I think there is some sort of rule that if you are an Eastern European filmmaker you have to have at least one scene of marathon group drinking in some sort of brightly lit holiday ball room. (Hell, Milos Forman managed to squeeze a whole movie outta that.) The Prefab People doesn’t disappoint on this measure, but it does disappoint if you are looking for a dreamy, surreal cinematic symphony like Tarr is known for. (I’ve only seen his Werkmeister Harmonies which is a carnival of long takes, music and tracking shots.) This is more of a kitchen sink, Mike Leigh-like slice of life presentation of a marriage falling apart. We open with the man stomping out the front door and leaving the woman behind, crying, with the scared kids and then we flash back to fragments of scenes of what got them there. We don’t really know who these people are - we just get to observe the moments, knowing they are leading to an unhappy end. Very low-budget and low-fi (those aren’t sound effects, that’s the rattle of the camera), the performances are sincere and the camera is probing. Not a pleasant film, necessarily, but an interesting experiment, especially considering where this filmmaker is headed.

Much like The Simpsons Movie, this direct to DVD feature can best be described as one long Futurama episode. One of those really confusing heavy SF twisty-turny ultra nerdy paradox-laden Futurama episodes with Al Gore in them. You know, the best ones.

Can’t wait to watch this one again with graph paper to see if I can actually follow all of the shifts in the space-time continuum!

Here’s something that they don’t tell you when you poke around and learn about Celine - he’s really effing funny. Misogynistic, racist, a probable Nazi sympathizer (if not full on collaborator) yes - but also really funny. The horrors on WWI are on full display starting with chapter two, but the vibe I got is much more P. J. O’Rourke than Erich Maria Remarque.

The first 250 pages are a plotless screed as “Ferdinand” looks down his nose at war, then the homefront, then Colonization in Africa, then New York, then the Ford factory in Detroit, with nothing but scorn for society and its inhabitants - those disgusting humans. Ferdinand is not above it, though, loaded with semen and feces and the barbarous human need to expel both of these at regular intervals.

Finally a return to France and setting up shop as a physician in a low-rent part of Paris where the focus is more on the bottom line than Hippocrates. Here something resembling a traditional plot comes in with a cast of despicable characters all screwing each other, literally and figuratively, to pass the time. Ferdinand finds himself, at the end, the head of a local insane asylum, the only natural place to be.

Every page of Celine’s book is like a punch in the eye of horrible, humorous depravity - and endless bon mots. Snuck between the nihilism, usually in ellipses, are short phrases of remarkable beauty. Celine was a hero the Beats and it is obvious why - nearly everything he writes is quotable (I’d give you some examples, but then I wouldn’t know where to stop) and, surely, if spake with the right cadence (or French accent) will make you sound real, real deep.

A very entertaining, although ultimately depressing book.

In 1997 Lou Reed released what I consider his greatest achievement other than 1989’s New York, Set The Twilight Reeling. I went absolutely batshit for this album and still dig it out from time to time. In 2000 he followed it up with the just-okay Ecstacy. It is no Twilight so after a few spins it went straight into the library.

I dug it out recently and while I agree with my original assessment that it is lesser Lou, there is still a great deal to enjoy on it (other than the money shot cover art.)

Tunes like “Paranoia Key of E” and “Future Farmers of America” have a really good groove and are very hummable.

The masterpiece, though, is the incredibly purple “Modern Dance” - a song that actually has the audacity to rhyme “Moon” and “June.” The lyrics to “Modern Dance” are so absurd they achieve a sort of brilliance; the song itself has the chord progressions of a classic showtune, but with Reed’s fuzz guitar and, um, unique vocal delivery. Everything that is awesome and awful about Lou Reed (he may be a fool, but he’s our fool) can be found on this track. It is, in its own way, absolutely fucking perfect.

Here it is on YouTube. He dresses like a chicken.

Hey - it’s Will Riker flirting with all the girls on DS9, yakking with Kira Nerys, her showing him the Defiant and - OH SNAP! He’s gone crazy! Wait, no, it’s not Will Riker at all. It’s Tom Riker. And TOM Riker’s gone crazy! He’s with the Maquis (okay, maybe not crazy crazy) and he’s on a suicide mission (he IS crazy!)

Sisko has to join forces with Gul Dukat (ewww) and find the Defiant. Damn the Defiant!

Turns out Dukat uncovers some shenanigans in the Obsidian Order (Riker’s plan all along? Kinda, but not really, but okay) that’s something of a reverse-Maquis. The plot thickens. Plus Dukat has feelings. What-ev. Great episode.

I remain very much in the minority, but I still feel that this is a pretty damned good movie.

The first 20 minutes - the Enterprise-B prologue - remains fanfuckingtastic. On its own, it is the greatest short film of the 1990s. The two big problems everyone’s got with this film are real, however.

1) The Nexus - it makes no sense. How is Guinan there? How does Picard find Kirk? How do Picard and Kirk leave? Why don’t they stop Soran at a different time, if they can go anywhere, instead of when he is armed and about to do damage? Why must Soran divert the energy ribbon to the planet and not fly a ship into it (he was in the El Aurian transport the first time, right?) Data says that the ribbon would destroy the ship but a) what does Soran care? and b) he was on a ship the first time - WTF?!!?

2) Kirk’s death. Sledding down an incline on a footbridge? Fuck you. You wanna kill Captain Kirk he better be at the epicenter of a supernova. Come on.

Okay, with that out of my system, it is a good movie. It keeps moving and has lots of nifty effects that hold up 14 years later. And poor Malcolm McDowell - he does a good job here and no one ever bothered to thank him.

Jadzia shtups some guy from a planet interphasing in & out of our corporeal dimension. They figure out a way to stay together. But it doesn’t work. Kinda like this episode doesn’t work.

This is one of those dreams where no matter how much you climb you just keep falling in deeper. O’Brien accidentally sets off a Fail Safe defense system for “Terok Nor” that, one screw up after another, leads to the whole station about to blow up. Garak tries to help out - to no avail. Gul Dukat comes by to twiddle his mustache and then - d’oh! - he’s stuck there too. Only Sisko and save the day with his kick-ass-itude.

Very fun stuff.

Quark accidentally smuggles a Jem’Hadar infant (they grow up so fast!) onto the station. Kira wants to kill it, Sisko wants to farm it out to Starfleet for study, but Odo (bristling at the idea of it living in a lab) uses his status as a “Founder” to try and domesticate him.

Not a lot of luck.

Sisko allows Odo to drop him off in the Gamma Quadrant, like throwing a fish back in a pond. Not a smart move, maybe, but for Odo sometimes you bend.

DS9 goes into the WTF mode with a highly Philip K. Dick-inspired story. Kira is kidnapped by Cardassians and awakens to find herself…one of them? Hw-hwhat?!?!?

The story is that she is not Kira Nerys, Bajoran freedom fighter, but actually a deep cover Cardassian agent who agreed to have her memory wiped for heavy infiltration. And all her memories are implants, etc.

Further twists occur when we discover that this new Nerys’ “father” is actually a Cardassian dissident. Things go around in circles a few times til we wind up where we started, but not without a good load of fun along the way.