Blows dust off this place...

I don't have much to update, but go see Junebug, and then every other movie you want to see. So what's with Everything is Illuminated ? The fact that they narrowed the scope of the movie makes me sad. But we shall watch it!

Another movie the Osio should be playing soon: The Squid and the Whale. It's from that guy who did the squid movie with Wes Anderson.

I saw Broken Flowers tonight. I plan to see it again and buy the soundtrack. What do other people think?

The preview for Everything Is Illuminated looks nothing like the book. I still insist that the book club see it together.

I saw Me and You and Everyone We Know tonight at the Osio. I really enjoyed the film. Miranda July is too adorable.

What other movies are people currently interested in seeing? I'll have to post my current list later.

I run the website MontereyBiz.com and have a really good movies page that shows everything playing from Big Sur to Santa Cruz.

I've been using LJ for quite sometime (under my personal account) but figured I needed a journal to help promote the site and found your community.

In the near future my site will also be showing full length movie trailers once I edit them down to a nice viewing size.

If you have any suggestions, etc for me to improve my site or movies page, let me know.

I watched the terrific Japanese animated movie Grave of the Fireflies this weekend after Fitz mentioned it last month. I hadn't seen it since it came out -- I was in high school in 1988. I remembered it being terribly sad and affecting, while Fitz took typical notice of the gorgeous anime (take a look at the stiletto-sharp drawings of boats and planes, and contrast it with the almost-impressionist countryside. Look at the boy's reflection distorted by the water fountain. It's beautiful.) The concept of unintended consequence is not completely unlike the also-very-sad-and-affecting Faithful Elephants.

The odd thing is, I didn't find Grave of the Fireflies all that sad and affecting this time around. I had just listened to Studio 360 that morning. Kurt Anderson, who used to edit, with Graydon Carter, Spy, presented a series on the concept of CUTE. Because you can't do a show on CUTE without talking about Japanese kiddie culture, there was a fascinating segment with the artist Takashi Murakami, with whom I know Jessica is familiar. All the elements Murakami identified in his (translated) interview were there in the movie. It was particularly startling to see the main characters, a cute little girl and her cute older brother, located so firmly in the waning days of WWII, precisely where Murakami locates the modern origins of Japanese cuteness. The pathetic, humiliating defeat of Japan (directly referenced in the film: "unconditional surrender") and its loss as a socio-military "hard power" gave rise to the kitschy "soft power" of Sanrio and Sailor Moon. Grave of the Fireflies was all of this writ large and adorable. Weird.

Anyway.

Note to self:
1) Never see a popcorn flick alone
2) Never see a new Star Wars movie again
Check and check

Rather than waste your time reading a loud-mouthed malcontent's musings on Revenge of the Sith, I am going to link to the New Yorker's spot-on and very funny review of said turgid episode (link). I still think you should watch it, if only to find better ways of describing glossy banality. It'll be a mad lib! I saw Episode ___ and all I got was this lousy movie.

My entry: I saw Episode SUCK ...

The movie is given too much credit for not being as bad as the other two, and fans are actually happy to see something that's slightly better than crap. Then again, I'm not really a fan. Can't you tell?

It wasn't all bad though. Darth Vader kills and eats little children. You can't ask for better use of the PG-13 rating.

No, not us, silly! My folks went to see the Enron movie. They both appreciated it. (I can't really say enjoyed . . .) Apparently forgoing any melancholy portraits of families affected by deregulation (those California outages? Yeah, that's Enron) or even noisy righteous indignation, the movie is just a condemning document of arrogance, greed and fraud.

For those of you who like Michael Moore without the bombast (I'm not one of you) this sounds like a must-see. So see, and say.

I've been reading a lot of scripts lately. You know, it's a lot cheaper than going to the movies. - Troy McClure

The Internet Movie Script Database, which has been around for some time, has the latest Star Wars movie script, complete with delicate wordplay and nuance we've come to expect from George Lucas. Oh, and there are other movies there as well.

Batman and Robin
All the President's Men
The Rescuers Down Under
etc...

Hola amigos. It's been a long time since I've rapped at you.


"They're driving me crazy! These Baptists are stupid. Stupid. Stupid!"

Now I haven't been talking about previous midnight movie showings, because, frankly, I've been lazy and didn't really care about Natural Born Killers and the other movie I didn't talk about.

But Ed Wood is a good movie, although it runs a bit long, and Johnny Depp, with his pencil-thin moustache and cross-dressing blindly optimistic director motif, is a pitch-perfect everyman. But it's still not going to make me run to the video store and pick up Plan 9 or anything.

P.S. A better post is coming. The midnight movie thing is getting kinda formulaic, but at least it forces me to update.

I was so taken by The Truman Show when it came out that I had to write about it in my high school paper. Knowing that The Eleight (y'know, because it was Leigh High School) came out only once a month, I realized that writing a review would be out of the question. So I wrote a bloated and cheesy "editorial" on what The Truman Show meant to me, without really mentioning the movie. Fond of it as I was, I sent it out to Truman Show message boards and Web sites, one of which still has the essay mentioned.

At its time, The Truman Show was hailed as "one of the decade's cleverest, most original pictures" and one of "the sharpest, bitingest satires I've ever seen" (note the -est superlatives). I saw the Truman's situation as a way to project my hopes and longings and vulnerabilities discreetly, unaware of other eyes.

[I sound like a wuss sometimes. I just wanna punch myself.]