God, I haven't posted in this thing for ages.

Since I wrote last a lot of things happened to me. I'm not really that irreverent lark whose ramblings one may find below.

I've read Burroughs and Pynchon and a few others in between. I'm no longer a total aesthete and I no longer measure a film's quality based around its splatter factor. I'm now interested in the sublime and seek it out when I hear whispers of its presence. There was a love, also, that didn't pan out like it should've and its aftershocks linger still.

Also, this is my space:

http://www.myspace.com/ohdaesugotacuriousgrin

Also, I think the greatest TV show of all time is/was DEADWOOD and that it's a fucking atrocity against humanity that it got canned. Shakespeare never got cancelled=fact.

Okay, so this is what I've been watching, all zero of you that care:

I saw United 93, and that was fantastic, but I can't really say much more about it. I want to see a crazy conspiracy 9/11 movie right now, but the best I could do would be Loose Change on the internets, and that looks a little shitty.

Then I saw Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, which just might have knocked either Broken Flowers or Dead Man off the top spot in my "Favorite Jarmusches" (Jarmuschi?) list, consisting of the four that I've seen. Great badass cinema.

Then I got bored with Netflix so I went to Hollywood Video and rented Hostel, Layer Cake, Marebito, R-Point and Gummo.

Hostel I've seen already, but it really is too good for me just to see two times, and Eli Roth DVDs rock. Most of the criticism of the film is either shallow or misguided. For "shallow", see pretty much everyone on IMDB. For "misguided", see Walter Chaw's pan over at Film Freak Central. I probably would have directed it differently at times, and the current ending is a bit too easy. But Roth is getting to be sooo good. Once the shit hits the fan, you'd think that if a younger Spielberg lost any sense of decency and made a kickass horror movie, he'd have made the last 40 minutes of Hostel. Excellent, sick entertainment.

Layer Cake I've also seen before, but I only picked up on half the plot the first time on account of the movie being the most awesomely convoluted movie ever. Matthew Vaughn is better than Guy Ritchie, and unless Matthew Vaughn decides to marry Madonna any time soon, he's one to watch. Daniel Craig is also going to be a fascinating Bond. A Blond Bond.

Marebito is this Takashi Shimizu quickie shot during the week before he shot The Grudge (the Hollywood one, which I'll admit I saw before Ju-on and I prefer slightly over Ju-on) with the Tetsuo guy in the lead, who is, in general, the man. The first fifteen minutes or so are a bit great, but then it gets a little too deep into its own nonsense, and while the greatness returns a few times, it's mostly downhill from there. Shimizu is a bit more energetic a director than, say, Miike at times, but Shimizu is almost a hack. Almost. Shimizu is more marketable, but most of his ideas are just typical J-horror, though I did appreciate Marebito's ideas and visuals at times.

R-Point's first 90 minutes are pretty well made for a Korean-made Vietnam war/supernatural thriller, but I won't deny that it bored me. The last 20 minutes, though, are something special. It becomes very stylish, very dramatic, and it all comes together nicely. It probably could have lost a chunk from the first 90 minutes, but I'm rarely one to complain about length.

Gummo is really quite wonderful. At times it's amateurish, but it seems intentional, and the amateurishness is really no different than what you'd find in your average documentary. Parts are sick, twisted, and uncomfortable, but there's something endearing about the whole thing. If it's an exercise in shock value, it's at least warm and humane about it.

And then, at the cinema I saw Art School Confidential. Now, I haven't seen Ghost World, unfortunately, but this Terry Zwigoff seems to hate everything. It's great to see. Art School Confidential isn't as good as Bad Santa, but it does mutate weirdly into a serial killer picture, and I tend to like that. (For instance, I wasn't expecting Match Point to have murders in it, and I was pleasantly surprised) Parts are pretty funny, and the cynicism is pleasantly overpowering. It wasn't great, but it was interesting and funny.

After that, I finally caught Lucky Number Slevin, and I found it was the sort of picture I tend to like. It was recommended to me by my gay friend, who works in a video store yet barely knows anything about movies. Anyway, so it was fun times, I loved the twisting and turning, the way the comic tone contrasted with the graphic violence, some of the dialogue, which was excellent if a bit too cute. I did find it to be a little too lightweight, but any movie with The Morgan Freeman V.S. Sir Ben Kingsley that is not directed by Uwe Boll has my recommendation.

Now, I'm just waiting on Lady Vengeance. This Friday cannot come sooner.

I have no idea what to think about Silent Hill. On one hand, it gave me the fanboy shakes and I felt the need to join half the audience in applauding it just to drown out the dumbass shouting "boo!"

The problem with Silent Hill is that it's King Kong all over again, a good director masturbating to his material so much that the movie goes on much longer than it should and half an hour could have been lost without hurting the movie. It doesn't help matters much that the studio was fucking retarded. They made them tack on the whole Sean Bean subplot just so there would be some men. That Gans accepted just goes to show you how much he loves Silent Hill. He wants to explore every possible facet of the movie, and in doing so he loses most of his audience in the process. Don't get me wrong, Silent Hill is pretty good filmmaking, it's just not good storytelling.

God, I need to see Silent Hill. It's not just you, God, that I'm talking to, but also Jesus. Seriously, guys, what gives? Why haven't I seen Silent Hill yet? Why did you have to organize time so that a day feels like 24 hours and 11 days feels like 264 hours? I am in desperate need of the goodness that may result from this game-to-film concoction. I mean, it has this French guy directing it, and the French, say what you will about their affinity for being pussies and burning cars, know how to fucking direct movies. It has Roger Avary writing it. I haven't seen half of the two movies that he's directed, but I know just from Pulp Fiction and to a lesser extent his own Killing Zoe that the movie is probably in good hands in the writing department. The production design, the makeup, the creatures, the cinematography, all of these look phenomenal. It even has fucking Boromir running around empty, dusty places and shouting for people. How many movies can claim to have Boromir, let alone Boromir running around shouting for people in empty, dusty places? It's based on my second favorite game series of all time, mainly because I don't get treated like a dumbass by it. It's smart. It's imaginative. It's disturbing. It's near goddamn inexplicable. I know all movies made out of games suck, but that's because the games mostly weren't worth making into movies in the first place. Maybe Resident Evil could have been good if they had stuck with George Fucking A Romero as the director. I read his script. It has a dying zombie horse getting shot in the face in the first ten pages. How many movies have that in the first few minutes? Not many. Instead they went with Paul Worthless Shit Anderson, who decided to make a feature length Sprite commercial with an occasional shot of Milla Jovovich's beaver (a very overrated beaver, too) and creepy-long nipples, and no horses at all, let alone dying zombie horses being shot in the face. But this movie, this Silent Hill, it looks good. It looks better than even the recent hard-R horror crop, even, which has been pretty awesome. April 21st cannot come any sooner, and that's the problem.

So yesterday I was watching some stuff from The Netflix and I saw this picture called Violent Cop from Takeshi Kitano. If you don't know who Kitano is, then tough. Watching a Kitano movie is like combining the experience of watching a Jarmusch movie and a Tarantino movie. On one hand, it's slow, full of long takes of people doing very little, and on the other hand every ten or fifteen minutes someone dies in a horrible way. I hate simplifying Tarantino as a "violent" director, personally, because look at the violence in Goodfellas or Casino and then look at the violence in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction--Scorcese is more violent than Tarantino. Yet, I don't think Scorcese is classified as a "violent" director, more as a director who makes movies that have violence in them. Or maybe he was before The Aviator and I just wasn't paying attention. And people say Kill Bill is so violent, but the violent parts people talk about are just intentionally campy homages to samurai flicks. But I'm sidetracked. Basically Violent Cop is about a cop who is violent. He likes beating the living shit out of everyone. So he does a lot of this. Mostly he just punches and kicks people instead of shooting them, because Takeshi Kitano is mostly too badass to bother shooting people. Some people get shot later on, but mostly it's Takeshi Kitano beating the living shit out of everyone. There are some other "good guy" characters that he doesn't beat the living shit out of, but they're barely important. Mostly it's about Kitano slapping the crap out of people. Yes, sometimes he slaps people. That doesn't sound very badass in theory, but he slaps this one guy, hard, in the face for five minutes straight, and if that isn't badass, I don't know what is. There's a plot, but it's pretty typical. The real stars of the movie are Kitano the director and Kitano the actor, and Kitano the director, debuting with this flick (it originally came out over in Japan in '89), is really, really good. The cinematography, editing, and all that shit is great. Kitano the actor simultaneously manages to be expressionless and badass, and you know some motherfucker is badass when his face barely moves. A lot of people say this movie is really violent, but with the exception of a few choice moments, it wasn't too bad. (by "bad", I mean stop your grinnin' and drop your linen awesome) There is one bit where a guy gets his head cracked open with one swing from a bat, which struck me as being a little exaggerated but it was nice to watch if I was into that sort of thing in some sort of alternate dimension where I thought stuff like that was hot. It ends in the usual Kitano gangster-flick fashion, which means that everyone important dies and the credits roll with you considering offing yourself, but in a good way. The movie does end with this weird freeze frame that I don't quite understand, but maybe because it was because I was distracted by outside factors while I was watching the movie. Anyway, it was pretty good, not my favorite film from Kitano, which might be either Zatoichi or Brother, the latter of which is seriously flawed but extremely enjoyable.

The movie I saw before on The Netflix was The Killing, by The Kubrick, back when he was in his pupa stage. While I don't think the movie has aged very well, because some of the dialogue and supporting characters are weak, it does have Sterling Hayden, and that has to count for something. Maybe I'm not stating how good this movie is clearly enough. It's got possibly the first truly nonlinear time structure. Unfortunately, when everything is happening has to be announced as the scene starts by what sounds like the narrator from Dragnet, which is really corny and dated. I still really liked it in spite of a few nitpicks here and there because it's just so damn good. Everything is all ironic and shit, and the ending is wonderful. It's also really short, so even people who didn't like The Kubrick when he became God and owned everyone else who will ever live's asses starting somewhere in between Dr.Strangelove and 2001 will probably like this one. One thing I found somewhat jarring was the fact that they drop the N-bomb in this. I know it was the 50's, but most of the movies from that time lived in a racism free bubble where everyone was white and fighting off invading aliens. And to prove that The Kubrick was an alright cat even back then, the guy who says it gets shot thirty seconds later for being a racist douchebag. Anyway, good flick.

So that's pretty much all I've got to say.