A Movie Nearly Every Night: Saturday Night Fever

Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Director: John Badham
Starring: John Travolta, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barry Miller

let's throw those heels on the table and see whose is bigger

The story is pretty simple -- Brooklyn kid trying to break out of his dull existence through dancing at the disco -- but that simplicity and the infamous disco explosion that came out of this movie can almost overshadow the seriousness of what's going on. I mean, honestly, it's easy to laugh at the clothes and the dancing and everything that came out of the hype that still surrounds it, but it's also very touching and real, and when they all get on the dance floor in that big group and dance to "Night Fever" I cried.

Here I am/Prayin' for this moment to last/Livin' on the music, so fine

What have they got outside of the disco? If Tony's house is any example, it's unpleasant. His parents snipe at one another ("You never used to hit me ... at least not in front of the kids," his dad says) and the only one everyone admires is Father Frank, who isn't there. When he comes back, no one knows what to do, so they just sit there, dead on the couch.

the collar doesn't really go with the hair

His friends are only out to make it with girls, drink, fight -- knock up their girlfriends who like communion wafers and then not know what to do because they don't love them enough to marry them. And poor Annette, with her married sisters, who can neither be a good girl nor a c*nt, because neither one will get her any kind of respect from the guys she grew up with (and, according to Tony, she can't be both) -- what's out there for her but to get knocked up by someone like Joey or Double J and end up married and miserable?

"There are ways of killing yourself without killing yourself," he says. It's what he's doing every day in Brooklyn. He's only alive in the disco; the rest of the time he's just "staying alive," marking time, waiting until Saturday to come around again so he can forget that regardless of how he feels about everyone else, he's always going to be looked upon as part of a group of animals. Even Stephanie doesn't know what to make of him at first because he's just another guy from Brooklyn. Is he interesting and intelligent? She doesn't know, maybe, then she thinks about it and says yes, maybe, she doesn't know, maybe.

my friends are liars ... my life ... f**k, what now

But Tony is different and, okay, you can say Travolta has dumb expressions on his face, and if you want to judge him the way Stephanie does, it's easy and it's expected. That's how others see him, so that's how we see him, but that's only at first glance, the simple glance, the "disco movie" glance. If you look again, there's always more going on with Tony. He's always thinking about his future --- whether that's the next Saturday or the next 20 years. Unlike his friends who are out for the quick f**k in the car, Tony always wants more, and he thinks it's attainable until he watches the Puerto Rican dancers beat him at the disco. That's when the darkness really settles.

Up until that point he thought he had a chance, that he wasn't one of the gang, and his first reaction is to give up. He violenty tries to "make it" with Stephanie, fails and realizes that going back, being like the other guys in his neighborhood, isn't an option. He's spent 19 years building himself into something else and it's no use to be what others think he is. It's not honest.

He realizes that he's going to have to work a lot harder to get what he wants, and that means getting out of Brooklyn.

A Movie Nearly Every Night: The Dirty Dozen

The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Director: Robert Aldrich
Starring: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes

"No, SIR, I will not be shaving, SIR"

So there's pure entertainment, there's the message movie, and there's something that falls somewhere in-between and that would be The Dirty Dozen.

War is hell -- check. But rebellion is cool -- check.

If you believe Sleepless in Seattle, this is a boy movie in the same way that An Affair to Remember is a girl movie, but I'm a girl and I don't really like An Affair to Remember and once this goes on I can't stop watching it. It's like when I discovered that The Three Musketeers were really kind of cool even though it was a boy book. I don't want to be a musketeer, but I wouldn't mind dating one. I feel the same way about boy movies, even ones where the guys don't bathe for a few weeks. I like watching guys do their guy things. That's pretty simple, right?

I also like John Cassavetes. He's intense and crazy and says whatever comes into his head and he's totally inspired as Victor Franco, so much that it's hard to believe he did this movie just to get money to make his own films. There's a lot of love for Franco coming out of Cassavetes, and this makes him a magnet for the audience. Sure, maybe you sort of care that Posey is going to "learn letters," but what you really want to know is: What is Franco going to do next?

Reisman (Lee Marvin) taunts Posey while
Franco (John Cassavetes) cheers from the sidelines

Not that the others are slacking. Even Ralph Meeker makes the most of his short role as the psychiatrist ("You've got one religious maniac, one malignant dwarf, two near-idiots --- and the rest I don't even wanna think about"), and George Kennedy is so amazingly low-key that it's hard to believe this was made the same year he was huffing about "Lucille" in Cool Hand Luke.

But aside from Franco, the one you really care about is Jefferson, played by Jim Brown. He's the only one who seems normal. Even Bronson has some issues and he's something of a post anyway, so, by using the wanting-to-date-a-musketeer standard, Bronson's Wladislaw isn't quite making it. (and Telly Savalas? Maggott?? Are you kidding?) But Jefferson is intelligent, calm, dependable and when you need a guy to ditch grenades down into air vents filled with gasoline, he's your man.

"Blow it, Jefferson!"

It's not a perfect movie by any stretch. You know, maybe it doesn't really make sense that hookers would want to dance with stinky soldiers or that blowing up a chateau of Nazis is going to help the war effort. But it's a good night's fun.

Why I went to Journalism school

Today's Eurosport headline:
Ferrari could dump Raikkonen
+
this picture:

+
this lead:
Team president Kimi Raikkonen has said that Kimi Raikkonen is not assured of racing for Ferrari next season

= editor's day off.

Yeah, no, he's not the president. I was worried about the headline until I got to the page and read the story. No fact checking? No facts to check.

He's on the podium in that shot, by the way, so it doesn't really fit -- Ferrari will drop a winning driver? There aren't pictures of him not giving a %^#@ out there? You bet there are. If I can Google one, Eurosport can. But, more than that, coupled with the headline, it implies an emotion that I just don't think he's going to have if "dumped" by his team, especially since he's been publicly shopping other careers for the past year and a half. What I suspect the photo is actually capturing is (a) a need for sleep; (b) a hangover; (c) a hot day at Spa after just getting out of a 110-degree race car; or (d) all of the above.

A (Hindi) Movie Nearly Every Night: Seeta Aur Geeta

Seeta Aur Geeta (1972)
Director: Ramesh Sippy
Starring: Hema Malini, Dharmendra, Sanjeev Kumar, Manorama

Geeta (Hema Malini) being cute as a button

The quality isn't always great and they sometimes lack the basics of film scholar-aesthetics, but the more I watch of Hindi cinema the more I'm starting to really love the essence of it. Unlike Hollywood, which seems to want to distance itself from its core beginnings of fiction and fun, Bollywood has captured and maintained one of the most basic functions of film: Escapism. Rather than drop $8 and sit down to watch what I can see outside for free, I like seeing something completely outside of reality. Hollywood, since the 1950s, and maybe in small, independent productions before then, has been pushing itself away from that tradition with the idea that film is a mirror on society. Honestly, it's as though we've gone back to the morality plays of the dark ages. Here is what we are and what we should/could/would be.

Just as an example, there are these movies out now (usually with Emma Thompson, but in the case of Dan in Real Life, with Steve Carell), which have single people of a certain age finding that Special Someone usually by luck (good or bad) and realizing that this person is their soul-mate. My mom likes these movies because it gives her hope that I won't be single my entire life. I don't like these movies because I think they're a Disney-fication of hope. Dan in Real Life is not a bad movie, but essentially it's a message-movie: There's someone out there, middle-age people. You'll find them. What if I don't? Then you've lied to me. Or maybe I just not a good enough person -- psychological play from entertainment? Why? Hindi cinema, on the other hand, doesn't preach, doesn't promise and therefore doesn't lie.

Solid Bollywood spectacle cinema doesn't give you expectations outside of its reality (Satyajit Ray ... well, that's a whole other topic.). You walk out of the world and into the movie, and for 3 hours you are somewhere else entirely, I don't care what's happening on screen. The characters could be mafia dons and there's still time for a song and dance. Bad things happen and good things sometimes come of it, sometimes not, but it's total, complete, 100% fiction. I don't know what it's like where you live, but in my town (and my town is weird) people don't stop in the street and sing about their feelings. I don't know that it really happens all that often in Mumbai, but it does in the movies. But it's not going to preach to you. You can be a good person or a bad person, you can be violent and shoot down the bad guys or you can be the bad guy, it doesn't matter. This isn't really happening. It's a shadow-show on the wall. It's a book with pretty pictures that entertains you for a few hours.

Seeta Aur Geeta, by Hollywood standards, is a silly movie, but by Bollywood standards is a big box of wonderful. Twins separated at birth -- one grows up wealthy but unhappy in this nightmare Cinderella-esque house; one is a gypsy street dancer. They switch places and many adventures and situations follow. I won't say I loved every minute of it, because Seeta's wealthy household is brutal at the beginning, but it's worth sticking it out because gypsy Geeta balances the accounts later (hand, belt, boot and ping-pong paddle, that's all I'm sayin'). But for 2-1/2 hours it made me forget about my horrible week at work and living in a nation of narrow-minded jerks barking down healthcare reform.

Friends, sometimes a lie told to combat injustice is worth a thousand truths and here's how we sing it.

And, yes, there is plenty of singing and dancing. They sing about love, they sing about alcohol, they sing about their love of alcohol because it's not real life, thank you. It's the movies.

I kid not

photo courtesy of
farm1.static.flickr.com/163/436620452_883ab0017e.jpg

I wish we hadn't already sent the disc back to Netflix, but this borrowed shot is probably a lot better than anything I would be able to capture from the grainy DVD.

It's more decorative armor than undergarment, I guess, but it kept the bad man off, so done and done.

The Devil's Playground

Sorry, not keeping up on the blog as well as I'm a-pposed to. We did watch another movie over the weekend called Ganga Ki Saugand, but I didn't review it because I wasn't entirely sure what happened in it.

There's this gold-sequined bustier that fits both the love interest and the sister (and then the sister trying to hit on the brother and the weird silver phallic statues that come between them); and this message that violence is bad, but maybe violence is okay if it's good violence, but non-violence is better, but for violent people violence is the only way to solve things, but it's all thanks to the Ganges anyway?

See? I just don't know. It was crazy. We have another Bollywood coming from Netflix today (Seeta Aur Geeta) and maybe it will be better.

Anyway, can't blame it all on The Beatles, although I finally got 100% playing the hard level on "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" and that took a lot of practice. But I'm also trying to get through the "nose" section of Tristram Shandy and thinking that maybe John Irving swiped a lot of his style from Sterne. Maybe.

I'm just sayin'.

So idle, but busy at the same time. Go figure.

A Movie Nearly Every Night: Poltergeist

Poltergeist (1982)
Director: Tobe Hooper
Starring: Craig T. Nelson, JoBeth Williams, Beatrice Straight

image courtesy of www.paranomaland.com

I don't have any solid screen shots of this one because it was on Bluray and the cousin/roommate had never seen it before. It was better to let him watch it straight than watch it while fussing with the Nikon. I borrowed the above picture from someone else (http://paranormaland.com/Poltergeistthecurse.html).

Spoiler alert -- although if you haven't seen this yet go rent it now and then read on. It's good. Really good. And here's why:

I've seen this a number of times -- one very memorable time on Halloween with my mom -- and every time I see it there's some new layer to discover. I mean, sure, it's a scary ghost movie and it works that way, but the weird family dynamic and the crazy set design (what's with those stairs?) and the strange ambient sounds just make it so much more than a simple fright flick.

You need a Point A? Start with the obvious birthing of the mother and daughter and work out from there. What's going on with the levels of motherhood -- the mom, the parapsychologist, the medium? What's up with the men? Steven is both a tool that brings about the destruction and a helpless victim of it. The women do everything -- except the teenage daughter whose only purpose seems to be to show that Steven knocked up Diane in high school (mom - 36; daughter - 16) and that they've spent the last 16 years working up to the dream home and the respectable life. But they still roll their own joints, drink and cry a lot, and after the son gets eaten by the tree they leave him standing there alone while they freak out about Carol Anne. What exactly are their priorities? And when the son later rips into that clown, isn't he just doing what his father was unable to do?

There are comments on violence, death and war, generational sexual mistakes, men requiring the use of remote controls and women using the television set controls (why can they just manually change the channel to watch the football game? Why do they have to fight with the remotes?), and really creative uses of light.

Sure, yeah, if you want to get scared, there's plenty of that too. But if you want to make a study of the social structure of a suburban community, I recommend it.

In the end you've got to wonder what the other neighbors are hiding.

Askoa part deux

Yeah, what a shock, he killed a bunch of people and his role as a Buddhist leader through India gets tossed off in a rolling paragraph at the end ("And then Asoka went forth..." and walked the Earf like Caine). Can't blame them really. What's more important: a few more songs or Asoka spreading Buddhism? It's not that hard to figure it out.

Beatles Rockband is lovely to look at. I kept screwing up because I wanted to watch the pretty cartoon in the background, but I think I did my part as an okay George for most of the songs. The cousin/roommate went in for some Expert play as Ringo and survived, although there is a little something inside that urges us to see if Rockband will really allow the Beatles to get booed off the stage. Somehow I couldn't allow it to happen 'though. That's the magic of British pop, friends.

Maybe tonight we'll start the story from the Cavern to Let it Be, but I have to uncross my eyes first. I'm tellin' ya, trying to play and watch the stuff in the background .... man, I thought playing Boston's Smokin' was hard.

A Movie Nearly Every Night: Asoka

Asoka (2001)
Director: Santosh Sivan
Starring: Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Danny Denzongpa

A somewhat random moment of singing and dance ... I love Hindi cinema

Title change to the blog since Beatles Rock Band arrives tomorrow and that will cut into movie watching, but also because I still haven't finished this one. At this point I'm not even sure when Netflix will be getting it back. It's only 2 hours and 30 minutes, which is short for Bollywood, but it was mom's birthday and we had to go to the market and I'm only an hour and half into it so far and now it's time for bed. I've got another hour, but I'm too old to stick it out tonight. Besides, this first half has given me plenty to go on and I'm pretty sure it'll end in somewhat the same fashion it started in.

See, it's my theory that you can tell the story of any Bollywood film in 5 minutes or less. Actually, if it takes more than 2 minutes, you're just using too many articles and prepositions.

There's this guy, Asoka (Shah Rukh), and he's a prince, and he leaves the kingdom because his half-brother wants to kill him, and he meets this princess, Kaurwaki (Kareena Kapoor), and she's not really a princess, but that's another story, and they get married. Now he's going back to his kingdom because his mother is sick. An hour and a half into it and that's all that's happened. I suspect it will pick up and he will kill some people when he goes home, but if you know your history (and anyone with access to Wikipedia does, come on) you know that he's going to eventually be an emperor and then convert to Buddhism. There's your final hour.

Shah Rukh is lovely and silly and all those things he tends to be in pictures -- and I have no problem with that. If you've got a good schtick you should make it work until the well runs dry. He's got maybe 10 - 12 years left of it, I'd say. Play it out, my man.

Pre-Buddhism Asoka ... he was a violent cheater, but kinda charming

There's singing, dancing, non-kiss love, meaningful stares and plenty of hair swinging. It's everything I expected so far and more.

But, yes, it's a little silly.

A Movie Every Night: La Decima Vittima

La Decima Vittima (The 10th Victim) (1965)
Director: Elio Petri
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Ursula Andress

Murder as performance art -- those crazy New Yorkers will watch anything

It's the 21st Century and, if mankind is still alive, he's playing a game called The Big Hunt. Participants are chosen at random from a contestant database to be either the Hunter or the Victim, and you have to be one or the other at least 5 times and survive to win. Caroline Meredith (Ursula Andress -- she's American. No, really) has just finished number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 and Marcello Mastroianni (playing a guy named Marcello) is on his seventh game when he's picked to be victim number 10. He needs the money having just annulled his wife (still no divorce in Italy??) and had his furniture repossessed.

"If the big hunt had existed in 1940, Hitler would certainly have become a member and there would have been no World War II."

Interesting theory -- so is this a political comment on the state of mankind in the new millennium? Or is it an Utopian vision of modern morality: instead of illegal murder and suicide you can play in the hunt and not only make your life and death an exciting game, but you also get one million dollars if you win number 10. That's right, one millllllllllllllllllllion dollars.

sheep and plaster casts better scurry...

Yeah, maybe it's about that. Maybe it's about kooky interior/exterior decorating and swinging fashion; or maybe it's about the influence of advertising on the lives of everyday people; or maybe it's modern society's need to validate everything through entertainment.

"Don't kill me, Caroline. Without television, wouldn't it be useless?"

Maybe it's about bullet bikinis and the even bigger questions raised by them:

Oh no ... you di'n't ...
you did.

Like where do you load it, and, yeah, come to think of it, how would you pull the trigger?

A Movie Every Night: Green for Danger

Green For Danger (1946)
Director: Sidney Gilliat
Starring: Sally Gray, Trevor Howard (wheet whoo), Rosamund John, Alastair Sim, Leo Genn

Sally Gray, Leo Genn, Trevor Howard, Megs Jenkins and Rosamund John
One of you is a murderer

My GOD I love the Criterion Collection.

This is a somewhat above average murder mystery in that the mystery is a little weak, but everything else is fantastic. The inspector on the case (played by a sly Alastair Sim) gets all the good lines and he shoots them out with a wonderful casual flippancy. He's like a shaved, well-mannered Dr. House. Trevor Howard and Leo Genn are the central men, both capable of love or murder, and the nurses, Sally Gray, Rosamund John, Judy Campbell and Megs Jenkins (who always seems to play a nurse or a housekeeper), have distinct characters and personalities, unlike the typical damsel-in-distress types. It's easy to believe that they could all be capable of murder, but who could it be......

Inspector Cockrill examines ghostly fingerprints left by the victim

Why do I love Criterion? Because this film is beautifully restored so that every nuance is highlighted, from the back lighting through the cabinet to illuminate a victim's fingerprints on glass, to the sharpening up of the background so that we can see the eerie hanging skeleton decorations at the hospital party. (Nurse "Freddie" remarks that it's August, so it's not Halloween. Are the skeletons some nurse's nutty idea of decorations or is it a presentiment of things to come?)

Dr. Barnes drinks away his troubles while the ornamental dead look on

Even the drinks shine with luminosity that made me thirsty for a cocktail (until they started talking about poison). By cleaning up the negative they've restored all of the purposeful shadows and lights, and the sound is so clean you can hear every innuendo that passes between them all. Sure, as mysteries go, the story could have used a little more work at the resolution, but watching it lead up to that point was more than worth it.

Tomorrow, what you've all been waiting for: La Decima Vittima (1965)

A Movie Every Night: Dracula

Dracula (1970)
Director: Jesus Franco (you heard me)
Starring: Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom, Fred Williams, Maria Rohm

One of the many shots detailing the inside of someone's nose

That was excruciating.

I've seen Ed Wood pictures with more going for them than this. I've seen educational films about wheat harvests with more going for them than this. Klaus Kinski, who might have saved it with his craziness, only gets to croak out one word: "Varna." That's it. The rest of the time he's wandering around staring and shaking his hair out of his eyes, and while he's doing it there's a camera man capturing it all. I know, because I saw him.

Shadow of the vampire? Nope, it's the shadow of the hand-held camera guy. Should we shoot it again? Jesus Franco, why should we?

A Movie Every Night: Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss

Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982)
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Rosel Zech, Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Froboess, Annemarie Duringer

Poor Veronika, always in some kind of prison

"Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression." -- Ranier Werner Fassbinder

We move from love to suffocation. Everybody is trapped and repressed by something in this movie, whether it's drugs or other people. They want to be free to express art, because, as Veronika says, if you're not free your art isn't free

The contrasts lighting is high and intense. The whites are so blown out sometimes that the darks get sucked in. It's brutal and illuminating. There are plenty of fun little references to UFA, usually in things said by the characters, but more often by the Expressionist sets (what's a mirror ball doing at the drug clinic?). Everything is blank, brutal, cold and full of misery. The war imprisoned Germany, which is then imprisoned by Americans with their black market morphine and their silly music ("The Battle of New Orleans" by Johnny Horton in particular). No one escapes until they die.

Yeah, it was a fun Friday night.

And angels sing thee to thy rest

Good luck, Michael Jackson fans. If you think you're going to get in to his spot at Forest Lawn Glendale I've got a little story for you.

I was a regular at Forest Lawn back when I was a kid (or after I was old enough to drive, but not old as I am now). I would go every month and hang out with Spencer Tracy and Alan Ladd and smoke cigarettes with Errol Flynn.

(Photo from seeing-stars.com)

It was nice. No one seemed to mind my being there and I always brought them daisies because daisies are kind of simple and sweet and less showy than roses. I couldn't afford roses in any case.

Once I was there with friends and we went into the Great Mausoleum with the sincere intention of paying a visit to my hero, Irving Thalberg (okay, you people in my dish about him cutting Greed need to lay off -- it's a complicated story and von Stroheim was mad. A genius, sure, but barking mad)(but I digress). We went in, sat through the entire Last Supper stained-glass window presentation (here's how it looks at sunrise ... now, sunset ...) about how the glass came from Italy piece-by-piece la la la. We get up, after respectfully offering this tribute of attention, and walk over to the Sanctuary of Benediction --- not to go in it, mind, just to lay our daisies at the gate --- and a guard was on us like THAT. No, no, no, he says. You have to go now. It's not allowed.

Paying your respects is not allowed at Forest Lawn Glendale. Remember that.

So, while I don't begrudge the famous a little peace in the end, it kind of sucks to get turned away when you're on a sincere mission of adoration. However, at Hollywood Memorial Park (or whatever it's called now) you can lie on top of Tyrone Power without a hassle. That's all I'm sayin'.

A Movie Every Night: Star Trek The Motion Picture

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Director: Robert Wise
Starring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, yeah, yeah, yeah...
Special Bluray edition
(which means the screen shots are courtesy of Nikon and the cousin/roommate)

Kirk, Spock and Bones: as it should be, friends

The idea behind this series is to watch movies I either haven't seen before or haven't seen all the way through. Now, I know you're going to think I'm lying on this one, but the only Star Trek movie I've ever seen all the way through is The Wrath of Khan. Honest as the day is long -- no, wait, I saw that one with the whales, but I never saw the first movie, although I think I maybe tried to watch it once way back when it was on SelecTV and the only thing I remember is that VGER was Voyager. I'm sorry, did I ruin it for anyone? I haven't. Honestly, by the time you get to that point you're already kind of sleepy anyway and the surprise is a little lifeless. It takes them 20 minutes just to get Kirk on board the Enterprise. (That's 20 minutes in a shuttle, not 20 minutes of forwarding the story.)

My mother likes this one, she says, because it's a love story. I think she's absolutely right. Kirk loves his ship enough to challenge the new captain out of ownership. The new captain, soon to demote down to commander, Will Dekker (Stephen Collins), loves the navigator, Lt. Ilia (Persis Khambatta), who apparently likes him, sort-of, but won't sleep with him or anyone, apparently, because she tells the captain and the entire crew that she is celibate even though no one asks.

Brokeback Enterprise

There are some sweet moments of boy-love between Kirk and Spock, machines love other machines --- it's a crazy universe. But the big love is clearly reserved for Dekker and Ilia, who ... it's complicated. Let's just call her Veeger and she's a machine, right, and she has feelings, right, but doesn't have feelings, right, and the machine wants to know if there's MORE, right, than just being a machine, right, so it's tapping into feelings, right, and so the mommy and the daddy when they get together....

Dekker "mates" with the machine

Kirk's reaction: How is it I've never had that kind of action?

Yes, my mother is right. It's all about love, love, Love!

A Movie Every Night: The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia (2006)
Director: Brian De Palma
Starring: Josh Harnett, Scarlett Johansson, not nearly enough Aaron Eckhart and far too much Hilary Swank

Josh Hartnett doing what he does best: staring into brown space

"Junior Nash was an inbred, Okie shit-kicker."

That's the only line in the movie worth quoting and it's straight out of Ellroy. I haven't read this book in years, but I seem to remember being interested in what happened to the characters. It was a grisly case, no one was all good or all bad, and that trip down to Tijuana and finding Lee and how he really dies ----- dude. My friend Jeff said he had to shower after reading it. In this version we get guys falling from a balcony and death in a fountain (which reminds me, Scarface is on tv tonight). It was really hard to care about what happened to these people and maybe I wasn't supposed to care, but, then again, maybe investing in them might have made it a better movie to sit through because it certainly made it a good book.

I blame the sepia tone. The whole thing is coated in brown except for one artsy moment at the end, one real, colorful, exciting moment and it's OH wait it's a nightmare hallucination.

Color = bad.

Oh Brian ... geez, you know, when you were copying Hitchcock I thought it was really cool. Some people thought you were just being unimaginative. I said nooooooo he's paying homage. He appreciates Hitchcock. He wants to show his love of Hitch's style. And, sure, some of the acting is kind of flat in The Untouchables, but Mamet's hard to do if you're not used to it ("Nice house. I said. Nice. House.") and who cared since the music was Morricone and the clothes were Armani? But you had Ellroy here. You had some hopped up great dialogue and it's drowned in floppy fake music and lost in weird, slow, unnecessary moments of nothingness.

You could have at least kept the Ensenada burial ground.

O

The full moon is coming. I know because this came through the work email this morning:


Message: You have an employee at one of your San Antonio by the name [name removed, but it was in the email] who used to work the bakery dept. at the Cosco store here in El Paso, TX I need to buy some pot and cocain from him as well as his usual store merchandise he steels and sells. Can you help me contac him?\\ thanks tom


"Tom" also provided his phone number and email address so we could hook him up with the Steelin' Deeler. Oh yeah, I don't work for Costco, so I'm not entirely sure why he chose us for this message, but I'm so glad he did.

A Movie Every Night: A Hard Day's Night

A Hard Day's Night (1964)
Director: Richard Lester
Starring: John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Wilfrid Brambell (the 5th Beatle)

John shares his hobbies

Maybe you don't have brothers. Maybe you haven't seen Jackass. Maybe you went to an all-girls school for your entire life and have never once run around like crazy with a group of boys who don't care if they tear their pants or fall on their face because the fun is in the freedom and the laughing and the falling down and tearing your pants.

It's pretty infectious.

And let's face it, adults are boring. They have to conform to conventions. They have to be reasonable. And it's funny, if you think about it, being middle-aged and old takes up most of your time. Get out once and awhile and forget what you've got to do and be what you really are. Parade yourself before it's too late!

Honestly, who can't appreciate that? Love them, like them, hate them -- I defy anyone to keep from joining in however briefly you do so.

Ringo contemplates the diagonal with his lovely Pentax

We all know the ending. We've seen the future. The beautiful black and white photography of Gilbert Taylor is lovely and somewhat poignant, knowing that he later did that weird hazy work in The Omen and the silly, eye-popping Flash Gordon. But this is the past, right after he shot Dr. Strangelove and right before Repulsion; when Richard Lester could move his camera through train corridors and chase his subjects down streets; when the boys were all young and alive and happy.

Do the pony and the jerk, let go of the night and fly through the day. You won't regret it. Not one moment.

Until it ends.