ACCURACY IN ADVERTISING

Tell Me Something (1999)
dir: Yoon-Hyun Chang

More like "Tell Me Everything." You may as well go ahead and throw a bongo in my hand and give me a Red-hearted firecrotch to verbally abuse, because this movie's got some 'splaining to do! I initially decided to give it a chance because I'd read that it featured some heavily Argento-inspired murder set pieces, although I now realize that those comparisons were nothing if not a bit generous. This isn't a bad film by any means, and it probably features the most unexpectedly touching flashback sequence ever set to a children's chorus interpreting the musical background of the first popular Fugees song (WTF indeed), but seriously, what happened? All of the grotesque exploding bags of body parts "hidden" in the corner of a crowded elevator in the world can't really make up for the seemingly unending string of question marks that will probably forever hover above my head every time somebody brings up this film, which may never actually happen as I don't think it ever gained too much in the way of notoriety. Nor did it ever gain much in the way of logicality, reason or resolution. In some ways this is beneficial; the film maintains a palpable sense of dread throughout its admittedly excessive running time, continually subverting expectations and providing more red herrings than a Communist fish hatchery. But there is no real payoff by the end, primarily due to the fact that it is nearly impossible to decipher exactly what happened. A brief list of questions: 1) who did it?, 2) what did they do?, 3) why did they do it?, 4) Placebo? Seriously?, and 5) wait... what? Maybe it loses something in translation. Maybe it loses everything in translation. Maybe I should even give it another look and hope that a second viewing will bless me with some degree of illumination, but Piranha 3D just dropped on DVD and if I'm going to waste my time watching something twice then it may as well feature an operatic underwater lesbian scene and the goriest beach experience since Saving Private Ryan almost convinced the world that Vin Diesel isn't dumb and Tom Hanks isn't a pansy.

In completely unrelated news, I can't stop listening to this Jeff the Brotherhood album. This song is the only real "ballad" but I like the video for its accurate representation of teenage romance: the girls are in the kitchen gossiping and smoking and looking hot and girly while the dudes dick around in the living room and probably never get laid. Life is unfair (unless you can shred the guitar, which I cannot).

SEMI-ONLY CHILD

Sisters (1973)
dir: Brian De Palma

I've got a half-sister and a half-brother. My sister is born of another mother and my brother of a different father. Technically, I'm an only child. But basically, I'm not. My brother always lived with us while I was growing up except for the summers that he would spend at his Dad's in New York. He was always a pretty cool guy, a bit nerdy in his early years and a bit douchy while at college, but he was always a really great brother and an all-aound good person. Very funny, very friendly, a little bit dumb. Now he's in a goddamned Amway cult and he gives me things like this bound-together mold of horseshit for my birthday and says embarrassing things out loud like "Law Abiding Citizen should get five out of five stars, easy!" Capitalist brainwashing aside, though, I love the dude and hope that he somehow manages to (probably accidentally) stumble upon the kind of superficial wealth and relaxed state of permanent emotional and mental stagnancy that he seems so desperate to be a part of. My sister, on the other hand, could not possibly be more of a class act, even if she had been hand-designed by some Serpentor-style superhuman embodiment of all classy female DNA throughout history. My high opinion of her may have something to do with the fact that she spent pretty much her entire childhood living with her mysterious mother and I never really had the opportunity as a kid to bond with her. So now every time we get to hang out it's a total treat. She's a pretty badass nurse married to a pretty badass emergency response guy of some sort and they have a super badass daughter who tells everyone that she loves them (and actually means it) and does things like draw pictures of my girlfriend and spell her name with unnecessary H's and stops eating pork products because she "really likes pigs." Both of my semi-siblings are into their own things and that's totally fine with me. Especially because neither one of them is actually just a violent manifestation within my own mind of my own dead siamese twin, you know what i'm saying? Brian De Palma gets a lot of shit for absolutely no goddamned fucking reason by a lot of film critics who seem to circle-jerk hatred all over this poor dude. His films are all good, though. All of them. Even the ones that should have been shitty because they were obviously work-for-hire projects so dude could pay the bills. But everything he's ever touched has been inarguably soaked within his own auteur obsessions: gender roles and sexual struggle, the myriad interpretations of "the truth" and the omnipresent concept of the double. You could think of him as Hitchcock for perverts, sure, and you'd be about 70% correct. But you'd also be short-changing not only the director who created the greatest Faust-inspired rock opera in cinematic history, had the audacity to successfully rip off Sergei* Eisenstein's most well-known sequence** for a goddamned gangbusters genre piece, inspired every rapper in the world to be an even bigger idiot and straight-up showed the entirety of one of his films as its own trailer . You'd also be short-changing yourself. Don't be a dick to you.

* LOL at myself for initially spelling it like "Fergie."
** not sure why this is in Italian. Or if it even is.

DRAGON BALLZ

The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008)
dir: Ji-woon Kim

I dated a Korean girl for roughly 2 years. It was during a particularly shameful period of my recent life, not because I'm prejudiced against lusty interracial couplings or because i'm some stereotypical young male who thinks long term relationships are like, the end of your life maaaaan, but rather because I had reached the inverted zenith of my 6-year foray into uselessness, albeit a uselessness that more than occasionally paid off with impressive bouts of world travel and more than a handful of night-time experiences that would most likely awe and inspire if they could ever actually be remembered clearly. At this particular point in my personal timeline, however, I was up to no good. I was up to no bad, either. I was up to nothing at all aside from working too way too hard pressing out top-rate (if i say so myself [and i do]) pizzas for bottom-grade pay, drinking too much even by the forgiving standards of a punk rock holdover in the city of richmond va and wasting the peak years of my sexual virility (probably) and aptitude for emotional barter/terrorism on someone whom i gradually realized i didn't really have any genuine feelings for. And also, she was crazy. Not because she was Korean, but because she was adopted. I know it's an ugly stereotype and there's always that nagging (because i have always been impressed by its succinct effectiveness despite having absolutely no basis for personal relation) lyric by the probably completely forgotten band Off Minor: "you can't compare a moment's conception to a lifetime of devotion." So yes, I do realize that by implying that all children of adoption will inevitably devolve into psychological trainwrecks with an incessant need for validation and complete inability to trust in anything resembling a close bond probably makes me seem fairly ignorant. I'm just saying that in this particular case, many of said Korean girlfriend's problems most likely took root within the catalyst of parental abandonment and subsequent replacement of said parents by two suburban white folks with problems of their own who most likely had no business taking on the massive amount of responsibility that such a charitable act entails. So what i'm basically saying is: girlfriend was crazy, but it wasn't her fault.
You could kind of say the same thing about this film. By all standards of zany cinematic entertainment, it's admittedly pretty great. Many (perhaps too many?) of the shots are extremely impressive, every single action setpiece--of which there are fuckloads; the entire film is basically a chase scene--is both technically awesome and as viscerally thrilling as anything in the first Kill Bill, and as an attractive slab of escapist foreign cinema it certainly shines. But the inescapable problem with adopting a genre as inherently American as the Western and throwing it into the undeniably singular prism of Korean cinema is that much of the original pathos, based upon a highly specific cultural barometer, is lost. Add to that the fact that this is in particular an homage to the spaghetti Western, itself a mutation of the genre, though certainly a far cry from abomination, that depends upon the stylistic particulars of what was happening in Italian film at an equally specific moment in artistic history. To disregard all of these factors and clumsily transport the idea and experience, brick-by-brick, into a new setting regardless of that setting's own particular strengths and limitations makes for some truly odd moments. Most notably being the film's final 20 minutes: excessively drawn-out and ostensibly awkward to Western viewers (as I find much of even the best Korean cinema to be at times, especially in relation to comedic moments), the finale unfortunately works to drain the film of its beneficial whip-crack pacing and non-stop slew of gunfire. The final showdown, as it exists, comes off as little more than a desperate yet unsuccessful attempt to emulate similar moments within Sergio Leone's own masterpieces. Still, you can't blame Kim for trying. He's a good director, he obviously has a great deal of love and respect for the films he has been inspired by, and a good 90% of this film is nothing short of pure, guilt-free entertainment. Also, his A Tale of Two Sisters is still probably the 2nd most terrifying movie that I've ever seen and not really understood at all, second to David Lynch's Lost Highway.
I guess in order to wrap up that admittedly awkward and probably unnecessary ex-girlfriend analogy: check out this film for the crazy hate-fueled sex appeal, but make sure you get the hell out of there before the impending, constantly-germinating downfall. Or not. That girl and I did have a whole lot of fun.

LAID UP

Branded to Kill (1967)
dir: Seijun Suzuki

I am currently pretty laid up with some serious flu-like symptoms, including but not limited to: my entire body feeling like i just got soap-socked by a roided-out battalion of drunken Chetnik soldiers, the inability to spend less than 2o minutes on the toilet at a time (usually with 3 to 5 minutes between trips) and the dried-out corn husk sensation of having spent the entirety of what should have been my always appreciated beauty slumber clutching onto sweaty pillows (and my REM-ed out, oblivious girlfriend) while desperately trying to keep tabs on the many ridiculous mental conversations that I was having with nonexistent characters from multiple fever dreams. Ironic, then, that my last act as a well man was to immerse my then-reasonable brain into the cinematic fever dream that is Seijin Suzuki's Branded to Kill. If you've ever read Chris D.'s "Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film" then you are already aware that Suzuki is an outlaw master of japanese film. But if you've never had the pleasure of checking out this film then you may not be aware that it features: a man urinating unbelievably casually onto a woman's face, the same man constantly demanding a fresh pot of boiling rice to smell, and poisonous butterfly slaves. To say much more would be to rob you of your own journey of cinematic discovery, and that's what SPOILERS are for. Just know that you are in for a treat, unlike myself as I valiantly struggle to type out the final few words of this paragraph with sweating fingers, nothing other than a mucus membrane of questionable authority preventing my bed from receiving a drastic and tragic change of color scheme.

THIS MY SHIT

Aight so here it is, my official New Year's resolution is to try to watch one new movie per day and then post something up about it real quick. I realize this will probably be impossible to do every single day, as some much tighter or much more ill shit might be poppin off and require all of my attention. So imma go a little easy on myself, which should be obvious since i won't even be starting this shit until tonight, january 3rd, and probably some time past midnight. But fuck it, it's my project and i can do whatever i want.
In other news i picked up some truly dope boxsets at a sale today. Look forward (at some point this year, anyway) to reviews of some lesser-known shit by notoriously Japanese-film-hating Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima and the absurdly sprawling Fassbinder adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz. That is the worst last name.

speaking of this motherfucker

BRAINBOMBED

I might just be stoned, but I swear to god that the "shuffle" on my iPod knows how fucking stoned I am right now. If i wasn't bombed and about to eat some pad thai (!) that i just made myself (!!), i probably would have skipped right past that Erkin Koray shit with a shrug and a yawn. As it stands right now i'm about to go into a goddamn conniption fit over how fucking SICK this song is. Approximately 1.5 weeks away from that International Studies degree that is going to open up mad doors and get me so much pu$$y [ed. note: sudden explosion of the tightest ever DREAM song right when i typed those dollar signs into "pussy" thanks to my main man iPod], and all i can think to do with myself is get bent, cook dank food and start typing on this neglected-ass blog. i have no idea what to do after college because i got this real world shit down like frowns. the thing is, i still suck at school, and i should really be working on at least 1 of 3 final papers. so i probably won't be able to update this shit with even a semi-serious level of dedication until like next wednesday, but i just wanted to say what's up.
your boy about to be on some unrelenting "movie-per-day" project shit.

*photo by Sergey Maximishin, total beast.

DUMB HOT

Pusher (1996)
dir: Nicolas Winding Refn

It's been a disheartening cinematic week for me. I regrettably kicked things off the other morning by having my nose rubbed in someone else's poop by Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent (1989), a film I've seen 3 times now. Directed by a guy who I might kind of hate but have an unreasonable amount of artistic respect for, I'm still having difficulty getting behind that one. Peep it yourself and I'm sure you'll understand the basis for my disavowal. Just make sure you're in a fairly positive emotional place. One that you don't mind being rudely commanded to leave by a manipulative Austrian asshole cinematic scientist. And then just yesterday I had a big French fart laid directly in my face by Alain Resnais's obnoxiously quirky and pointlessly confounding Wild Grass (2009). There wasn't a single frame throughout that entire film where I almost forgot that I was watching A FRENCH FILM directed by A FRENCH DUDE who was "masterfully playing with the art form." For the record, fuck "playing." Especially when it's just one old dude in a sandbox pissing all over his own plastic shovels and laughing to himself while everybody else just stands around and scratches their heads like whhhaaaaaaa. So thank fuck for Nicolas Winding Refn, an unstoppable Danish juggernaut of a director, who single-handedly saved my week with this balls-out portrait of one mid-level drug dealer and fulltime fuck-up in a perpetually dreary Copenhagen. Refn is a bit of a beast, as should be obvious to anyone whose seen this year's borderline-surrealist biopic Bronson or gloriously violent parable Valhalla Rising. The Pusher trilogy, and this first entry in particular, are how the dude initially made a name for himself. Refn made this film on a baby budget just after being denied entry into Danish film school, using only handheld cameras and an odd mix of professional actors, amateur friends and genuine street people. The result is an extremely naturalistic portrait of one man's struggle with his own steamrolling incompetence, a surprising feat of sympathetic character study that has you feeling genuinely bad for this guy despite the fact that he's kind of a piece of shit, not unlike Kim Ki-duk's mad underrated Bad Guy (2002), but with less blatant misogyny and much more thinly-veiled homoeroticism. This is no-holds-barred filmmaking in the most blunt and thus cliched sense of the phrase, but there is the undeniable presence throughout the proceedings of a young and passionate creative mind that is in complete control of the chaos that we witness unfolding. And the dude uses music in his films with the exact amount of aesthetic precision and ostensibly random genius that you hope you would use it in your films, if you made films. Nothing washes the mental palette clean of joyless scolding or pretentious poppycock quite like a well-done and undeniably unique gangster flick. Peep this one, then peep the sequels.
In other news, my final semester of school meanders on and the weather is gradually shifting into some chilly-ass bullshit. So hook yourself up with some Salem on your ipod and maybe that new reissue of the Chromatics' "Night Drive," spread some shrooms on a peanut butter sandwich and prepare yourself for a 3 month rainstorm.... of the mind.

NUN OF MY BUSINESS

Flavia the Heretic (1974)
dir: Gianfranco Mingozzi

Haha. I'm still chuckling from just typing that name. Italy, LOL. This was a pretty perfect movie for me to watch right now, as its very existence and the experience of viewing it sort of mirrors the late-20's end-of-college personality crisis in which I seem to be currently stuck. I'm about to hammer the final proverbial nail into the shitty proverbial coffin that is the "college experience," albeit my own has been very different from that of most young Americans because I'm kind of old and I hate pretty much all young Americans, but nonetheless I find myself in a rut that is very common, I'm sure, to what most of them go through at this exact moment in their educational timeline. I'm sort of like "fuck school" right now (senioritis) but I'm also kind of "fuck everything else, too" (angeritis). For the past few years I've dedicated the majority of my time and sanity to the historical and analytical study of international cinema, with the occasional segue into the realms of that ubiquitous language of beggars and thieves (jk) Espanol and the surprisingly inclusive fart-cloud that is known as "Religious Studies." Here enters Flavia, itself an obvious example of said international cinema that, unlike the majority of its nunsploitation brethren, actually offers up some analysis of its own both in regards to the art form of cinema and the perpetual dialogue between all of man's religions. Far from just another titillating exercise in religious-inspired sexual depravity, this film actually has a lot of interesting things going on in it that don't revolve around the supple flesh of long-repressed (read: horny) nuns or the erotic torture they receive at the hands of other totally hot naked nuns. In fact, there isn't much here in terms of thoughtless titillation. I dare even say that as a nunsploitation title it sorely disappoints. What we do have is a borderline successful observation on the interplay of multiple religions (primarily Catholicism and Islam) in the historical context of female repression, mostly successful because of the fantastic performance by Florinda Bolkan, who you may (should) remember from Lucio Fulci's unheralded and best film, Don't Torture a Duckling. It certainly never reaches the point of a reasonably well-researched term paper on the topic, but it does at least inject its dreary proceedings with some degree of genuine insight. Of course, I barely remember a fucking second of it. For all of the film's best efforts to engage me in a compelling discourse on these topics the only thing I really remember is some woman having her nipple sliced off and some other lady crawling nude into the hollowed out chest cavity of a dead cow (see above, holy shit). And therein lies the problem: I don't give a shit. About film analysis. About religious study. Even about Spanish (it's hard). Here I am about to graduate with what is supposedly a successful education in three different areas and I barely remember shit about what I was taught, nor do I really care all that much. I certainly have no idea what I plan to do with any of it. Teach other people a bunch of shit about the German New-Wave that doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of the universe? Mediate arguments between interfaith couples? Hang out in El Salvador? I don't know anything about El Salvador! I don't know anything about myself! Was school just a huge waste of time and money, just like I decided it was when I was 21 years old and dropped out the first time? I seriously hope not. But in the meantime I will continue to enjoy movies like Piranha 3-D despite the best efforts of my film professor to turn me into a snobby, joyless connoisseur. I just had to look up how to spell that word. I might be dumb. And I think I'm pretty alright with that. This December I will end up with a BA in International Studies, but my brain has had a PhD in Weird for as long as I can remember. We'll see which one I use more.

YOU CAN USE PEACE DOGG BUT I USE VIOLENCE

I apologize for the lack of updates, but it's been a rough week for ya boy. On Monday my weirdo parents were in a pretty bad motorcycle accident when a deer straight up just jumped right into them. My mom is remarkably UNSCARRED (queue the mental image of Phil Anselmo's stomach tat with that imaginative experiment in spelling), but my dad is fairly thrashed. He's doing alright considering that it was a motorcycle accident and dude is in his 60's, but he'll probably be posted up in ICU for at least another week while his NINE BROKEN RIBS (queue the mental image of Phil Anselmo's anguished facial expressions during any given Pantera video) and the bruise on his brain heal. So I've been spending a lot of time at Roanoke Memorial Hospital this week, hanging out with my family and reminding my drugged-up father that he's in a hospital, not a prison. Other than that I've been sweating buckets over VCU's nonsensical graduation application process, smoking too much weed and watching shitloads of films that I haven't gotten around to writing about. So in the grand spirit of remembrance that surely permeated every red-blooded American's thoughts throughout all of yesterday, here is a short review (imma be late for work) of the most enjoyable and shamelessly violent movie I checked out this week.

Machete (2010)
dir: Robert Rodriguez

Famously based on its own fake trailer, Robert Rodriquez finally got around to fleshing out this pulpy homage to "classic" grindhouse cinema by giving Danny Trejo all of maybe 13 lines, throwing together an admittedly fantastic and perfectly cheesy story about the intertwining worlds of Mexican druglords who inexplicably carry around Samurai swords and are Steven Seagal, racist U.S. politicians and the current hot-button issue of illegal immigration, somewhere along the line also convincing Lindsay Lohan to kind of show her boobs. The result is actually a lot better than I expected, injecting the genre with a much-needed dose of self-aware parody and casual humor that doesn't ever go too far or distract too much from the seemingly nonstop array of decapitations, naked breasts and shocking visual moments where you realize that Trejo is like four fucking feet tall! Extra points for Jessica Alba kind of being naked and also being surprisingly good at this kind of thing. Between this and The Killer Inside Me, she might be growing on me as opposed to simply making my pants grow (sorry).

I also checked out:

Crank: High Voltage - very effective in terms of what it promised and what I rightfully expected. Don't cheat yourself by pretending you're a high-brow pussy; this movie is absolutely worth a rental. Fun and vulgar with a genuinely good sense of humor about both itself and all of the racial/sexual/etc. stereotypes that make life worth living.

The Marriage of Maria Braun - sneakily subversive period drama from Fassbinder. I'd go into boring academic detail but that's what school is for. If you're a fan of Fassbinder then you've already seen it, and if you've always been curious about him but kind of terrified by his coke-fueled madness and brain-rapes like The Third Generation, then this is a great place to start. Accessible but intelligent, like the world's finest women (huh?).

Frantic - just after doing some pretty weird things and getting into trouble over it, Roman Polanski took off on a self-imposed (and self-preserving) exile from the U.S. This was, I believe, the first film he made during this period, but it's very possible that I don't know what I'm talking about. Oddly enough I don't really know what this movie is talking about either because I fell asleep twice while trying to watch it. It's not bad or even all that slow, I just smoke too much weed and get off of work way too fucking late. Harrison Ford was pretty cool in the 80's but I saw an interview with him recently where he seemed like kind of a prick and had a pretty shitty earring. Oh well, I guess we can't all age as well as "Siamese Dream."

There were some more, but I'm having a hard time remembering what they were. Fuck you guys anyway, go do something cool outside.

FLIP WATER LIKE POLAND SPRINGS

Twentynine Palms (2003)
dir: Bruno Dumont

Yikes. I don't really know where to start with this one. I suppose a warning is in order: I don't recommend that you watch this film. I'll probably never watch it again, and I've sat through The Spirit of the Beehive like three times now. This is some tedious shit. It's also some deeply pretentious shit. And some misanthropic French-people-never-actually-laugh shit. But it's also some really, really good shit. As a movie-going experience this could fit pretty comfortably within the Michael Haneke "disgust for/punishment towards my audience" school of hopelessly high-brow pedantic hijinks. Certain segments (alright... most of the film) is iiiinsaaanely draaawn oooouuuut (read: boring) and the ultimate "payoff" is so jarring that you'll probably end up more angry than anything else. Angry at Dumont for putting you through such an ordeal; angry at the characters for simultaneously representing and subverting everything you thought you knew about human behaviour; and angry at yourself for completely missing the point. Despite the often breathtaking landscapes and mathematically-tight shot composition, this is not the cinema of escapism. It's a painting, sure, but a painting with a metric shit-ton of carefully held-back pathos seething within its framed borders. As an experiment in cinema itself, I can't think of much that could make it more successful than it already is. I've read some reviews that compare it to the Adam & Eve yarn about original sin and some totally expected write-offs as just another long-winded meditation on the banal and omnipresent nature of human evil. But personally I think it works better as an unsettling, realistic portrait of a certain stage that most ultimately doomed romantic relationships settle into before the inevitable, messy split. We've all reached that point where communication has crumbled and the only real expressions of emotion towards our so-called better half are fighting and fucking. The two characters in Twentynine Palms are believable because of their painful awkwardness. They barely speak one anothers' language (literally and metaphorically), their physical encounters are random and bizarrely personal: during the (many) graphic sex scenes--which are themselves somewhat refreshing, existing as they do in a touchingly honest series of naturally-lit, non-glamorous encounters--both characters seem completely enveloped within themselves. Sex is not a shared, transcendent experience between these two lovers anymore; it is a violent cry against the inevitable truth of the relationship's futility, an ironically impotent attempt to practice control over the situation, and a selfish final act of stress relief. When the film finally erupts into an unexpected melee of brutality, we as viewers should not actually be all that surprised. Our supposed Adam & Eve have been tenuously perched atop this well-spring of violence throughout the entire film, and several sequences have obviously hinted towards the impending, omnipotent-seeming danger that has surrounded them the whole time. The interesting thing is that we never quite know where the eventual attack will come from. Much like many romantic relationships, our two characters seem to exist within a world where they are the only actual living inhabitants. We can feel the undercurrent of tension between them, hinting at an eventual confrontation that will not be easily solved by the most obnoxious and awkward pool-sex since that hilarious scene from Showgirls. And we can also sense their discomfort within and distrust of the surrounding world, which is itself framed as an undeniably impressive but nevertheless desolate landscape of unseen spaces and unknown motivations. Dumont's film is unnerving as all fuck, especially because anyone who has ever been in a relationship that failed will initially relate far too easily with the barely-likable protagonists. And yes, it does meditate on the nature of evil. It also subverts nearly every road-romance film that came before it by focusing solely on the negative moments of its central relationship as opposed to the adventurous sense of discovery and rebirth that usually shows up in such films. Nothing is fixed in this film, and you'll most likely walk away with many more questions than you are comfortable with, the very least of which being "did they ever even pay for those ice cream cones?"

REAL TALK

I realize that a few months ago (!!!) I made a promise that I would update this blog something as ridiculously often as once every evening. Clearly I was bluffing and by this point that promise must seem as empty to the two of you as my balls after watching this fucking video. But the truth is that I have actually been busy. I went to Mexico, and it was a beautiful, fascinating and wildly entertaining country full of friendly people, incredible food and cheap-ass beer. But it also happens to be a country that is held together by bubble-gum and magic. If you've been there you know what I mean. Aside from that I've just been "mastering some skills." If you've ever had some skills to master then you know what I mean. Fortunately for my own motivational reasons I have now begun my final semester of school (fingers crossed, butthole puckered), I have made an executive decision on my own life: for the entirity of this semester I will somehow find the time to watch one movie per day and post something about it up on this blog every evening. Grand ambition meets Great big bags of weed. I'll start that shit on Thursday. In the meantime I've been fucking around with this band called REAL TALK, (all caps to enhance shameless self-promotion). In honor of my impending graduation I'd like to share the best song that I've ever written:

Jungle Bungle

take some pills

have a thrill

don't forget to write your will

eating fungus

beasts among us

beware the stares that night has brung us

bungle in the jungle

accidental death

psilocybin visions

ravaged by savage breath

lions, tigers, bears oh shit

nothing's sticking to the script

pupils dilate, vomit, sick

panic, clutching sharpened stick

this isn't fucking happening, man

yes it is

wife and kids

never see them after this

now it's through

nothing new

the stains in the grass

used to be you

That song is about a drug vacation in the jungle gone wrong. Anyway, stay tuned for an actual movie review this Thursday. Probably that sexy interracial saucepot pictured above. In the meantime, if you is high:

CUT SKOOL CUZ YOU LIKE, "FUCK SKOOL"

My spring midterms will be over next week and I'll have about one solid month of packed bowls, tanned bodies and ignored alarm clocks to glide me through the eternally awesome Richmond summer before I head to Mexico for four weeks of drinking, studying and lingual embarrassment. I hereby swear to do my damnedest to utilize that first month, prior to dodging kidnappers and pretending not to notice narco "activities,"to churn out my first honest-t0-god printed on paper zine since the infamously gay-titled "Your Words are Bullets" virgin and only issue from way back in like 2002 (maybe). So look forward to that, if you're into that kind of thing. Meaning me and my opinions and a thousand euphemisms for tits n' ass. In the meantime, here are some tits n' ass for you to ogle because my "feminist" girlfriend is playing Zelda in the other room and fuck school.

THIS WEEK IN NETFLIX

"Defendor"

This is pretty much the same movie as the incredible "Mirage Man" except not Chilen and not not starring Woody Harrelson. I think this one is actually Canadian, but it could have easily taken place in Detroit. Were you aware that Detroit sucks? Were you aware that this movie made me cry a little bit? Were you aware that it is perfectly acceptable for a grown man to cry over the story of a mental retard who thinks he's a superhero seeking vengeance against the imaginary villain who killed his mom, even though she actually just died because she was a junkie? Well, consider yourself aware-ed.


"Daisies"

1966 surrealist freak-fest from Czech New Wave staple Vera Chytilová. Her name has at least one or two more weird punctuation marks above some letters, but my computer doesn't even understand Eastern European chicken-scratch so those punctuation marks unfortunately "do not compute." This film is pretty much the working definition of avant-garde in fluid form, so Chuck Norris fans beware. Imagine living inside of a Rauschenberg piece with two frustratingly fit but extremely obnoxious upper-class pixies following you around and chirping like birds. Sounds like a nightmare, I know, but give this one a try if you've got the mental balls for it. Often misinterpreted as a proto-feminist experiment, I personally think it's more about the uselessness of lazy, spoiled bourgeois trifles (i.e. the kind of art school twats who probably love this movie) in light of the greater good of mighty Socialist productive society(!!), although I do feel like not liking this movie would somehow make me a misogynist. Worth considering: is it weird to be extremely turned on by scenes of cute girls making huge sloppy messes and smearing cake all over each others' faces, or scenes where they just sit around and eat tons of food? Is there something wrong with me?


"Sheitan"

The French horror new wave was pretty on-point there for a while, and I feel like this little nut-kicker gets unfairly overlooked by most people who should appreciate this kind of thing. A bit of the standard "city kids get fucked with in the countryside" formula, but refreshingly skewed by a particularly manic sensibility, some truly great shot composition, an unreasonably hot temptress and enough bizarro shit to make "Gummo" fans scratch their heads and glance around for the exits. Vincent Cassel is unrecognizable and totally incredible, especially considering the fact that he is an A-list international superstar who is basically just goofing around with the French equivalent of the Day by Day dudes. It may sound redundant, but the scene where they chicken-fight with thuggish melungeons in an eerie green hot spring is totally creepy.

I'M A MESS

There is no good reason for a 28-year-old man to get as shamefully inebriated as I did last night. My last semi-clear memory is walking into Aladdin's sometime between the hours of 1 and 2 am. The guy at the counter took one look at me and said "you can't bring that bike in here" to which I responded "what if I just bring my bike in here?" to which he immediately and confusingly responded "ok." Having successfully shattered his defenses with my unmistakable gift for debate, I confidently sauntered over to the counter and ordered my usual, a falafel pita with onion rings. After counting out the dollar bills slowly and carefully and paying the man, I sat down to complete a crossword puzzle with the assistance of two genuinely thugged out black dudes. They were helpful at first but eventually lost interest when they noticed I was just drunkenly filling in "words" like SLAIT and THRASHE so they started talking to some girl who looked younger than me about her 13-year-old son. By the time my food was ready, she had given both of them her number and I was ready to ride my girlfriend's bike home (I still have no idea where my own bike could possibly be locked up). Unable to locate her or anyone else because I forgot that I had a cellphone, I ended up sitting in the darkness of my balcony eating my falafel, alone and confused.
It seems like this past month or so since my best friend and #1 warrior Superchill passed on to that great big catnip field in the sky, I have been falling to pieces. Not in an overwhelming nervous breakdown type of way that alienates your friends and makes them avoid your phone calls, but more in a subtle way where I just sit around all day not doing any of the things I need to do and then get so shitfaced at night that I spend a very loud and probably very obnoxious half hour boozily explaining to my friend that "the past is meaningless" and then making fun of everything that everyone in the world has ever liked just because the one thing that I liked more than anything else was taken away from me. Not very constructive, I know. I'm working on it.
On the plus side I've been having some pretty amusing mornings based around piecing together the forgotten moments of the previous evening's shamble through my apartment in search of somewhere to lay my clouded head. Like some amnesiac detective who is unaware that an outside world even exists, I shuffle around the apartment between the hours of 9 and 11 am trying to figure out why my shoes are in the bathroom, why my passport is in the freezer and how exactly I apparently created something edible from the baffling ingredients of egg noodles, brown sugar, sliced tomatoes (I was wielding a knife?!?!) and soy milk. Why are there ants on the television? Why is one sock on the porch? Why is my girlfriend in such a great mood? Did we have sex? Did I even brush my teeth? Do I even know where my toothbrush is? Yikes.
I'm a mess. And it's getting old. Starting tomorrow (not today; hangover) things are going to need to change around here. And by "here" I mean "inside of me, personally." No more boozing away the pain instead of utilizing my usual creative outlets, this blog included. I hereby guarantee a new and improved schedule of updates that will keep you entertained and informed. And by "you" I of course mean "me." Does anyone even read this thing? Well, no matter. Starting tomorrow, the new GET MUMMY will launch onto the unsuspecting blogosphere a whole new world of shit that no one cares about. I hope you're ready. And by "you're" I mean "I'm."

ILL SHIT, SONS

Some ill shit has gone down and continues to go down over this past weekend and this shitty week of midterms, so I haven't had much time for or interest in updating. But rest assured that I will soon fire off a review of this total fucking gem.



this is some next level shit.

VAHLINTHINEZ

REVENGE OF NETFLIX FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE OF DOOM ON DEATH MOUNTAIN 2

"The House of the Devil"

If you remember the 80's like I remember the 80's, then you don't remember much of shit. You and I probably both have somewhat comparable mental menageries of personal and most likely weird childhood moments, cultural frameworks and maybe just a little bit of adult concern seepage. An onion basket of images, sounds, smells and nausea, all crystallized into a fragmented broken windowpane overlooking the spotty, subconscious past. A bicycle ride downtown to the army surplus store for those MREs that I somehow found delicious, much to the confusion of a father who had no other choice than to eat them during a stint in Vietnam that he still refuses to talk about. The girl who lived next door that my older brother and his friends forced to eat dog food one afternoon, and who my parents caught sneaking onto our back porch two nights later to secretly eat some more. You know, crazy 80's cul-de-sac shit. Everything else is just a messy Pollock painting of family moments, Christmases, treehouses, Lego competetitions, injuries, lies and "fibs." The overall culture of the 80's itself is a blur around the edges, but one that somehow still penetrates my memories like Roman Polanski penetrates shiny European baby-pussy. Maybe one of my oldest and most prominent memories of the decade that oversaw the initial forging and tempering of my young molten soon-to-be-awesomeness would be the evening which, like dozens of others before and after it, began with my parents going out to the kind of function they could still enjoy together while my brother and I were young enough to be successfully handled by the high school girl with questionable morals from just across the street. In fact, the only thing that set this evening apart was the fact that I pooped in my pants because I was too afraid to go upstairs and use the bathroom by myself. I never asked my marginally-responsible babysitter to take me upstairs because I was embarassed to be afraid. I never told either her or my brother that I pooped my pants because I was embarassed to be a pants-pooping maniac who already had shame issues at much too young of an age. So I just kept my distance from the two of them for the rest of the night (poop smells) and would occasionally have to walk backwards out of a room so that they wouldn't notice what I was convinced must be the huge visible lump in the back of my pants. UNFORGIVABLE. Another noteworthy moment from that night was much earlier, before my messy brown downfall, when my neighbor showed me the article in the newspaper about the slasher icons Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. At the time, just the photograph of Freddy in the paper bugged me out for the rest of the night. I was terrified. Fast-forward 20 odd years and I've got the horror palette of Rob Zombie's wettest dreams. And that's why I love "House of the Devil." I'm not saying anything else. Watch this one if you have even a passing interest in subtle horror. I know that sounds crazy but wikipedia that shit. "Subtle horror." It exists! This is a surprisingly convincing slice of solid gold homage right here, and if you don't get a Pavlovian boner for the babysitter's best friend's hair then your 80's childhood was sadly less stocked with confusing-to-a-young-man older babes than mine was. Sorry, man. Get over it. What are you, 30?

DON'T STEREOTYPE MY THING, YO

Puerto Ricans are loud. I realize that sounds extremely stereotypical and uneducated but those things don't concern me because it also happens to be true. I don't personally know any Puerto Ricans on an intimate level (however you want to interpret that) and I haven't spent enough time in the predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the majestic nightmare that is New York City to mean "Puerto Ricans are loud" in the Jerry Seinfeld sense of anglocentric befuddlement. It's a stereotype that I never really knew existed. But over the recent Christmas/New Year holiday my girlfriend and I spent two weeks in Puerto Rico and I am telling you right now that those fuckers are loud. All the time. Music is omnipresent and inevitably BLARING, be it the pounding goofy gangsterism of reggaeton or the classier leanings of some laid-back salsa. No matter the tune, the undeniable fact is that some tune will always be present. It pours out of open car windows, the doorways of high apartment balconies and tiny boomboxes on the laps of street dudes. Then there are the fireworks. Ubiquitous throughout the holiday season, celebratory explosions would shoot randomly from the streets into the skies with absolutely no warning. As in: directly from the streets and straight up into powerlines. At all hours of the day and night. The people themselves are in a seemingly constant state of chatter; boisterous, proud and admittedly pleasing to the ears. Spanish is a tight language and the particular dialect in Puerto Rico was so singular and fast-flowing that it rendered my limited talents in español basically useless. Everyone patiently suffered my stumbling through one incomplete sentence and immediately responded in English so masterfully learned that my shame was plugged in and amplified so much that Space could observe it. The Moon knows I'm a terrible bi-linguist.
The experience as a whole was solid. Old San Juan is a bonafied good time punctuated by epic colonial forts and the kind of architecture that makes you want to drink mohitos in the cobblestone streets all day, wearing an ice cream white suit & a panama hat, grabbing the asses of some possible prostitues and maybe drunkenly waving a gun around while some guy follows you and plays a horn. No one was doing that and I can't imagine why anyone would be, but that's what I wanted to do. The beaches in San Juan and the surrounding area are probably not the nicest on the island, but they did the trick for me. And I never tire of laughing at German accents or bonering over THICK LATIN CULOS. The tiny island of Vieques was a mixed bag; the southern town of Esperanza was a sloppy tumble of gross U.S.tourists thankfully salvaged by its incredible ocean views and the surrounding beaches that sort of changed my limited understanding of what "paradise" could actually mean to a person as broke as myself. The northern town of Isabel II was a differenct experience altogether; we spent the 2 days following the New Year there and were greeted by a gaggle of stumbling amiable zombies, wasted from 2 days of opulent rum consumption. They wandered around glassy-eyed and smiling, stopping occasionally in doorways to dance by themselves whether there was music playing nearby or not, and engaging my girlfriend and I in some of the most entertaining and warm conversations either of us has probably ever had with a total stranger, booze-influenced or otherwise.
I went to Puerto Rico with zero expectations and left with probably a lot less insight than I should have gleaned, but my overall impression is that of a genuine and welcoming place that deserves much more time and inquiry than I was able to grant it. The culture-shock was more of a slow burn than a jarring confrontation, its impact most likely softened further by the fact that I was reading Werner Herzog's "Conquest of the Useless" while I was there. Herzog was struggling with his own concepts of human nature in relation to the necessity and interpretation of art while slogging through the armpits of South America. I was trying to get a tan and eat as many plaintains as possible while floating around in the friendly rat-tail of the Caribbean. I imagine that's part of why he has spent his life as a cinematic Indiana Jones and I'm sitting in the school library listening to Tangerine Dream and avoiding my Spanish homework.
Different strokes, I guess.

"Mengele's an asshole. Remember that."

Surf Nazis Must Die isn't a very good movie. Despite the honor of boasting one of the greatest titles in cinematic history, the film itself just fails to deliver much of anything. Unless you foam at the mouth over plodding go-nowhere storytelling and/or an absence of a single nugget of dialogue that could be interesting to anyone then I would recommend you steer clear of watching it. I was 20 years old the first time I saw it, and the precarious situation in which my virgin viewing took place maintains a significantly more detailed foothold in the annals of my memory than anything that actually happens in the movie (i.e. nothing. Nothing happens in this movie. Nothing). We were all sitting in the darkness of my new-at-that-time friend Ron's living room: me, Ron, Ron's terrifyingly social retard of a hulking straight-edge roommate, my friend Graham and Ron's ex-girlfriend, whom I shall refer to as Shitty Liz because her name was Liz and because she was shitty. Ron and Shitty Liz had freshly slid off of the tail-end of their several year relationship, which culminated in them moving to Richmond together from Maine, almost immediately breaking up, and continuing to live together in the same shitty apartment where I was now watching this terrible movie with them; high out of my mind, bored out of my skull and nearly choking to death on the tension that hovered in the room like a sixth person, uninvited and passive-aggressively rude. Throw into this nauseating cocktail of awkwardness the added spice of my relatively well-known-at-the-time friend Graham, who had shown up independent of myself under the pretense that he was in store for a chill date with his new acquaintance (Shitty) Liz, completely unaware that she still lived with her ex-boyfriend and that both he and I and scary straight-edge Steve would all be there, too. My high was helping to take off the hard edge of discomfort, or at least helping me to remain joyfully oblivious to it, and I settled into a pile of pillows on the floor, ready to experience what I had previously been promised was the pinnacle of D-movie riches. But this movie sucked. It still sucks, and it will probably always suck. Regardless, I was the only one to finish it. Shitty Liz and Graham took off early, probably to go get some coffee and talk about literature or whatever other stupid shit people our age used to do instead of just immediately smashing our crotches together and getting it over with. Scary straight-edge Steve retired to the kitchen to disassemble and clean his handguns (I swear to fucking god), acerbically muttering under his breath "fucking edge-breaker" every time recently edge-broken (and totally hammered) Ron would stumble towards the kitchen for another 40 oz. Ron was just drinking by himself in his room by this point. I stuck it out for two reasons. A) I was really, really high and this terrible movie seemed like a better option than any of my others, and B) the fucking SOUNDTRACK.
Jon McCallum had me mesmerized. Try to imagine an early John Carpenter score bumping fur with that latest Fuck Buttons album that every music reviewer in the world is currently masturbating to. Only better, because this shit sounds like it was composed and recorded in the locker room of a public swimming pool by a rogue 1980's computer nerd who just ate a handful of Quaaludes and was attempting to therapeutically overcome the loss of his calculator watch at the hands of some real-life Surf Nazis. Sequences of surfing dudes and dudettes shot in extreeeeeeeeemely slow-motion melted into my brain by way of my eyes solely because of the music's ability to smooth-talk my disinterested persona into letting them pass. For years I've wandered around haunted by the memory of these sounds, unable to find the means of replication. I swore that I would never sit through this disastrous picture again, and uncovering a hard copy of the soundtrack is like trying to fuck without body parts. I remained hopeless that I'd ever hear any of it again until about a month ago when I stumbled upon some equally affected individual's blog, where he had for immediate download the score in its entirety, recorded directly from his goddamned VHS copy (sound effects and all).
I've been listening to it almost every single day since then, and have decided to put it up here for anyone who may be interested. It's probably not for everyone, but if you're anything like me then this will not only fill, but will forever define, a very specific slot within your vast library of musical appreciation. I recommend it for headphones during a walk through the city in early fall, assuming you have no particular place to be. Get caught up in it completely and come to realize the full potential of low-budget film scores and why typing the words "Claudio Simonetti mediafire" into Google may do more for your knowledge and appreciation of music than any number of blogs, magazines or bullshit record store recommendations will ever be capable of. If you're not breaking into goosebumps by the time "Blood in the Water" kicks its way into your head then I hate to break it to you, but you've got tampons in your ears.

Jon McCallum - Surf Nazis Must Die