As cute as bunnies are, they have such judgmental eyes. The mirror of man is in that stern visage.

It's unfortunate that Lynch took RABBITS down from his site when he was planning on using parts of it for INLAND EMPIRE. It's pretty bizarre. You can probably find a copy of the series on a bittorrent site, though.

"You’re a good promoter for Hollywood. I feel like somehow you should be able to make some money out of that."

One thing about living here is that it gives added depth to reading Chandler and Dick and watching Lynch. But most important is that I'm not having to replace mufflers falling off of my car due to Detroit's winters anymore.

Yeah that's always good. Always good.

Lynch's last two films are especially LA confidential, huh. (I'd like to say that living in Wellington gives added depth to watching "The Lord of the Rings", but... not so much.)

Umm... probably a really stupid question. "Dick", that would be Philip K?


(I'm watching season three of Buffy tonight, lent by a friend, so will address IA/Dptd this weekend.)

Yep, Phil K.. I'm reading his realistic Californian book, HUMPTY DUMPTY IN OAKLAND, right now. It ain't VALIS, but it's alright.

PKD books I read:
- Clans of the Alphane Moon
- Radio Free Albemuth
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- A Scanner Darkly
- The Cosmic Puppets

I read all these in my late school years (funnily enough the period referenced earlier re Darko). I hadn't read a lot of 'weird' fiction then, so I found some of the more out there Dick stuff, well, pretty out there. I remember Radio Free Albemuth to be fuckin trippy! I loved Cosmic Puppets, and, true story, I had scarlet fever myself as a kid - I survived. (Or did I? Oooooh...)

Anyway, I've been meaning to read some more Dick, now that I'm all growed-up, but haven't got around to it.

THE DEPARTED v INFERNAL AFFAIRS (Possible SPOILERS ahead, though I won’t be giving away the specifics of the ending.)

INFERNAL AFFAIRS is a good, lean, mean thriller – a nice concept well executed. THE DEPARTED is a good enough remake, but with extra fat. They added quite a bit of extra content in TP. Mostly well handled, and I appreciated it because it meant there was something to gain out of the remake for someone who’d seen the original.

I’m not so sure about the more complicated relationships with the main women character. From the viewpoint of someone who saw IA first, her having close involvement with both characters seemed almost cheesy.

The end of IA was better. It had much of the same basic results, but with one key difference, which I won’t spoil (just yet anyway). But it did mean IA had a less cynical quality than TP - a little redemptive, even.

TP has a great opening line, though: “I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.”

I’m interested to get an opinion from someone who’s seen them in reverse order. TP is just good enough that, if it was the first version you saw, it might seem like the better film. Knowing what basically happens may take the edge off IA.

TP?

The 'Parted.

K

Obviously.

Midnight Eye has a review of THE GLAMOROUS LIFE OF SACHIKO HANAI that I talked about on the last page.

Also, if you want to see social rebellion in its purest form, a great Japanese documentary is available on dvd: THE EMPEROR\'S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON . And that great title perfectly captures the film. The director, Kazuo Hara, is a radical documentarian who believes in letting his subject matter do as it will in front of the camera. He films people as if they were wildlife. We get to see his subject here, Kenzo Okuzaki, get in fist fights that he starts with no interruption from the film crew. The cops come at least twice that I remember, where they are verbally assaulted by Okuzaki for being vestigial tools of the emperor. He also regularly lies to get the truth out of people. He does achieve some effects with his brutal approach such as getting veterans of WWII to admit to cannibalism of their own soldiers (it depended on rank). This film is incredible and I'm looking forward to seeing the other films from Hara now available on video. From the review: And for HK action fans, I recommend Johnnie To whose work I've recently started delving into. All 3 of the films I've seen metaphorically deal with the handing over of Hong Kong to the Mainland. In a tribute to Kurosawa's judo film, SUGATA SANSHIRO, To's THROWDOWN is about a down-on-his-luck judo master going blind and having to rediscover his inspiration in life with help of a couple of drifters. There's plenty of bar-room brawls, but all done with that tumbling style of judo, which makes it a different kind of martial arts film. To applies a light touch to the crime, violence and onsset of blindness with an uplifting message. It's a bit like watching an old Lubitsch film, actually. EXILED is about a gang of boyhood friends who find themselves working under different crime bosses or on different sides of the law. One of them is to be killed with a couple to do the killing and the others doing the protecting. It deals with the struggle of core values (family, friendship, etc.) in the face of a changing social climate. The best of the 3, EXILED, is about the democratic election of a new Triad chairman. The new chairman is faced with the possible onset of gang war due to a loose cannon who wants to throw out the old ways and make himself leader. There's an undercurrent of irony in the film being about the democratic tradition of HK gangsters contrasted with communist rule in Mainland China. The new chairman seems rather complacent and friendly throughout much of the film, but when it comes to time to do what he has to do, you get a great slowburn payoff showing why he commands so much respect. The guy who plays him, Simon Yam, has that same steely, but kind, eyed quality of Beat Takeshi that makes him so fascinating to watch. There's a real easy-going pace to all of these films, punctuated by some amazingly wellshot acts of violence. To loves the Leone wide-angled shot where he pans to a statuesque figure in the foreground. He also loves long shots where much occurs on camera, including the action, rather than rapid-editing occlusion. He could definitely teach a thing or two to our current action directors in the US. He's a really good mainstream director.

I saw this over Thanksgiving. The audience I saw it with was audibly unhappy with the ending of the movie. However, many of them were also audibly having spirited arguments about various plot points (who has the money, etc.) as they exited. I think if it weren't for the last 30 minutes or so, the movie would do reasonably well.

I loved the movie; I haven't been able to stop thinking about it and I'm now reading the book. However, it is very McCarthy. I.e. an incredibly well-crafted set-up with fascinating but psychologically remote characters, in which every detail and sparse line of dialogue drips with meaning -- all of which devolves and meanders away from hard-wired dramatic expectations in favor of impenetrable pontification. I have read at least four McCarthy novels, and still have no clear-cut idea as to his own theology or philosophy -- there's so much interwoven into his texts and they are so cold and non-internalized (far more so than this movie, even) that it is very difficult to piece coherent interpretations together; and yet, due to the nature of the work, there is endless fodder for such analysis.

It almost seems cruel in this case, of McCarthy and the Coens, in the sense that his set-up is so god-damned good. It's a cold movie, but I actually think it had the majority of the audience I was with by the balls until one of the main characters unexpectedly bites the dust. From there the movie seems to float a bit arbitrarily, and the dramatic climax everyone was hoping for, and which the set-up absolutely invites, simply does not happen.

I am still sorting out my thoughts on it. On the one hand, I don't mind the eschewal of expectations and dramatic cliches, and I expect as much from McCarthy, especially after being mindfucked for months by Blood Meridian. On the other hand, to set up the Sheriff's (and probably McCarthy's) resigned pontifications -- which are the intended center of gravity, here -- around such a razor-sharp little cat-and-mouse caper, feels somewhat arbitrary to me. As bad-ass as the bad-ass in this movie is, and as violent as the movie gets, none of it feels as far afield as the more random incidents of cruelty cited by the Sheriff throughout the movie -- because there is arguable motive here, a plot, a briefcase full of money at play. It is interesting how oddly meaningless that briefcase becomes as things unfold -- a simple symbolic elicitation of dark forces in the world, almost. But, images like the old man fleeing a torture house in nothing but a dog collar -- an image we never see, but are only told of -- tend to be a far more intuitive basis for the Sheriff's attitude throughout the film.

So far -- just a dozen pages in or so -- the book reads like an incredibly, almost boringly straightforward transcript of events: as if McCarthy had sat there watching the Coens' movie and simply dictated what was happening on paper. That's to say, so far it seems as if the movie was so god-damned faithful an adaptation that I'm wondering if reading the book is even going to add a whole lot (although that it wouldn't goes against all my prior experience with McCarthy.) Maybe I'll add some further thoughts after I finish it. It should be a fairly quick read -- another thing that I usually don't associate with McCarthy, but here it is.

K