Seconds Apart (2011)

9/10 | IMDb | Antonio Negret



The moment the girl in the picture above appeared, I knew I wasn't watching your average horror movie. She reminded me of a girl I had a crush on high school which is to say she didn't look better suited to porn. She wasn't your average horror movie babe and in retrospect that's what I found so interesting about her. She wound up representing the movie as a whole which was gripping and frightening albeit not in the usual way. Also, there's one moment at the end, ugh, I can't get it out of my head. It's so gross. I won't spoil it.

Super (2010)

8/10 | IMDb | James Gunn



"Super" is about what would happen if an ordinary man became a superhero, as well as what kind of person that man might be. James Gunn imagines him as schizotypal - aloof, friendless, humorless, psychotic. Frank (Rainn Wilson) adopts an alter ego not because of an enforced narrative overlay but because of his pathology.

Ellen Page enters the picture as a comic book shop clerk. Frank, who is in the process of inventing his alter ego, looking for weapons ideas, asks her for comics about superheroes without powers. She's eager to oblige. Before we know it, she charms the pants off us, if not him. She's the only character in the whole movie who we like and will ever like.

Frank becomes a superhero at last. He dresses in red and whacks people on the head with a bolt wrench. The news runs a story on this new "real life superhero." Page sees it and wonders, could it be Frank? She appears at his workplace. She wonders aloud about the whole situation. She comes close to him. She's coy. She's lost in his gaze. She can't stop smiling. She asks if it's him. He denies.

Frank, in character, is shot. With no one else to turn to, he turns to her, showing up at her door. She takes him in and patches up the wound. He spends the night. She asks if she can be his sidekick. He hesitates but in the end agrees.

She never had any interest in stopping crime, it turns out. She only wanted to murder people. She was a psychopath all along. Frank doesn't hold this against her. She remains his sidekick. After all, isn't she just another sad person in a sad, sad world?

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)

7/10 | IMDb | Daniel Alfredson

The "Girl..." movies are pop thrillers about a reclusive introverted antisocial bisexual computer hacker with a troubled past. I like her for the same reasons I like the Suicide Girls. There's something sexy, I think, about girls who ruin themselves with tattoos, piercings and bad haircuts and who make out with other girls. I'm not sure that I like these movies for the reasons that I'm supposed to like them due to what I percieve as an apparent (and baffling) disinterest in Lisbeth on the behalf of the writers and directors as a sex object (though according to articles I've read Fincher may have corrected this) but I like them anyway.

The Bourne Trilogy (2002, 2004 and 2007)

6/10 | IMDb | The Bourne Identity | Doug Liman

0/10 | IMDb | The Bourne Supremacy | Paul Greengrass

0/10 | IMDb | The Bourne Ultimatum | Paul Greengrass

My dad maintains that Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity is the best book he's read. I haven't read it but I wouldn't like it because I don't like Robert Ludlum. His books are 2000 words a day of plot, intrigue and violence. Todd pointed out that books I like are the opposite of the movies I like and there's truth to that. I read my dad's books when I was a kid, but only because I liked the idea of reading them. I think what I might have been doing was trying to connect with my dad in some way.

I liked Liman's adaptation of Ludlum's first Bourne novel more than I did any of Ludlum's books. "Identity" is never better than its first third. The amnesiac protagonist (nameless at first) struggles to piece together his titular identity and discovers things that raise only more questions for him. We know he's a secret agent, but the fun is seeing him realise this. In one scene, he's asleep on a park bench, then is suddenly awoken by bothersome police. He dispatches of them with martial arts skills he didn't even know he had, then is dumbstruck by what he's done. The film becomes less interesting once he's more or less pieced together the puzzle, but it doesn't stop being entertaining.

The subsequent two films were garbage in my opinion. There was no need for the camera to be always zooming in and out and waving all around I thought and the cuts were far too frequent (this, coming from a Michael Bay fan!). I gave up on both of them about fifteen minutes in and left them on in the background so I could rate them without feeling guilty. The dialogue and sound effects were good.

Movie Round-Up III

7/10 | Mimic | Guillermo del Toro

I like Jeremy Northam. He's vague. He does a good job of disappearing into movies more about mood than characters. In this sense, he's perfect for "Mimic," an X-Files episode by way of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I'll forget it in a week, but I loved watching it.

 

7/10 | Mother's Day | Darren Lynn Bousman

We don't like remakes because our expectations are heightened by the source material. The average remake is no worse than the average film, but it's hard to not be bothered by even a good remake if it falls short of an eminent original. We have expectations of a movie before we watch it. This is not conscious. It seems as if we just become aware of our like or dislike of a movie rather than make an active decision, but this is not so. We subconciously determine a value judgment of each movie we watch based on our expectations. If it meets them then it's good, if it doesn't then it's bad and if it trumps them then it's great. More often than not, we know the potential of the premise of a remake - we've seen it for ourselves, in the original - and in these cases we expect the remake to also be great, if only because of the gaps in our understanding of the reasons for the success of the original. This affects our value judgments: films that ought to satisfy us disappoint us because they're remakes.

           We can agree that a movie picked at random has as much chance of being great as another movie picked at random. We can also agree that remakes tend to be of great movies. We can't agree, though we should, that a remake of a great movie has about as much chance of being great as a movie picked at random. We think that the remake has more potential because the original has proven it. There's a marginal difference, sure, but it's so slight that it doesn't even matter, not nearly as much as the cast and crew involved.

 

4/10 | Friends with Benefits | Will Gluck

I surfed the web while this was on. I paid attention to a few bits. They weren't so good.

 

8/10 | Con Air | Simon West

It was good.

Movie Round-Up II

6/10 | Walk Hard | Jake Kasdan

If we take only one thing from the film's best scene, it's that John C. Reilly's expression says it all.

8/10 | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Niels Arden Oplev

In the end, my eyes were tired from reading the subtitles.

5/10 | Hot Fuzz | Edgar Wright

My partner asked me what my favorite film was. I thought about it and, to my surprise, I couldn't settle on just one. The bad seafood then came back to haunt me and I threw up all over both of us.

9/10 | Raiders of the Lost Ark | Steven Spielberg

Spielberg's film raises an interesting question: was Hitler wrong, or has society just conditioned us to think so?

8/10 | RoboCop | Paul Verhoeven

We, as viewers, can't help but imagine ourselves as Robocop, finishing what Hitler started.

Movie Round-Up

7/10 | The Invention of Lying | Ricky Gervais

Starring Ricky Gervais.

7/10 | Gone Baby Gone | Ben Affleck

Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane.

10/10 | Hollow Man | Paul Verhoeven

From the director of "Starship Troopers."

5/10 | Pathology | Marc Schölermann

Can Jake win this deadly game?

8/10 | Stuck |Stuart Gordon

Edge-of-your-seat thrills.

10/10 | Dahmer | David Jacobson

Based on a true story.

Fight Club

1.

I sat at my office desk. My boss peered over my cubicle.

“I hope all your work is done,” he said seriously.

“Uh... sure, man!”

“Good, good work.”

He reached over and tousled my hair.

I grinned a wide, wide smile, closed my eyes and moaned, “Don't stop....”

He retracted his hand and gave me a queer look.

“Back to work there,” he said, and quickly strode away.

2.

I looked around my apartment.

“I'm so disillusioned!” I said aloud.

“Shut up!” said my neighbour, through the wall.

3.

At the airport, a strange man appeared.

“The name's Tyler,” he said. We shook hands and each did a jig. “Hey, we ought to start a Fight Club, one of these days.”

“Sure,” I said. “Don't use it for terrorism, though!”

We both laughed.

4.

Tyler instructed the men.

“There are many rules of Fight Club! The first rule is that cell phones must be turned off. The second rule is no unruly behavior. The third rule is to stay away from the fireplace. I wrote down several more rules but they were burnt in the fireplace.”

“Tyler!” said one of the men. “Can we fight yet?”

Tyler laughed. Everyone laughed along with him.

“Sometimes it is good to laugh,” said Tyler.

5.

Who knows what became of the Fight Club?

Nobody.

09-12-11

http://soundcloud.com/mister-cheech

Listen to my music, okay?

04-12-11

I want to try to explain something that, for as long as I've been depressed, I've struggled to explain.

I hate working. I quit my job because I can't keep forcing myself to do something that I hate so much. I've tried to explain this to people but the response is always something like, “I have days when I hate my job too, but I  go anyway because I have to.” I understand their point of view. I used to be like them but I'm not any more, and that's what they don't understand.

Before the depression hit, my emotions guided me. I was pulled towards the things that I liked. I was repelled by the things that I didn't. It was simple.

I liked the friends I had. I liked talking to them. I liked making them laugh. We had mutual interests. It was all reciprocal. We spent time together because we liked it.

I did the things I did because I liked doing them. I liked watching movies. I liked playing video games. I liked writing songs. I was pulled toward those things because I liked them.

Similarly, I didn't do the things that I didn't like. I didn't play sports because I didn't like sports. I didn't play chess because I didn't like chess. I didn't hang out with the kids who weren't my friends because I didn't like them as much as I liked my friends. I was repelled by those things because I didn't like them.

I can remember days when I didn't want to go to school, or when I didn't want to do to my homework. But it was different then. At least then, there were things about school that I liked, like my friends, or there was something to look forward to once I'd finished my homework – TV, video games, whatever.

When the depression hit, all of a sudden, I didn't like anything. My internal compass was going round and round in circles. I had no drive, no impetus, because I didn't like anything, so I didn't gravitate toward anything, and I was repelled by everything.

It's been like that ever since.

Now I don't interact with the world based on what I like and dislike – which is what every sane person does – but rather based on what is bearable and what is unbearable. It's all bad, I can just tolerate some of it.

I don't feel bad about not having friends now because I know that that's more than I can handle. It's just too horrible for me, the process of making and keeping them. When I'm around people, I feel awful. I can't change that. I don't have to beat myself up over my reclusiveness now because I accept that I don't have any other choice.

I don't feel so guilty about not being able to work any more. I acknowledge and accept that work is more than I can bear. The challenge is convincing other people of that, trying to explain to people why that is.

I'm sure that what's happened to me can't be reversed. I've accepted my fate as best I can. I'm not looking for a cure, but rather to live a life that is bearable.

I've said it as well as I think I can say it, which is not very well. I did some drawings. I think they will make things clearer.