Criterion

As the proud few who read this blog know, I am kind of into movies. I say that in the most understated way imaginable. The reality of the situation is that while I find it easy to refrain from using crack and heroin, if there was a way to place Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Seventh Seal, Akira, Blazing Saddles, Ichi the Killer, Yojimbo, and The Sword of Doom onto a heated spoon I would be a five-syringe-a-day junkie. I'd be broke and my 29-year old face would look like the hallowed out wax visage of a melting Norwegian troll candle.

DVDs are almost as prolific and scattered in their releases as VHS tapes were in their 80's heyday. We're getting shows that aren't even off the air yet, as well as classic movies and TV programs from years gone by. And yet, as much as the studios try, I am still dissappointed to find that such shows as Thriller and Parker Lewis Can't Lose are still not available on DVD. (Although I did find out recently that Parker Lewis will be out sometime this summer.)

The buoy on the sea of movie history is The Criterion Collection. If you have ever watched a DVD commentary, or know what one is, then you are familiar with the major contribution that Criterion has made outside the bounds of their own catalogue. Criterion invented the DVD commentary. Criterion created the idea of "special features", and to this day, Criterion makes the best commentaries and includes the best special features of any DVD company around. (There are standouts in other companies, for example, the Fight Club DVD commentary has David Fincher, Helena Bonham Carter, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.) But the best comenatary I've ever heard is from the Criterion edition of The Rock: Michael Bay, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, actors Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris, and technical [Navy Seal] advisor Harry Humphries. It is an amazing way to watch a movie.

The Criterion Collection puts out classic movies and conemporary films - anything they feel is important and needs preservation. Why is there no Criterion Citizen Kane? Because Citizen Kane doesn't need saving and there's nothing left for Criterion producers to find that hasn't already been found about the film. Sanjuro needs to be preserved. Branded to Kill needs a documentary. No one in the world will go the lengths to make a great release of Le Samaurai or Jigoku. Criterion to the rescue!

If you think you're a film critic, fan, buff or casual viewer, check out the Criterion collection. Then go create a Netflix account and immediately fill it with The Milky Way, Wild Strawberries, Tales of Hoffmann, The Blob and The Ruling Class.

Graduating: addendum

I just read the David Foster Wallace commencement address that Patton Oswalt felt he had to live up to.

Here it is.

It's great.

Graduating

There are all sorts of different experiences that 18-year olds have when they graduate high school. Some of them fuck their girlfriends as a pledge to stay true while they're off at separate colleges. Some get cars or SUVs. Still others might get taken to dinner or receive really nice pens. Some might get good advice.

I got a speeding ticket, a copy of Oh, The Places You'll Go! and a label maker - the better to identify my things while away at college.

Apparently some people received a version of this commencement address from alumnus Patton Oswalt: from Patton's blog, May 25, 2008. I feel like my life would be 1000% different today if I had heard these words at my graduation.

Watching Watchmen

You find small moments of genius in the strangest places. In Men in Black, a good movie but not a work of genius, we get the genius line, courtesy of Tommy Lee Jones, "A person is smart, but people are stupid." No sentiment sums up the adaptation of Watchmen better than that.

Take it how you will: either that the adaptation sucked and was made by stupid people or that the adaptation was formed because of the nature of the audience dynamic of the movie-going experience. I think the adaptation was a success. The movie was good. It was exciting, violent, gritty, well-realized, engrossing and dense without being too overbearing. Of course I'm coming from having read the story, so that gave me a good sense of what was transpiring onscreen. I know a lot of people who hadn't read Watchmen before, and they were a little lost at the winding storyline.

A single person watching or reading something can handle a wider range of weirdness than an audience in a theater. For some reason there is a place where an audience will become a complete organism and reject what is happening onscreen. I think the filmmakers were nervous about the original ending in the book, so they re-wrote it so it would play better in front of the collective American audience. They did a great job, because the ending is still the same, it's just different. (I know I'm being vague, but I'm not giving away either ending in detail.)

Watchmen has always been touted as the unfilmable book. That is partly because the script had been tossed around all over the place between companies for about twenty years prior to this release. At the end it seemed that two studios had rights to the story, so one of them got international rights and the other got domestic rights. It's a messed up tangle of lawsuits and copyright BS. Long story short, we have a Watchmen film and it's good. The other reason that Watchmen was considered by some to be unfilmable is because it is a dense tale with lots of characters and side-stories that come together to form a wonderful whole, but would make a 6 hour movie necessary.

There are a couple of big changes, one big blue change, and a few smaller alterations that are curious. The most obvious is that there is a lot more Dr. Manhattan...a lot more shown onscreen in fact. He wears more clothes in the comic than in the movie. I'm not sure why they chose to do it that way, but if you want to see a large blue penis, run out and buy a ticket for Watchmen. Another change is the added violence in the prison, where a thug's arms are cut off with a circular saw instead of just his throat being slit. Not sure why the added change with that one. I like gore as much as the next horror fan, but a scene like that will make some people stay away from the theater. It just wasn't necessary.

** Spoilerishness ahead **Casting was strange. When you cast a film based on a novel, it makes sense that there would be some disparities, but when you cast a comic book movie, don't you know what the characters are going to look like? Some people were way off, and it changed the tone a bit. Take Dan Dreiberg for instance, (Nite Owl 2). In the book he has fallen out of shape. In the movie he doesn't look out of shape at all. That detracts from the humanity that the book has to offer. The original story is all about how human these people are underneath their costumes. The movie makes them all amazing physical specimens, and that is counter intuitive to the book. Also Ozymandias is not how I thought he'd be. He seems like an evil genius bent on world domination, not a good guy who feels hemmed in by the only apparent solution to world peace. In the book, Ozymanidas is defeated by his own intelligence. He does what he feels he has to, but he doesn't want to do it. The ends justify the means though, so he goes through with his plan.

Everyone's favorite character, (even if he's your second favorite, he's still who the movie is about in my opinion), Rorschach, is awesome. There's not much to say about him. The filmmakers spent the most time on Rorschach and every part of his performance, look and voice is perfect. He brings the characters and the film together.

Apart from that, the movie works. You can't have everything from the book in the movie anyway, so there were always going to be some elisions. I think the movie works very well in conjunction with the book. They are both required reading and viewing. If you have seen the film, read the book and still want more, you can buy/rent Tales of the Black Freighter, an animated movie that is direct-to-DVD which is a movie version of the story-within-a-story from the Watchmen graphic novel. You can also buy/rent Watchmen: The Motion Comic. The Motion Comic is about 5 hours long and it is the entire graphic novel, panel by panel, slightly animated, but exactly the same as the graphic novel. It's an interesting experience from what I've heard.

Sign #115 of the coming Apocalypse

There will be a new wine on the market in April. CLD Imports will be bringing the Aussie wine, Return of the Living Red, to American shores next month. The wine is getting pretty solid reviews. it is non-vintage, uses 2 different kinds of grapes, and will probably turn you into the un-dead. Sounds like a blast. The states where CLD Imports distribute to are, CA, IL, NJ, TX, DE, MD and DC.

I would buy a bottle just to have it forever for the fun of it if I could.

See the wine here.

And here.

And just so you're made aware, The Grapes of Death is a real movie about a wine-making town in France wherein the chemicals put on the grape plants turn everyone into zombies when they start drinking the wine.

The long-awaited obscene post

My girlfriend, chaste virgin that she is(n't) commented recently about how unfair it is that I get to see copious amounts of bare boobies all over the place but she doesn't get to see the equivalent. Where are all the dicks? I assure you that they're there, hiding behind underpants and jeans wherever you go. The issue is more why are there boobs in every movie, but a big ixnay on ocksay? The answer is the same now as it was when I first posted about this topic here, the MPAA has problems with penises.

It's misogynistic I know, and also it's completely unfair. It's a strange weird relationship that guys have with the dicks of other guys. In locker rooms it is no big deal to change and weigh yourself and sit on your towel in the sauna naked. No one cares really. Girls in the locker room hate the fact that other girls are in there naked. But at the same time, girls are drunkenly drawn to breasts and think they're funny and no big deal in public or when they are watching a movie; a guy will never touch another guys' dick, even as a joke, and they'll boo whenever they see a 5 foot long cock on the movie screen. (I mean, it's 5 ft. long because it's on such a large screen. The same way that a girl in a movie has quintillion-D breasts on the same screen...perhaps in the same [money] shot.)

Anyhow, my GF gives me a hard time last night about how there are so many movies with tits and none with dicks. So I go through my DVD collection and point out all the movies I have where there are cocks. I think the total, in a collection of about 500, was 15. There's a dick in Life of Brian, I Am Curious: Yellow, W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, Sweet Movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the list goes briefly on. And what did the GF have to say about all those dicks? "I don't want to see black and white foreign dicks."

She's kind of right...American cinema hates a dick. You can't even show a whole scene of marionettes fucking in an American movie, it has to be edited down. (I appreciate that there is a "yellow shower" and a "hot carl" in said marionettes-fucking movie, but c'mon...it's puppets!) Thora Birch wants to get naked in American Beauty and she's underage? No problem, her folks can sign a permission slip. Kevin Bacon accidentally flashes his member in Wild Things? He has to get woken up at 3am by the director who has to find out if it's okay with him that his johnson has screen time and then they have to discuss it for a two hours and finally settle on it being cool. Ricockulous? Definitely.

Team America Uncut Sex Scene | Viral | SPIKE.com

What can we do about this? I propose that for the next month, you just grab the dick of every man you pass by on the street, look him in the eye and say, "I, as a woman, appreciate and respect the penis. Feel free to be comfortable showing and seeing this little guy all the time." Don't want to do that? You can watch this movie instead of desensitize yourself to the dick in the privacy of your own living room.

However, another issue, albeit a much more subjective one, gets brought up at the same time. My significant other says I get to see boobs and she doesn't get to see the equivalent What exactly qualifies as the equivalent? Technically a bare chested man is the same as a bare chested woman. Un-technically, a bare chested woman is much less acceptable in public than a bare chested man. If you're a man then you can walk around town without a shirt and no one will say anything to you. (Unless you're Quato, in which case you should just keep that shirt on, man...) And since boobs are so round and pleasing to the eye and hands and etc., are they really in the same erotic category as flaccid cocks? My heterosexual opinion is, "no". There are very few things in this world less attractive and more hilarious than what looks like a turkey throat hanging between your legs. Sorry, but that's how I see it. Now an erect cock on the other hand...there's something nice there. Maybe it's because so many great things look like erect penises: rocket ships, submarines, geoducks, trains, balloon animals, George Washington's head on a folded dollar bill, Joe Camel's nose, et al.

I think that the tide of male domination of imagery in this country has saved many people from a sight that is intentionally hilarious: the exposed, limp cock. And instead, we have decided, culturally, to embrace the naughty but acceptable naked breast. I'm cool with this trend. How do you feel about it, readers?

England has a lot of great things going for it: Boddington's, Guinness, Keira Knightely, Samantha Fox, "Are You being Served?", the MG. A major strike against England are its new anti-terorist laws.

Remember when the Patriot Act came out in this country and everyone was in an uproar because the government could tap your phones and look at your e-mail bu no one you ever knew had anything bad happen to them? England's version of that is much, much worse. England doesn't just have these laws in place to stop terroism either. They are doing it for the protection of all English people. CCTV cameras are up in all the major cities, and I'm sure, if it was possible, they'd put them on every sheep and cow they could get their hands on.

Happy reading.

Happy reading.

Happy reading.

Happy reading.

The picture at the top of this page is a photograph of graffiti by Banksy. If you don't know who Banksy is, then you should check him out. At the link, whichi s his homepage, you'll see many examples of his work including his Guantanamo blow-up doll at Disney World and his post-Katrina work in New Orleans. He is a fascinating person.