Charles: I know I've seen some Johnny To, but none of the ones you mention. FULLTIME KILLER is the one the comes to mind off the top of my head. Seen that one? It's interesting. It's not real fresh in my mind though, as I saw it quite a while back.

K

One theme I do see in a lot of the McCarthy work I've read is that letting the Devil into your life (so to speak) never does any good, and to think that you can one-up him is vain. I have yet to read a McCarthy novel wherein the forces of Evil are defeated, or anything near it. So you have the beginning of No Country for Old Men, in the Sheriff's thoughts, with a passage like this, which opens the book -- and which differs just a bit from the Coens' version of the opening. The bold bit is key here, a heavy superstitious thread that runs through other McCarthy novels.

Compare to this bit from the opening of Suttree, following a description of Knoxville at night:

And the final feverish, almost dream-like passage about the Judge, the bad-ass, maybe-Satan-incarnate character from Blood Meridian:

Don't even get me going on Outer Dark, but suffice to say Evil is not easily defeated in McCarthy's universe, and engaging it on any front is disastrous.

In No Country for Old Men, there seems to be some question as to whether Chigurh is Evil Incarnate, some agent of Satanic fate (as he seems to fancy himself) -- or merely a slippery psychopath, a crazy violent man, and nothing more. But in the slightly different opening the Sheriff already seems to be aligning him with Greater Forces; so maybe that room for questioning is introduced by the Coens' rather than McCarthy.

K

HBO On Demand counts as 'stuff I've rented lately', doesn't it?

Finally watched the last four episodes of Six Feet Under this weekend. It kind of fell apart at the end. They tried to squeeze too much drama into the last few episodes. Too many flashbacks and dream sequences and the like.

Seasons 1 and 2 are great. Seasons 3 and 4 are good. Season 5 is merely O.K. The show had it's moments. Well worth watching.

I also finished watching the first season of Tell Me You Love Me this weekend. It's definitely worth a look. There's not a lot of melodramatic soap opera bullshit, and there's lots of fucking. It's easily the most explicit television show I've ever watched.

Mm. The year is ending with some real good 'uns, actually. Control came to my city not too long ago, and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead a bit after that.

Since then, I've also seen Margot at the Wedding and I'm Not There -- both terrific films.

And I haven't even gotten to see No Country for Old Men yet. I hope it's half as good as the hype. I do like me some Coen Bros., but even before their recent little spat of what I can only imagine are detours from their true muses, they could be variable, if largely worthy.

Matthew

I just watched The Kumite, because it features Tony Jaa who is basically the Muy Thai boxing version of Jackie Chan. It turns out that he's the villain of the piece, which I thought might be interesting. It wasn't, really.

The Kumite is about a high school guy from China who kickboxes. He wants to enter an Asian mixed martial arts tournament and beat Tank (Tony Jaa) because he's the best.

Along the way, our young hero Bond falls in love with one of his teachers and it becomes a mutual thing. Which is interesting, because while people disapprove the idea isn't met with the shock and outrage somebody from the U.S. might expect. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the half-Korean Kim is totally adorable in a take her home to meet your mom sort of way.

Anyway... You get to see some good fight scenes, but instead of being "Best of the Best, only without Eric Roberts crying" which is what I expected, it's more like a remake of Rocky. Right down to how it's more about winning at life than whether or not Bond wins the title.

Tony Jaa is basically the Apollo Creed character. His training scenes evoke Drago from Rocky IV a little, and he breaks a guy's leg for no good reason... but it turns out that he isn't all bad.

Mixed martial arts turns out to be the key to success. Most competitors stick with one fighting style (usually Muy Thai or some other form of kickboxing), but Tank (Tony Jaa) mixes in some kung fu to defeat some of his opponents. His big thing is to use grappling moves because the kickboxers don't know how to counter them effectively.

After various complications arise for Bond, such as getting kicked out of his kickboxing school, he finds a new coach who is basically the Burgess Meredith analogue.

Bullshit Bill (as they refer to him in the English dub) decides that Bond needs to learn some kung fu. So, he learns a bunch of new things to do with his hands (Wing Tsun moves, for example) and enough grappling to maybe keep Tank from knocking him into next week.

And it works. So well that it made me wonder why none of the other kickboxers thought of it.

Eventually, Bond and Tank are the only two left. But instead of just showing the two best guys beating the crap out of each other, the movie takes a slight detour to start focusing more on that whole "winning at life" thing.

Other plot threads get resolved in the midst of a bunch of annoying flashbacks to stuff we saw already, and then things get all ambiguous and subtle on us.

I think Bond and Kim finally get together after the film goes forward in time for no good reason instead of telling us which guy won. But that may be just my romantic side showing. We don't even know how old Bond is when they meet again during "another summer", just that he went off to college in some other country and he might still be in school.

I hate that the movie just sort of ends without resolving everything. If he lost to Tank, just for example, there would have been no harm in telling us because they already made the point several times that simply managing to make it that far was good enough. Tank even told Bond that he respected him for doing so well up to that point. If he somehow pulled a miracle out of his butt and won... well, it would have been nice to see it.

It's a fun movie for the most part, but the last fifteen minutes or so really piss me off.

Mildly recommended.

Madget,

Well, Chigurh is the only one who lives by rules, applied absolutely. He reminds me a bit of Dale Cooper from TWIN PEAKS, actually. Although he allows for randomness, once the outcome has been determined, he lives rationally, i.e., by a code, rather than by desire. Unlike Satan, Chigurgh doesn't deceive, he's brutally honest. He is the soldier doing his duty, the employee being the best he can at his job. What retail chain wouldn't want such a guy in their loss prevention devision? The Nazis could've used a 1000 like him, but so could the US.

Haven't seen FTK, only the 3 To films I mentioned. I've heard it's good. He's a pretty diverse director, doing comedies and melodramas, as well.

Matthew,

Did you see BEFORE THE DEVIL ...? I thought it was pretty bad, but I recommend it for the nude butt shots of Marisa Tomei. Jesus, she gets better looking as she gets older .... Anyway, I know you don't care about that, and a Ethan Hawke isn't exactly a male parallel to Tomei. There's this unnecessary nonlinear structure where Lumet clues you into to time switches by this irritating swishing noise and visual effect. None of the characters act in a manner that makes much sense. It would take my revealing much of the "twists" to explain why, so I'll leave it at all the high drama comes from implausibly manufactured scenarios. And Hawke is at his most headache-inducing.

I'M NOT THERE had me wishing that at times (yuck, yuck), but it's a significant improvement over VELVET GOLDMINE and it's had me thinking about it since I saw it (which is more than most movies). I've noticed a strain within Haynes' films devoted to honoring other artists: he tends to simply duplicate/lift scenes and styles and expects that to say more than it probably does. VG was a pastiche of wellknown stories about glam rockstars loosely connected in a pretty bland narrative. FAR FROM HEAVEN was a pastiche of wellknown Sirk films and stylistic techniques. And, now, we have a more diverse pastiche of Bob Dylan stories and films from the period in which the stories took place. Even if it isn't as engaging on a dramatic level as FFH (the Gainsbourg as wife to a superstar scenes are pure formulaic drudgery), it's more intellectually interesting. The movie oscillates between an anti-essentialist reading of Dylan and essentialist one, and I think it ultimately fails for this reason. Despite the film's argument that Dylan as a pop construct is a series of stories that belong to us all, the film comes down pretty much on Dylan's own quixotic (and I'd say hypocritical) resistance to his pop cultural status. For example, the critic who attempts to argue the moral issues around his status is the only interpretation of Dylan that's very literally criticized in the film (in a "if you were in my shoes" essentialist segment, where he's aligned to the oppressor of Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett). Thus, there are right and wrong stories about Dylan. But, on the other hand, Dylan as a black child calling himself Woody Guthrie is an okay "lie"/form of story-telling. However, the film isn't completely uncritical of Dylan, such as the borrowing of the black militants from Godard's ONE + ONE as a contrast to Dylan's referring to the Stones as that popular little cover band. I have plenty more thoughts, but that's enough from me. Color me mixed, I suppose. But I do recommend it.

That's an interesting point, and one that Woody Harrelson's character alludes to, in a slightly forced-seeming bit of dialogue with their mutual employer. But is the Sheriff not principled and living by a code? At any rate, it makes the relationship of Chigurh and Moss's tale to the Sheriff and his pontifications that much fuzzier to me. Maybe I'm approaching it too conventionally; or maybe I'm misunderstanding the Sheriff. But I assume the "true and living prophet of destruction" he refers to is Chigurh, amplified in much the way Chigurh would like: that he is an inevitable tool of fate. Moss' wife challenges this notion. But then, as you point out, Chigurh is being a good employee -- which itself is arguable (he's been caught for something or other at the beginning of the movie, and I'm a little unclear on the extent of his role, and his relationship to Harrelson's character, who seems too quickly disposed of in the movie.) Mmf; I wanted to see the movie again before the credits had even finished rolling. I'll see what I can cull from the book. I'm not sure what I make of it. But the Sheriff: those eyes he describes, windows to no soul, are also Chigurh's, no? I try to align it with the rest of McCarthy's work too which complicates it maybe. It's interesting to see a McCarthy story set in relatively contemporary times. His first book, The Orchard Keeper, set in the 20s or 30s or thereabouts, seems to view the encroachment of a codified society as practically apocalyptic. But like Maurice points out at the end of No Country, things aren't so different. Still: systemization and technology on a broad scale are generally regarded with tremendous suspicion. Take this bit from Blood Meridian:

Yet like Chigurh, in Blood Meridian, the Judge (neither of the above characters, but the central destructive force) tends to be an honest and a reliable, if brutal, employee. His somewhat De Sade-ian reckoning of the world seems rational; you almost wonder if McCarthy embraces it in some way, the arguments are so well-presented. An ex-priest and the Kid -- who maybe has intimations of a conscience -- offset him; but they are also weaker, and they do not prevail. And they are not especially sympathetic anyway. The Kid, in a repentant moment near the end of the book, finds a hooded old woman alone in rough country somewhere; he speaks to her, offers to help her, and get her through to safer lands, etc.; then he realizes she's been dead already, for a long time, and he reaches out to touch her, and she crumbles to bone and dust.

There's a very hopeless undertow to McCarthy's work, but it seems a different animal than mere crotchety pessimism. He's closer to Stephen Crane's naturalism; but interwoven with all sorts of fevered Heironymous Bosch-esque biblicism, and a deeper historical reach.

Anyway, I don't necessarily expect you to be able to respond to much of this, I guess, but, well.

K

Well, as always, you make me want to read his books. I will, damnit. This reminds me of that discussion I had with Gene about books dealing with good and evil. I suspect he'd call all of this "ironic," but it really gets to the meat of morality, dunnit? So much evil in the 20th century is really just the cold rationality of rule following. Me, I'd side with the Sheriff, but in the end, he's a quitter (unlike Brolin or Bardem). Harrelson's character, to me, functions as the other side of the Sheriff, willing to do a job, but not at expense of his sanity or life. And here sanity becomes knowing when it's time quit or compromise.

Yeah; I see his point with "ironic" I suppose, in its broadest sense, but to apply it in the way Gene does seems to me to assume a motivation that I don't think is necessarily there on the author's part: that is, to actively scramble a simplistic genre model that he (Gene) is giving inherent precedence and authority. As if Franz Kafka should be accountable to Stan Lee. What goes on in Kafka or McCarthy isn't so pettily reactionary. I suppose a kind of irony is going to be symptomatic to any superior artistic mind tackling his subject with complexity or originality, though. Irony itself is a bit relative, I'd say. It's like saying that the reason someone has a cold is that they're sneezing. But maybe that's not fair to Gene; I don't remember if he was arguing irony was a central motivation. It just seems to me inherent to the idea. Ironic what? Kafka seems too far outside any recognizable genre; I mean, it's not some kind of "let's tweak Daddy's way of telling this story" narrative mischief. Sure it's different, but it isn't a gimmick. It is what it is. If I read a McCarthy novel that concluded with the recognizable foe being vanquished and the ostensible good guys living happily ever after, it would eschew my expectations; is it then ironic? I dunno. I don't see what it matters, anyway.

K

I just watched Pittsburgh, starring Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr. and Illeana Douglas.

It's kind of like Waiting for Guffman, only everybody is playing themselves. Some of the participants thought it was a real documentary, so there's a mix of stuff that is totally real and stuff that is improv and other scenes that blur the two in ways that just make the whole thing confusing.

Basically, Goldblum is in a production of The Music Man with some famous people he knows and wackiness ensues.

It's a cute movie... but Guffman is funnier while mining similar territory.

My favorite running gag is that Begley is trying to get Goldblum to do an infomercial for a portable solar generator he invented.

The deleted scenes are a hoot, and the commentary does a lot to explain the running gags and inside jokes. So, it's definitely interesting and funny enough to be worth renting.

Recommended.