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Friday, October 24, 2003

"It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive."
-Mark Twain

"Wigger please!"
-Ben Franklin

"There's a baseball diamond where our little league has its games, about a mile from here. We meet there around two-thirty in the morning, and we have us a knife fight..."
-Kill Bill


the first quote is why Mark Twain is the shit. it's a quote about quotes! madness! and i have invented many quotes "to deceive," to start of chapters or stories, or simply to cheat on my homework. it's lots o' fun.

finally saw Kill Bill. good shit. should have been called "Plot Be Damned" instead though because there was just about nothing going on except a kill crazy rampage (and he even uses the words "kill crazy rampage" which some might remember from the Dogs) and some obscure music mixed with a minimal amount of Wu-Tang beats. i drove to Cleveland to go see it because i'm stupid like that and i owed my friend "G" a visit to see his new house. we had the theater to ourselves (small town, after ten on a weekday) and they actually had to start up the movie when we got our tickets. the girl took our money and made a call ("que up number twelve, over...") and that's kind of weird, knowing that the movie wouldn't have been playing if we wouldn't have gone to see it. it's like the tree falling in the forest or something. me and G sneaked some cans of Fosters in there with us to get happily lit through the previews. Fosters...Australian for "loud fucking hiss when you crack them in a movie theater." we also had some fun imitating what the projectionist would be grumbling about up above us since we were stopping him from going home early ("i know i said i was bringing the pizza baby, i'm sorry...baby i know i said we were moving out of that van, i'll be home in two hours...baby i know i said i'd fix that car...") and we imagined him having to peddle the projector with his feet, just to make him even more miserable in our mind's eye:

"baby i don't peddle movies all goddamn day to come home and listen to your shit!"

so the new "Matrix" preview looked like Star Wars crap, with a giant Master Control Program thing talking to Ted. i always knew it would turn into "Tron." "Return of the King" preview had the usual amount of weeping and hugging and epic music. the new Peter Weir movie could be good, men screaming at each other on a wind and war ravaged ship. we'll see. i'm a huge fan of "Mosquito Coast" and "Last Wave."

"Kill Bill" was exactly what i expected. few surprises with the exception of a baseball getting sliced in half that hit very close to home. and was it just me or was there some crazy eleventh-hour editing going on? the "pussy wagon" gag was given away before the joke...the obligitory Tarantino non-linear structure was the most pointless it's ever been (why show the revenge list scenes backwards when you could just change the order on the list? and again, the "pussy wagon" showing up in the wrong order) and i'm wondering if he feels he's not allowed to make a linear movie anymore...and what exactly happened to our coma-fucking hero, Buck? was his jaw ripped off with her teeth or what? scene missing just like the Nine Inch Nails video.

still good stuff. got the trunk-view moment that he's managed to put in every one of his films. i really enjoy those. i think you can, and should, find a way to have a trunk's-eye-view in any movie there is. most movies have cars, and if there's a car, put someone in the trunk! fighting was solid. liked the little lethal schoolgirl a lot. could have done without those couple of wire-work "Charlie's Angels" moments though. where people start floating for no reason at all? that crap looks fucking awful and someday people will realize that. but most of the fighting was toe-to-toe bashing and punching and cutting so it was cool. very alarming opening scene too. hey, anyone notice the Ranger from "Dusk Till Dawn" come walking in that chapel? remember, he was the guy who said "retards shouldn't operate a grill" before Tarantino's character shot him through his 10-gallon hat? that was funny. next movie should be sweet, even if they scammed two tickets off me. although, how they're going to get a believable fight out of a tired old Carradine is a mystery to me. hell, he was moving slow in "The Long Riders" twenty years ago. well, at least he was able to finger his sword handle ominously. oh yeah, don't let them fool you with that "goriest movie ever made" talk. it's bloody but they switch to black and white at the end to minimize the impact so the most disturbing thing is actually the dripping watery sounds of the gore you're not really seeing. so yeah, the audio is the goriest, but not the visual. now that i think about it, i might have to put together another list. Gorest Movies and/or Scenes of All Time. i'm going to start working on it at work today.

epilogue: the projectionist actually drove a big new truck. his lonely vehicle was right next to mine in the parking lot when we left. at least he didn't have to peddle home too.

::: david - 12:19 PM [+] :::
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