[108]

i just watched "apocalypto", after a couple years of everyone i know telling me to watch it. i was lucky to be able to watch it on blu-ray on my dad's enormous LED HDTV.

i didn't realize that, at over age thirty, i would still be able to see a film for the first time and consider it my Favorite Film Ever.

it had everything! minimal exposition, a ziggurat, and a hot / sometimes-naked pregnant female lead!

mel gibson, in addition to being a psychopath who sometimes screams at his wife over the telephone while being clandestinely tape-recorded, is also crazy enough to probably literally believe he has actually met / conversed with god before, which more or less makes him what professional film critics would call an "artistic genius".

wow! what a great film. i might watch it again someday.

i saw "true grit" yesterday, too. it was more or less a perfect film, and i suppose i liked it a little bit.
_________________

[108]

[108]

"25 fucking years, man"
_________________

[108]

today i re-read nikolai gogol's "taras bulba", and now i'm going to watch both the 1962 hollywood film and the 2009 russian film!

this could be an awesome idea or a terrible one!
_________________

[108]

"true grit" made me want to see the coens remake something enormous and beloved -- ben-hur, gone with the wind. i am so not joking.
_________________

[108]

[108]

[108]

so who's excited about THE GREEN HORNET on friday?????????

. . . . . . . . . i guess i'm going to see it.

in other news, i might actually go see "the dilemma". because: i am kind of a jerk.
_________________

[108]

[108]

man, weird. jennifer connelly was also in "requiem for a dream". hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
_________________

[108]

oh man, i will go see that.
_________________

[108]

roger ebert calls "the green hornet" "an almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about."

man, what a good sentence.

i guess i am still going to go see it with my little brother, because what else are you going to do with your little brother before going back to san francisco until christmas?
_________________

[108]

hans landa!

yeah, ebert's 3D vendetta is weird as hell. he did admit that "avatar" used 3D well. so who knows.

i personally dislike 3D as well, though i am starting to come around thanks to a couple of trailers. it took a trailer for fucking pirates of the caribbean to convince me that maybe 3D is really cool and someday it'll be perfect and awesome. being able to discern the distance between the tip of extreme-close-up johnny depp's nose and his eyelid is pretty nifty, and i suppose it has applications outside dumb action movies.

maybe "the green hornet" is dumb as hell. well, whatever. i'm going to see it tonight anyway :-3
_________________

[108]

[108]

also: if anyone cares, i saw "the green hornet". IN A WORLD of superhero movies, this one might be some kind of postmodern masterpiece, in all its fascinating terribleness. i agree with ebert at least 90% of the time. i guess this was one of the 10%. i'd give it a strong two and a half stars, and strongly urge the filmmakers to make the second one Even Weirder.

the weirdness of the action scenes was actually remarkable. the whole last blatant disgusting overblown setpiece was extraordinary! ebert jokes that seth rogen probably had an easy time writing the screenplay because all he had to do was write "now the special effects people make nine minutes of action", though man, ebert, can't you see that this is a different breed of action? this is some weird, sticky, twisted shit. so man, whatev. it's the kind of action scene that only a writer could think of. like that big action scene at the end of "pineapple express": it's full of precise geometrical awareness that literally any other modern movie with a gun battle or car chase lacks.

we have two superheroes who are journalists (spider-man and superman) and two superheroes who are exorbitantly wealthy (ironman and batman), and two superheroes who are more or less constantly believed to be bad guys (spider-man and batman). with the green hornet, we have a multimillionaire journalist superhero with a villainous reputation. i guess the guys writing it were just like, "whatev let's put lots of awful / weird dialogue in there and make the action scenes logistically fascinating".

i didn't love the movie, or even like it a lot. however, it actually made me feel something, in all its exuberance.

then there were the parts where it felt about as frustrating as any given episode of "inspector gadget". the main character is a stupid, jerkish brute with a barely-sketched sense of justice. then he's got this friend (kato) who is a genius at everything. they say that, in hong kong, they called "the green hornet" tv show "the kato show", well, i wonder if they're going to call this "the kato movie", because that's pretty much what it is.
_________________

[108]

[108]

[108]

I saw Takashi Miike's "13 Assassins" last night at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Man! It was pretty spectacular. I am not exactly a fan of Miike's particular style, and I tend to not get along with people who mention loving Takashi Miike within thirty seconds of someone telling them that I had lived in Japan for a long time -- as though, "Hey, you actually went to live in Japan, so that must mean you're an even bigger Takashi Miike fan than I am!" While this has built up a frothy tendency to preemptively exhibit -_- faces at the mention of Miike's name, I have never been able to successfully (attempt to) deny that he is a supremely technically talented director. Couple this inner realization with my oft-voiced opinion that old Japanese samurai movies would be The Best Thing Ever if they had some real modern production values (which I swear isn't as slimy and stupid a sentiment as it might seem in this sentence), and you get a pretty great film!

"13 Assassins" is "derivative" beyond derivative, though it's derivative of The Awesome, and it's so potently captured and confidently realized that I just about threw up at the end. Miike & Bros really nail the portrayal of all the samurai archetypes, and there's this faint, barely visible interjection running throughout the closing scenes: all these people are the same person, on different days. Someone once said that samurai duels in old films are the "most romantic love scenes" in cinema. "13 Assassins" is so together that the sword scenes blend partway into the feeling of one man talking to himself (like Robert DeNiro in "Taxi Driver"). I thought it was interesting -- and awesome -- that the one audience comment I most frequently overheard at the end was "I couldn't tell the characters apart". Of course!

That's a common complaint about the traditional samurai films, though at least this one has a well-defined villain. By "well-defined" I mean we really know very, very little about him as a person. The film does a perfect job of communicating the shadow of historical context -- all we need to know is that the bad guy is the Shogun's younger brother -- and thus legally untouchable -- has been rising in political position, and is a textbook psychopath. Other samurai films -- by which I mean the kind that they play late at night on Japanese TV -- would be too clean to effectively communicate evil. They contain near-endless scenes of men kneeling on the floors in rooms, looking down, speaking in grave tones about how so-and-so must be stopped. People love and revere these old films, though they are disingenuous, in that they are a conservative era's mass-media portrayal of what were dark, sick times. Takashi Miike is not afraid of The Crazy Shit, and he reins it in pretty superbly to communicate very quickly why this guy deserves a whole bunch of death.

The whole final third of the film is a pretty fantastic revenge gangbang with precisely the right amount of soliloquy (that is, very little). And when it comes together, it comes together to the head of a pin. I'm pretty sure you could enjoy the film on the surface level, as a story of hard dudes fucking up other hard dudes, though I'm also pretty confident that I am going to be able to watch this one a dozen more times just to savor the intricacies of the characters.

Anyway -- I see a lot of films (way more than I ever write about, say, in here), and I know I am pegged as a "Japan guy", though let the record show I literally never rave about modern Japanese films. (In fact, I have said before (many times) that modern Japanese mainstream films are shit.) So it's pretty neat -- for me, anyway -- to have found one that I like so much!

I've wanted a straight-up real Miyamoto Musashi film series -- something better than The Samurai Trilogy, which is way too clean -- for a long time. Man, it would be great if Miike did something like that. Though maybe "13 Assassins" is enough.
_________________

[108]

i wouldn't call him "mainstream". seriously, "mainstream" japanese film consists mainly of shit you would never hear of or see. just filthy, awful, lower-than-lowest-common-denominator shit. mainstream japanese cinema is like if they made a new spider-man, superman, batman, and iron man film every three months . . . with the same guy playing the lead in every one of them.

i make the distinction because i . . . think that "13 assassins" was "mainstream" when it came out in japan last fall.

i think.
_________________

[108]

[108]

whoa really?
_________________

[108]

if they spelled it alasska i'd probly go check it out (sunglasses face)
_________________

[108]

RIP Sean Bean
He Was a True Bro
_________________

[108]

[108]

amazing spider-man looks retarded :-/

watching all three transformers movies in a row this week! tonight is transformers 2!
_________________

[108]

"captain america" was pretty yay!
_________________

[108]

[108]

i accidentally viewed around thirty seconds of it, and was seized nearly the entire time with an almost uncontrollable urge to do something (anything) else.
_________________

[108]

[108]

going to see steven soderbergh's "CONTAGION" friday night because: why not!

then, to maintain my street cred i am going to go see a remastered "the man who fell to earth" on saturday night at the landmark theater in berkeley! it's a pretty hokey film, though it should be awesome to see it in a nice theater.
_________________

[108]

i'll have my 3D glasses on 8-3
_________________