“We’ve got people playing stringed instruments; it’s the end of days, brother.”

Once again, Brad and I have teamed up for another Blog-Off, so be sure to check out Brad's review/essay when you're finished here.

Christopher Morris' Four Lions initially caught my attention for two reasons. The more innocuous reason being that it is the first film distributed (Stateside, at least) by the Alamo Drafthouse's new distribution arm, Drafthouse Films. The second, potentially nocuous reason is that it is a farcical British comedy about a group of inept would-be London suicide bombers. I don't know how this film was received in its native England, but it's the kind of movie that would have generated plenty of controversy, had it gotten a little more mainstream attention that is.

Before getting into any kind of discussion about the merits of making such a comedy, I just want to say a few things about the movie itself. Overall, I think Four Lions is a great film. I think it primarily succeeds in its ability to handle tone, particularly its ability to gradually shift from a light-hearted farce to a grim dark comedy over 97 minutes. For the first 30 or so minutes, Four Lions is a black comedy almost in theory only. The suicide bombing aspect could have been easily switched out for any other harebrained scheme, and the movie would have only lost its nominal edginess. It is a fleet, fast-paced, British comedy, reminiscent of the excellent In the Loop. But just as it lulls the audience into almost forgetting that they are watching a group of potential suicide bombers, the movie begins introducing darker elements that proceed to progressively ground the movie in more realism. Its near-slapstick buffoonery slowly gives way to a grim, dark, and utterly audacious black comedy by the film's end. It's wonderfully executed, at times laugh out loud funny, and generally a bold success.

That being said, I would be remiss if I didn't at least try and address the issue of making a comedy about suicide bombers. Should a movie be made about suicide bombers? I'm of the mind that nothing is categorically off limits for comedy. Just, the more sensitive the subject, the more onus the filmmakers bear for justifying using such a topic as a basis for humor. Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, his 1940 lampooning of Hitler, gets referenced lot when discussing Four Lions as an example of a film that uses humor to address serious social and political topics. Generally, simply being funny can be enough for me, but the addition of some kind of social or personal insight will all but earn my seal of approval. I'm not terribly sensitive about a lot of topics, but it certainly is not a given that people can pull this off (Louis C.K., one of my favorite comedians, tends to walk this line but not always necessarily on the right side of it, in my opinion).

Does Four Lions justify its existence as a comedy regarding suicide bombers? I would argue yes, with one caveat. It is funny and ultimately treats its subject matter with appropriate reverence by the end. What it does not do, that some viewers may wish it would, is really explore more in-depth facets of suicide bombing. Whether that be what drives an individual to attempt such an act, what underlying social ills give rise to a culture featuring such behavior, or what the human consequences of suicide bombing actually are, Four Lions doesn't concern itself with delving too deeply into these issues. This may earn it some accusations of simple sensationalism, but personally I would disagree. It earns its place by virtue of being funny enough, while fully acknowledging what it's dealing with as the film progresses. I don't think it provides any scathing personal or social insight into suicide bombing, though. Some have argued that the movie is saying that suicide bombing is born of a dangerous mix of misguided passion and blatant idiocy, but within the insular world of the movie, almost everyone is an idiot, suicide bomber or not.

In writing about this, I realized that Four Lions prompted a lot more thoughts than I initially thought it would. Rather than make this any longer than it already is, I'll just say that Four Lions is destined to be a cult classic. It seems to have avoided a fair amount of controversy by virtue of flying more or less under the radar, but it's the rare film that seemed to have avoided its potential detractors and landed in the laps of its intended audience. An audience that I can only imagine will grow via word-of-mouth over time.

[NOTE: In writing this, I may have googled some very suspicious phrases. If I happen to disappear in the near future, please inform the US Federal Government of my undying patriotism.]

“Do you want to meet a ghost?”

Warning: reading this post may kill you. Or at least turn you into an unsightly black smear on your wall. Beware…

Over the past couple of years, I've taken to listening to more and more podcasts (mostly of the film variety, with Battleship Pretension probably being my favorite). As listening to podcasts has increasingly become part of my daily routine, I've caught myself almost referring to podcast hosts as "friends" or "people I know" when talking to real-live people. I have yet to actually verbalize that mistake, but it's been on the tip of my tongue more than I care to admit. The immersion into online life is a massive contemporary issue, and one that becomes increasingly important by the day. It's no wonder, then, that movies like Catfish gain (relatively) large amounts of attention. All the more impressive is a decade-old film that elegantly, prophetically, and terrifyingly explores what the online world can potentially do to us as social animals.

Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 film Pulse is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the J-Horror genre. And although it may be the best that I've seen, it is hardly a traditional horror film. The plot consists two parallel stories; one follows a young woman, Michi, whose friends and coworkers start to mysteriously kill themselves or simply disappear, while the other follows a college student, Ryosuke, as his first experience with the internet drags him into a dark world littered with ghosts seeping through into our world via the internet. Ultimately, their paths cross, as the epidemic spreads throughout Tokyo, Japan, and the rest of the world.

Pulse initially presents itself as a typical, though excellent, Japanese ghost movie. Characters start dying almost immediately, replaced not with corpses, but with dirty black smears hidden inside rooms sealed off with red tape. As Michi, Ryosuke, and their respective friends investigate, they stumble upon unsettling videos of the dead and missing online, as well as terrifying apparitions that appear from within the sealed rooms. Through the first 30-45 minutes, Pulse is a tense and terrifying horror movie about the ghosts in various machines. The ghosts themselves are nerve-wracking and otherworldly; Kurosawa's use of slow motion and blurry focus creates a simple but utterly terrifying effect. But what elevates Pulse beyond a well-executed horror film is its abandonment of the horror genre at about the 45 minute mark, at which point it veers away from horror and into a bleak philosophical meditation on isolation, loneliness, and the fear of death.

As I watched Pulse, I remember being thoroughly confused by it. It was going in directions that seemed so out of place with its own first half. After watching it, I wasn't sure what to make of it. My initial reaction wasn't so much that I liked it, but more of a general "what was that?" After a day or two, though, everything had seeped into my brain, rattled around a bit, and I realized how thoroughly impressed I was with it. It is dark, bleak, and more than a little confusing, but it's ultimately a fantastic movie about the dangers of the replacement of real life social interactions with digital facsimiles. It grimly warns of the dangers of our ever increasing need for interconnectedness being taken over by less and less nourishing replacements. Our reliance on easily accessible replacements ultimately breeds a desperate feeling of loneliness and isolation, instilling a fear that drives more attempts to feel connected, but that simply erode social ties even more.

Part of what is so impressive about Pulse is its ability to seemingly have increasing relevance as the years go by. Made during the nascent years of the internet's takeover of mainstream life, its horrific vision of what our reliance on technology does to individuals seems amazingly prophetic (albeit somewhat dated, especially when it comes to Ryosuke and his initial ventures into the computer world). Unlike many sci-fi and horror stories warning of an overreliance on technology, Pulse sets its sights not on technology's takeover of human function, but its takeover and erosion of the interconnectedness of human existence. Ten years old and I struggle to think of a film more geared toward the (admittedly paranoid and overly grim) concerns and issues of our evolving social lives than Pulse.

I recently had an exchange with a college friend via Facebook. Among other things, we both lamented that our college friendships seem to have withered over the past few years. We were both surprised and disheartened by this, both of us assuming that our various friendships were too important and meaningful than to just evaporate over time. I made a passing mention that maybe Facebook provides a bare minimum of connection that no one makes the effort to really, truly keep in touch. The fact that our friends' lives are so easily accessible online removes all motivation to actually keep in contact. I'm sad to say, I think I (and Kurosawa) may have been right.

[On a related and depressing side note, I passed up the opportunity to attend a leisure suit party last night, in which the leisure suits were actually provided for you, in order to sit in my apartment alone with my cat and work. Probably best not to take my advice when it comes to maintaining some semblance of a human social life. Consider me your bleak, ghastly Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.]

“This is what it’s all about. Beer, sun, and naked honeys making out underwater!”

It has been over nine months since I posted here. Children have been conceived and born since the OM was last up and running. It's been a sad, sad state of affairs around these parts. But thankfully, as he has done in the past, my brother Brad has resurrected the OM with a tempting offer of yet another OMvBLDPFMBoSD. On the table this time around? Piranha 3D, now in glorious 2D in my living room! So after you're done reading my (much more insightful and better written) take, be sure to check out Brad's.

Spring Break has descended on the small, usually sleepy Lake Victoria, overrunning the town with bikini-clad coeds and shirtless meatheads partying and boozing. A good orgiastic time was had by all. The end. Oh wait, not so fast. It seems a local earthquake has cracked open the lake bottom, opening a fissure into an enormous, previously isolated and self-contained underground lake, releasing countless vicious prehistoric piranhas intent on feasting upon the hordes of oblivious revelers. Then a good orgiastic time is had by all.

Director Alexandre Aja built his reputation as part of the vanguard of extreme French horror (e.g., Inside, Frontier(s), and most notoriously Martyrs) with his 2003 film Haute Tension (a film whose merits Brad and I adamantly disagreed about). Although Piranha is Aja's 3^rd English language film, after his The Hills Have Eyes and Mirrors remakes, it is a marked tonal departure from his previous movies. Rather than the oppressively grim, nihilism of his previous movies, Piranha was clearly always meant to be campy, exploitative trash, more intent on having visceral fun than hammering the audience with dehumanizing brutality. Piranha is replete with near constant nudity and exaggerated, pretty silly, albeit still very graphic, violence.

Overall, Piranha is almost exactly what I was expecting it to be, but it was still a bit disappointing. My initial reaction was somewhat reminiscent of my reaction to Hostel, though I liked Piranha much more. I think there's an inherent problem with trying to make an intentionally campy exploitation movie. Sometimes a film, by pure accident, slips from the realm of bad to stupidly and entertainingly insane. But attempts to recreate that phenomenon on purpose usually rob the subsequent film of an earnestness that is often a necessary and organic part of its appeal. Essentially, too much self-awareness can doom a project like Piranha. Although Piranha is definitely not "doomed" by self-awareness, it is hobbled by it. For whatever reason, I didn't care for the Richard Dreyfuss cameo at the beginning, and a scene in which Ving Rhames uses a boat motor as a weapon was more a rip-off than wink towards Dead Alive. Christopher Lloyd's appearance as a manic marine biologist was great fun, though.

Speaking of the cast, Piranha sports a pretty impressive roster. It's always great to see Elizabeth Shue, here as Lake Victoria's sheriff (she seriously needs to get more and better work; she was easily the best part of Leaving Las Vegas, outshining Nicholas Cage's Oscar-winning but painfully one-note performance). Adam Scott is an actor on the ascent that I always like seeing, and he's good here as a seismologist/general man of action. Jerry O'Connell appears as a Joe Francis (of Girls Gone Wild and general terrible human being fame) surrogate, and while I don't much care for O'Connell, his admittedly one-dimensional performance is played to the nines and a lot of fun. Everyone seems very game for the very over-top silliness of the movie. Including a cameo by Eli Roth as the host of a wet T-shirt contest, that's really only worth mentioning to point out that at one point he calls a woman's breasts her "Danny DeVitos."

All that being said, Piranha is an entertaining, trashy good time. For all of its problems, Piranha does succeed in its essential mission, to cram as much sex, violence, and superficial fun into a lean 88 minutes as humanly possible. The aforementioned violence varies greatly in quality, entirely dependent on whether Aja is utilizing CGI (which is embarrassingly bad) or practical effects (which are extremely gory and overall pretty impressive). Especially during the central set-piece of the movie, a pretty astoundingly prolonged scene of the piranhas' attack on the party-goers. For instance, an initially great effect (that loses a lot of its impact due to its repeated use) is when someone is attacked in the water and then pulled out to reveal their limbs have been reduced to skinny, bloody bones, held together by a minimal amount of flesh. (The first few times this happens, it's a great use of practical special effects and an effective reveal. After a while, all it did was remind me of that old Titannica sketch from Mr. Show.) Piranha does its job of providing a number of memorable kills, such as an attack victim splitting in half as she is being carried out of the lake by two cops and (in my opinion the most cringe inducing) a woman getting her hair tangled in a boat propeller. And I have to admit, the very strange extended nude underwater ballet scene was something I have never seen before. Made all the stranger by characters' constant insistence that it was "so hot."

I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the 3D elements. Piranha was filmed in 2D and post-converted (as opposed to having been filmed with 3D cameras a la Avatar), but was always planned to be 3D. And the "it's coming right at me" moments are pretty obvious to pick out. There are a lot of piranhas that turn and snap at the camera, a couple of scenes of fast moving piranha-vision, and at least one moment of a girl puking directly at the camera. Probably the most notorious moment in Piranha is Jerry O'Connell's death, in which the piranhas devour the lower half of his body, including "taking [his] penis." Cut to a shot of a piranha swimming up to you and regurgitating said half-digested penis. I'm sure seeing this movie in the theaters in 3D would have amped up its trashy appeal, but I'm not sure that it would have been worth all the extra money.

Overall, Piranha 3D gave me pretty much exactly what I was looking for. While it wasn't overly satisfying, it still provided a pretty substanceless good time. This is very much the cinematic equivalent of junk food, plenty of empty calories with absolutely no nutritional value.

[EDIT: In true OM fashion, this has been up for less than an hour, and I've already had to fix a couple of typos.]

“Do you love him, Loretta? [I love him awful.] Oh God, that’s too bad.”

Well, we're at it once again. Brad and I are writing up simultaneous posts, and at the risk of pigeon-holing ourselves after only two ventures, we're doing another Nicolas Cage movie: Moonstruck. I promise that the next OMvBLDPFM blog-off won't be about Nicolas Cage. It'll be about F.W. Marnau. Or maybe Aliens versus Predator: Requiem. Or something in between. Who knows? But not Cage-related. Probably.

Moonstruck is a multiple Oscar-winning romantic comedy from 1987 about a few days in Brooklyn when the full moon brings the trials and tribulations of love to the fore. Cher plays Loretta, a widow, who upon accepting a marriage proposal from Danny Aiello, agrees to invite his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to their wedding in an attempt to act as a go-between in patching up their rift while Aiello flies to Italy to be by his dying mother's bedside. Loretta, as much as she resists, falls hard and hopelessly in love with the emotionally intense and charismatic Ronny. The conflict between what Loretta wants v. what she can't resist, who she likes v. who she loves, and doing what she wants v. doing what she must is mirrored in a pair of subplots involving her father and her mother. These various conflicts play out in a close-knit, family-oriented, über-Italian Brooklyn setting.

I had seen the first half of Moonstruck a couple of years ago. I was at a conference in Tampa when I came down with the flu. The first thing I did when I got home was brew some chamomile tea and turn on TCM. Moonstruck was on, so I laid in bed, drank tea, and watched a romantic comedy starring Cher. When later recounting this to my mom, she promptly asked me when I had turned into an old woman. My mom's opinion aside, the truth is, I really liked what I saw. It was entertaining and heart-warming in a completely comfortable and non-threatening sort of way. It turns out the movie only starts strong before meandering through some perfunctory plot points, eventually petering to a painfully unsatisfactory conclusion.

That may sound overly harsh, but given its critical acclaim and its strong beginning, the mediocrity on display is a little more painful than usual. Aside from a couple of good performances and a few good moments, Moonstruck doesn't have much to offer that can't be found in your typical romantic comedy. Not to dump on romantic comedies. Some of them can be pretty great (see It Happened One Night, The Apartment, High Fidelity, or even Notting Hill), it's just that Moonstruck is decidedly not great.

As far as its Oscar pedigree, Moonstruck picked up wins for Best Actress (Cher), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Olympia Dukakis, playing Loretta's mother, Rose), as well as three additional nominations for Best Director (Norman Jewison), Best Picture, and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Vincent Gardenia, playing Loretta's father, Cosmo). After watching the movie, I'm convinced that Moonstruck just had the good luck of being 1987's pick for the annual non-stuffy Oscar pet. Much like Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Erin Brockovich, The Blind Side, and countless others before them, there always seems to be one mediocre movie that has some combination of pseudo-indie (and thus "artistic") credibility and mainstream appeal that the Academy touts and rewards with undeserved attention (full disclosure: I've never seen Juno, so for all I know, it deserved all the praise it got, but the rest are painfully average, at best). The Academy seems to pick one a year and nominates it for a host of awards, presumably to draw popular attention to the bloated, meaningless, political, and ultimately very frustrating self pat on the back that is the Oscars. My guess is that Moonstruck was 1987's offer from the Academy to the hoi polloi.

Ultimately, the worst element to Moonstruck was the story. It suffers from spreading three tales of infidelity in the service of love, infidelity in spite of love, and fidelity in the face of temptation too thin over its 100 minute run time. The romance of the primary storyline never gives the viewer any reason to buy into it, it simply plugs along with a mechanical sort of "because that's the way it's written" mentality. It very obviously takes for granted the viewers' need for any kind of relational development. Not fairing any better, the two subplots are only easy to believe because they're so trite. One thing all three storylines have in common is that none of them go anywhere of interest. The ending to Moonstruck is so pointless and insulting that it borders on personal offense. If you've ever seen an ending to a movie that is a frustrating combination of obvious and so stupid you can't believe they actually went through with it, that's the ending to Moonstruck.

The beginning is comfortably enjoyable, but the movie quickly reaches an apex when Cage's Ronny delivers a manic, melodramatic monologue about the origins of the rift with his brother somewhere around the half an hour mark. There are a number of ridiculous lines that Cage delivers with a pitch perfect tongue-in-cheek earnestness, if such a thing is possible. That scene and the final breakfast table scene are easily the highlights of the movie, with Cage replacing manic, off-kilter intensity for a comical silence as he plays passive observer to the unfolding drama. Cage and Dukakis's understated performance as the somewhat prideful, always calm, and (mostly) quietly suffering matriarch are really the only two things Moonstruck has going for it. And unfortunately, that's simply not enough.

Don't forget to check out Brad's take over at Brad Liening's Daily Poem Factory-Machine.

[Note: I glanced over the last few entries, and Jesus there are a lot of typos. I'll try and put a little more effort into proofreading these things before posting them. Sorry about that. It's kind of embarrassing, actually.]

[Note: God damn it, I already found a typo and fixed it. Seriously, why is this so hard?]

“Like every serial killer already knows, eventually fantasizing just doesn’t do it anymore.”

I don't have any kind of clever personal lead in to this. Basically, my friend Conor called me and asked if I wanted to see Kick-Ass at the Alamo, and I said yes.

For those who don't know (presumably people who aren't huge nerds), Kick-Ass follows a nondescript teenage boy who asks himself, "why hasn't anyone ever tried to be a super hero?" and decides to take it upon himself to do just that. He figures that super-heroism requires nothing more than a costume and a desire to help people. Granted, he has no super powers, is movie-scrawny (which is to say super fit, but skinny), and knows nothing about crime fighting, or fighting in general, for that matter. After constructing a costume out of a scuba suit and naming himself "Kick-Ass," he sets out on the streets of New York City to fight crime. This sets off two chains of events: first, one of his ill-conceived attempts at stopping crime is recorded and uploaded to the internet, making him a viral sensation; second, he runs into a father-daughter team of masked crime fighters who have been operating for an indeterminate amount of time, but entirely under the radar.

I will start by saying that I enjoyed the movie. It's incredibly vulgar, extremely violent (in that over-the-top, comical, desensitizing way), and is frequently laugh out loud funny. It's a clever, action-heavy, super-hero send up, that at its best is exciting and fun, and at its worst is a little too wink-at-the-audience and has a tendency to fall into the same clichés it's satirizing. People who aren't into comics and super-heroes will probably find it to be enjoyable escapism, and people who are familiar with the ins-and-outs of comics will find it to be smart (and at times, frustrating) on top of that.

The two basic storylines mentioned above more or less breakdown what I liked about Kick-Ass and what didn't really work for me. I really like the character of Kick-Ass. Granted, his real-life alter-ego is something of a non-entity, but the ways in which he attempts to adopt the super-hero lifestyle can be absolutely hilarious. In a twisted bizarro sense, he actually succeeds at his job. In multiple scenes, Kick-Ass successfully stops crime on his own essentially by getting his ass kicked. Either the criminals spend too much time beating him and the cops show up or his beating attracts too much attention from nearby gawkers. Kick-Ass is perpetually in over his head in a comically brutal yet determined way. His naivety and determination in the face multiple savage beating and near total ineptitude manages to elicit a funny combination of inspiration and embarrassment, admiration and facepalming.

Mixed into Kick-Ass's personal storyline is a fair amount of pretty clever satire. The dialogue, for instance, is often intentionally clunky and heavy-handed, and when it hits, is a pitch perfect send-up of tough-guy super-hero movies. There's a fair amount of comedy mined from the idea that the simple pragmatics of being a hero are actually a lot harder than one would probably anticipate. For instance, Kick-Ass sets up a Myspace page to act as a sort of "hero upon request" system after he realizes that just wandering the streets looking for crime doesn't really work (such as his attempt to find a lost cat). This side of the movie, the more comedic and satirical side, is really what I enjoyed.

Eventually Kick-Ass runs afoul of a low level drug dealer. Coincidentally, a father-daughter hero team has been targeting this particular drug ring. Hit-Girl and Big Daddy save Kick-Ass and thus he is introduced to two legitimate vigilant heroes. At this point the real plot kicks in, as Kick-Ass is thrust into real-life crime-fighting and the battle between a drug king pin and a pair of sociopathic costumed avengers. It's this element to the movie that didn't work nearly as well for me. It bears exciting action fruit, to be fair, but it also undercuts a lot of the more clever satire from the rest of the movie. In most respects, Kick-Ass turns into a typical super-hero story.

There are two things that I feel obligated to mention. The first is the character of Hit-Girl, an extremely foul-mouthed eleven year old girl trained by her father her entire life to be a brutally efficient killer. Just about every review of Kick-Ass makes explicit mention of Hit-Girl and how she steals the movie. Personally, I wasn't all that impressed. The acting is fine for a young actress, but hardly noteworthy. Her character is extremely one-note, the novelty of watching a little girl dismember mobsters and drug dealers wears off almost as quickly as the novelty of watching a young girl spout near endless streams of profanity. It's sort of like a bloody version of Sarah Silverman. I get it. The trailer alone was enough for me to tire of the shtick. About the only thing that stuck out to me as really good about the Hit-Girl character was that since she is so small, a lot of her stunts were pretty acrobatic (a lot of jumping and flipping over and around the villains).

The other thing I feel I must mention is Nicolas Cage, who plays Big Daddy. His performance is oddly un-Cage-like, too self-aware and too labored to really be a true "Nic Cage" performance. This isn't to say it's bad, it fits with the style of the movie quite well, actually. From the way he refers to his daughter as "child" to the stilted Adam West speaking cadence he adopts as Big Daddy to the special costume element that perfectly rounds out his disguise. It's an over-acted performance that I found enjoyable at a pretty easy and superficial level. It's no Wicker Man or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but it's pretty fun just the same.

Oh wait, forget what I said earlier, there is a personal side to this entry. I guess it's more of an outro than intro this time, though.

After the movie, Conor and I decided to head out around downtown for a while. We first headed to the Driskill, a fancy historic hotel in downtown Austin with a very relaxed and comfortable bar. First of all, there were two separate wedding parties at the bar, so brides, grooms, and fancily dressed wedding-goers abounded in the background. To start off with, I order a whiskey and ginger ale, only to be told that the bar is out of ginger ale. The bartender asks me if I would prefer a whiskey with coke and sprite mixed together. I respond, "uh…does that work?" with flashes of Seinfeld going through my head. He assures me that ginger ale is just sprite with a splash of coke, so I acquiesce. And what do you know? He's right! It totally tasted the same. So Conor and I take our drinks and plop down on a big cushy leather couch with garish/awesome spotted cow hide sides.

After about a drink, we relocate to the bar, at which point Conor and I became privy to the hooking up of a pair of middle-aged bar flies. To my right was a forty-something man wearing a white T-Shirt that said "I (heart) lesbians" and to Conor's left was a lone forty-something woman. We were their go-betweens as they passed notes written on bar napkins back and forth. Eventually the man moved to sit next to her and they proceeded to full-on, open-mouthed make out, while the woman rubbed the man's crotch with her knee, before the two departed into the night, holding hands (seriously, holding hands). Watching those two may have been the highlight of the night.

At one point I get up to use the bathroom. The Driskill bathroom has two urinals with back stones in the bottom in lieu of urinal cakes and stalls with full floor-to-ceiling doors. I walk into the bathroom and both urinals are in use, so I head to the first stall. I open the door just as the man inside is pulling up his pants. After a quick, "oops!" I shut the door and go to the next stall, where I again walk in on a man pulling up his pants. After a somewhat bewildered, "shit, sorry!" the first guy explains that there are no locks on the door, and just as he was pulling up his pants, he saw the handle turn. He said he figured it was "uncanny timing" so he didn't say anything. I proceed to use the now vacant stall and walk out to wash my hands. There is a fifty-something Asian man in full engineering nerd attire (khaki pants, short-sleeved button-down shirt, tucked in, with an enormous phone holstered on his belt) using the sink next to me. A stranger yells from the urinals "I can't tell my asshole from a black stone in a urinal!" This makes no sense to me, but sends the Asian man into boisterous guffaws and muttering things like "good one" to himself as he strolls out of the bathroom. Nothing about the individual elements is that outrageous, but added together, it was one of the more surreal bathroom trips in recent memory.

The night finally ends with Conor and I meeting up with my friend Lance at a place around the corner from the Driskill. My attempts to meet up with Lance lead to a frustrating "who's on first" series of texts. Lance: Come meet us at Lavaca St between 4^th and 5^th. Me: Cool, where are you at? Lance: Lavaca St. Me: I know, which bar. Lance: Lavaca St between 4^th and 5^th. Eventually I gave up trying to get Lance to tell me where he is, and it wasn't until Conor and I saw the sign that we realized the bar was actually called Lavaca St, as well as being located on Lavaca St. We all had a good chuckle when Conor and I got there. "Oh, hahaha."

And so ended my Kick-Ass adventure…

“I need the coke back. I snorted what I thought was coke, turns out it was heroin, and I have to be to work in an hour…”

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Ow, that hurt all my senses at once…

I seem to have the exact same reaction to every Jason Statham movie. At first I think it looks absolutely terrible. Then I really, really want to see it. Then I see it and realize that it was both absolutely terrible and absolutely awesome. This leads me to a night of dubious distinction, a Crank mini-marathon in which a small group of intrepid friends joined me for a night of drink and Crank and Crank: High Voltage.

Plot is hardly either Crank's strong suit, so I guess consider this your SPOILER WARNING, in as much as it's possible to spoil a movie with almost no plot. So let's get the plots, such as they are, out of the way now. In Crank, Jason Statham plays Chev Chelios, a mob hit man who is poisoned and the only way to hold off death by heart failure is to constantly keep his adrenaline pumping. In Crank: High Voltage, Chelios has had his heart stolen and replaced with a mechanical one that requires constant electrical jolts to keep it from failing. In both movies, Chelios goes on a violent rampage through the streets of Los Angeles, killing multitudes of people, causing near limitless amounts of property damage, all while trying to track down salvation from his imminent demise.

The two movies are fairly similar. Both are hyper-stylized, filmed and edited in a post-MTV sensory barrage. The experience is akin to watching a hard-R 90 minute music video, and it is as awesome, bizarre, and exhausting as that might sound. The stylistic flourishes on display can be so constant, varied, and fast-paced that it almost defies description. In terms of content, Crank and Crank: High Voltage are both filled to the brim with unending, extremely graphic violence. For instance, in one memorable moment from Crank, Chelios chops off a man's hand and the man then proceeds to take a swing at Chelios only to miss and punch the pavement with his bloody stump. And that could probably be considered fairly tame (if more cringe-inducing) compared to the rest of the movie.

Despite the fact that Crank and Crank: High Voltage are so similar, it's kind of astounding how different my reaction to each movie was. I thought Crank was extremely fun, well made, and surprisingly witty (more clever than intelligent, but occasionally witty nonetheless). The movie is definitely inventive and a whole lot of fun, assuming you have a tolerance for comical over-the-top violence, irreverence, and a healthy dose of absurdism. One of my favorite moments is when Chelios goes to a hospital to steal a shot of artificial adrenaline. He forgets how much his doctor (played by Dwight Yokum of all people) told him to take, and ends up taking five times as much as he was supposed to. Upon realizing this, he shoots out of the elevator and sprints down the streets of LA, going full tilt in a hospital gown, on the phone with his doctor, while an erection visibly flops around under his gown. (That may sound stupid in writing, and is also stupid in the movie, but it's still incredibly funny. If this sounds just regular stupid and you can't see any reason why this would be appealing, Crank probably isn't for you.)

Crank: High Voltage, on the other hand, is the kind of movie that you walk away from feeling a little stupider than you did before you watched it. Even the paper thin plot is abandoned fairly quickly, as the movie dissolves into a mind-numbing series of increasingly bizarre and nonsensical events. The most egregious example of this is when Chelios chases a Chinese gangster toting Chelios's heart in an ice cooler into an electrical transformer. After Chelios charges his heart by grabbing the transformer, he mutates into a giant Godzilla-monster version of himself, the Chinese gangster also inexplicably mutates into a giant, and they fight for a while before they both inexplicably change back to normal. The rest of movie tries to push the envelope with results that are mixed at best. It's not a total loss and there are some pretty great moments (the movie opens with Chelios literally being scraped off the pavement with a snow shovel), but those moments are overshadowed by absolutely horrible ones that are sprinkled liberally throughout. For instance, a shoot out in a strip club involves a stripper having her breast implant shot and ruptured, spewing silicon all over, and in another scene an obese gangster is sodomized with a motor oil covered shot gun. All-in-all, the hit to miss ratio in Crank: High Voltage is pretty bad.

I can honestly say that if you think Crank might appeal to you, you should really, really check it out. It's an extremely fun, entertaining movie, and surprisingly inventive at times. While Crank: High Voltage wasn't a total waste, I was ultimately pretty disappointed. I guess if you walk away from Crank thinking to yourself, "you know, that movie was kind of slow and boring and way too plot heavy," then maybe Crank: High Voltage will be right up your alley. (All that being said, I'm already pretty jazzed about the possibility of a third Crank movie.)

“Maybe there’s no middle ground. The void has won.”

As evidenced by the massive delay between my last post and this one, I had all but abandoned this blogging business. I had vague intentions of taking it up again, but a lethal combination of an exhausting work schedule and laziness effectively killed any efforts to resurrect the OM. Thankfully some gentle nudging from my brother Brad has finally got my ass in gear. So send your thanks/curses to Brad, because the Octopus Motor is back! (Until I get busy/lazy again, anyways…)

I am definitely one of those people who goes through phases in which I tire of all of the music in my collection. Not only that, but I tire of all of the music that sounds like the music in my collection. As frustrating as this can be, I usually end up finding something that is unlike anything else I've heard before. There are few things I find as exciting as hearing something completely new after a drought of listening to the same things over and over again.

"Excited" is definitely an apt describe for how I felt after hearing Shining for the first time. The first song I heard was "Healter Skelter" (yes, that's how it's spelled) off their newest album, Blackjazz. With an album title like that, I was expecting some combination of black metal and free jazz, and "Healther Skelter" pretty much delivered just that. Or at least the first minute to minute and a half did. As random squawks and awkward staccato drumming rambled on for about a minute and a half, I was not impressed. But by the half way point through the five and a half minute long song, the drumming took shape and the squawks were enveloped by propulsive, intricate, face-shattering guitars. By the time it ended, I was sold. I had to have more and as soon as possible.

Shining are a band that is incredibly hard to pin down. Writers have described them as "part bop, part experimental composition," "jazz metal," and "neither black metal nor jazz." Odd as it sounds, a combination of "jazz metal" and "neither black metal nor jazz" sounds about right. Ultimately, Shining's music is (in no particular order) abrasive, intricate, heavy, progressive, influenced by both black metal and free jazz, intimidating, smart, and incredibly unique. The first time I listened to Blackjazz's first track, "The Madness and the Damage Done," it sounded like a disjointed wall of noise, as if there was a room full of musicians, all playing different songs as loud as they could, trying as hard as possible to drown each other out:

But by the second time I heard it, I realized that the song (and most of the rest of the album, for that matter) was an intricately woven tapestry of interlocking parts. Like some kind of experimental game of sonic Tetris. All of the musicians were playing incredibly different parts, but all those parts fit together to form an initially difficult-to-grasp whole. The drums pummel at a break neck speed, while multiple guitar lines jump in and out of the song at unexpected intervals and the vocals seem to be off in their own world. But "unexpected" doesn't mean inappropriate or random. It all fits together in a very structural, almost architectural sense, just not in a typical song-writing sense (I guess that means you can probably add "math rock" to that list of influences and descriptions).

Shining can be, and often is, heavy, abrasive, and seemingly inscrutable. The music also, just for good measure, will periodically all give way to lengthy passages of ambient noise, jazzy horn squawks, slow gentle instrumentation, or full-on, mind-breaking free for alls. Though "The Madness and The Damage Done" is probably the most accessible song on the album (and first single), to get a real sense of what Shining does so well, one needs to look no further than the true centerpiece of Blackjazz, "Blackjazz Deathtrance:"

To truly enjoy and appreciate Blackjazz takes a certain combination of patience, attention, and tolerance. This is music that will only appeal to a very small contingent of people. It's too strange to appeal to most metal fans, too heavy to appeal to most prog rock fans, and just flat out too weird and abrasive to appeal to pretty much anyone else. But that being said, Shining is making truly unique music. The more time I spend with Blackjazz, the more I realize how unlike it is from just about anything I've heard before.

As exciting as uniqueness can be, it can also cover up plenty of deficiency. I've been duped by novelty before, but Blackjazz is more than mere novelty. As viscerally exciting as Blackjazz was the first few times through, that visceral excitement has given way to a more cerebral appreciation. What was mind-erasingly intense the first few times through has shown itself to be well executed and well structured musical innovation. But make no mistake, as the layers of howling quickly pile on top of one another at the start of "The Madness and The Damage Done," I still feel my body brace itself for an intense sensory assault. And then it starts all over again, better than the last time.

One of the ways Brad was able to convince me to resurrect the OM was the suggestion of some joint projects in the near future. I think we have our first one lined up, so stay tuned to the OM for the forthcoming Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans Octopus Motor v. Brad Liening's Daily Poem Factory-Machine Blog-off Smack Down: 2010. Or as it will be henceforth known, the BL:PoCNOOMvBLDPFMBoSD: 2010!

“Disposing of dead people is a public service, whereas you’re in all sorts of trouble if you kill someone while they’re still alive.”

I realize that I've haven't posted anything in a long time. I wish I could say I'm sorry about that, but I'm not. Sure I've read books, seen movies, and heard music worth telling other people about, but you know what? I didn't feel like writing anything, so I didn't. And I feel A-OK about that.

But. But. BUT. I just watched movie that I need to tell anyone and everyone about. I can't not spread the word about Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore), and all of its insane, batshit, hilarious glory.

What is Cemetery Man, you ask? Well, it's a movie that is something of a combination of horror, comedy, romance, erotica, drama, and giallo all wrapped up in some fever dream Freudian nightmare. Just about the only thing not in this movie was incest, which is really only noteworthy because I'm pretty sure this it's at least partially French.

Rupert Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte, the caretaker of a small town cemetery. He lives in a dilapidated house in the cemetery, along with his assistant Gnaghi (an absolutely amazing François Hadji-Lazaro), a bloated, dim-witted man-child who only communicates through a series of grunts. As is explained in the opening, people who are buried in the cemetery tend to rise from the grave within a week of being buried, making part of Dellamorte's job to matter-of-factly brandish an antique revolver in order to shoot any undead in the face at a moment's notice (or, as the case may be, whack them in the face with a sharpened spade).

Beyond that set-up, it's hard to figure out what else to recap of the plot, since the movie has a tendency to take bizarre turns frequently and at regular intervals. There's some stuff about impotence, impending nuptials involving the decapitated head of a teenage girl, a Death Incarnate-urged murderous rampage, and Buñuel-esque love story revolving around a woman who keeps reappearing despite Dellamorte repeatedly killing her. And violence. Oh the violence. The movie appears to be fairly low budget, but it is filled to the brim with graphic and gratuitous practical special effects (including exploding heads, lots of flesh-eating, and at least one scene of Dellamorte smashing a zombie nun's face into a bloody pulp).

I wish I could present something of a coherent explanation of what Cemetery Man is like, or even what it's about, but given its tendency to spin off into wild, unpredictable territory, I feel like it's nigh-impossible to do that. One thing to note, though, is that the movie never comes across like it is cobbled together from multiple narratives. Despite its crazy narrative, it does come across as basically linear. The movie moves from point A to point B to point C and so on perfectly smoothly, it just happens that points A, B, and C are vastly different from one another. But the movie never seems jumbled or mashed together.

At least part of the reason I loved this movie as much as I did was its huge stylistic debt to the giallo movies of the 1970s. I intend to write up a post entirely devoted to giallo at some point (we'll see if that ever happens), but basically giallo movies are horror or suspense films made in Italy primarily in the 1970s known for their overly stylized look, garish colors, intense musical scores, elaborate and gruesome set pieces, and their tendency to eschew logical narrative in favor of a typically surreal atmosphere. Cemetery Man more or less follows that template. Intense, almost suffocating visuals. A bizarre, dream-like narrative. Gruesome and stylized violence. And just all around amazing.

[After babbling about how great Cemetery Man is after watching it, my opinion was confirmed by my friends Conor, who said, "Yeah - that movie is fucking terrific, even if it's more than a little totally inexplicable. You're right - it's like they jammed together a horror movie, a love story, a Bruce Campbell style B-grade movie, and some strange Euro art film all into one movie. It's awesome," and Brencho who said, in part, "I love Cemetery Man…ahh, fuck…gross…"]

“’Scream! Squeal!’ Those were the first words I heard you say.”

Everyone I know who has seen the Swedish film Let the Right One In (aka Låt den rätte komma in) has seen it multiple times. When it first came out in theaters, no less than four people I know went back for a second viewing almost immediately after the first. Needless to say, I was extremely excited to see that it was going to be released on DVD last Tuesday. I immediately threw it at the top of my Netflix queue, and got to experience Let the Right One In shortly thereafter.

Just to come straight out with it, does Let the Right One In live up to the uniformly positive reviews? Is it so good that it warrants going back to the theater the next weekend to watch it again? Yes. I think it is fair to say that Let the Right One is a modern masterpiece. It is the kind of movie that begs repeated viewing, not because it is too dense or confusing that multiple viewings are required to appreciate it, but simply because it is so good that you'll inevitably just want to watch it again.

Let the Right One In chronicles the burgeoning relationship between Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and Eli (Lina Leandersson). Oskar is a lonely and neglected 12 year old boy; the only attention he receives is in the form of bullying at the hands of a gang of classmates led by the cruel Conny. Eli is Oskar's enigmatic new neighbor, a 12 year old girl who is kept isolated in her apartment, appearing sporadically in the housing project's courtyard at night, often underdressed and barefoot in the snow. The movie depicts the quotidian horror of being the strange kid growing up, the day-to-day problems, both emotional and logistical, of being a preteen vampire girl, and the bond that grows between these two young isolated children.

Tomas Alfredson's direction is characterized by a near clinical level of precision. Every shot, every edit, lighting, and sound are all carefully and thoughtfully chosen and expertly executed. It is apparent that everything in Let the Right One In has large amounts of thought behind it. This over controlled, over thought style of filmmaking can (and often does) choke all the life out of a movie, but thankfully the excellent and naturalistic performances of all the actors, and especially the lead child actors, breath more than enough life into the movie. The excellent acting and writing give Alfredson more than enough leeway to carefully construct his film exactly the way he wants it, down to the tiniest detail.

Ultimately, one of Let the Right One In's greatest strength is its ability to be so many things all at once. While most films that try to span genres and blend tones end up being messy failures, Let the Right One In succeeds so greatly in large part because it isn't trying to be everything at once. By simply being what it is, by simply telling the story that it wants to tell, Let the Right One In manages to be that perfect blend of tones, themes, and genres without having to try. It is a love story, a coming of age story, a tense thriller, a suspenseful horror movie, and at times a pitch black comedy all at once, and succeeds at doing all these things extremely well.

There are so many things that can be said about Let the Right One In. So many scenes are packed with subtly and ambiguity that repeated viewings and post-movie discussions will inevitably uncover more and more layers to characters' internal and external worlds. Everything in the movie is so downplayed and implied to such great effect, that any time anything is presented explicitly it is jarring, heartbreaking, and/or horrifying.

I would love to say more, but for the sake of spoilers, I won't. I will say this, see Let the Right One In, and see it multiple times.

“The detective…A dangerous and impulsive man.”

In Gun, With Occasional Music, author Jonathan Lethem marries hard-boiled pulp noir with dystopian sci-fi satire. Imagine if Jim Thompson wrote Brave New World (or if Aldous Huxley wrote The Killer Inside Me). I feel like a Philip K. Dick comparison would be particularly apt here, but I've never read any Dick, so I'm not going to make that comparison. But I feel like it's at least in the ball park.

Gun, With Occasional Music follows the misadventures of a private investigator named Conrad Metcalf, who has been hired by a murder suspect to clear his name. The victim? Metcalf's last client, the rich and successful urologist Maynard Stanhunt. Metcalf navigates a near-future Oakland, populated by gangsters, molls, crooked Inquisitors (i.e. the police), and evolved animals (including a particularly aggressive kangaroo mob enforcer named Joey). As the case progresses, Metcalf finds himself in a tangled web obsession, drugs, and violence that threatens to be his undoing in any number of fashions.

There are two things about Gun, With Occasional Music that are immediately striking. First is Lethem's prose, aping old hard-boiled dime store noir. Second is the near-future world he creates, a twisted take on a future recalling Brave New World that is both funnier and more horrifying than anything in Huxley's classic.

Lethem's prose is all hard-boiled dime novel. For instance, opening to a random page I find: "When the door closed, he turned to me and his eyes lit up for a second, and he came towards me with a fist coiled up at his waist, and smashed me right in the middle of the stomach. It was the closest thing to language that had passed between us. I guess I should have been grateful to the guy for opening himself up to me like that." To be perfectly honest, the overly self-conscious dime novel prose was distracting at first, but soon I gave myself over to the fun Lethem was having playing with pulp conventions. The prose is undoubtedly cool, and Lethem both buys into that cool and subverts it. One of the best running bits throughout the book is Metcalf's penchant for metaphor. Depending on how on top of his game he is at a given moment, Metcalf's metaphors drip with pulp cool or completely fall flat. This reoccurring bit sums up why Lethem's noir writing works, it can drip with cool, it can be silly, but it's always fun and always amazing.

Lethem's portrait of a near future Bay Area will be broadly familiar to anyone who's read any dystopian literature, but the particulars of his vision can be both haunting and hilarious. The closest predecessor to Lethem's dystopia would have to be the aforementioned Brave New World. In Lethem's future, everyone is on "make," a psychologically deadening class of drugs that include Acceptol, Avoidol, Forgettol, and similar variants. Politeness has been taken to such extremes that asking questions requires a license and any improprieties are punishable by law, specifically by reducing an individual's state-monitored "karma" (a sort of social currency). Nerve-swapping is both funny and more than a little unsettling. The evolution of the news media is so bizarre and amazing that describing it here wouldn't do it justice. I almost laughed out loud when I reached the moment where the title comes from.

And, of course, there is evolution. Animals can be scientifically "evolved," giving them the mental capacity of humans, leading to everything from child-surrogates, sex slaves, and the occasional kangaroo mob enforcer. The most horrifying aspect of Lethem's future, though, has to be the baby-heads. Baby-heads are infants that have gone through the same forced evolution as the animals, leading to a subculture of drug-addled, cynical, alcoholic infants who speak in surreal nonsense and riddles. Metcalf's trip to a baby-head bar is far and away the most memorable moment in the book, a cross between a crack house, an opium den, a flop house, and a dive bar, populated entirely by talking infants.

Gun, With Occasional Music is a quick, wonderful read. It is funny, scary, engrossing, confusing, and above all, entertaining. I would recommend it to anyone who likes detective stories, science fiction, satire, or simply good books.

Jandek Reviews, Pt. 2: Living in a Moon so Blue

As I mentioned in my review of Six and Six, I'm anticipating a lot of these Jandek albums to sound very similar to one another. For now, I'll give a brief recap of Jandek's sound, but focus more on giving a brief description of how Living in a Moon so Blue (1982) differs from Six and Six (1981). The upcoming installments in the Jandek Reviews series will follow this general format (brief description of Jandek's style with a description of how the current album differs from those that came before it). Unless I come across an album that is such a departure that warrants a brand new, from scratch review, I'll stick with this format. On to the review of Living in a Moon so Blue:

Jandek's music consists of a single man playing guitar and singing. The guitar is out of tune, and played with hard, unpleasant plucking, rather than strumming. The guitar playing can be arrhythmic and seemingly random. Jandek's singing is usually a hushed whisper, a sort of speak-singing, but can at times rise into a strained, somewhat atonal singing voice. The lyrics tend to be of a stream-of-consciousness, surreal, and nightmarish style. His music is unpleasant and strange, but much like his almost nonsensical lyrics, there is deep emotional and intimate content that is as easy to feel as it is oblique and difficult to make sense of.

Broadly, Living in a Moon so Blue doesn't deviate too much from that description. It does, however, differ from Six and Six in some ways. Lyrically, the album is not as impenetrable. The lyrics are still oblique and personal, but they make more literal sense than Six and Six. The guitar work seems to have progressed a bit. It is still difficult, out of tune, and consists mainly of plucking, but it seems less random. A few songs even incorporate some strumming, but it is just as harsh and abrasive as the plucking (e.g. "One Step Ahead" started giving me a headache by the end of its 2:24 run time). At times, the guitar sounds like it is being strummed and smacked at the same time ("Crime Pays"). Just as the guitar playing has progressed a bit, harmonica is introduced as well, such as in the song "Alexandria Knows."

Overall, Living in a Moon so Blue is very similar to Six and Six, but includes a little more variety and is slightly more straightforward. But make no mistake, this is still harsh, unpleasant, and difficult music. Part of what makes listening to Jandek rewarding is having the patience to appreciate the subtle changes to such a simple and singular approach.

“What’s it like to be stupid?”

If I had to describe Smart People in one word, it would be "generic." It is one of those self-consciously quirky pseudo-indie dramedies, populated by self-consciously quirky characters, who have self-consciously serious conversations peppered with overly clever dialogue. It's not unwatchable, by any means, but it is definitely something that you have seen before. Its familiarity is probably its best asset, lending the movie a nonthreatening sense of comfort.

Smart People follows how a series of events following a head trauma induced seizure changes everyone's lives (at first for the worse, but then for the better). Dennis Quad plays Lawrence Wetherhold, a curmudgeon of an English professor at Carnegie Mellon, who is taken to the Emergency Room after hitting his head while breaking out of the campus impound lot. There he meets Dr. Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former student of his, who informs him that due to the fact that he suffered a trauma-induced seizure after his fall, his license would have to be revoked for six months. This prompts the arrival of Lawrence's ne'er-do-welll, lay about adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Hayden Church), who invites himself to stay with Lawrence and act as his chauffeur. Add in Lawrence's two children, the over-achieving, politically conservative, book-smart, socially inept Vanessa (Ellen Page), and the willfully distant, bitter, poetry-writing James (Ashton Holmes), and you have the makings for some quirky family indie drama.

Lawrence, a widower, starts dating Janet. Chuck makes it his mission to get the 17 year old Vanessa to act her age, that is to say, he talks her into smoking pot and getting her drunk. James basically shows up now and again to point out how miserable everyone is, and how Lawrence is so self-involved that he has no idea what's going on in his own family. With the exception of James, who is probably the least fleshed-out character in the movie, the characters' relationships do evolve in some interesting ways. Vanessa masks her own feelings about her father dating again by becoming over protective of him. There is less a sense that she is upset that her mother is being replaced, but more that she herself feels replaced, long having taken on the role of a surrogate housewife. Vanessa's relationship with Chuck takes a somewhat interesting turn, just as it looks to be another free-spirited slob rescues square from button-down boringness story. Unfortunately, Lawrence and Janet's relationship, arguably the main storyline of the movie, is probably the most boring. There's no real emotion progression. Basically, some stuff happens, and that's about it.

Smart People isn't a bad movie. All the main actors (even Parker) are serviceable at their worst, legitimately charming at their best. The directing is competent. The writing is fine, even if it is overly generic. I can't think of a situation in which I'd recommend watching this. I guess if you're looking for an easy movie, a way to turn off your brain and watch a very middle of the road movie, it might do the trick.

“I get a funny feeling”

I was just eating dinner, reading /Film, and listening to iTunes on shuffle. I stopped momentarily, thinking "Holy shit, this is really good." And yes, I was at least partially reacting to some good Gilliam news (of which there has been quite a bit lately), but no, that wasn't really what gave me pause. The song playing on iTunes was big, anthemic, and extremely catchy. I looked and saw that it was "The Fan" by Material Issue, off their 1994 album Freak City Soundtrack.

As I recall, I bought a used copy of Freak City Soundtrack about a year and a half go as part of a 3-CDs-for-$10 deal, and never really gave the album that much attention. I listened to a few songs, but never paid much attention to it. After hearing "The Fan" I turned shuffle off and listened to the album in its entirety while I finished dinner.

Freak City Soundtrack is filled with fantastic power pop. The entire album is quintessential power pop, loud and fast guitars speeding through pop songs overflowing with infectious hooks. The best songs on the album celebrate feelings of unrequited love. And I do mean celebrate. There is no sad bastard moping to be found, instead the songs rejoice in the nervous excitement one feels when they've met someone new.

This nervous excitement, whether represented in the lyrics or not, permeates the album. You get the impression that lead singer and main songwriter Jim Ellison is the kind of guy who's sort of nerdy, awkward, and much cooler than he thinks he is, and that impression is exactly what comes across in the music. In this respect, he sounds like the bridge between power pop pioneers like Cheap Trick and later bands like Weezer, who found much more success just a few years later.

Material Issue does sound distinctly 90s, which can make them sound a little dated. But songs like "Goin' Through Your Purse," "Kim the Waitress," "A Very Good Thing," and "Ordinary Girl" are near perfect pop songs, showcasing masterful songwriting. Ellison unapologetically incorporates sounds from 60s pop, 70s arena rock, 80s punk, and distills it all into catchy, upbeat, 90s alternative pop. Despite the fact that it sounds very much of its time, the songs on Freak City Soundtrack are simply too good to be tarnished by seeming too dated.

Needless to say, this album was more than worth the $3 or so that I paid for it.

Sadly, Jim Ellison committed suicide less than 2 years after the release of Freak City Soundtrack.

[Note: I was going to embed the video for "Kim the Waitress," the only song off the album that has a video, but Universal Music has disabled the embedding feature. You can watch it here.]

“You can feel it. That cold ain’t the weather. That’s death approaching.”

I've never read the 30 Days of Night comic book, but I've heard that it's fantastic. At the very least, I've seen some of the art work, and it's pretty amazing. I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to reading it, but seeing the movie adaptation certainly isn't motivating me.

30 Days of Night starts with a pretty awesome premise. Every winter, the town of Barrow, Alaska experiences 30 days without sunlight. The small town is so remote that there are no roads in or out, and the flights to and from civilization halt during the month-long darkness. On the eve of final sunset, a rash of vandalism besets the town. Power and phone lines are severed, sled dogs are viciously killed, a commercial helicopter is stripped, and a mysterious stranger (Ben Foster) appears. Shortly after the sun sets, the town is overrun by a pack of vampires, signaling the start of a month-long siege. The story follows the attempts by a small group of residents to hide and wait for the eventual sunrise. Among the residents are Sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett), his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George), and a handful of other locals.

Though 30 Days of Night may have a few things going for it, overall it's, at best, a by-the-numbers horror thriller. Hartnett is terribly bland as the typical horror movie hero, specifically the calm, competent, self-sacrificing, All-American-Boy variety. George's Stella is essentially the female version of the same archetype, she has all of the same characteristics as Eden, just to a lesser degree. It isn't even worth talking about the other residents; they're not even fleshed out to the point of being archetypes. They're just sort of there to be picked off, one by one. Even Ben Foster (Six Feet Under, 3:10 to Yuma), who generally impresses me more every time I see him, is almost laughable as the Stranger. He talks in a strange and strained accent, speaking in riddles that are supposed to be eerie or terrifying, but are mostly just irritating.

One glaring problem with the movie is the pacing. The vampire siege don't build or escalate, it sort of lurches forward in abrupt leaps. It jumps from build-up, to full on war, to cat-and-mouse hide-and-seek, to confrontational resolution in near transitionless scene changes. On top of robbing the movie of what could have been a slow, suffocating sense of tension, I was also left with the impression that without the subtitles announcing "Day 7" or "Day 18," I probably would have completely forgotten about the 30 days without sun concept, assuming this was all happening over the course of a single night. Hartnett's single proclamation that being rough, pioneering Alaskans, they know how to deal with the cold and ration food appropriately robs the movie of getting any tension out of the 30 days gimmick. A single night, a week, a month, or even a year, there is no tension in how long the vampire siege lasts. No one seems particularly worried about supplies or how long they have to last in the Arctic cold without power.

30 Days of Night's main problems are its combination of genericness, erratic pacing, bland acting, and missed opportunities. Which is not to say the movie is a complete failure. There are a few things that it manages to do well.

The movie's take on vampires, for instance, is initially exciting. These vampires are much more animalistic than most representations. With the exception of a few locals-turned-vampires, the only vampire to speak is the leader (Danny Huston), using an archaic language. The rest of the pack communicates through bird-like chirping and screeching. They behave like a pack of well-organized wild animals. The vampires are reminiscent of the infected of 28 Days Later, just with a bit more self control. There is some every effective use of fast-motion early on, when the vampires are seen only as blurs of dark colors on the white snowy background, picking off residents, who seem to fly off the screen. As with most monster movies, though, once the vampires come out of the shadows, they get progressively less scary.

The residents soon realize that their attackers can't be stopped with bullets, and discover that decapitating them is the most effective way to stop them. This leads to a few gory scenes in which Hartnett graphically chops the heads off of some vampires and some bitten locals (usually taking two or three whacks to do it). The first time around this is a jarring and horrifying sight, but as with the vampires themselves, it is used more and more with diminishing returns. (It also seems oddly timely, given the conversation I had had at a party the night before about real life decapitations like this one and this one.) Along the same lines, there are a few scenes that should have been much more upsetting, but movie simply didn't earn the right to elicit any real emotion from the audience (such as when they're forced to kill a little girl vampire, who inexplicably has an Einsturzende Neubauten tattoo, or when Eden discovers that his deputy has murdered his entire family rather than let the vampires get them).

There are a few scenes that are done well. The vampires' first full-on assault on the town is shown using aerial shots of the town's streets. We see the chaos spread out over a few city blocks, as people scramble through the streets, vainly shooting at the vampires as they are chasing them. Or a husband's vain attempts to chase his wife from crawlspace to crawlspace, as the vampires drag her through the snow and under houses. As the vampire leader, Marlow, Huston is somehow both animalistic and somewhat debonair, almost like he's constantly struggling to remember what it was like to act human. I'm sure there are others, but I'm at a bit of a loss trying to remember them.

Ultimately, 30 Days of Night is a fairly bland, by-the-book movie. I certainly wouldn't recommend renting it. It's the kind of movie that might be worth watching if it's on TV and you have nothing better to do, but that's really the only circumstances I can imagine where watching this movie wouldn't seem like a waste of 2 hours.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

I recently watched David Lynch's Lost Highway. I remember seeing it shortly after it came out, which means it would have been some time in the late 90s. I also remember being thoroughly confused by it, but still liking it. I didn't really trust my previous opinion of it, and for good reason. I was probably 15 or something when I saw it the first time, which means my opinion is worthless for a few reasons. First, no wonder I didn't understand any of it, I was 15. Second, the soundtrack features a lot of Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Rammstein, so 15-year-old me thought that was pretty sweet. Finally, the movie features plenty of nudity, and no one should ever trust a 15 year old boy's opinion of anything that involves nudity. So, anyways, here we go, Lost Highway Round 2:

Lost Highway starts out following avant garde jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Fred suspects Renee of cheating, and is especially wary of her friendship with a man named Andy (Michael Massee). Their marital issues are put on hold, though, when Fred and Renee begin receiving video tapes in the mail. The tapes initially show the outside of their home, but soon begin showing the interior and even Fred and Renee asleep in their bed. Fred and Renee's storyline continues to progress (I won't say much more for the sake of spoilers), up until Fred is literally replaced by Pete (Balthazar Getty). Fred goes to bed one night, and the next morning Fred is gone and Pete is in his bed. Pete is a young mechanic who gets the majority of his work from Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), a violent and ruthless (albeit pretty charming) mob boss. Mr. Eddy introduces Pete to his girlfriend, Alice (Patricia Arquette, yet again), and soon Pete falls in love with, and starts a torrid affair with, Alice. As the situation between Pete, Alice, and Mr. Eddy spirals out of control, Pete's mind begins to slip away. All of this, both Fred and Pete's stories, are overseen by a threatening and mysterious diminutive Mystery Man (Robert Blake).

Lost Highway revels in film noir conventions. The mobsters, the femme fatales, seedy motels, double-crossing, and infidelity. The film also has a decidedly nourish style, steeped in darkness, the sets are draped in deep reds, stark whites, and urine-stain yellows. (Though, apparently, the Region 1 DVD release looks different than other versions) The film is certainly a David Lynch film, exploring concepts of identity and reality, presented in an ambiguous, fever dream style. Lost Highway seems to be Lynch's homage to the more exploitative side to film history, recalling classic noir and drive-in fair like Siodmak's The Killers, only seen through the distorted and nightmarish lens of classic Lynch.

While it doesn't reach the heights of Lynch's upper pantheon (e.g. The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks), Lost Highway most certainly has its merits. It's an exceedingly dark and terrifying movie. It is certainly confusing and even frustrating, but worth the effort, especially if you're a fan of David Lynch (or neo-noir or psychological horror, for that matter). Plus it has one of the more ridiculous casts I've seen in a while. The following actors are all in the movie in roles of varying size: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia, Richard Pryor, Gary Busey, Henry Rollins, Giovanni Ribsi, Marilyn Manson, Twiggy Ramirez, and Balthazar Getty (who, for whatever reason, I feel like I should know, but admittedly don't).

I do want to talk a bit about the confusing nature of the movie, but that requires discussing things that are definitely spoilers. So if you haven't seen it, and want to see it, stop reading here. Part of what makes the movie so exciting is not really having any idea where it's going.

*** SPOILERS ***

So, I'll admit up front, I had no fucking clue what was going on when this movie ended. I was trying to piece together how Fred and Pete's stories were connected. There were obvious connections (e.g. the Mystery Man, Renee/Alice, Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent, Andy, etc.), but I still couldn't seem to make the two worlds fit. Not even a little. I wasn't expecting the pieces to all line up perfectly, but I was seriously at a loss.

I did a little internetting, and pretty quickly came across what seems to be the prevailing interpretation. One that, in hindsight, made me feel extremely stupid for not figuring out on my own. Here goes: the entire Pete storyline was a fantasy/delusion/dream of Fred's. The second half of the movie was essentially an "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" story (which, by the way, you can read in its entirety here), meaning Fred was condemned to die and experienced a sort of dream-like hallucination or psychotic break. A fantastical escape from his inescapable fate.

Here is basically how I see the movie's story breaking down. Fred suspects his wife of cheating on him, kills her, and is sentenced to death. He experiences his escape from reality in the form of "becoming" Pete. Pete goes along with his normal existence (which apparently is comprised of going to dances at bowling alleys, having sex with his unbelievably good-looking girlfriend Sheila, and working at the garage). Pretty soon, Fred's reality comes creeping in to Pete's world. Alice, the ersatz Renee, enters the picture, and Pete begins reliving Fred's life. Soon the Pete fantasy has become so overlapped with Fred's real life, that Fred re-enters the picture, re-replacing Pete, and proceeds to finish out his own story (i.e. killing Renee and her lover Dick Laurent, aka Mr. Eddy). After informing himself of Dick Laurent's death (i.e. the first scene of the movie, as seen from the other side of the intercom), Fred leads the police on a high speed chase through the desert while being electrocuted in the "real" world (hence the strobe lights and all that jazz).

Now, this obviously doesn't explain everything. Is Pete a real person? If so, how did he and Fred switch places? If not, what was all the talk about what happened "that night" to Pete? Who is the Mystery Man? Why was he sending Fred and Renee the video tapes? How could Fred tell himself that Dick Laurent is dead?

There a number of answers to those questions (e.g. the Mystery Man is something akin to Fred's conscience, and was sending him the tapes to remind him of what really happened as opposed to simply what Fred chooses to remember), and plenty of other questions one could ask. I'm not looking for definitive answers, especially given that this is David Lynch we're talking about. No matter how you look at it, this movie is not going to wrap up into a neat package. There will always be loose ends, and that's definitely not a criticism. He doesn't give you everything, and many times, I'm not sure there's an "everything" to get. But that's just part of what makes Lynch Lynch. It's part of what elevates him from simply a filmmaker or storyteller to an artist.

Plus, any movie with a scene as terrifying as Fred's confrontation with the Mystery Man is worth seeing. "Alice who? Her name is Renee. If she told you her name was Alice, she's lying. And your name? What the fuck is your name!"

[Update: The discussion of interpretations of the movie has continued in the comments. It is filled with spoilers, but my opinion has progressed past the "Owl Creek" interpretation.]