foxtrot_sierra

I came late to the late Mr. Swayze's bandwagon, but I have discovered the following reasons to define him as, indeed, a bad-ass:

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Auditioned for a rock band today. I mean a real rock band, not the video game.  Via Craigslist and email got in touch with them and heard the music off their MySpace.  They rock harder than I typically do but, hey, pitches are pitches.  Via email learned that they play in "Drop C" (high-to-low:  D-A-F-C-G-C) and that all their guitar and bass parts are virtually identical, so I decided to audition for both positions.  I learned two of their songs off the internet.  Via email learned guys have been playing for years and are connected in H-Town.

Took Sam Houston to I-10.  At low traffic times it's a racetrack.  Rehearsal centers are about the scariest buildings on earth.  Windowless, soundproof rooms in windowless corridors.  Played the two songs I'd learned off the internet on both bass and guitar.  Guitar-guy let me video him playing other songs for rehearsal purposes.  Drummer guy was cool too.  Learned some riffs and noodled.  They said I was the best one so far but they had two more bassists later in the week.  I said I would keep practicing their songs and showing up for their rehearsals until they found someone they like more than me.  Noodled some "Fascination Street" before leaving.  Drummer called "Disintegration" a "pretty much flawless record."

Before leaving home, hours earlier, wife and I agreed that the day would only be a failure if they weren't there.  An adventure is never a waste of time.

Drove home.  Listening to Enigma to gay out after all that hard rock.

If you were a boy in the '80s you know that GI Joe action figures were the best toys.  I mean the little ones, not the big dolls from the '60s.  They were the best not because of any backstory or set-up between hero and villain or any personality that the characters associated with the figures were supposed to have.  We ignored all of that stuff and made up our own stories.  They were the best because they had relatively realistic joints at the shoulders, elbows, hips, waist, and knees, as opposed to Star Wars or Masters of the Universe action figures.  They were the best because they were the most flexible.  Even if their central rubberband split and you had to replace it with a long, more stretchy rubberband from a kitchen drawer.  Even if their little plastic man-tools had a tendency to get broken off.
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The First Day of Shooting is an Official Selection for the 2009 Gulf Coast Film + Video Festival!  And the 2009 Gulf Coast Film + Video Festival has been CANCELED!  So I get the laurels but otherwise I don't need to do SHITE!

Life is a series compromises and tiny defeats, a continual holding action against giving up on dreams, hairlines, integrity, and the heartbeat itself.  Do people like TV because it speaks to our feelings of being compromised adults, because every frame of every second has clearly been shoveled through focus groups and corporate cronies?  Because no series has any intention of ending at an artistically appropriate juncture, but instead every episode will be stretched interminably and every season drag on forever and every new season spiral into pointlessness until, like the storyteller Scherezade, its head is chopped off?  (Thank you Engines of Our Ingenuity for making the 1001 Arabian Reruns connection for me.)

 

 

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“And that’s when the CHUDs came after me.” So says Homer Simpson, in describing the final mishap of his disastrous trip to New York City. The same could be said of “Babel,” the solemn and humorless new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Amores Perros”), in which one disaster after another keeps mounting and mounting for our poor characters, until you expect the Mongols from “Andrei Roublev” to ride in next, swords held high. For lack of any other emotion, I wanted to laugh at the movie’s aura of inevitable catastrophe. At it, not with it.

( 2006 review )

Saw this back at Landmark River Oaks with the wife, possibly at a pre-release screening. Liked it a lot when I first saw it, but if I saw it again the mixture of fact/fiction/interviews/animation might strike me as too clever. I'd probably still like it though.

( 2003 review (***1/2 out of ****) )

Unlike books, poetry, sculptures, and all that other stuff, movies exist in time. They give us the "feeling" of time better than any other artform. We can be made to feel time pass quickly, slowly, inevitably, excruciatingly. Even cinema's bastard offspring TV has a time tool that it could uniquely but rarely exploits: the enforced break. Commercial breaks and the weeks between the episodes of TV serials can give us the impression that more time has passed for the characters than really has, or that we have spent more time with them (the time we spend thinking about them between episodes compounding the time we actually spend watching them).

"It's a Wonderful Life" was a flop in theatres but became a classic on TV, where commercial breaks between each of its eras – George Bailey as a kid, as a teenager, when he should have been in college, as a newlywed, as a father, etc. – gives it more of an epic feel, as if George and the Angel Second Class and everyone else are still busy living while we're going to the bathroom. Odd, then, how technologies that allow an entire TV season to be watched commercial-free in one sitting might be robbing them of their epic feel.

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Great, trashy, doom-and-gloom, can't-win-don't try kind of fun. "Double Indemnity" is the only Billy Wilder movie I really love (sorry, my filmsnob cred sinks). I saw "Touch of Evil" in the theater during it's 50th anniversary re-release, the other two on DVD.

( Double Indemnity (**** out of ****) )

( Out of the Past (**** out of ****) )

( Touch of Evil (**** out of ****) )

Saw "Event Horizon" in the theater with friends. Watched "The Forgotten" on TV with wife, possibly while doing dishes.

( Event Horizon (**1/2 out of ****) )

( The Forgotten (**1/2 out of ****) )

MY MOM:  (Complains about how expensive everything is.)

ME:  So is there a particular age at which everyone just stops understanding inflation?

MY DAD:  It's about 50.

 

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Amadeus (1984, 160 min theatrical release, 180 min director’s, PG theatrical, R director’s) ****
I'm not sure I've ever heard a serious criticism leveled against "Amadeus" (historical inaccuracy is not a serious criticism) except that it's "middlebrow." Yes, of course it's middlebrow, but it's the most breezy, accessible, and fun 3-hour middlebrow period epic ever! Nary a week goes by when the Mozart laugh doesn't come in handy. I saw this movie for the first time on a Saturday or Sunday in high school, when I'd missed the first few minutes and it was showing on TV spread out over five hours or something. The promos during commercial breaks were clearly (and inaccurately) for a different broadcast of "Amadeus" intended to be divided over two nights.

2004 review
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Andrei Roublev (1962, B&W, 205 min, NR) ****
The final black-and-white scene had me bawling my fucking eyes out. Hours of Russians and Mongols being casually violent to each other (including that badass bit when a nobleman nonchalantly threatens to run someone down with his horse), and then in the end God proves that mercy is infinitely more powerful than any show of strength. "We'll go to the city and you'll build bells and I'll paint, and what a feast it will be for the people." Love it, love it, love it.

2004 review
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Apocalypse Now (1979, 153 min, R) ****
and
Apocalypse Now Redux (2001, 202 min, R) ****
Ah, "Apocalypse Now," once and future and always shall be one of my favorite movies of all time. Did I see it in elementary school, or did I at least wait until I was in junior high or high school? Either way, it was a 4x3 VHS, taped by a friend of my mom off HBO. The teenager in me loves its cheerful nihilism, the boy in me loves the violence, the hippy sissy Catholic in me loves the anti-war message, the wannabe filmmaker in me loves the color, and the part of me that fears I'll droop into a middle-aged sadsack who wants his media as bland as heat-lamp food from Luby's hopes that I'll always get a kick out of its sheer intensity. Jesus, I'm tempted to watch it right now if I didn't have to go to work in an hour-and-a-half. I've long considered the helicopter battle the greatest scene ever filmed because it captures both the beauty and savagery of which human beings are capable.

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Amelie (2001, 122 min, PG13) ***1/2
Rented this with the wife, maybe a year or two after it came out, but back when the intense color-filtering thing was still new and still meant something. Really, really like "Amelie," especially the acrobatic filmmaking and the score and Audrey Tautou, but couldn't form a personal connection with the lead couple as a couple.

2004 review
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Antony and Cleopatra (1974, 162 min, NR) ***
Janet Suzman, who plays Cleopatra, shows up a decade later in "The Singing Detective," which is pretty sweet, and I should talk about it sometime.

2004 review
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I like David Gordon Green. Sometimes he can be a bit precious and sometimes he can take a few whacks at you with the poignant stick, but, as a mumbly Southerner, I like him a lot. His films are slow, lyrical, often not really about anything for long stretches, yet they've always struck me as easy and accessible, not at all scholarly. I can't help thinking that he delivers on the indie promise that a largely-redundant Kevin Smith has failed to live up to. But the two filmmakers really have nothing to do with each other. I don't think he's quite made a great movie yet, or a masterpiece, but he's got one in him, and his body of work is steady. He's currently attached as a writer to a remake of Argento's "Suspiria" -- which couldn't be more awesome -- and his next turn as director might be a fantasy starring James Franco and Zooey Deschanel and co-written by Danny McBride. I haven't seen his "Snow Angels" or the episodes he directed of Danny McBride's washed-up redneck show.

George Washington (2004 review)
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All the Real Girls (2004 review)
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Undertow (2004 review)
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