My mother told me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. And, usually, when it comes to festival-level films, I keep mum about the bad ones I see (unless directed by Rex Piano.) But I feel like I have to warn you about this picture because you might get suckered into it just the way I did.
There’s a dude who hangs outside the Angelika selling DVDs of his own film. He speaks eloquently and passionately about cinema. I fell for his schtick and paid $5. At first he said, “pay what you wish” and when I handed him $5 he came back with “most pay $20.” That should have been my first warning.
Imperfect Strangers is a collection of long scenes of people yelling at each other in living rooms, actresses scrunching their faces up and pretending to cry, absurdist phone conversations wherein characters discuss for argue for five minutes as to whether or not they are going to have a phone conversation. By the time the African Prince shows up in his Rolls Royce with New Jersey plates, you will either have turned this movie off (97% probability) or you will be so glued to its transcendent badness that you’ll be wishing all your friends were watching, too. I can only describe this film as the American Idol tryout-reject of independent cinema. So much so that I can’t wait to lend this to you. Makes the work of Ed Wood look like Casablanca.
This may be the first time I’ve seen a Bergman film and just… didn’t care. I get what this movie is doing (I guess) I just don’t see the point. Distant artist hallucinates? Is that really all this is? I tried watching with the commentary track but the “expert” they had was a real putz who would just summarize what was happening in each shot. “Now we see them walking along the rocks.” I love the other Bergman films of this era like Shame and Persona, but this just escaped me. I’ll try again in a few years.
I’m having a hard time not-listening to Bill Frisell’s “Unspeakable,” a CD from 2005 that has been on repeat for many, many days. Produced by Hal Willner, it is a perfect blend of Medeski, Martin & Wood-style jam/funk and Frisell’s pointilist modern-electric “jazz.” There are strings on most tracks and ocassional forays into dissonance (but not so much that Ann asks me to turn it off.) On CD it isn’t quite as “out-there” and revolutionary as his concert with the “Unspeakable Orchestra” that I saw last year, but it is still a great deal of fun.
The last of Philip Roth’s “Kepesh” novels is the best of the three. A 150 page unloading of septuagenarian fears, regrets and revelation presented as one unending confession to an undisclosed friend. Prof. Kepesh seems content diddling his students, appearing on PBS and NPR and hanging out at Lincoln Center until he gets in the drawers of the Cuban-American Goddess Consuela, wherein he falls completely to shreds.
I never know just how much we are supposed to laugh/scoff at Roth’s characters for being such a-holes. There are garages full of essays wondering just how much of Roth’s work is autobiographical, but considering he has been married and divorced a few times, and since this is a persistent theme in his work, I am starting to believe that Roth really does place the weight of the entire world on his schlong. In which case, maybe he isn’t as clear-eyed an observer of life, the universe and everything as much as I suspected.
Still, this book is very entertaining, loaded with laughs as well as some depressing-as-hell passages (it is called The Dying Animal after all.) Recommended highly.
I have a strange obsession with this movie. I know I am inflating my grade. I’ve seen this movie many times and each recent time I’ve questioned myself somewhere along the way. (Why do I like this again?) It is, at heart, a low-budget deranged horror/sci-fi movie with a stitched together plot and a baffling ending. (All computers have nervous systems? Did Revok’s plan to ship out Ephemerol work? How exactly has Cameron Vale “won” at the end?) But let’s cut to the chase — this movie is all about the amazing ’80s music, the blood-red carpets and chrome shopping mall, the bland boardroom at “ConSec” and the overall unease one feels throughout the entirety of the film. Just who the hell are the good guys? Which group of resistance fighters should we be rooting for? What exactly is this a social parable for? And will we see another exploding head like at the beginning? (Kinda.) And Stephen Lack. . .he’s acting like that on purpose, right?
That’s the most disturbing thing about Scanners. The simply otherworldly bad acting of the male lead. Surely, this has to be on purpose. Because most of the movie is dubbed, there had to’ve been opportunity to at least swap his voice out (nothing you can do about those goo-goo eyes.) The other performances, Michael Ironside & Patrick McGoohan especially, are actually quite good considering the ridiculous dialogue they have.
In conclusion, I recognize that this is a flawed film, but I hold it very dead to my heart.
While not quite as action packed as The Best of Both Worlds this cliffhanger is loaded with dramatic tension and ever expanding wheels-within-wheels plot. This all goes back to the Khitomer Massacre and the creation myth of Worf, who, let’s face it, after Spock, may be the best Trek character ever created. It ain’t easy being Worf. For one thing, you’ve got to deal with Picard always harassin’ ya — first tellin’ ya one thing (go fight to restore your family’s name!) then tellin’ ya something else (but don’t expect me or the Federation to help!)
A pox on the house of Duras and Q’apla! to the house of Gowron (for now) and look out for that lurking female Romulan, who ends this two-parter with one of the better twists, in that it has a nice double meaning for longtime fans.
This may be heresy, but here goes: this is a pretty awful episode. Data “gets a girlfriend.” And, also, since the producers were worried to do an episode without any action, the ship is in jeopardy for five minutes, but Picard saves the day during three of those five minutes. It is kinda funny to see Data trying to make sense of human emotion, but all I could think of were cheesy ’50s robots saying “Teach me to… Love.” Not recommended.
Listen – we tend to like the things that hit us at an impressionable age. When I was toward the end of high school/early college I really got into French New Wave. I dug the breezy, jazzy attitude, the fashion, the cutting and shooting style and, yes, to a certain extent, I liked seeing French people babble about Marxism. Call me crazy, but I find it somehow quaint.
To that end, yes, I enjoyed this oft-bashed, somewhat-boring and very pretentious movie.
50% is cool enough. Fly-on-the-wall footage (in full magazine-length takes on an arcing dolly) of the Stones recording “Sympathy for the Devil.” Metallica: Some Kind of Monster may have nailed the “inside the studio” creation bit better, but this works, too.
The other half are these nonsensical skits. Black militants babbling and posing with guns. A pornographic bookstore with a weird Nazi meets Laugh-In thing going on. An interview with a waifish woman who only answers “yes.” And lots of graffitti and sloganeering. What can I say? I find this crap amusing. I don’t think you are supposed to listen to every word. Who could pay attention to all that?
I’ll not argue with anyone who calls this slap-dash pseudo-art. Because they may very well be right.
Oh no! Does Jordan plan to read Star Trek comics now, too? And what about the three hundred thousand expanded universe novels? Aggggggh!
No — I’m gonna lay off on that. At least until I finish the whole project. But good ol’ Shappy let me borrow this. And, I can’t lie, it was entertaining. But bad! Dead God is it bad! And. . .for the most part. . .totally untrue to Trek.
Arguements about whether or not The Animated Series should be considered canonical or not are a complete joke compared to this stuff. Mr. Spock is emotional! Kirk and Scotty hate each other. Kirk goes around slapping women all day. . .and everyone acts like they are in a submarine, not a Constitution-class Starship. The word is that the dude who wrote these hadn’t even seen any of the show, just pictures of the actors.
Nevertheless, battles against the Vegetable-Men (if that’s your thing) are to be found in these pages.
Collected are:
Issue 18: “The Hijacked Planet”
Issue 19: “The Haunted Asteroid”
Issue 20: “A World Gone Mad”
Issue 21: “The Mummies of Heitius VII”
Issue 22: “Siege in Superspace”
Issue 23: “Child’s Play”
Issue 24: “The Trial of Captain Kirk”
Issue 25: “Dwarf Planet”
I shan’t get more granular with my review.
I’ve been letting this one stew for a couple of days. At first I wasn’t sure if it was just okay. Then, after a day, I realized that I loved it. Then I just wondered if it wasn’t just my overall love for David Cronenberg that was leading me to inflate my opinion of the movie. But, no, I’m officially going to say that this is quite a piece of work. It is a slow movie, a cereberal movie. A movie more about tone and mood, really, than plot. Which is odd because the movie is shot in a somewhat flat style. The star of the show, really, are the stars. V-Mort is indeed remarkable.
The first 20 minutes of this movie are fall-out-of-your-chair funny. The remaining hour and ten minutes are so boring and bad you’ll start tearing your hair out. It’s mildly fascinating as an exercise in how deceiving a movie can be.
No one is more shocked than I.
When I was a kid I loved this movie. I was obsessed with it. I would stay up at night and imagine what the world of Bob Hauk’s New York was like and what sort of things were happening there before Snake Plisskin arrived. I watched this movie the other day and guess what? It sucks. It still wins points for having an incredible concept and for some cool sequences, but overall? A complete piece of dreck. I so wish I never watched this again.
Eric Larson’s “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America” is fascinating and fun reading. There is a movie in the works and it will suck. It is the history and Larson’s contextualizing of events that make this a fascinating story – not the plot. The movie will just be a CSI episode, but olde timey.
Anyway, who knew that stories about the first Ferris Wheel would be so damned entertaining?
I can’t drink anymore. Seriously. I rarely drink anymore and when I do I have one beer or one glass of wine. I have some bottles of hooch at the house left over from a New Year’s party — that’s Jan 1, 2006. Those that knew me in my youth, perhaps saw me boozin’ a poker games, must accept this: I can’t drink anymore. I had a few beers — not an ungodly amount, just a few — on Saturday night and now, 24 hours later, my head still hurts. Getting a mild sunburn didn’t help either.
Anyway, there’s just one more beach weekend left – then I can relax.
Fascinating and depressing, Herzog takes us to the world of the deaf and blind. Our guide is Fini Straubinger, a woman who lost her sight at age 15 and her hearing a few years later and, after 30 years of laying in bed doped up on morphine, has become an advocate for the deaf-blind. She speaks well and is spoken to tactilely, meaning someone must make poke, peck and swish at the palm of her hand. Watching this activity is amazing. How anyone can learn this system of communication is remarkable, let alone to do it when deaf and blind. Herzog then shows us people deaf and blind from birth that’ve not been taught to communicate. These helpless people mirror an earlier scene when Fini’s group goes to the zoo. Herzog is careful not to present the deaf-blind as animals, but as individuals trapped in their own consciousness. Even the best trained can only make mild, sporatic contact with others. However, there are moments of joy – like a lift in an airplane or a shower or bumping into and exploring a tree.
I remember as a kid, during car trips, my sister and I would ponder which was worse — being deaf or blind. (For some reason, this was a frequent topic.) To explore the existence of being both is truly horrifying.
I think everyone can agree that it is impossible to read anything to do with Iron Man without singing Black Sabbath in your head, right?
I always liked Iron Man. Because, much like Batman, he doesn’t have any magic powers. He’s just a guy using technology. And many is the time Iron Man will take off his super suit of technology and hang around in his underwear and talk to his second in command. And he’s got a hardy 80s moustache in this book, too. Who can’t love that?
This time around Iron Man defeats (among other foes) Stilt-Man — arguably the dumbest supervillain ever. He also gets in a pouty-match with Captain American and gets the West Coast Avengers to kick him out of their playhouse. What-ev. Like Iron Man wants to hang out with a douche like Wonder Man.
Anyway, there’s lots of flying and crazy noises and crashes and bright bright colors in this collection. Very fun to read when you are almost asleep anyway.
You hear the phrase “Rochester, New York” and you figure, eh, it’s upstate somewhere. Let me tell you, that place is FAR! And if you make a wrong turn, it is REALLY FAR!
Anyhow, Ann & I attened the second wedding in a month – this time we couldn’t walk home like at the Beer Garden. But this, at the lovely Sonnenberg Gardens outside of Rochester (someplace upstate) was a nice excuse to get out of town for a few days. Rochester is lovely and any town named after Eddie Anderson is good with me.
There are lovely photos of both events to share – eventually I’ll get them up (as well as new pictures of Goober) on the blog.
