I do love Un Coeur En Hiver; but no, haven't seen any Malle. Consider it mentally noted though. The sum total of my exposure to French cinema is Un Coeur En Hiver, Betty Blue, Delicatessan, City of Lost Children, and 'Red' and 'White' -- if those last two were even French? Been a long time so I don't recall.

K

DAMAGE ... I felt like that name was familiar ... Louis Malle I mean. I have Damage on VHS somewhere. It was ... eh. Ok.

K

Yeah, Damage was okay. I did think the cast/performances were fine -- that was the best thing about the flick. Binoche, if I'm recalling correctly, came under a lot of attack for her performance, but I thought it was pretty damn perfect.

I'm pretty sure the only other Malle I've seen is Atlantic City and A Murmur of the Heart. Interesting films. I'd love to finally see My Dinner with Andre one day...

Matthew

I really -- genuinely -- like Who's Next. And Eminence Front. And You Better You Bet. Plus a few others. (Townsend's solo album, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, is also a real favorite of mine.)

And men not liking sports? Bullshit. Seven words: men's gymnastics, men's swimming, and men's diving.

Matthew

Later Malle has a different feel from early Malle. I did like ATLANTIC CITY quite a bit, but DAMAGE just makes me laugh, particularly the scene where Irons keeps knocking Binoche's head into the floor. Haven't seen MY DINNER, though. But don't judge his early work from his later. While he didn't follow a Milos Forman career trajectory, there is a difference.

Silly QT. I know one friend right off the top of my head who says The Who is one of his top 3 favorite bands. Actually, I like them quite a bit too... I just saw them last year (RIGHT after John E. died). Don't care much for sports though...

And nobody sees any reason to pretend to like them, either. Lots of my friends are barely aware of them... of course, lots of my friends are into TODAY'S HARD CORE RAWK, so ther's no accounting for taste...

I sometimes wonder if everything comes down to musical taste.

I hate the Eagles and love the Coens and I hate the Who and love Tarantino.

I've never liked a comic from any comics creator who lists a bunch of crappy bands on his letters page (and only creators with crappy musical taste ever list a bunch of bands on his letters page).

In the scheme of things, The Who is significantly worse than the Eagles, so I'd be closer to having a civil conversation with an Eagles fan.

I liked the movie TOMMY and Ken Russell, so I'm betting that he did it for the cash only.

To enjoy The Who is deny your humanity.

It occurs to me that KILL BILL would make an excellent video game. Structurally it resembles an above average Actrion/Adventure or first-person shooter: the player receives a character-associated "trademark" weapon (ex: Lara Croft's two pistols), fights enemies in several enclosed spaces, then moves on to bigger challenges. As a movie it's quite bad; as a game it would be great. I for one would love such a game. The dialogue is so awful that it already resembles the little non-gameplay dramatic interludes that occur in VICE CITY and all the rest.

You can tell I'm having a hard time discussing KILL BILL purely as a film. Maybe that's why I'm going off on these Godard tangents. I had the same experience when ATTACK OF THE CLONES came out. I mean, the movie is so obviuosly bad that what can one really say to convince someone otherwise? And why would you even bother?

Charles, that essay on Lynch, isn't it the one wher DFW suggests that the band-aid that Marcellus perpetually wears, for no apparent reason, in PULP FICTION, is some kind of Lynchian gesture? I think it was more likely a little Godardian gag, a bit like the fedora that the main character in CONTEMPT wears all the time, even when naked. The most interesting thing about that essay is DFW's quirky little observations of life on a Lynch set. He also comments on the surpising crappiness of Lynch's paintings which he describes as quite sophomoric and derivative of Bacon and Rothko. I've seen some and I'd have to agree.

Your response to Madget would be a far more succesful defense of a Guy Maddin film like CAREFUL or ARCHANGEL, than KILL BILL. Fine, let a movie be "pro-filmic", to use your term, let it intertextualize until it's blue in the face, but at least let it be even slightly interesting to watch, which KILL BILL isn't. Tarantino seems to have learned the lessons of naively trashy movies a little too well: you really cannot tell if the director and actors of KILL BILL are aware that they're involved in a shitty movie. Maddin's films, on the other hand, are stunning. Yes, at first sight, they seem to belabor that most tired of Postmodernist hobbyhorses, the ironic appropriation of past texts, and yet this is so beautifully interwovern into the film and the imagery and rhythms are so amazing, that they achieve a greatness that Tarantino can't even approach. For some they're overly hermetic: THE HEART OF THE WORLD not only references a bunch of old silent-movies but a famous UN-MADE film, for crying out loud. But its also might be the best 6 minutes of film I've ever seen, and I haven't see even a tenth of the films that Maddin references.

By the way, I'm coming around to your dislike of Paukine Kael. Mainly, I enjoy her prose, which is clever and memorable. It's the only movie review book that I own, actually. But if you step back and and just look at her critical judgements you can see how ludicrous she is. Check out her reviews of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and THE SHINING for an example of what I'm talking about. Anyway, I'll come back to your post later.

Now here's a short little precis of stuff I posted before that got erased:

To Gene, on Godard's supposed "archness":

This is simply untrue. People perceive Godard as cold and distant because he doesn't traffic in the familiar emotional cliches of Hollywood. Unless a character is tearing his shirt off and yelling "Stella!", they're percieved as cold puppets of Godard's hyper-intellectualism. Characters don't telegraph their emotions in Godard, they simply present them in a very matter-of-fact way, which some have mistaken for a distancing or ironic gesture. That would describe Hal Hartley's characters, not Godard. Take BREATHLESS. When Belmondo is shot down at the end there's a death-scene that's played out in a very moving, understated way. When Seberg sees him lying there, she has a quietly stunned look on her face and outs her hand over her mouth. It's a quiet gesture of shock. The look also says: This is reality. Belmondo is no longer simply a risible parody of a French gangster but a real man lying dead in the street. Then they go through their little face routine which strikes me as very genuine, the sort of private joke couples have with each other. BREATHLESS is actually my least favorite Godard movie, but, as an example, it'll serve well enough.

Armond White.:

Yes, it's bullshit. Basically White's theories are typical of a certain trend in Cultural Studies that died, oh I don't know, at least five years ago. Based on a crude misreading of Frankfurt Schoolers like Adorno and Benjamin (and more recently Edward Said) they essentially regard white, hegemonic culture's appropriation of black culture as simple instances of "cultural poaching", to use one of their terms. Cultural poaching involves going around decontextualizing pieces of culture, such as Blaxploitation, from their political and cultural mileus and recuperating them in a politically innocuous, watered-down form into The Man's culture. They regard this as a kind of quasi-Imperialist gesture, a bit like a Victorian gentleman decorating his drawing room with pieces of British conquered culture--Afghan rugs, African lions-heads, etc. White, Cornel West, and all the others, feel that cultural trends such as Hip Hop and Blaxploitation constitute "sites of resistance". They enter into the mainstream of white culture and yet, just below the radar, they're quiety subverting it. Yup, they're sticking it to The Man right under his own nose and he doesn't even know it!! Boo-Yah!!

Whatever. The theories are a joke. A text-book example of reductionism. The only thing being "resisted" in these political "sites of resistance" is any meaningful political action whatsoever. White does work as a "useful idiot", to use Lenin's phrase, someone whose idiocies are valuable to the extent that they demonstrate what good critical thinking SHOULDN'T be. Slavoj Zizek very effectively demolishes the whole theory in a few dazzlingly argued pages in his 9/11 book. Poor Edward Said. He couldn't stand the mis-use that was made of his work by Queer Theorists, Hip Hop "scholars", and other flavor-of-the-month academic trends.

--

So now that KILL BILL's suckiness has been revealed to the world I can sit back and look forward to the really great movies of the fall and winter: RETURN OF THE KING, Guy Maddin's THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD (starring Isabella Rosellini with prosthetic legs filled with beer), THE PASSION (which probably won't be very good but I like Jesus movies), and THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS (why not?).

Just 'cause Adam F. mentioned the upcoming MATRIX sequel, I am moved to say that I finally watched RELOADED and found that its 'ending' had far less closure for me than KILL BILL, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK or even FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.

Plus which I didn't like much about TMR save the stunts. But KB blows even the best of those away, no contest.