guide. Krakauer calls Boukreev's decision into question, which of course, he should. But just a few pages after that, Krakauer acknowledges Boukreev's later attempts to find a group of missing climbers, writing that "[i]t was an incredible display of strength and courage, but he was unable to find any of the missing climbers." (p. 222). Krakauer also writes with a sense of honesty, even willingly bringing up his own mistakes and his own contributions to the tragedy: "[M]y utter failure to consider that Andy might have been in serious trouble -- was a lapse that's likely to haunt me for the rest of my life." (p. 196). There are many more examples to prove those two points, but for the sake of brevity, I'll move on. The last thing that really got me came near the end, as Krakauer describes going back home to all the things he used to take for granted. "[E]ating breakfast with [his] wife, watching the sun go down over Puget Sound, being able to get up in the middle of the night and walk barefoot to a warm bathroom" (p. 282), all reminded me of how, at one point or another, death reaffirms life and how profoundly certain events can change a person. But I had never really left the comforts of my own home here at sea level British Columbia. Yet, as I read that line, I suddenly understood, in some small way, what Krakauer and his teammates had been through, carried forward by only their sheer determination and will. I can tell you right now that I will never climb a mountain. But for the 333 pages of this book, I got a sense of what it might be like. And so, even if you're not really into nonfiction, I still recommend this book for that very reason.

The second book I've read since my last post, I'm still not sure counts. Because, well, it's a play. In any case, Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" is actually in town at the moment but I was too late in getting tickets, so I'm settling for reading it. Now, everyone compares this play to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" but what most people don't realize is that "Waiting For Godot" is all about existentialism whereas "Rosencrantz" is more about determinism. "Rosencrantz" also belongs to a very exclusive type of theatre known as 'metatheatre'; essentially, 'theatre about theatre'. Much like the 1976 film, Network, the characters eventually become vaguely aware that they are actually in a film/play. In the middle of Act One, Rosencrantz loudly proclaims, "I feel like a spectator -- an appalling business. The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute." (p. 41). And no one does until the end of the scene. But metatheatre aside for now, the theme of "R&G" is the illusion of free will. Aside from the slapstick absurdist elements of the play, "R&G" is actually extremely dark. After all, if free will doesn't exist and we all know what happens to Ros and Guil at the end, where does that leave us? At the end of Act Two, Ros and Guil are about to get on a boat to escort Hamlet to England. We all know what really awaits them, but Ros sees this as an opportunity to be free at last and makes a point of saying so to Guil. At which point Guil replies, "I don't know. It's the same sky." (p. 95). Act Three gets even darker, with the Player denouncing life as being a "gamble, at terrible odds" (p. 115), until finally, Ros and Guil meet their end and Guil reflects on it in his final chilling monologue: "There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it." (p. 125). Strange that one of the funniest plays of all time is also one of the darkest. Acts One and Two, by the way, are hysterical. Watch for the game of questions and how they try to trap Hamlet. I'm still livid at the fact that I missed the live production.

An entire week has now gone by and still no reply. Always disheartening when one has to double-post. In any case, the lack of a response hasn't slowed me down. To the contrary, actually. Now that I can finally say that I'm all caught up with my college workload, I've had more time for films. Moreover, my classes are even starting to show more films. Thus, I've been watching an average of one movie a day for the past week. The strange thing is, the six movies that I've taken in since last all seem to pair up in some way. So even though I didn't watch them in this order, I'll be reviewing these films pair by pair. (Current IMDb Top 250 standing: 143/250.)

The reasoning behind the pairings, by the way, is dubious at best. Just thought I'd address that now before someone else did it for me. So this first pair here will concern two films that both start with "A" being used as an indefinite article, the first film being Cronenberg's über-stylish action-drama about a small town man who is not quite what he seems when he blows away two thugs bent on robbing his diner: A History of Violence. It's been an extremely long time since I've seen a really great mainstream film -- it's currently No. 4 on this week's box office -- and I really didn't think Cronenberg would ever be the same again without his trademark technicolor gore after he made the mediocre Spider, but let me tell you, this film has a maturity of storytelling that make this at the very least, the best Canadian film of the year. High-quality visuals, yet the story itself never seems Hollywood despite very clear act divisions because the focus is never on what the protagonist is called upon to do, but on what effect his choices have on his family. It's more a character drama that an action flick and not since 1994's Léon has a better action movie been made. The other movie I watched with "A" being used as an indefinite article in the film's title was the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. My personal favourite Marx Brothers flick, but the individual gags from Duck Soup were funnier. I was completely transfixed by Chico and Harpo on the piano and harp though. Amazingly talented entertainers, those Marx Brothers are.

The next two films have what I feel to be a fairly obvious link, so I won't say a word more on the subject. It all started last Sunday when I went off to my first VIFF movie of the year, The Duelist. A South Korean action-comedy, it's probably funny back in South Korea but ever since Kung Fu Hustle made it to DVD just a few months back here in North America, I haven't exactly been itching to see another Asian action-comedy that looks like it was directed by the guy who did "Animaniacs". To be fair however, it did manage to redeem itself at the end with a beautifully shot slow-motion duel between Namsoon and Sad Eyes -- how much more Asian can you get? -- but I really wouldn't recommend this film to anyone. Kinda like Crouching Tiger meets Miss Congeniality, but somehow, still less funny. It seemed quite popular with the crowd though. Maybe I'm the crazy one here. But I doubt it. The other movie I saw in the past week was actually Steven Spielberg's first feature, Duel. (Get it now?) And now that I know a little more about what it takes to be a good director, I actually admire Spielberg more in terms of his technical expertise. Duel as a story, however, is beyond shallow. Simply put, a guy in a small red POS family car faces off against a massive tractor-trailer and this is somehow supposed to mean that we are all, deep down, just as animalistic as a bloody hyena or something. I get the symbolism and there really is a certain elegance to the story's simplicity, but I'm just used to stories where the message isn't quite so obvious. Not something I'd watch again but still something I'm glad I've seen.

The last pairing isn't as obvious as the other two unless you really know your Danish films so I'm just going to put it right out there. Lars von Trier wrote both. And of course, they're both Danish. The first film in this category was actually something I intended to catch at VIFF '04. The Five Obstructions, being a documentary of sorts, is kind of like the ultimate reality TV show for film buffs. Lars, ever the directorial sadist in this film, challenges his idol, Jørgen Leth, to remake his own classic 1967 short, "The Perfect Human", five times with a different 'obstruction' on each remake, thereby forcing Leth to rethink story and visual integrity. Yet, only three of the five are really worth watching and I really expected more, so I walked away disappointed. Just goes to show I should really stop buying all these expensive foreign movies before watching them. (And as a side note, it should also be mentioned that I have now also seen "The Perfect Human" in its entirety as a DVD extra. It should also be mentioned that the Canadian film, Nothing, makes a lot more sense after having seen this relatively obscure short.) And finally, we come to my favourite movie of, well, the whole damn year. Last night, me and Oriana went out to see that post-Dogme Vinterberg flick I was raving about in my last post, Dear Wendy. I actually walked away still excited about this film. It managed to combine the theme of adolescent alienation à la The Virgin Suicides with the classic Western mise en scène of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In a word, brilliance. Especially Vinterberg's method of showing and not showing gore at the same time. Lovable characters, a healthy dosage of attitude and a magnificently creative writing style that takes a bag of coffee and transforms it into a matter of life and death without ever bordering on childish ridiculousness, Dear Wendy hit my personal Top 5 last night. I can't remember ever loving a film so much upon only a single viewing. And me and Oriana are falling all over ourselves waiting for the DVD to come out. I frickin' love it. Ask me and I'd be more than happy to tell you more.

(Scene from "Dear Wendy", 2005)

You know what's really interesting? Ever since I started going to film school, I've just been looking at films differently. It was easy before for me to critique, say, the recent remake of War of the Worlds and dismiss it as mind-numbing Hollywood fare, but now, after having to analyze every little detail of the production process, I can no longer make a snap judgment like that. As a result, it's very likely that from now on, my reviews here will take on a slightly more forgiving tone, even in the face of stuff out in theatres right now that you or I normally wouldn't even pay to see. Of course, I'm still not a huge fan of big-budget productions but I'm also actually finding that I enjoy movies just a little bit less than I used to. I think it's because, now that I have a decent knowledge of the inner workings of these entertainment features, I can no longer view them with the same sense of detachment that I used to be able to. Oh well, just as long as it doesn't kill VIFF '05 for me. That's right: The 24th Annual Vancouver International Film Festival is back in town. And guess what's showing. None other than Three Dollars, the same Australian film that you recommended to me all those posts ago. But don't get too excited just yet, LordRobbo. I can't make it out the one night it's playing. I'm going out to an Arcade Fire concert with a few of my friends that night. Blows, eh? Maybe some other time.

So what with college eating up all of my time and bombarding me with so much film-related information that the last thing I want to do when I get home is watch a movie, I've really only seen seven films since my last post. I got a few shorts in there though, amongst them Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou. Surrealist cinema at its finest, I'm telling you. Know that scene in The Matrix when Neo's mouth disappears? They stole it from this. Find it, rent it, watch it. Even a full rental price is worth these 16 minutes from the masters. But as far as features go -- and I'm really going to try to make this short here because I'm meeting up with Oriana tonight -- nothing this time really grabbed me. Sure, I saw Battleship Potemkin and yes, the Odessa steps sequence and the mutiny scenes were great, but somehow, I was expecting more story content. I feel like I should love it just because I'm a film student, but I probably wouldn't watch it again. I was entertained, but I watched it more for the sake of finding out more about film history than to be pulled into the story because, frankly, I just wasn't. It came off as being really propagandist too. Did you find that? Following that, I rented a little French film called They Came Back. Interesting idea, really. What if the recently deceased all came back one day and decided that they wanted to resume their normal lives? What if they wanted their old wives or husbands back? Their old jobs? No brain-eating zombies here. But, just like every other French film I can recall seeing in the past year-and-a-half, the ending is where it all falls flat. Great intro, excellent rising action -- turns out they're not completely normal after all -- but then, just when you think it's about to get good, it just farts out an ending and it all dies. I think I'll give France a few more years before I watch anything new from them again. But while we're on the subject of horror, let's mix it up by going into a completely unrelated genre like, I don't know, courtroom drama? And boom, you have The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Advertised as a horror, but playing out like a psychological drama with a supernatural edge, it's actually smarter than it appears. Like Dark Water in a courtroom, but with more cringe-worthy contortions. A few good scares, but it's no horror so don't be fooled. Saw Reservoir Dogs after that and found it extremely overrated. I liked the dialogue and all, but it just took my expectations, crumpled them up into a little paper ball, ate it and then shot itself in the head. The violence doesn't bother me, so that's not the reason. It's just not my kind of movie. The era of the tough-talking gangster is dead. I personally like seeing characters a little more true to life than Mr. Blonde. Just my personal opinion. There shouldn't be a need to, like, excommunicate me for not liking a 'classic'. Actually, come to think of it, the violence kind of saved it in a way. The police officer tied to the chair getting shot? That added a much more human element to the story, especially after we found out that he had kids. Brilliant directorial decision.

Dogme. If you don't yet know what that word means, look it up. If you're a film geek, you need to know. Examples include the Danish films, The Idiots and The Celebration. I actually had to do an in-camera edit, semi-Dogme short earlier today for film class. Fun as hell to shoot, but watching it is a different matter. See, I just don't know if I like it yet. I've only seen one and that was The Celebration. It was interesting to watch from a student filmmaker's perspective, mostly because you're always very aware of camera positioning because one of the Dogme rules is you can't use a tripod, but the mark of good camerawork is making it unnoticeable. The Celebration was hard to watch for this very reason. Also, it's not a particularly imaginative story. I had a good idea what the dark family secret was long before Christian blurted it out. But let's keep this moving. I watched Tim Burton's Corpse Bride that same night and I was somewhat disappointed by that too. As visually captivating as The Nightmare Before Christmas, but with character development in all the wrong places. The ending felt egregiously contrived as a direct result. But I won't spoil it. And finally, Risky Business. Not the party movie I was expecting. Oriana fell asleep and I felt like joining her. Creative enough as an idea, but maybe this is just my bias against Tom Cruise cropping up again. I found it boring and a waste of great story potential.

Well, so much for being forgiving. I'll be back with more after I hit up VIFF '05. I'm going to catch some post-Dogme Vinterberg with Ori. You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to it. Or how pissed I am that Three Dollars and Arcade Fire are playing on the same night. Grr.

(Scene from "Corpse Bride", 2005)

At 8/27/05 12:32 AM, DrWurm wrote: ummmm anyone seen -donnie darko- or -what the *bleep* do we know-?

Yup. Well, the former anyway. Enough times to make me not want to watch it again for a good decade or so. As for the latter, I always meant to watch it, only I could never find the time. That, and new stuff that I wanted to see more just kept popping up. I'll get around to it though. Eventually. Actually, scratch that. How is it that I only attended one day of college so far and I'm already three days behind in my reading? School's going to eat up most of my time for the next three years. Looks like this is the end of my one-movie-every-two-days streak. Curses.

Guess I'll just be jumping into the movies now. Haven't actually seen any listed ones this time, so I won't bother doing the count again. Besides, it takes too much time. I have almost a dozen pages of post-production related jargon to plug through tonight to at least catch up somewhat with my courses. Damn you, film school. The textbooks are expensive as all hell, too. That's $300.00 I could have used to rent Les Revenants and about a hundred other movies I want to see. Not that I'd have the time. I'm just becoming more bitter by the second, aren't I? Grrr.

All right, then. First one up is the perfect example of a decent Canadian film. Quirky, low-budget and much better than anybody thought possible, Nothing is now one of my favourite Canadian films of all time (with Saint Ralph somewhere up there too). A story of slackers meeting solipsism, the general premise is hysterical. Simply put, two guys living together under one roof discover one day just how much they hate the world, only to emerge from their house moments later to discover, well, nothing. Where once was the world, there is only now a blank, white, bland-as-tofu wasteland. At first, the two friends adjust well, but as always with buddy flicks, things go awry. With very entertaining results. The film never descends into darkness -- it's kind of impossible with all that white anyways -- but there's still a decent enough pacing of conflict to keep things interesting. I watched it twice in two days and even though I checked my watch once or twice the second time, I still enjoyed it more than most movies I watch only once. If you're into independent weirdness, be sure to give Nothing a look if you can find it. And while you're at it, watch Cube as well. Same director and same level of weirdness, only Cube is as dark as it gets. Girlfriend somehow got me to watch Evita after I made her watch Nothing -- she actually fell asleep, the cork-nut -- and it very well may be the one musical I've seen so far that I didn't really like at all. Maybe it was the long and repetitive musical numbers. Maybe it was the lack of comic relief and cinematic rhythm. Or maybe, just maybe, it's because I can't take Madonna and Antonio Banderas seriously when the two of them are lip-synching so unconvincingly, they might as well be fish. I never want to watch it again. And I really, really don't care about how many awards it's won. I really don't. In fact, you know what? I liked The 40-Year-Old Virgin more. Know what the funny thing is though? The night we went to see that, we were initially planning on seeing Night of the Shooting Stars at a small art house theatre. We couldn't make it. So naturally, we watched a sex comedy. (That's sarcasm, by the way.) Yet, it was surprisingly smart. A sex comedy actually departing from 90% of the teenage stereotypes that American Pie established back in 1999? Who would've thought. Lewd, yes; crude, yes; but funny? Hell yeah. At the very least, it's the best thing out in mainstream cinema right now. No wait, back that up. Broken Flowers is. Remember old Coffee and Cigarettes Jarmusch? His latest project involving Bill Murray, so you just know it's going to be good. A middle-aged man every bit as soporific as Mr. Bob Harris wakes up one morning to not only his girlfriend leaving him, but also a mysterious pink letter informing him that he just might have a son. So, he sets out on a quest to track down all his old flames in search for the teenaged bugger. Cracks a person up in that quiet way that Lost in Translation or Songs from the Second Floor does, but the ending is a little abrupt. But the more I think about it, the more I like it and I've been thinking about it a bit. That's another one I want you all to see. Be forewarned though. It's one of those love-it-or-hate-it flicks.

[You know what I just realized? I just keep referring to my girlfriend as 'my girlfriend'. I should start referring to her with her name from now on, don't you think? Oriana. Her name's Oriana. And I love her to death. Let's move on.]

Oriana's kid brother convinced the two of us to watch Kung Fu Hustle shortly after the Jarmusch. Having seen Shaolin Soccer a few years before, another CGI-loaded wire-fu foray into the realm of martial arts comedy, I had an idea what to expect. And I think I liked it just a little more than Oriana, me being able to pick up on the subtle nuances of the Cantonese language without having to read the subtitles. (The subtitles got it all wrong either way.) Think The Matrix meets Looney Tunes -- which I'm sure has already been said before -- but a hundred times more plotless. Fight after fight after fight, I didn't even remember what the story was at the end of it. Oh wait. There wasn't one. Following that, I caught up with an Iranian buddy of mine, Fez, and got him to come with me to the funniest documentary I'll likely ever see: The Aristocrats. The documentary is all about the world's dirtiest joke. In fact, it's so dirty, comedians keep it amongst themselves and all tell different versions of it, often competing to see who can tell it the best (read: with the most sex and the most scat). I don't know about you, but I can appreciate a good dirty joke. Which is probably why I laughed harder at this than anything else I've seen in a good long while. Easily offended? Stay away. Otherwise, enjoy. The last film I saw was Girl with a Pearl Earring and while I'm sure the book was great, the film bored me to tears. No onscreen chemistry whatsoever.

(Scene from "Broken Flowers", 2005)

At 8/30/05 06:33 PM, MasterStalker wrote: Stephen Kink's "Everything's Eventual". It's a collection of short stories incluing one based of his series "The Gunslinger".

Stephen Kink, you say. Sounds racy. But no, I've actually read that. Ages ago, while I was still in my Crichton phase, as a matter of fact. And as I recall, not all the stories were that great. For instance, for every 'L.T.'s Theory of Pets' or 'Lunch at the Gotham Café', there was a '1408' or 'The Road Virus Heads North'. In fact, the only short story that I really liked turned out to be the book's title story, 'Everything's Eventual'. It had a fun protagonist, not just another middle-aged male writer who seems to appear in every third short story King writes, only under different names. I'd look for examples, but King doesn't really interest me anymore. Same goes for Ludlum. That having been said though, don't just skip the first two Bourne novels just because you've seen the movies. Trust me. They're so different, I don't even know why they didn't create a new character entirely. Completely different storylines as well. So don't do it.

So it seems that no one liked my little website idea either. Maybe I'll just keep my mouth shut from now on? Oh well.

I'm starting college tomorrow, by the way. So unless you guys want textbook reviews, I'm probably not going to be around for a while. I'm also reading a 655-page book, so it'll probably be a month before I set foot in here again. But that's just fine. It's not as if this thread moves rapidly or anything. Either way, I've actually completed two books since "Tuesdays with Morrie". The far superior one, "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood, is the one I shall discuss first. I first heard about Atwood in my Lit 12 class when we were doing this poem of hers called 'Disembarking at Quebec'. Personally, me being more of a sonnet kind of guy myself, the free verse didn't really grab me at the time but the poetry of it was very lyrical and very easy to understand. So, knowing her to also be a novelist, I eventually picked up on what to read from my fellow lit geeks. And, well, they were all reading "Oryx and Crake". So I picked up a copy. My first impression was that 'Disembarking' was a far cry from the futuristic dystopia of "Oryx and Crake", but Atwood obviously has a knack for it. Without missing a beat, she describes creations of genetic engineering in vivid detail and then, almost facetiously, fashions portmanteau sobriquets for all of them, such as the rakunk or the pigoon. The same wry humour that appears in the novel's nomenclature is also present in the prose, with Snowman, the novel's protagonist, reflecting on his near-apocalyptic situation with unadulterated pessimism, such as follows: "These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency." (p. 48). Yet, as with 'Disembarking', there are at times true poetry in the text. Snowman's old addictions, no longer at their apogee due to the difficulty of, say, locating a cigarette with 98% of the world's population dead -- for reasons that I'll leave you to find out -- are described as "lying dormant like flowers in the desert." (p. 333). Atwood jumps back and forth masterfully between the two registers, going from colloquial to eloquent with such ease as to make an aspiring writer like myself feel like snapping every pencil in the house into a thousand tiny pieces so as to scatter them into the ocean. But it is the combination of her evident mastery of the language and her science-fiction brilliance that ascend "Oryx and Crake" to high art. For instance, one of the unpleasant factors that seem to afflict the future world as Atwood sees it is the media's obsession with sex and violence. In Crake's world, this now seems to be all the media has to offer; Videodrome-esque executions and sex shows playing online around the clock. The arts are dead. All that remains is no longer gratification of the mind, but gratification of the body. And as Atwood puts it, "the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance." (p. 104). Beautifully, beautifully written. In fact, quite possibly the best book I've read all year. I recommend it to all. Just for future reference, I'll be picking up more Atwood very soon.

Now normally, with a book as awesome as "Oryx and Crake", I'd just never shut up about it and keep talking until I used up all 6,500 characters allowed to me in this post. I still have an entire page of notes on the book that I was prepared to discuss -- I mean, I haven't even mentioned the BlyssPluss Pill yet -- but unfortunately, that character limit actually does cause a few problems when I have more than one book to talk about. Which brings me to "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" by Richard Bach. And no, I didn't pick up this book myself. A girlfriend's father -- that's a girlfriend, not my girlfriend; there's a difference -- recommended it to me and told me to take a look because he knew that I liked and read philosophy every now and again. "Illusions", I guess, was his idea of a philosophical book. Don't even get me started. At 192 pages, just like "Tuesdays with Morrie" -- what is with inspirational books all being 192 pages? -- at least it's a mercifully short read. Nothing new to see here, just a 1970's offering from the realm of fortune-cookie philosophy. The characters, all two of them, are bland as all hell and the conversations that they have are more aphoristic than dialogue. Throw in the fact that half of it makes about as much sense as a quadriplegic mime -- "You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past." (p. 63) -- and the other half is just plain wrong -- "[T]he whole motion of our time is from the material toward the spiritual." (p. 50) -- and you have 192 pages that I never want to touch again. Granted, the premise of an ordinary man meeting a messiah, miracles and all, is intriguing, but the book's really just too dull to make a person think. Like all bad books I read though, I must admit that it does have its moments, but as always in these cases, it was too little too late. However, it was good for a laugh. Yet, that probably was due more to the book's quality than its contents.

I swear to you that I'm getting dumber. I read faster now but I get the feeling that I'm missing out on most of it, my mind doesn't wander as much as it used to and I've just become bitter and cynical about everything. And here I am, just graduated, off to college to study film. I remember my English Lit 12 class and the talks we used to have about Shakespeare and Orwell. It all used to have so much meaning. I used to take great pleasure in spending time researching all my topics so I'd be able to pump out the best possible essay, and at the end of the day, I'd look at my grade and go to sleep happy knowing that I'd accomplished something. But now, I read and for some reason, it's no longer worth understanding. There's no grade. I read for enjoyment now and I read plenty. Almost eight books since school let out for the summer, as a matter of fact. But I get the feeling that I'm not enjoying it as much as I should be. Maybe it's because I no longer have to look for meaning in order to get a good grade and without that motivation, well, there's just no drive. I love learning, but I feel as though I'm not learning anything. It doesn't help that everything feels old either. The book I'm reading right now, as entertaining as it is, is just another literary sci-fi dystopia. So what? It's been done.

I'm also starting to have second thoughts about studying film. I used to spend time in coffee shops writing screenplays for fun. But even that's a joke. I wasn't the only one. And now I figure that since I'm going to be taking a course on it, I might as well learn more about it before picking up a pen again. So I stopped. And even if I were to start again, I wouldn't know where to begin. And now, as far as film goes, I just watch them. But recent movies bore me. So I went back into the classics, until I realized that Fellini bored me. And that you can only watch so many Hitchcock flicks before they start becoming predictable. So I started watching indie movies until I got sick of all the forced quirkiness of movies like Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite. So now I just watch whatever I can find. I got lucky the other day. Nothing is the best film out there that none of you have ever seen. Rent it if you can.

And you know what else is troubling? I don't remember the last intelligent conversation I had. Back in freakin' Grade 11, I loved philosophy and I'd rant for hours about how I thought the world worked. I believed that we all operated believing ourselves to be serving our own means when we were really taking actions simply to serve some sort of higher biological purpose that we were thus far blinded to. I actually made a thread about it at the time: On Interpretation and Illusion. But now, I'm philosophically agnostic. My mind doesn't go those places anymore and all I do now is watch movies that I'm not even sure I like and read books almost for the sole purpose of just being able to say I've read them. All this mental deterioration and in only the space of one poorly-spent summer. At this rate, I'll be an idiot by the time I leave college in three years. Just in time to join the real world. Hopefully, by then, I'll be too stupid to care.

At 8/22/05 07:33 AM, LordRobbo wrote: What are your favourite 10 films?
I don't know what's come over me recently, I never seem to have time to watch movies recently. Although I have started editing a small mockumentary for school, and am beginning three other film projects soon.

My favourite ten films? Wow, I don't know. However, I do know that Lost in Translation is my favourite so far from all the hundreds of movies I've seen and is, naturally, my pick for the best film of 2003. I also really liked Hotel Rwanda, my favourite of 2004, and -- a lot of people are kind of shocked about this -- I think Sin City's the best movie of 2005 thus far. Other favourites include American Beauty, The Secret of NIMH (a childhood classic that I recently rediscovered), Good Bye, Lenin!, Shaun of the Dead, Taxi Driver, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Elephant, Chinatown and a bunch of old Bergman and Hitchcock stuff. I wish I were more foreign film savvy though. I just know there's a bunch more French and Italian stuff out there that I'd love but haven't seen yet. I've been playing catch-up for years now. I guess that doesn't really answer your question but maybe it's something I need more time to think about. I mean, everyone loves American Beauty and Chinatown, right?

As for never having any time to watch movies now, I'm almost getting there. Spending all my time reading these days. Great page-turner I'm immersed in now called "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood, and between reading and spending time with my girlfriend, I have very little time to watch stuff unless I'm watching it with my girlfriend. Interesting to note that you're an aspiring filmmaker yourself though. Or are you just doing small film projects on the side? Have any dreams of becoming the next De Palma or von Trier? Really, I'm interested.

Since I'm already here, I might as well take the chance to fill you in on the last four flicks I've taken in since City of God. I mentioned something about a classic from 1915 and if you've ever taken a film course, or just like watching Jeopardy, you'd know that 1915 was the year that the very first feature-length silent film was introduced to the world; D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. At just under three hours long, the film documents the American civil war, the assassination of President Lincoln and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike most films considered epics, 'epic' isn't just a euphemism for 'really long' here. Birth of a Nation really does have an epic quality to it that would take multiple viewings to entirely appreciate. But this film is still a major talking point today not just because it was, in many ways, the beginning of an entire art. It was also because it seems so racist. Apparently, after the war, there was a massive black uprising in the South and the film's intertitles seem to speak approvingly of the KKK for putting a stop to this. One of the main characters actually becomes a clansman and from there, the racial overtones go out of control. There is talk of Aryan birthrights, black anarchy and so on and it's actually quite difficult watching the KKK being presented as heroes in the last half hour of the film. Yet, I still wouldn't discount Griffith as a racist (like so many others have done), simply acknowledge his invention of such basic filmmaking techniques as the close-up and the fade-in and leave it at that. Hell, I don't even think he's really a racist. A year after The Birth of a Nation in 1916, Griffith made a film called Intolerance: Love's Struggle Through the Ages. Griffith was still a genius, in my eyes. The sheer scale of many of the scenes in Nation still dwarf anything that Michael Bay can put together and they were almost a century apart. Come to think of it, add Birth of a Nation to my list of favourites too. As far as classics go, it's still a film great.

The other classic that I mentioned in my last post was just an old 1950's Fellini, La Strada. About Gelsomina, a woman sold to an abusive travelling strongman to be his assistant, the film follows her to her discovery of a happy-go-lucky clown whom she finds temporary comfort in from the physical and verbal beatings of her truculent companion. At this point, the film takes a tragic turn and the strongman's rage ultimately ends up destroying all three lives in one fateful moment. It's played with the right balance of humour and human anguish but this being my third Fellini film, I'm starting to worry that he just might not ever be my favourite director, Italian or not. La Dolce Vita, while not without style, seemed lacking in structure and City of Women, it seemed, had a really hard time trying to figure out whether it was feminist or misogynist. This one here just didn't spend enough time with the right characters. The strongman's all yelling and beating, not that interesting. But along comes the clown and we want to spend more time with him, to hear more from a character with depth. And what happens? He's onscreen for twenty minutes, max. I was just expecting La Strada to blow me away but after all this, I think I still like Antonioni better. Maybe my mind will change when I see 8½. We'll see.

Rounding off the four flicks, we have Cabaret and Coffee and Cigarettes. Now, I've always loved musicals so it's kind of a given that I'd like Cabaret, but there's more than just the music here. With a backstory full of illicit sex, unrequited love, the Nazis coming into power and, er, English lessons, it's probably the deepest emotionally of all the musicals I've seen. But the music really stands alone. A live production is coming to town for me next year and I'll be somewhere in the back row -- too poor for good seats, you see -- belting out every song I can remember from the movie. I'm giddy already. About Coffee and Cigarettes, it's just a series of vignettes directed by Jarmusch, all featuring pop culture icons of our generation. The vignettes are plotless, of course, all taking place over cigarettes and my personal drink of choice, but although many are totally worth it -- the "Cousins?" and "Delirium" ones, in particular -- most are too slow to be of any interest.

(Scene from "Coffee and Cigarettes", 2003)

At 8/22/05 10:24 AM, MALforPresident wrote: where's konrad and ben to scare away people with their long posts

Fact of the matter is, I just don't know what to say in here anymore. You, Allison and Marcus more or less run the place now and you have your own private conversations. Besides, I don't think anyone in here really cares about what I've been watching or reading, so I post in other club threads specifically geared for that. So unless I feel like ranting on about nothing in particular -- which isn't often but is, coincidentally, kind of the way I feel right now -- I don't drop by and I end up using my time, in my definition of the word, 'productively', by either watching movies or reading; the result of which, I then end up spending my limited time on the BBS talking about those in -- surprise, surprise. -- other club threads specifically geared for that. So even when I have free time and am not spending it with Ori, it's still a rare occasion for me to find myself here posting, as I'm sure it is for Konrad as well. We've both hooked up. You can't expect us to be online 24-7 the way we used to be. And before I forget, congratulations on not only getting to 11,000 Posts, but also for finally surpassing me in post count. Also, Allison: I finished the sixth HP novel and you were right on all counts. Bitchin' book, even if it was a little predictable.

But that's what I've been doing all summer. After finishing up that short film which sucked up the first two weeks of my summer, I went into overdrive reading. You know I've finished roughly seven books since the beginning of summer? And this is the guy who took a month to read "Hamlet". I'm now onto "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood -- not like I expect anyone to care -- and I just got back from Hawaii last week after taking a seven-day, six-night tour of Oahu, Maui, and that big honkin' island that I have a sneaking suspicion is just called Hawaii. I would have posted from one of the internet cafes there but I needed to keep up with all my e-mails. Funny how people always try to contact you more when you're hundreds of miles away. And this week, I've just been getting ready for going away to college. Binge shopped the other day. Blew over $200 on three DVD's, two CD's, a book ("Oryx and Crake"), a plain black pullover from Old Navy, a messenger bag and dinner for two between me and Oriana. I need to go shopping again soon. As you may have noticed, there's no real school supplies on that list, not unless you count Sin City as a filmmaking resource guide. I need to make time for that. Shopping, that is. Not to mention time for figuring out just how the hell I'm actually going to get to my college once classes start. I don't know how to drive -- and even if I did, I don't have a car -- so I need to figure out my bus route. Almost a two-hour commute, I'm told. I'm buggered.

And you just know I'll never get around to it too. I like my book too much. I'm like a little tumor on my bed now, completely benign were it not for the fact that finished books fly off of me every week or so to be replaced by a fresh one. Not that that's a bad thing. I've always wanted to be able to tear through books at least as quickly as I do now. I already know enough about movies, so why not become literate in preparation for college as well? Just thought I'd let you all in on the fact that I'm a whole new kind of lazy now. I'm productively lazy. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it. By the way, as little as you guys see of me even now, it'll be even less come September. Between college, my girl and my newfound lust for lit, I'll be around the BBS, just not here. I promise to visit but go ahead and put the room up for rent. It was starting to smell a little funny anyway. Later, slackers. I never would have survived high school without you. You are my coffee.

Robert Rankin's still on hold. Doesn't look like I'll actually be able to get to any of his stuff until at least fall. I finished the memoir, by the way. It's just that I'm more busy now trying to catch up on the movies I need to watch before my college film course. I want to be the guy in the back row who knows everything. Not quite pedantic but close to, you know? Which is why I have D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation upstairs, just waiting to be watched. Not to mention some old Fellini. In any case, me not usually being much of a reader and already having finished roughly seven books this summer, I think I've deserved just a little bit of slacking in the literary department. It's so hard though. I'm reading the best book I've read all summer right now and at times, I can't bring myself to put it down. I blame Atwood. Oh, and by now, I'm sure you've already noticed that I've selected the light bulb as my post icon. I'll get to that once I'm finished talking about "Tuesdays with Morrie".

It took me a while to realize it, but "Tuesdays with Morrie" by Mitch Albom is just a bit of a joke when you start having conversations with other people about what they've been reading lately. I only picked it up in the airport bookstore in Honolulu because I recognized the title; the Arts Club Theatre Company in Vancouver -- where I live, which I don't believe I've mentioned before -- is going to be carrying it as a play for their 2006 season. Being kind of in with live theatre around here, I thought it would be a good idea to read up on what would soon be the talk of the theatrical town. Besides, at a thin 192 pages, what damage could it do? I had read the first forty pages at an altitude of 35,000 feet, jetting across the Pacific, when I noticed something on the back cover mentioning, almost in passing, that Mitch Albom was also responsible for "The Five People You Meet in Heaven", something of a tearjerker classic as far as 'inspirational' literature went. Inspirational literature? Dear God, what have I gotten myself into. The general idea of the book is that the author, Mitch, once had a favourite professor back in college whom he lost touch with. Then, of course, his professor, Morrie, starts withering away from Lou Gehrig's and it is here that Mitch finds Morrie and decides to embark on one last thesis together: What goes through a man's mind when he knows that he is about to die. The thesis then becomes the book. Doesn't sound too bad, does it? Well, it wouldn't be, if not for the maudlin writing style, the rambling dialogue that carries what little story there is, and the indubitable preachiness of Morrie's 'life lessons'. It wouldn't bother me so much if the advice were actually worth it, but most of them are just nonsensical aphorisms. Albom quotes freely, first from Levine, then Auden about love, then of course, from Morrie himself. "Love is the only rational act." (p. 52); "Love each other or perish." (p. 91); "Love wins. Love always wins." (p. 40). This isn't advice. This is a Disney movie. In the end, most of Morrie's philosophy on life and death sounds almost exactly like the teachings of Maslow and his humanist psychology. Although the words, 'self-actualization', are never actually used, we all know that that's what he's getting at. Need more proof? Here: "The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it." (p. 42). Find meaning within yourself, pursue your own goals, love one another and so on. Buz, buz. The book is called "Tuesdays with Morrie" because the meetings with the author's old professor always take place on Tuesdays. They're Tuesday people. And if you still don't think you have a proper feel for the book yet, pay special attention here because "[e]ach time we talk, he listens to me ramble, then he tries to pass on some sort of life lesson." (p. 46). That could not be more accurate. To be fair though, Albom himself is not completely without literary talent. As preachy as the memoir is, the funeral scene at the end -- please, we all knew it was coming. -- was truly touching. It's just disappointing that the ending was perhaps the only part in the book when I felt that Morrie was actually human, aside from just being an archetypal wise-old-man that would have made Jung proud. Maybe that's even what Albom was trying to get at. We don't often know how to really feel about death, and as a result of that, life, until we're forced to face it, head-on. The front cover of my copy claims that "Tuesdays with Morrie" changed 'millions of lives'. It didn't do much for me, but it got me thinking for once, which is a good thing. It's just a shame that the book was as lame as it was. And as much as I'd hate to admit it, there's one line from this book that I'll likely always remember: "Death ends a life, not a relationship." (p. 174).

Now that the half-as-long-as-the-book review is out of the way, we come to my idea. Instead of just coming back here week after week only sharing our views on what we read with the maybe five or six regulars of this place, why not expand a little and do something just an iota more productive by setting up a website or something containing every single one of this book club's reviews? Alphabetized index by author, a general thumbs-up thumbs-down rating system, all linked to post excerpts from the club's members. It's really only a matter of Copying and Pasting and anyone who knows a little HTML would be able to pull it off on even one of those free blog sites that everyone and their dog seems to have. It would be better than just having our posts fall off the most recent page, never to be looked up again. Lemme know what you guys think. Personally, I think it'd be great for us to set up an online resource for NG's closet readers and whoever else might want to listen. Good publicity means more members. Think about it.

At 7/27/05 01:17 AM, LordRobbo wrote: Raging Bull and Drugstore Cowboy are modern classics, and The Battleship Potemkin is a silent classic. Carlito's Way was just a very good movie, and it seems I've left Scarface off that list which would be in at Number 5 (both it and Carlito's Way are Brian De Palma films).

Haha, just because I haven't seen them doesn't mean I don't know what they are. I'm the guy who spends the time he isn't watching movies reading about them, remember? It's just tough tracking down some of these films, after all. I've still never seen a copy of Battleship Potemkin on store shelves or otherwise. That's why I still haven't seen it. But I will eventually. I promise you that. Sorry for not posting in such a long time, by the way. Been in Hawaii for the past week and it's only just now, with me sedated enough from two straight hours of Thievery Corporation, that I'm able to escape the backlog of work I actually need to do just so I can return to talking about my main passion for one precious evening: Film. Still only eight films since last though, but now I'm up to 140/250 listed films on the List. Four of the eight films I finally got around to watching just happened to be classics. Go me.

So, guess what really isn't a good date movie. I'll give you a clue. It involves rape, HIV, underage sex and an NC-17 rating. Give up? Larry Clark's 1995 flick, Kids. Complete and total mistake to watch it with my girlfriend. Out of all the movies I've seen recently, this was one of the most difficult ones for me to watch and I'm probably not going to see it again unless I have to. Shot in typical shaky, independent-film format -- which normally would be an insult, but in this case, lends the picture a certain quality of gritty realism -- this film doesn't have much as far as story and cinematography goes, but the dialogue and the film's, er, climax is uncompromising in every sense of the word. It's harsh, there's definite cringe moments and, well, it'll make anyone who sees it a little more careful about promiscuity. Besides, I've heard that Kids was actually once referenced by Eminem in one of his songs. If that's not indicative of the film's content, I don't know what is. Following that, just an old horror classic making no attempt at social commentary whatsoever, Night of the Living Dead. (The people under the impression that there actually is one on racism within the film are mistaken. It's really only a matter of acting ability that the character of Ben happens to be black.) Now, as I'm sure you're already aware, I've always had a bit of a soft spot for old horror movies, so naturally, I loved seeing how it all began. In an orgy of Bosco chocolate syrup, numbered boards and expired copyrights. Er, never mind. But it really is impossible for anyone to say that they're into horror films until they've seen this one. It starts off slow but progresses in such a way as to establish an entire genre. It's tame now, but in the 60's, it was probably the scariest thing out. After that, back to another flick I watched with my girlfriend. Only this was essentially bargain bin crap. The Upside of Anger, a new DVD release about a woman whose husband suddenly disappears who then finds comfort in the arms of her beer-guzzling endomorph of a next-door neighbour, is more or less Something's Gotta Give with none of the charm and none of the wit. We watched it at one in the morning and I still maintain that I could have entertained myself better by sleeping. Seems I always have terrible luck with date rentals. Oh well. At least watching Duck Soup by myself a few days later made up for it. Honestly, anyone who doesn't like the Marx Brothers should be shot, Paths of Glory-style. And anyone who loved Ginger Snaps: Unleashed should probably be done in the same way too. I only sat through it because my dad rented it thinking I'd like it because I kinda liked the original. Only this one comes off as a Cryptkeeper episode with a touch more sex. I mean, the original was fairly intelligent in using the protagonist's lycanthropy as a metaphor for puberty, but the sequel feels like it was written by a horny 13-year-old. Thank God it was short. Now to completely switch gears, we're going to jump into some Kurosawa. Ikiru's brilliant, isn't it? I've really only seen two others of Kurosawa's, but this one's stayed in my mind until now. Granted, while I was watching it, it felt like it would never end -- partially because Watanabe was played as a bumbling idiot for the first half of the film -- but it really captures the sense of being unfulfilled in one's dying days that "Tuesdays with Morrie" warns us against. (Just thought I'd throw in something about what I was reading.) But despite all the hopelessness, Ikiru is not without humour. There's a scene fairly early on that makes it clear to us what Kurosawa really thinks about bureaucracies and if you know what I'm talking about, you'd know that just about every show that does parodies has borrowed from it. It's not my favourite movie, but it was powerful enough to make an impact on me. If even for a moment. Saw Taxi Driver after Ikiru -- and it's now part of my DVD collection, as a matter of fact -- and it's easily one of my favourite flicks of the 70's, right next to Jaws and Annie Hall. Great character study of an obviously disturbed mind and one of my favourite climaxes of all time, even if it is only accomplished by placing 90% of the film's overall violence in the last fifteen minutes. In fact, I'd probably be raving about it more were it not for the fact that I took in City of God earlier today, the true story about gang warfare in a violent neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. You're going to smack me for this, LordRobbo, but this makes Goodfellas seem like Alice in Wonderland. I'm not quite as into this as Roger Ebert was -- "One of the best films you'll ever see!" -- but it's the best foreign title I've taken in since I saw Bad Guy all those months ago. I recommend it fully.

And that covers it. Right now, I have two more classics sitting upstairs, one listed and one just really old. Think 1915. I'll be back. Just give me a week or two. Cheers.

(Scene from "City of God", 2002)