Taking advantage of my newly-licensed status, I went to the Tivoli and saw the new release of GBU.

Stopped at Vintage Vinyl. Got Skip James cd, also the new Kraftwerk (used). Kraftwerk is not filed with electronica for some strange reason. The blues section, in St. Louis, mind you, is all of 4 feet wide. I need to go record hunting with my license.

The flick was shown on a small screen, but it was nice to see it in the theater anyway. The 24 frame flicker is nice, especially at the end, when Tuco is running around the cemetary. All the passing tombstones blur quite attractively, setting the relatively motionless Tuco in relief.

The updated footage was not major, but still nice. This extended cut of GBU is essentially the international version of the film. There's a scene with Angel Eyes in a confederate hospital, which helps develop the war theme. The film is very much a war movie masquerading as a western.

The new dialogue was noticeable. Eli Wallach and Clint Eastwood are still alive and did the adr work, though their voices have aged. Lee van Cleef is dead, and the fellow who did his voice was fine. As the whole movie is dubbed, it doesn't really detract from the film.

I listened to Skip James on the way home. This is the new release called "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues," and features selections from his first session following his rediscovery in the 60's. These versions are new to my ear, and interesting in that they are quite different arrangements of the stuff I know. For Skip Jamesage, I recommend first the compilation Blues from the Delta followed by the complete 30's recordings, which is one disc of the 18 surviving James tracks from that era. This includes Devil Got My Woman as featured in Ghost World. The former disc consists of 60's recordings of Skip. The guitar work isn't as good, it's been calmed down considerably and made much more regular, but the audio quality is miles beyond the transfers from often sketchy 78's.

• I found out today that I would be offered the consulting job in 3-4 weeks.
• I fucking love lists.
• Upon telling my parents that I would be looking at SF jobs in this time, they were none too enthusiastic. Why give up such a great opportunity? It took me a long time to make that kind of money.
• In my awkward preteen years, I would obsessively rent and watch Heathers whilst devouring an Imo's pizza. I did this so often that the two are linked in my mind. It also makes it very hard for me to watch Heathers.
• No problem with the pizza, but then I am a big fucking pig.
• Mein hottie! I can walk!

Woot! I took my test and got my license. I flunked parallel parking, but that didn't matter. Sweet!

Freddy vs. Jason - generally entertaining, tho Elvis Mitchell in the NYT is right in noting that the middle bit is dull. A lot of time is spent running around with the kids and it's not all that great. Also, the Destiny's Child chick is awful, sucks some fetid, smelly ass. On the plus side, the movie top loads its silicone tits, so you get hot juggery early on. Directed by The Bride with White Hair's Ronnie Yu, it's about as good as his Bride of Chucky, which is to say not quite as good as TBWWH, but still pretty hot. FvJ, however, does not feature the most gorgeous, amazingly hot woman ever to walk the face of the earth - Jennifer Tilly - who was typically brilliant if not particularly naked in Bride of Chucky. Eh, what can you do.

Jason X is Jason in space and oh my god does it suck. It has the production values of Emmanuelle in Space and none of the naked Krista "credited as Busty Woman in Elevator in Liar Liar, also featuring the delightful Jennifer Tilly" Allen. The film has a short cameo by David Cronenberg, and he does die violently, so that's a plus. There's also a cute scene involving virtual reality and a couple of topless campers (one with an oddly mannish voice) getting beaten to death by sleeping bag. Otherwise, titless shit! The DVD has a short history of the Friday the 13th series, explaining that the whole series started as a shitty Halloween ripoff and just kept limping along from there. The idea of the hockey masked killer didn't even show up until the third flick.

Ugh, counting FvJ, I've seen 3 F13 movies. The first one, which is unbearably dull (and I like fucking Tarkovsky's Solaris and would blow Stanley Kubrick if he weren't, you know, dead), is fucking horrible, not at all scary, and pales (pales! I say!) in comparison to Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, two contemporary cut em ups. Jason X is just fucking awful, and FvJ is pretty decent. Fucking Friday the 13th. The TV series was better than this shit.

Oh, at the showing of FvJ, I got to see a bunch of horror-themed trailers. I saw the trailer for the Michael Bay-produced remake of Texas Chainsaw, which looks slick and has Lee Ermey in the "Look what your brother did to the door!" role. I'll probably see that. I also saw a trailer for a film called Underworld, which looks to be a movie about Matrix fighting between vampires and werewolves (there wolves! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha), which looked pretty and pretty fucking retarded. I'll probably see that shit, too.

So then there's also The Ring, which is a remake of a Japanese horror flick called Ringu. The Ring was pretty popular, and it's not a bad film. Website about all them fucking ring shits. Anyway, Naomi Watts is totally hysterical throughout the movie, which makes one think of Lost High...I mean Mulholland Drive, which is a better film, not exclusively but certainly partially due to Ms. Watts' angry, depressed, violent and, as a result of these emotions, extremely hot masturbation sequence. Anyway, it's pretty creepy, until the big twist and resolution, which is awful and apparently a concession to the novel that the movies are based on.

Ok, I only know this from visiting the website, and these things do spoil the movie, so read on at your own risk. So the idea behind the ring is that you watch a videotape and then you die. First of all, this shit is going to be outdated just as soon as fucking recordable dvds or whatever digital (doo doo do) technology comes about, but anyway. So as they reveal in the movie, the tape is the psychic death cry of this poor girl who got thrown down a well to die but didn't die and instead got pissed off. So the big twist to the movie is that the girl's actually evil, and when the protagonists help her out, she gets more powerful and that's bad. That's the fucking twist.

Now, the movie's pretty good up until this point, creepy and evocative. Unlike Mulholland Drive, the movie has to fucking make sense (fucking split infinitive), so they give this backstory of the girl in the well. Here's where the movie starts to fall apart, cos it's no longer mysterious and ooky, it's specific and goofy. But anyway, in The Ring, Naomi Watts figures out that the way to keep from dying once seeing the film is to - get this - copy the videotape.

So the movie ends with her desperately getting her Sixth Senselike (and therefore Danny from The Shining-derivative) to copy a fucking videotape. This is utterly retarded, and is, according to the above-linked website, explained thus:

So the videotape is really a virus, which is attempting to infect the viewer with a disease that will create a human form for the evil wet bitch to live in. And since viruses have to survive, if you copy the tape, the virus recognizes this spread as beneficial to its survival and doesn't kill you. Now, this kind of science makes sense only if you a-are a creation scientist, or b-play a whole lotta Japanese RPGs. Which is to say, it's complete bullshit and really fucking stupid. It's like Midichlorians in Star Wars, tossing pseudoscience onto a completely unscientific concept to give it a kind of logical drag (as in queen). BULLSHIT! But the movie's pretty good on the whole, really spooky, and Brian Cox is great and the horses are haunting.

So the cd player the other day started playing something I didn't recognize. I started getting into it and suddenly realized that I was listening to Air's 10000 Hz Legend. This prompted me to give the disc another shot, and I've decided that I now like the record.

So I downloaded their most recent deal, City Reading - Tre Storie Western with Alessandro Baricco. Here's the concept - Alessandro Baricco wrote three short stories which are westerns, and he reads them over Air's music. The stories, translated here, are nice and the music, being Air, is well-suited to soundtrack music. A very nice little record.

Oh, and I want a copy of the Steak n Shake photo and I'm disappointed that "St. Louis #2" didn't make the cut.

Arnold loves kids.

In today's exciting extended entry on Superelectric, we cover the movies River's Edge and 28 Days Later.

And, wot's more, I have an actual link, this to an interview with Hunter S. Thompson which is only remarkable in that it appears on Don't It Suck Balls, also known as Ain't It Cool News. I link it simply because it is one very very small redeeming factor for the site, which should never be read regularly and which I visited only out of desperation.

River's Edge

River's Edge stars Crispen Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye, and Dennis Hopper. It's an 80's flick, and if you're familiar with Larry Clark's Bully, you have some taste of what the film is like. Lost teens in the pacific northwest, who spend their time listening to Metallica and getting drunk/high sort-of conspire to sort-of cover up a murder of a classmate by a member of their group. Like Bully, it's based on a true story and it has very much a ring of truth about it - you can see how these idiot kids do the idiot things they do, very real in that respect. Fans of Errol Morris' "Everyone's the protagonist in their own internal movie" notion should enjoy the film, particularly Crispen Glover's odd performance, as he plays a character who desperately tries to cover up the murder and help his murderous buddy, even though the murderer, played by Daniel Roebuck who would later go on to play Jay Leno in The Late Shift, seems oddly disconnected and unconcerned by getting caught. The whole movie portrays a very real teenage lack of affect (except for Glover), and is very good.

So Bully was a Larry Clark film. Larry Clark rose to fame for directing Kids offa Harmony Korine's screenplay. Korine then wrote and directed Gummo, which also portrays the particularly American sense of alienation and despair amongst kids in small towns. That film opens with a visual nod to River's Edge, which explores much of the same territory but features a lot less outright wackiness (no bacon is taped to the walls in the movie) and a lot more actual, you know, plot. The younger brother of the Keanu Reeves character is essentially a character in Gummo or Kids, a really scary look at a kid growing up not giving a fuck about other people's lives and turning into a monster due to poverty, a lack of family, drugs, and a bad haircut. Also notable is a token Reagan conservative character who exists in the movie just to be yelled at.

River's Edge was written by Neal Jiminez, who was one of the writer's on Errol Morris' ill-fated The Dark Wind, which I haven't seen.

Anyway, the movie's fucking awesome, tons of twists, plays a lot like Blue Velvet meets Gummo but actually makes sense. I like it best for its portrayal of real America, something you just don't often see. I liked Gummo for much the same reason, and would welcome recommendations for similar films. Glue sniffing and retarded prostitutes optional.

28 Days Later

Well, it's nice to see another Danny Boyle film that I cannot compare (unfavorably, I might add) to the lint and slime that accumulates around the glans of a puerile, pre-erectile, circumcised cock. It's an engaging horror film of the zombie genre, shot on DV and looking quite pretty, I might add, in its DV-ishness. Interestingly, CGI special effects look just as fake in DV as they do on film, so let's all be grateful that this film is mostly an old-school Zombie chiller.

The film is incredibly derivative. After a short, unneccesary, and overly message-y prologue (itself stolen from 12 Monkeys with some Clockwork Orange for seasoning), the action starts with a man waking up in a hospital, discovering that the city is completely empty, having suffered some apocalyptic tragedy. This is the beginning of Day of the Triffids. Then the fellow hooks up with some people who have -so far- survived the zombie holocaust. Two members of the group are found via a light signal from a building window, also from Triffids. The group then goes out and finds a small military band with plans for surviving the zombie nightmare that involve some icky reproductive plans, also a key situation in Triffids.

Unlike Triffids, there are no giant, man-eating, locomoting shrubbery.

At any rate, the film is very much like Triffids, which critics had said explored the impact of disaster on the British middle class, which I guess it does. 28 does not. It's use of horror as social commentary is pretty limited to "Gee, humans can be real monsters, can't they?" For good, socially aware zombie filmmaking, I would have to suggest George Romero's zombie trilogy, particularly Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. You have to do some background research on the imdb to find which cuts are the proper ones to see. Suffice it to say that you want the long Dawn of the Dead and the original b&w Night of the Living Dead and not its remake.

Those films are particularly notable in that they take place in actual surroundings - they have definite locations and contexts which they're critiquing, particularly Dawn... which takes place in a giant shopping mall. 28, in contrast, sort of takes place in London for the first bit, although it really only uses its location to make the point that a once bustling metropolis has been reduced to a ghost town by the zombie plague. In Dawn..., the zombies gather at a mall outside Pittsburgh. Why? "Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives. " Dawn... is pretty heavy in its commentary, though the pokes at rural Pittsburgh hunters in Night... are very good, too.

Anyway, once 28's gang reaches a small military outpost, it turns into a mix of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, some freaky Italian's I Spit on your Grave and Romero's third zombie film, Day of the Dead. The army gang there is unprofessional and half-mad. This part of the film sets up a new horror - the soldiers who want to rape the women in the London survival party. Another member of the party goes on a bloodthirsty rampage to prevent this, using zombies to destroy the soldiers.

Day of the Dead took place in a military facility and, just as in 28, the real horrors are those of the authoritarian soldiers who preside over the small community of scientists with a leer and swagger. Like 28, they're keeping a zombie in chains for research purposes. Like 28, they meet their end at the zombie's hands.

I reference I Spit on your Grave as it's a rape-revenge movie. The menace of the soldiers about to rape the two women is very real and probably the scariest part of the movie, although I wonder if it goes a little too far in the exploitation direction. Unlike ISOYG, nobody's actually raped, and the revenging is done by a male member of the London party, who suddenly turns into John McClane from Die Hard and even gouges out the eyes of one soldier. A bit over the top, and very much like Last House..., Wes Craven's EARLY EARLY (pre-Nightmare on Elm Street, and WAY WAY pre-Scream) revenge horror flick in which a mother and father brutally slaughter some dudes who raped and killed their daughter. That's a pretty fucking disturbing film, by the way. The violence is brutal and sadistic and it numbs the viewer much as one imagines Keanu Reeves' little brother in River's Edge is numbed. Ha! A callback for you motherfuckers!

28's revenge is not, however, as over the top as the ending, which is the most ridiculous escapist fantasy this side of the Universal cut of Brazil. Everybody turns out ok, they're all rescued, the world doesn't end, blah blah bullshit.

Danny Boyle and the guy who wrote The Beach, since they were editing together a horrorfilm megagmix, should've stolen the ending from Night of the Living Dead - far and away the best horror film ending ever. And yes, I'm including The Shining. Oh, and I should note that 28 has a second ending tacked on to it that I'd rather not think about.

Now, this is one pretty unoriginal film, and it really doesn't stand up as a bright and shining light in the horror canon. According to Boyle, the film's real contribution to the zombie genre is that it has fast zombies. OK, word up, dude. If you're looking for the best in classic zombie, go for Night of the Living Dead. For a truly inventive zombie tale, check out Criterion's edition of Carnival of Souls or Romero's Dawn of the Dead.

I've bagged on this film a bunch, so let me get to the real point. I realize that all (one?) of you reading this have seen probably none of the films it steals from. I have to say that 28 steals pretty effectively. The movie is genuinely thrilling, has some excellent surprises, and keeps getting better and better as it goes along. I have seen those movies, and even though I know all the stolen bits, those bits were stolen because they are effective. I very much recommend 28 Days Later. I would say, though, that the film's real saving grace is its DV cinematography. It's nice. Better than fucking Blair Witch, that's for DAMN sho'.

By the way, if you've got DV movie recommendations, I'd like to hear them. I can think of 28, Blair Witch, Time Code, and Julian Donkey Boy. There has to be some good other stuff out there.

But, really, if you've got IFC, watch the Romero zombie flicks when they show them around Halloween.

First, let me congratulate Goldtoe on the excellent use of Google to identify the Blake's 7 reference. All the fun of getting the joke with none of the pain of intimate familiarity with British sci-fi shown on American PBS.

Now, I must ask that you not read the extended entry. There, I present some rather spicy extracts from a story entitled NATALIE'S PERVERSE SECRET (NATALIE PORTMAN) by patentleather1@yahoo.com. I have elided the "action" from the text, leaving only the dialogue. Nevertheless, as this is dialogue from a tale covering such sensitive issues as M/F, F/g, M/F/g, inc., pedo, shoe and foot fetish, sploshing, ws, scat, what remains is still not safe for work and should not be read by anybody.

Nevertheless, I feel this dialogue has a certain Roy-Orbison-clingfilm quality about it that makes it worthwhile.

Following an extended introduction...

Natalie: I see that you have more than just a patent leather mary-jane shoe fetish. For you seem to be getting yourself sexually off by smelling my stinky feet.

Natalie: Ok then smell away and get yourself off as you please.

Smelling ensues, and then later...

Natalie: Not only have I always wanted to experience a guy fucking me in my cunt I have always fantasized what it would be like for a guy to take me from behind and penetrate me in my asshole.

Natalie: Ok then lets stop talking and cornhole me.

Holes are corned, and afterwards...

Adam: Well Natalie did you enjoy that?

Natalie: No problem Adam the pleasure is all mine. I love having you as my boyfriend and experimenting with all the sexual acts. I want to continue.

And they continue, but then a problem arises...

Adam: What is wrong Natalie. You know whatever nasty fantasy you have I will understand and try to fulfill it.

Natalie: Ok but if you cannot come up with something I will understand, especially fulfilling that fantasy is a social taboo and can cause you to go to jail and for me to loose my acting career.

The happy couple discovers a temporary solution, and the piece ends with this hopeful snatch of dialogue...

Natalie: Adam I think it is time that we get married. Are you interested?

Adam: Ok then lets get married!

Jesus Christ, I swear that the next blog entry will be better.

I forgot to mention - I really wish I lived in SF now, so that I could vote for Larry Flynt for governor.

Bonus points for identifying the title reference.

Movie notes.

Daredevil - Now, a friend who had recommended the movie suggested that we skip the "origin story" part of the movie and go straight to the first fight sequence and watch from then on. Which we did. So maybe I missed something, but that movie was wet, smelly, feces-ridden ass. Mr. Swingers was incredibly fat, too. Elektra's costume made her look like she had bad implants. Oh, and Daredevil's stunts were just plain ludicrous. I'm reminded of Blade's superleap out of the hospital, how it seemed unbelievable in the scene, and was an indicator of the fantasy element in the story - Blade was, after all, half vampire. Daredevil is just a ultrablindman, nothing else.

Spiderman could do that shit because he was bitten by a radioac---er, genetically enhanced spider. The people in The Matrix could do that shit because they were in The Matrix. Daredevil? Well, he listens to really shitty music and sleeps in a watery coffin. These do not give one amazing jumping ability. That aside, Colin Farrell played Bullseye as if he were a really snotty supervillain. On the whole, the movie was bad.

Solaris - much better than Daredevil. Not as good as Tarkovsky's, but what can you do. They hyped up the romance portion of the film, made it a pretty love story fable, added some twistiness and an action movie plot to frame the whole thing. Produced by James Cameron, the similarity to Aliens is amusing - we've already sent a security team, no response - we need you to go check out things on our space colony.