a couple movie updates here… haven’t quite seen one movie a day, but i’m pretty close… last night i missed, but the night before i saw Scarface playing at the Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak; it was playing as a midnight movie. it’s really amazing to go back and watch these older pacino films [ like ‘dog day afternoon’ or ‘the godfather’ or ‘serpico’ ] and see how he owns the screen… sometimes i forget because his presense is so much a part of our understanding of film that i have to go back and watch him just to remind myself that he really is that good!
okay, another film i just watched [ on tv again ] is Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Now aside from the fact that heather graham is terrible in this movie, it’s just super funny… it’s got the introduction of Mini Me and Fat Bastard… really, it’s hilarious… anyway, watching it on tv just isn’t quite as good, so if you do go out and watch it, get the dvd.
i also watched Wild Zero, a japanese zombie flick that was pretty funny… don’t get me wrong, it was terrible and a little preachy what with the moral of the story being something like it’s okay to be different and being comfortable with who you are is what’s really important, but there is also the japanese punk/rockabilly band that saves the day and the alien space ships that keep flying around and the plethora of people being turned into zombies identified by their discolored skin making them look like drugged out clowns…
the last movie i’ll mention is Primer. i’ve seen this one before, earlier this summer at my mom’s house, but it was so good and i just heard it mentioned again since it was shown at Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival. It’s a movie about four guys building things in their garage… they are working toward something that they understand, but in a way that opens up other possibilities. they discover some strange properties about what they are making and it turns out to work as a time machine… of course this leads to some seriously hard to understand logic problems and potential paradoxes, but there is a real sense that it is possible and even if you can’t follow everything on the first viewing, you believe that it all fits together… the cinematography is beautiful and the questions that arise are worth thinking about and hey… it’s guys building stuff in their garage; that’s how the personal computer started right?
well… back to it… i watched one other thing that probably doesn’t count as a movie, but whatever… Systm just released their 3rd episode online… it’s cool and geeky and techie and teaches us how to make and select A/V cables… it’s a big download, but if you are into it, it’s worth it. [ the previous two episodes are cool too… ]