Wednesday, May 27, 2009

THIS WEEK IN NETFLIX


"Let The Right One In"

Damn, son! I know that picture is bad-ass but don't be fooled. This isn't some "Lost Boys" style vampire fun-fest. This is a significantly more serious piece of filmaking and doesn't really deserve to be lumped in with much of the other crap that falls under the phrase Vampire Movies. About three or so years ago I knew these two dudes. One was named Chad and he was a total seductive vampire-looking asshole: really tall, dark features, solemn face, monotonous bad attitude, well-dressed and all that jazz. The other guy was named Justin and he was a total 2,000 year old back to basics monstrous vampire-looking fruitbasket: also very tall, but repulsively thin with long scarecrow hair, wicked witch length fingernails, scary yellow teeth and translucent skin. Once I realized that I had never once seen them in the same place at the same time I figured out that they were in fact the same dude. Chad was the night-time form. He would go out to shitty dance-punk shows and seduce women with his vampiric style and good lucks. If they were unlucky enough to stick around too long the next day, however, they found themselves face-to-face with Justin. He was the day-time form, and he didn't give a shit if you found out how old and ugly he was. Your ass had already been seduced! Might as well sit around with him and listen to hippie music all day. I'm not really sure what happened to those/that dudes/dude, and I really don't care because I never liked them/him all that much anyway. But the point is, this movie isn't like that at all. It's classy. It's atmospheric. It's layered. It's tons of other words that real film critics use. But all you really need to know is that it is tight. And with the decline of that much black metal worth listening to it's seriously putting Scandinavia back on the cultural map.


"Blindness"

Wow. This is a really great adaptation of the book that took me about four attempts to finally get into. I started reading it while I was spending a month in Italy, attempting to travel on a gnat's shoestring budget. I know you're like "gnats don't wear shoes" but in Italy they do. Expensive ones. They also have shitty fashion mullets, very little respect for women and drive like blind retards in tiny little cars and scooters that you are still afraid of. After a pretty boring morning in the town of Ferrara (no offense to bike dudes) I was able to settle my mind down enough form the constant waves of culture shock to really get caught up in this story. If you've read the book you'll probably be pretty pleased with this film version, one of the few that I can honestly say really "gets" the overall theme and aesthetic vision of the original material and recreates it as well as possible. It was around five years ago when I read it, but certain scenes in this movie evoked near-perfect memories of entire written passages. This is the textbook definition of faithful. Luckily everything translates surprisingly well--with the possible exception of Danny Glover as a semi-mystical one-eyed puppy dog narrator--and works fine as a movie. You might be disappointed by not seeing a graphic depiction of a dude jizzing into a woman's mouth at the exact same moment that a knife cuts open his throat, or you might not because you aren't as fucked up and weird as I am. Your loss.

1 comment:

  1. I see you've discovered the "bold" font on blogger. Two nights ago I was at a Vice magazine party with free vodka (i swear i just went for the free booze!) and I was chatting up this Swedish girl that was kinna fine and at one point she halted the converstaion to tell me she was "celibate," to which I replid "that's an interesting lifestyle choice" to which she replied "well actually I'm just tired." How's that for atmospheric and layered? europe!

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