Static Fix

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:48:00 +0000

oof, really been neglecting this lately. couple of excuses. i have been sick for like the past week or 10 days or couple of years, not really sure how long, probably due to the multitude of benadryl working its way through various streams, but it's certainly been longer than it should have been. and i'm drinking water and tea and juice and ginger ale almost as much as whiskey so i don't know what the problem is. i'll give it one more day. then that's it. me and this body are through.

other things are happening and not happening too. taking these writing classes and have therefore no interest in writing whatsoever. have assigned reading again. was reading a lot before. not reading so much now. although i partly blame the unconsoled by kazuo ishiguro for being as thick as a drum. and i am technically leafing through that new david foster wallace thing by that lipsky guy who like talked with him or traveled with him or both right when wallace first got famous. but for some reason lipsky has this tripartite approach where he italicizes his own speech, leaves dfw's normal and then inserts all these bracketed asides where he comments on the interaction taking place. so it'll be like...

like the famous wallace stegner quote?

sort of. also just like after the harpers thing [an essay he wrote for harpers] i got some notoriety there or whatever, and then i'm just very concerned about how i'm going to look. like if i show up at some store for a reading am i going to be the harpers guy? i wanted to be famous and i wanted to write this thing and i spent three years on it and i'm proud of it, i really am proud of it, and maybe in a couple years things will settle and people will look at it and say this is pretty good and ill feel less lonely. [again, lonely, wallace very concerned with loneliness]

it's like shut the fuck up man. the harpers thing, i get it, a piece for harpers, and lonely, i get it, the dude doesn't like being lonely. save your brackets for someone who cares.

but the wallace stuff is alright. i think it will get better. for the first 50 pages he clearly doesn't really like or care about lipsky at all. he admittedly only agreed to have him there so that he could reject all the other interviews. but i think over time they probably get more comfortable with each other.

still though, not really reading that much, not really watching that much. i have another few movies i still haven't posted here and i read the murakami book sputnik sweetheart to basically fluff the numbers. hopefully still somewhere near on track to getting 50 books in for the year. that's the only figure i care much about.

have to come up with essay topics now for an argumentative piece for class. didn't i major in this? what am i still doing? maybe i'll talk about what fuckwads people who blog are.

The Anderson Tapes (Sidney Lumet, 1971)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:05:00 +0000

kind of a good one here.

sean connery, sidney lumet, a young christopher walken. there were parts of this i really loved. the first half hour or maybe hour is really solid, where anderson (connery) puts together his team and sets out with the plan. fantastic stuff. i love how they start when connery exits prison, cause everybody loves a prison exit.

sorry i've had a few tequila shots tonight.

great stuff. walken is really good as a supporting character. in fact some of his best roles are as supporting characters. i kind of wish this guy never got really famous, just stayed in the 70s for like 30 years and played backup to everyone else. although i like him in the dead zone.

massive heist stuff. connery's fresh out the pen and wants to rob an entire apartment complex. his flamboyant gay sidekick scouts the loo, and he and his cronies bust in to rob it all. old guy they know from way back plays the doorman. classic stuff. man i shoulda been a conman.

very 70s stuff here. can't let you go without mentioning that. the sound effects are super dated. as a fan of the retro, i can dig it. but it'll certainly turn a lot of people off. you just have to give it the benefit of the doubt like cheesy dramatic stuff in movies from the 40s. you know the deal.

great lesser known genre piece though. if you live for all this shit like i do, check it out. sidney lumet's a master.

almost midnight. passing out.

Rampage (Uwe Boll, 2009)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:51:00 +0000

i had never seen an uwe boll movie and never heard of the guy before but oh my god read his wikipedia page please. i'll just point out that it has a section titled "Critic Boxing Matches," which explains the various critics he has challenged to step in the ring with him...thus proving with incontrovertible evidence that his movies weren't awful.

but they are awful, it would seem.

rampage is the only one that gets halfway decent ratings anywhere. netflix showed me slightly over 3 stars. that slightly over generally makes the difference between a bad movie and a good movie for me. rampage falls somewhere in between.

it's probably a little more bad than good. but not for the reasons people seem to say.

it's about a suburban middle class guy in his early twenties who slowly and quietly assembles a full body kevlar suit of armor and a stockpile of automatic weapons. then he goes into the streets and starts shooting people. in cafes. in bingo halls. in a salon. in a bank. he pretty much shoots everybody. then the police come. so he shoots them.

it's why does herr r. run amok or haneke's the seventh continent but with way more weaponry. it does very little more than these movies and it has less intellectual tension. it has a much more metal soundtrack though.

people who praise it for glorifying violence so much that it actually becomes an anti-violence movie might be right but they're sort of missing the point. a director who challenges critics to boxing matches can never be called anti-violent. he seems to agree that violence solves problems, which i think is true, it can. it doesn't mean it's a good solution or one that particularly suits the nature of the problem, but it not totally anarchic all the time.

the violence in rampage is actually much less socially interesting than reviewers seem to think. it's realistic enough that it is disturbing at times. but there's less underneath than it might seem. i mean, everyone saw american beauty right? the suburbs are all fucked up. we get it. we've gotten it for the past decade. another killing spree doesn't really tell us anything. people are capable of this kind of violence and very very few of them resort to it, thank god. there's also political violence in the world, but boooooring.

the part that's really damning is the fact that society has no means of stopping this guy once he's gotten started. civilians can't stop him. police can't. his own violence doesn't do him in. he doesn't kill himself. boll is actually saying something much more critical of american society, that its means of curbing the effects of whatever causes the need to break out are completely inadequate. that, like in grand theft auto, there aren't always repercussions.

that's true in the video game world, but i'm not sure it's true in the real world. a man cannot simply kill hundreds and wake up the next morning and go to work for the rest of his life. the human psyche is too weak for that.

there is a bunch of political video-confessional stuff thrown in. it's all very 90s, all of it, and much much dumber than a lot of fans will think. it's all just capitalism sucks blah blah the suburbs, i'm gonna go shoot people. but all in all the movie isn't totally bad. brendan fletcher is kind of good. i genuinely wanted to see what happened to him at the end. the 30 minute shooting spree has good mixes of pauses and, well, not-pauses. and i watched it all in one sitting, which i guess is kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel, but something nonetheless.

it's not worth watching really. but we all have those nights where we feel like shit and want to play left for dead 2 until the end of time or whatever, and this can be an okay outlet for one of those nights i think. just don't get out of hand with it.

Silk Parachute (John McPhee, 2010)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:11:00 +0000

i've been reading a lot of essays. john mcphee writes for the new yorker and probably plenty of other places and i don't remember why i one day ordered a book of his essays from the library but i did and it came and somehow i read the whole thing despite not liking it.

topics include: lacrosse, eating weird natural food, photography, golf, champagne/wine, high school basketball coaches.

it all has this air self-justifying air about it. like, it's important to you because it was important to me. and, if i describe an activity well enough, it doesn't matter why i describe it, the activity needs no justification. this is against my whole philosophy of everything, which holds firmly that people should always be prepared to defend what they do. the rationale is that actions have consequences and therefore what you do affects others and that makes you responsible. act without reason and you're fucking with everyone you selfish prick. kind of thing. why did i go into that?

wikipedia says mcphee was important for helping turn essays into a more literary endeavor. that's fine. whatever. i found most of his essays pretty boring and a little vomit-y. the lacrosse one is memorable i think because it's so long. parts of it i liked but i'm a sports fan. he should have gone deeper into the geographical underpinnings of sport, like why baltimore is the cradle of lacrosse in the US and what that means for the sport. but even that, i mean, 50 pages on lacrosse...i'm surprised i got through this whole book really.

anyway, clearly not a bad thing, this, but it's just not my style. i think mcphee's speaking to a whole different type of person than me, older, hippier, the kind who talk about how they like traveling and cooking and reading.

The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:49:00 +0000

thinking about switching designs now that blogger has these new templates up. been hard to motivate with the posts lately and using the stock designs makes it just a tiny bit easier and faster to upload everything. not like anybody really reads here you know, it's kinda just my cultural memory stick, but i didn't know what to say about the vikings so i said this instead.

kind of an all star cast: kirk douglas, ernest borgnine, tony curtis, janet leigh, but a maybe not so all star topic: vikings.

there's no metaphor or anything, this is just about vikings vs. the british. we start out with some greek literature things. a son is conceived that's half viking and half british, given a necklace to wear, and somehow during the flash forward ends up becoming a slave. now much later, a british map maker flees to support the vikings led by the bearded and benevolent viking ragnar and his very brash and insulting clean-shaven einar, who immediately gets into an altercation with the slave. little does he know, the slave is his half brother. one thing leads to another and they invade the english to kidnap a wench.

decent movie. the stature of the actors seems a little inconsistent with the style of the movie. it's all sort of raucous and haphazard, but the actors seem to be going for a little more of a greek tragedy style. makes it feel slightly off the whole time.

kirk douglas is entertaining as a swashbuckling viking frat guy. and there's one of the more creative strategies for getting past a raised drawbridge i've seen before. really though the combination of axes and castles sells itself. axes and castles.

Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:27:00 +0000

i signed up for these berkeley extension writing classes and they're sucking all my outside work time. (and some of my at work time). so i'm 4 movies and 1 book behind on posting here and i also have 4 warren ellis graphic novels i might want to talk about and i watched season 1 of twin peaks.

also, world cup, right? terrible soccer but i don't care i'll watch anyway. fucking jabulani is making every shot sail 30 feet over the goal. highlights though, switzerland fuck yeah. chocolate 1 tapas 0. south africa, tough break. asian teams are overachieving. the usa team is awesome and has to beat slovenia. for the love of god please beat slovenia.

but here goes for now, stagecoach. probably the best of the few westerns i've ever seen.

master filmmaking here. the chase sequence at the end is phenomenal. awesome action considering what kind of shit cameras and equipment they had back then. also classic dynamic between the people - same sort of dynamic as lost horizon. one foolish effeminate guy. one flat out drunk. inevitably these two become friends. one stuck up woman and one down to the earth woman. then two sort of conflicting but stylishly a little different main guys. here it's john wayne and the poker player who can handle a gun. great crowd for a road trip.

if i ever make a movie, this is what i'll watch to learn how. the camera work is noticeably good and not ostentatious at all. it's just exactly the way it's supposed to be.

it has a good, funny, touching, and deceptively appropriate ending. ties everything together nicely. movies that do this really well will always go over well with audiences. i think audiences for better or worse tend to put a lot of stock in endings, so much so that average movies like iron man stick in your mind as awesome because the endings are so sharp. endings are key, new filmmakers need to take note.

"Orson Welles argues that it was a perfect textbook of fim making and claimed to have watched it more than 40 times during the making of Citizen Kane"

hard to argue with that.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:25:00 +0000

get a load of these bums.

so. interestingly, the only part of this movie i'd seen before was the bicycling part, which is far and away the most absurd, and is undoubtedly an homage to jules and jim. the whole movie is basically an americanized jules and jim. the shared love interest. the homoerotic thing. the bits about going to war. the bicycle episode with the music. the use of photo stills at the beginning. jules and jim, but a western.

since i like america better than i like france, i'll take it. the additions of guns and awesome buddy banter are brilliant add-ons. the first hour or so of the movie is up there with anything ever made in terms of entertainment i think. awesome individual scenes. arguing with the train guard. re-taking the leadership reigns of the gang. and getting chased by the wonder crew of lawmen. totally awesome. the whole movie could have been running from lefors and lord baltimore. for guys that never see screen time, they're awesome minor characters.

the second half of the movie was a little less great to me. the trip to bolivia drags on a bit. the war between them and the law takes a backseat. but nothing beats the first hour.

this is kind of shit commentary here, apologies, but it's been a long week. usa wins 1-1!

The African Queen (John Huston, 1951)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 23:28:00 +0000

it's a very satisfying movie to watch. old movies are usually good about that.

bogart and hepburn have to escape the germans in africa during world war 1 but all they have is a little boat and a lotta moxie.

classic david and goliath story going on except david's a boat and goliath is a bigger boat. a bigger german boat.

doesn't take long for a romance to brew. you know it's coming because this they always get together in the 50s. there must have been babies running around like ants back then. you can't even go on a simple boat ride without getting hitched.

cutely ties up every loose end. they even get married for god's sake.

melodrama early on, adventure in the middle, and comedy at the end. you can't take any chances. not when there's a war on.

In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Peterson, 1993)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 05:47:00 +0000

everybody knows this movie right? i even had to pause it a couple times and ask myself, have you really never seen this? you spent ages 10-15 in front of the tv. how could you not have seen this?

but somehow, in the line of fire eluded me. other wolfgang classics like outbreak, air force one, and the perfect storm, did not. line of fire's funny cause it's pretty cliche. hard nosed over the hill cop guy gets targeted by raving psycho who you find out has some professional beef with him and they go toe to toe for a while. final sequence takes place on a rooftop, bridge, hanging from a helicopter, or in this case, in one of those side-of-the-skyscraper elevators.

clint eastwood has to protect the president. he failed when jfk got shot and now he's gonna squint and say fuck you asshole and redeem himself. works pretty well actually. reasonable strategy.

john malkovich is the bad guy and i'm pretty convinced he's actually a serial killer in real life and the acting is a perfect cover. nicely done. the bad guys really make these movies. the stars get more of the credit: keanu reeves in speed, clint in this, bruce willis in die hard 3, but it's the late dennis hopper, john malkovich, and jeremy irons that make all three of those movies. take away those guys and you end up with every recent nicolas cage movie.

all said and done though, it's pretty generic. classic 90s tv movie.

just a heads up. if i stop posting when the world cup starts, don't call the cops. i'm alive. i've just quit my job and have been lying on the floor watching espn 3 on my laptop for a month. no sweat. usa!

Hopscotch (Ronald Neame, 1980)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 15:56:00 +0000

walter matthau, what a pro. the guy has been around the block and this movie puts him to good use. he plays a cia agent who gets relegated to a desk job for subverting some orders. in retaliation he starts writing chapters of a book that exposes all sorts of cia secrets. his cia boss, an asshole, and one of his colleagues, a friend, now have to hunt him down and kill him before he publishes anything. miles kendig (matthau) is a savvy runner though and he's getting away every time and playing a few tricks on people in the process. it's a cia comedy, if that's a genre.

pretty good movie. it's like grumpy old men but with a cool context. matthau carries the whole thing. and yes, sometimes it's a little creepy when he's flirty with his lady friend because he looks like a contracted accordion or an anime slug beast but it's more endearing than gross and i like anime well enough.

pretty funny. well paced. good acting. sam waterson is especially likable, as always.

Count Zero (William Gibson, 1986)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:00:00 +0000

i can never decide which cover art to use for these science fiction books. always such awesome covers.

i am of course listening to the new ellen allien (dust) as i write this. only new german techno can complement 80s william gibson novels.

i want to say i have mixed feelings about gibson but i don't. i think he's fantastic. the mixed feelings are about my ability to read. for some reason, and i think this is a common thing, i find it really hard to keep pace with the plot of his books. he jumps around with each chapter (evidence for this is the wikipedia page heading Plot Summary being broken into 3 "threads"), but i've gotta be able to deal with that by now. the harder part is when he jumps around mid-paragraph. it's not that the scene changes or anything, it's just that characters go from discussing something practical to using slang and then the action moves to something else. it's like wait, what? and there's not very much description really. which is always odd for science fiction because it's so much about creating alternative worlds. in gibsons the worlds are given and if we can't see what they look like they it's on us.

i'd love to talk about count zero specifically but honestly i have very little idea what the hell happens in it. i always read the entire book in 30 minute spurts on bus commutes to and from work. do not read gibson books this way. read them in large chunks.

there's a girl whose genius father implanted her with biosoft to allow her to jack into the matrix without a computer. there's her father who a commando named turner tries to protect. there's a wealthy german guy named virek who's trying to be god. and there's a girl named marly who sort of maybe unknowingly helps him, you know, become immortal. that sums things up, right?

i guess i have to read mona lisa overdrive now. and eventually i will have to re-read this and nueromancer so i can maybe get a glimpse of what the hell the future holds.

Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjaerg, 1997)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:46:00 +0000

damn swedish names are impossible to spell. that title took me 20 minutes and i think it's wrong.

decent little flick. no idea why i watched it. story of my evenings.

stellan skarsgard is pretty good. he's always pretty good. here he plays a detective investigating a murder. the deeper in her gets the more screwed up he gets. probably didn't help that he shot one of his own men and tried to cover it up. oopsie!

surprised this was criterion collection, it's not particularly artsy or original or even that good. has lots of shadows though. the criterion people love shadows. or maybe they have a swedish quota to fill. i prefer lars von trier's the element of crime for its weirdness or pretty much any kiyoshi kurosawa movie for psychological procedurals.

tip of the day: take trader joes turkey chili and dress it up with whatever vegetables you like then dump it on a baked potato. i'm ladling it into my mouth right now.

The Spanish Prisoner (David Mamet, 1997)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Fri, 28 May 2010 04:30:00 +0000

never enough mamet to go around. i’ve seen a lot of his movies but leave the last couple for times when i really need to watch something new and cool. i try to do this with all beloved directors. it had been a while and i was having trouble motivating myself to watch anything, so the spanish prisoner it was. david mamet’s the best at calling your internal motivator weak and kicking it in the groin.

this movie is basically the same as house of games, which i think is a little bit stronger of a movie. when you’re talking about a conman and a victim, which mamet always is, the conman has to be the more charismatic one. here it’s steve martin and nobody’s more endearing on screen than him. in house of games it was joe mantegna, who’s underrated. the strength of house of games was that mantegna was the leading man of the movie, not just of the con. here it’s campbell scott (i know, right? who?). so we have to following this dude around while he gets thrown for a loop. we follow the victim so the con’s on us as much as it is him. in house of games we follow the conman, so we should be in the know about it all, but we’re still stumped. that’s the harder directing job.

but the spanish prisoner is still pretty solid. a guy creates something known only as ‘the process’ which is gonna make his company rich as hell. he meets steve martin on some island and gets roped into a super elaborate twist-laden plot to steal ‘the process’ and pin the whole thing on the rube.

mamet never wastes a shot. it’s like his directing m.o. i’ve read a couple of his books and he’s militant about cutting the fat. every shot has a goal and anything that shows up anywhere that doesn’t work to reach that goal must be cut. them’s the rules. this strategy works great for these step-by-step type genre movies. you get to the end and think wow that whole thing was one big ass heist. and so clean.

less trademark mamet dialogue than i wanted. except for calling the thing ‘the process’, which is classic. campbell scott isn't very compelling even for a lame everyman (but the supporting cast is excellent). and the fact that steve martin should be in more scenes are my only real complaints. otherwise it’s a a carnival ride. you pay your entry fee, go for a whirl, and get dropped back where you started. it’s a hollywood blockbuster but for your mind instead of your eyes.

The Andromeda Strain (Robert Wise, 1971)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Thu, 27 May 2010 03:50:00 +0000

the "recommended science fiction" panel on my netflix page has about the shittiest selection i could ask for. this is because i've seen so many already. movies like the wraith and freaky faron, hellboy 2 and the mutant chronicles are mainstays. there are still plenty of worthy ones i haven't checked out though, especially old classics. the andromeda strain was one that had eluded me for a while. i thought for some reason it was going to be more like outbreak and less like fantastic voyage. i pictured military takeovers of cities and honey i promise i'll be safe family drama and probably an infected monkey or two. but this is all just a team of scientists in an underground lab in nevada. that much is more my style really. the movie on the whole wasn't.

nah, i wasn't blown away here. it's pretty straightforward. everyone in a small town ends up dead. turns out years back there was some government cover-up regarding alien bacteria. now a team of scientists gets assembled to identify the virus or whatever it is that's leaked before it spreads or they'll have to nuke the whole area. naturally there's a real nail biter (air quotes) of a scene where the guy with the only key just barely makes it to the abort button in time. naturally.

the only part i really liked about the movie was the twenty minutes or so devoted to cleansing the scientists' bodies one stage at a time before they get to the very bottom level of their weird underground facility. it's mostly silent except for the computer lady telling the people what to do. sort of mesmerizing scenes. everything else has been done a hundred times. and the psychological probing by the director is really minimal. the characters are pretty hackneyed. even more hackneyed than the word hackneyed probably. but it's not really a bad movie. i mean if you like this sci-fi disease-procedural sort of stuff. not really my cup of tea. i like my sci-fi with more philosophy. this is just babies and nukes. babies and nukes.

Orbiter (Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran, 2003)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Wed, 26 May 2010 03:46:00 +0000

been reading a lot of graphic novels lately. ever since i finally got internet set up in my apartment my attention span has gone from movies and books to tv shows and graphic novels. now i find myself sitting around bored in the evenings. beer consumption has gone up.

it's the unflappable tendency to adapt that's so killer. instead of adding new opportunity you have to incorporate it, which means other things change to fit it. terrible. also, i always say (never out loud) that if you don't feel like reading, you're not trying to read the right thing. for any mood, any motivation level, there's a good book. i'm sitting on bird by bird by anne lamott, imperium by ryszard kapuscinski, silk parachute by john mcphee, orbital resonance by john barnes, and one troubling night i dipped into the old book shelf and tried to swallow to the lighthouse by virginia wolfe straight. none of this is working right now.

of the few things i've consumed lately, a strangely high number seem to involve teams of scientists assembled to solve some sci-fi-type problem. fantastic voyage, the andromeda strain (forthcoming here), and warren ellis's orbiter. ellis is awesome and ever since transmetropolitan he's become my go-to graphic novel writer.

orbiter starts with a space shuttle landing somewhere in the u.s. in the future. the shuttle had veered off course years before and just crash landed without warning one day. one man is alive on board, the ship is covered in some kind of skin, there's dirt from the moon on it, and no one has any idea what the hell happened to it. a biologist, psychologist, and astrophysicist get called to the site and simultaneously start piecing things together.

it's just one volume and only takes an hour or so to get through. so it's a short story. there isn't much time to delve deeply into the insanity of the returner, the wtf-ness of the skin on the ship, or the theoretical physics that "explains" where the ship went. there's only time for scientific procedurals, the very beginning of a cute relationship, and the building of an argument to keep funding nasa. not really kidding about that last part. ellis seems to have written the whole thing as a plea to for the love of god keep searching the cosmos for anything and everything possible. it's mankind's destiny.

i'll leave it at that. trying to keep the posts coming but it's tough.

The Forever War (Dexter Filkins, 2008)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Sat, 22 May 2010 03:58:00 +0000

is the font all fucked up? i've been reduced to just a mac here at home now and i blame the jaguar car of computers for all future complications. bear with me.

i am getting into a bad habit of skipping days on my posts here. my reading and watching has slowed dramatically over the past two weeks. for a while i was averaging probably about 6 things a week. i struggled to plow through 4 in the last two weeks combined. luckily i had stockpiled some ones to blog so i'm still keeping up my numbers, but the reserves are dwindling. i have one book and three movies consumed but not yet vomited (posted). maybe this weekend i'll get back on track. taking these berkeley writing classes. not sure why. oh right, cause going to work everyday is like going to the zoo when all the animals are asleep.

dexter filkins has been reporting in iraq and afghanistan for like the past 20 years or something, most recently for the nytimes. he should have died many times over. this book is a series of related but non-linear stories from his experience in both places. they're all presumably true, he is a reporter after all.

the book shares its name with the brian haldeman sci-fi novel that i haven't read, any good?, which is also being turned into a movie directed by ridley scott. 2011-ish, says imdb.

my favorite chapter was about the following:

a group of soldiers had a gorgeous, drop-dead stunner of a blonde woman in their unit or just hanging around or something. what they'd do is they'd go into a new village with a few soldiers in a humvee and have the blonde stand up through the sunroof with no helmet on or anything. one guy would hop out and yell "american woman for sale" and all the iraqi men would come running. they would say, "i'll give you anything. my house, my family, anything for this woman." iraqis go wild for blondes. the soldier would keep saying "no that's not enough, gotta be more, not enough." meanwhile they would send other soldiers around back to all the houses, no vacated except for women and children, and they'd take any guns, weapons, bombmaking supplies they could find. then they'd come back, say "sorry, maybe next time" and take off to the next village. word eventually got up to one of the superiors who shut it down. chapter ends with the guy saying, "a real shame. it was the best idea we ever had."

the book is a page turner. like if harry potter carried an old russian assault rifle through a minefield. it's pretty light when it comes to big arguments or conclusions. part of the whole deal is that no one really knows what the hell to conclude or argue over there anymore. but it's full of great stories, great characters. it was one hell of a read.

The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Thu, 20 May 2010 04:58:00 +0000

the back of this dvd talks all about how marilyn monroe is this sexpot who twists all the main characters into knots and wreaks havoc on the men in the movie. i think she gets about 4 minutes of screen time. w.r. burnett tells her to go back to the living once and a police investigator tells her she's very attractive once. oh there are plenty of knots and twists but she doesn't have a hand in any of them. attractive nonetheless though and i guess this is one of her earlier roles. it's a troubling sign though that the dvd trumpets up the whole marilyn affair so much because it suggests the movie doesn't have enough going for it otherwise.

now, this is a classic of classics so it's hard to knock it exactly. i wasn't around in the fifties. i don't know if this was groundbreaking or not. all i know is it's pretty entertaining. sterling hayden is fun to watch as the tough guy lackey getting dragged into trouble he doesn't really deserve. w.r. burnett is the dignified statesmen who's actually flat broke but too proud to admit it. those guy are always down for a drink. and there's a jewel heist. how can you argue with a jewel heist?

but all in all i just can't say much more about it. i watched it almost two weeks ago and have been putting off this post because i didn't really know what to say, which only of course makes it harder because now i've forgotten any of the details that might make this worth reading. i didn't love it. how's that? oh well. another one crossed off the list. sorry for the downer of a last paragraph. here's a cute marilyn shot. sure was a looker.

David Boring (Daniel Clowes, 2000)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:23:00 +0000

halftime of the magic/celtics game 2. time for a quick blog.

this is the best graphic novel i've ever read. now i have to back up a little and explain that i haven't read that many graphic novels. but still. i've read a few and this is the best. unbelievably sophisticated and fun. wikpedia says clowes jokingly described it as "like fassbinder meets half-naked nabokov on gilligan's island." the only thing i would reply with is, "yep, spot-on."

start with a sexually frustrated slightly self-centered open and honest young man, add a noir element with strangers wielding guns and not afraid to use them, and finish everything off with an impending nuclear winter. what do you get? a hybrid graphic novel that epitomizes the dysfunctional family, or something like that. it was a tough sentence to follow through with but i tried.

great simple art. really engaging characters. a swirling plot that touches on everything great about graphic novels. genuine emotion and action. what more can i say? amazing stuff.

be back tomorrow. go suns!

If.... (Lindsay Anderson, 1968)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Mon, 17 May 2010 22:49:00 +0000

another movie i had never heard of til recently. picked it off the library shelf, saw immediately that it was going to be awesome, cracked a trader joes simpler times lager, then another, and watched to my heart's content.

boarding school kids have to go through all the motions. sitting in big lunch halls. hazing from the older boys. weird sexual misconduct. bullish and antiquated authority figures. secret booze stashes. normal sexual misconduct. dreams of revolution.

malcolm mcdowell is the leading man and he basically does a toned down version of a clockwork orange. it's obvious that kubrick wanted exactly this performance for his movie. and he got it. same thing here.

his name is mick travis and wikipedia says martin scorsese named travis bickle in homage to mcdowell's character in this movie. the british youth school rebellion seems distinctly different from the adult big city rebellion but i can't be critical about taxi driver. or this movie, because it's awesome. it's truly a fantasy and there are very few movies that do this sort of thing. it does have, and maybe suffers from, a lot of 60s editing. there are over the top shots and scenes, abrupt cuts between them, a very liberal use of black and white, absurd dialog, and the whole thing generally has a lot of experimental gimmicks. i don't think they do much to add to the main arguments of the movie. but it gives it an okay retro feel and makes it sort of interesting to watch the first time.

there's not really a plot either. there are main characters. but everything is juggled between them. there are small jumps in time. there's no straight story. but you do start to identify with characters and learn their stories. also the whole thing is parsed into vignettes with section titles. all of this stuff is nonsense, but it's a tribute to the power of the idea and some of the performances that the movie is awesome despite it.

the nicest thing about the movie is that you only need to watch it once. you get it. any more viewings would be indulgent. so check it out and then watch a clockwork orange again.

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (Jacques Becker, 1954)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:18:00 +0000

couple snags this week have set me back. internet problems at work, some excessive drinking, the usual. on the upside i successfully got internet set up at home after about a trillion setbacks and more angry calls with at&t, so there's that.

keeping the black and white crime theme going. i also watched the asphalt jungle last week so hope you like it.

i'm still recovering from Le Trou. the movie was so good i just took the time to capitalize the title to make it stand out. i have pretty low standards over here. the prison-escape-that-never-was was so awesome i queued up everything jacques becker ever made. i probably have his old christmas home videos sitting in my mail box now. naturally i started with the one that featured the most guns.

don't touch the loot (that's the title) is about a couple old gangsters with too many gold bars. too many gold bars attract a lot of attention, that's why i wear all mine on a necklace around my neck. so people are always checking me out. yes it gets very heavy. that's why i drive a wheelchair. with gold rims. having a lot of gold pisses off guys named angelo, and a nice guy with a name like max just can't have some italian-sounding greaseball eyeing his money like it's one of his women who coincidentally he's also eyeing. when a friend gets kidnapped, old french guys find tommy guns and hit the highway.

solid little movie but it's no prison escape. a little slow through the middle but has a nice tie-up at the end. i liked it. actually it felt pretty american. they're meaner to women but there's still a big emphasis on loyalty. the middle is a little drawn out, but it still builds to a climactic action sequence. all in all it wasn't far from the american 50s mode. when it comes to french crime, the later jean pierre melville movies are the cream of the crop, but becker is still the man to see if you're planning a prison escape.

Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Tue, 11 May 2010 23:11:00 +0000

kind of an obscure movie today. i hadn't heard of this until last week when i was trolling my library branch's 3 mini-aisles of dvds. but with a title like blast of silence i didn't have any choice but to pull the trigger.

this is the most film noir movie i've seen. it follows a hitman casing his next kill. he runs into some childhood friends that make him rethink his life. he thinks and rethinks and realizes he's an asshole and this isn't a lifetime movie so he goes on to finish the job. there's a lot of voiceover, drinking, gun play, a woman gets slapped once or twice, typical 50s guy with a gun movie. manhattan gets the old black and white treatment for ambiance.

there's a real loneliness throughout and of course a sense of impending doom. in fact, rarely does a movie's runtime display on the dvd player feel so much like a ticking clock.

it's a good film, prototypical noir. a prime example of the genre. and apparently it was dumped into theaters for for a few showings and then canned by the studios. it's sort of easy to see why that happened too. the movie is so straight-down-the-middle it could seem half-assed and uninteresting to audiences. but that would be selling it short. sometimes what pushes the genre into that troubling triangle between reflexivity, excess, and parody is a movie that blatantly gives every one of those words the finger. and you have to respect that.

Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer, 1966)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:11:00 +0000

a hand-picked team of specialists gets miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a man with a clot in his brain that needs lazering. moving on. they're in a nuclear submarine because, you know, the cold war. when they get in they ruminate about the philosophical implications of humans looking at the insides of other humans, which somehow takes the form of a "did god make this?" debate that lasts all of 4 seconds. with the intellectualizing out of the way, they immediately get sucked into a "strong current" and taken off course. check "get taken off course" off the list. then they have to go through the heart to get to the brain but there's a lot of turbulence around the heart so they better freeze the man to stop his heart from beating for a while and then quickly revive him. check "battling the elements" off the list. then they run out of oxygen and have to tap into the man's breathing to re-fuel. check "running out of food, water, or air" off. while they do this they have to exit the ship and swim around where naturally one man gets separated and pulled away but then returns. check "divided we fall" off the list. so now they're finally getting close except one of them is actually an enemy spy. "enemy spy". who, by the way, sabotaged their lazer which required cannibalizing the radio to fix so they "lose radio contact". check. now with the gun fixed they zap the clot but in the process the saboteur destroyed their ship and they have no means of escape! check "nearly go down with the ship" off the list. so they have to swim for the nearest exit, which is, wait for it, the eye, where they will escape through the tear duct because human triumph is deeper when it's sad. they make it. de-miniaturize. the end.

questions?

just one.

why? why oh why was this movie ever made? it's basically every plot gimmick of suspense movies crammed really tightly together into one story. one story about miniaturized scientists driving a nuclear submarine through a dying man's head.

also, the ship is still mini and in the man's body. won't that grow big again and kill him? fatal plot flaw. oopsie.

in a wonderful bout of subtle sexism, bombshell raquel welch is brought on the team as the doctor's assistant and the climax (one of the seven, at least) of the movie has her getting attacked by antibodies while the men try to rip off her clothes in order to see her naked, er..., save her.

the rest of the movie is men standing around in a lab looking at giant projections of the outline of the human body and repeating useless medical phrases.

there is one silver lining though. this movie is parodied left and right for obvious reasons, namely, its ridiculous plot and arguably more ridiculous visuals. but if you've seen it, then you can tell whether the parodies are funny. on a related note, people always take a smug pride in knowing the parody references in things like the simpsons or b-movies or whatever, but it's like, what are you really admitting to? you're basically saying, "i'm smart because i know what dumb movie they're talking about because i watched that dumb movie!" ... and welcome to my life now.

Mao II (Don DeLillo, 1991)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:40:00 +0000

this is a phenomenal book.

but it's not an easy read.

i felt like the plot was tightly knit at the beginning and unraveled toward the end. as with the recent don delillo i've read, the plot is pretty secondary so this wasn't too surprising. he's writing creative philosophical essays more than he's writing creative stories that discuss things philosophically, if that makes sense. and i'm okay with it because his arguments are flat out fascinating. it's major point is that terrorism has replaced novel-writing as the world's strongest way of changing beliefs and outlook on a large scale, of capturing human history (i think i heard someone put it this way). and it's a really bold and totally contemporary argument that not a lot of writers would have the audacity to tackle.

he also has paragraphs discussing and describing the twin towers.

and this book was published in 1991.

i had heard everything about how delillo had a preternatural knack for predicting the future but i must have checked the copyright date on this book 20 times while reading it because he predicted 9/11, i'm convinced. if you read this book i think you have to admit, yeah, he called it. it's so uncanny i started wondering absurd things like are terrorists reading don delillo? is don delillo a terrorist?

if you google "mao ii" the 4th entry is a nytimes article titled "look for a writer and find a terrorist" written by lorrie moore, so i'm not alone in my train of thinking here.

this book also pre-dated the salman rushdie ordeal when he was essentially held hostage for his writing. and the plot of mao ii centers around a novelist working to support a poet who was kidnapped by a terrorist group.

it's also about the changing relationship between the individual and the masses. hence the andy warhol mao painting that combines the arch individual replicated to infinity. and more specifically it's about crowds.

it's worth reading just for the sheer prescience and "no fucking way" moments. but aside from that it's pretty complicated and requires some deep attention and a willingness to reread regularly. in a way i think these are the only kinds of books that should exist. they make everything else look like nonsense.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Thu, 06 May 2010 21:35:00 +0000

it's based on a john le carre novel. i've never read anything by the guy but you can tell from the amount of shelf space he gets at borders what kind of a writer he is. the kind that writes books that get turned into spy movies starring richard burton. this is an okay one. i mean i'm a real sucker for spy movies so i'll eventually see them all, but you shouldn't do that. this is one that warrants skipping unless you've got some black and white british fetish.

the deal is that a guy takes one of those spy jobs where you have to act like you've defected to then join the other side's ranks and screw with them. same as in the departed. in typical serial mystery novel fashion, there's a twist at the end that isn't so much of a twist as a flipping over of the script. it leaves you wondering, if they flipped it once, will they flip it twice? and then a third time? it could end up ending the way i thought it'd end the whole time and i'd be surprised about it.

communists. you love em when they're cute and firey and you hate em when they're plotting to kill you. so often the two end up all meshed together there's really no way to win. if movies are any indication, communists have more fun. but that has to be a lie. no one who dresses so blandly can be having that much fun. oh speaking of playing dress up, this movie has jules from jules and jim in it. he wears a stylish beret and plays a german jew. it's a weird mix of german french jewish commie that completely distracted me the entire time.

sad to say there's really nothing you can't get here from other similar movies. my working theory is that americans do better movie mysteries and the british do better tv mysteries. pretty riveting stuff right? this is what thoughts get reduced to when you keep logs of how many movies you watch in a year.

btw, liking the new caribou album this week. swim. that's what it's called: swim. it wasn't a command or anything. unless you're feeling like it. i dont really care if you go for a swim or not. mind the weather though if you do, wouldn't want you to catch cold. a bitter wind can be a real stinger when you get out. we've all been there. (losing my mind, it seems).

Sympathy for the Underdog (Kinji Fukasaku, 1971)

AlexBarkett@gmail.com (Alex Barkett) — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:01:00 +0000

a veteran yakuza gets out of jail after 10 years to find his gang has been disbanded and replaced by a powerful crime syndicate. he rallies the few loyal members he has left and goes to okinawa where there's still territory up for grabs. the gang muscles their way through some small time crews and carves out some space. they have a few character guys, one cowboy with a quick trigger, and the leader is a stone cold badass. even though they're only a few strong and they lose a couple along the way and are always an inch away from getting wiped out, they're totally relentless. when the huge gang from tokyo comes into okinawa to stake their claim, there's only one way to hash things out. giant gun/knife/car battle.

this is kind of a low budget yakuza movie so you dont get john woo fight scenes. it's much more about the quiet moments before and after the action. the battles themselves are jittery and raucous and usually over pretty quick, but my oh my how awesome it is to see one man stand in front of 1,000 with sunglasses on, get asked to leave town, and say totally calmly, with guns pointed at him from every direction, nope.

make no mistake, quentin tarantino has seen this movie. kill bill has sympathy for the underdog written all over it. if any part of you likes westerns, samurais, badasses, people who are quiet and merciless, low budget action, and making a lot out of a little, watch this fucking movie.