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well, my friend and i saw "ponyo on the cliff by the sea" in a cavernous theater in shinjuku sunday night after missing a train.

it was the most absolutely terrifyingly amazing experience i think i've ever had with a movie.

when i was six years old, the art teacher would have to use words to explain what "art" was; now, they have "ponyo".

japan's complete and utter inability to make anything truly "world-class" frustrates me to no end sometimes.

ponyo is universe-class. you could show it to a sentient paramecium from a planet with no water, and it would understand everything perfectly.

two days later, even though i've finally gotten some sleep, the film is kind of still right there, like a knife in the top of my head.
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i physically can not bring myself to watch a preview of "quantum of solace".

it comes out in japan, like, in may 2009, for fuck's sake.

i'm hopefully going to be in LA around christmas, so hmmm.
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i watched woody allen's "celebrity" for the first time last night, and found it way better than everyone had said it was.

kenneth branagh's performance as, uhh, woody allen was pretty confusing. i've never seen a man so thoroughly british speak with an accent so perfectly american in such a way before.
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man, i downloaded "the chronicles of riddick" like six months ago for some reason i can't even remember, maybe because i saw "pitch black" way back when i was in college and kind of liked it. today my hard drive was almost full so i decided to watch one of the several movies on my desktop; i picked riddick, and wow! that's a pretty good movie! if i were fourteen years old and had a hundred million dollars, this is the precise kind of movie i would make.

man, it's like "star wars" with han solo, luke skywalker, and darth vader encased in one character.

and that's a hell of an ending!
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does it have any of that watermark shit on it?
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man, aside from fucking benjamin button (already out over here because of, yes, brad pitt) NONE of the oscar best-picture nominees are going to be released theatrically in japan at ALL.

last year, following the academy awards, "there will be blood" played on ONE SCREEN in the WHOLE COUNTRY for ONE SHOW a day for ONE WEEK.

the people just don't get movies here :-/

i am interested enough in "slumdog millionaire" to NOT watch the DVD screener rip i downloaded, and instead wait for the blu-ray rip.

hey, i have no other choice -- amazon.com won't ship the US blu-ray to japan!
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i watched MICHAEL CLAYTON (blu-ray rip lol) last night, and wow!

though not AWESOME enough to enter my top maybe-fifty films ever, it was a trillion times better than it had any right to be.

what an ending!

for a LEGAL THRILLER, it's surprisingly clippy, brisk watching, too, so if you haven't seen it, throw it on, smoke up a bit, have a shot or two, whatever your thing may be, you know, however you prefer to get fucked up, and check it out.

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oh shittt

good thing this movie will actually come out in japan!

actually, it will. "coffee and cigarettes" and "broken flowers" both premiered in japan, now that i think about it. i was at both of those premiers! and jim jarmusch came out and talked for like a half an hour before each film!

for years, japanese underground rockers have loved jarmusch's films for some reason; i guess this makes sense.
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just watched the 1080p trailer on my LCD HDTV!!!!! one more time to listen to the music and i do believe that is boris, yes.

wow, yeah, this movie is going to be retardedly great.

"how did you get in here?"

"i used my imagination."

man if jim jarmusch and david mamet teamed up, something pretty amazing would probably happen.
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whatever man

film's got more style in its pinky toenail (or, one-minute trailer) than killer7 had in its whole bloated drowned obese corpse
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while this thread is hopping, allow me to announce that i have downloaded a 1080p blu-ray rip of "synecdoche, new york", and i will graciously allow the fucked-up japanese film distribution system TWELVE HOURS from this moment to announce a theatrical release date in tokyo before i take matters into my own hands and watch the damned thing already.
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well, i also have a "dead man" poster on my office wall, so yeah
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that is -- lol -- one way to put it

i also have a "paris, texas" poster in my office, btw
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god damn it, i didn't really need that spoiler sitting there on its own line :-/

i skim pretty fast you know :(
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at the tail end of my tri-yearly re-watching of all things david mamet, i found myself not completely sated, so i decided to watch the films in which he only shares writing credits, or films that he had stricken his name from. so i watched "ronin" again, and then decided to move on to "hannibal".

while about to torrent "hannibal" i took note of a film called "hannibal rising", apparently released in 2007. i immediately thought, "they . . . made another one?" i torrented it and watched.

holy fuck! that is one fucking terrible film. it is a great case of a film in which literally everything is inexcusable. who the hell thought anyone would want to see this shit?

though only two hours long, the film felt eight hours long.

probably because it took me eight hours to watch it!

that's a good question, then, in this age of the torrented movie -- what's the longest it ever took you to watch one film one the first run-through?

immediately after hannibal rising ended, i realized i had "red dragon", "the silence of the lambs", and "hannibal" queued up after it in VLC. i don't even remember downloading them!

i just finished watching "red dragon" -- for the first time. i'd read the book and seen "manhunter" previously. i must say, "red dragon", though directed by a serious frat boy, definitely felt like genuine literature compared to the bullshit i just suffered through.

i only had to pause it for one very brief toilet break!

i am going to watch "the silence of the lambs" tonight! i have seen it maybe twenty times.

i feel like it would be a good idea, at this point, to explore the genre of the barn-burning page-turning serial-killer novel hollywood adaptation, if only because i've never seen many of them outside "silence of the lambs", and i feel like it would be a good idea to deepen my familiarity with the stories of novels that regularly sell eight million copies.

does anyone have any recommendations for terrible-though-watchable hollywood blockbuster serial killer investigation movies???
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i have seen both seven and zodiac, and liked the latter much more than the former. though they were both pretty good!
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"synecdoche, new york", one of the finer films of the past two decades, finally has a release date in japan!

that release date is october 17th, 2009. it will play on one screen in the entire nation, one show a day, for exactly one week.

fuck!

the theater it will play at happens to be one of my favorite cinemas on earth, so i will definitely go see it there.

this is the same theater where i saw jim jarmusch speak prior to the premier screenings of "coffee and cigarettes" and "broken flowers". maybe CK will make an appearance at "synecdoche". i would like that a lot!

also, the japanese title of the movie translates, unfortunately, into "new york inside my [his] brain"

kind of takes some of the mystery out of the film, there.
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i don't know guys, i think two alien prequels could be alright :-3

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cocaine socialist, you must have learned by now that the hollywood pitch men are able to make even a masterpiece look like a conventional hollywood film in the trailers, if they really want to.

conclusion: this film could be some serious The Shit

whoaaaaaa: you can't pause or stop the ad that plays after that video! all you can do is kill the tab. wow! never encountered that precise brand of terror before.
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"el aura" is a pretty fantastic film!
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i hadn't seen "the darjeeling limited" for terrible, boring reasons. i was waiting for a blu-ray for the longest time. then i found a gorgeous 1080p rip online. i downloaded it a few days before they announced the blu-ray being released this fall. then i figured i'd wait. i changed my mind an hour and forty minutes ago.

i just watched it.

wow, that's a hell of a film, right there.
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oh, sweet!
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hahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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don draper is getting around!

also, when did the world start calling ben affleck "the acclaimed director of 'gone baby gone'"?

i mean, that's a decent film and all.
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plz no inception spoilarz

going to see it in like twelve hours ffs
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