Before C&W
31 January 2009
29 January 2009
28 January 2009
Aussies Eat More Barbie
Who is ready to stay up all night to watch the final that begins at 12:30 am Sunday morning?
Me, either.
22 January 2009
Get Drunk Eat Chicken
The new Chicken and Waffle place across from the Jack London Barnes and Noble (formerly the Jack London Inn) has 2 for 1 drinks and complimentary chicken wings every day from 4-7.You need to know that.
The Hamlet is Faulkner's funniest novel. It's also bloated, but that's another story. The sections on Eula Varner, physically precocious fecund mama-child of the soil, whose 12-year old curves drive her teacher to give up a law career to bask in her presence and kneel at her recently departed desk so he can place his cheek to the seat where her bottom left its heat, and on the Idiot Snopes who falls in love with a cow, which Bill renders in the prose of knightly courting and yes, our lovers consummate their relationship, over and over again, are pants-wetting hilarious. This is arguably (after Sanctuary?) his most underrated work.
Lost in La Mancha is a decent documentary about Terry Gilliam's failure to finish his dream project about Don Quixote. Trouble, it comes their way. Think of it as a poor man's Hearts of Darkness with Johnny Depp's sexy hair as garnish.
Reprise is a Norwegian film about two young men desperate to make their names in the literary world that clearly shows earnest young men of letters are universally wearisome. Interspersed with flashy rapid-fire snapshots pondering alternate fates (oh Run Lola Run what you have wrought on the young filmmakers of Europe), this is most entertaining when the group of friends (that includes our heroes) is giving each other shit. One of the guys was in a punk band with the hit, "Finger Fucking the Prime Minister", and his verbal drive-by of a pretentious editor is the best scene in the film, clearly illustrating that punk is better life training than literature.
Caught a Hubert Selby doc that was mostly friends saying how great he was. And Last Exit to Brooklyn is extraordinary and underappreciated, but I'm weary of buds-only interviews and still shots. Documentaries are not video fanzines.
Starting Out in the Evening is a surprisingly thoughtful examination of a hungry young grad student desperate to make her name by exhuming the reputation of an out-of-print 70-something novelist. She compares herself to Malcolm Cowley and offers herself to a man on death's door. It is quiet and slow and subtly complex, as the generational divide makes obvious the death of literature as serious art and cultural force usurped by flashy magazines and self-help books. Yes, she gets her comeuppance, sort of, but the ad men still win in the end.
14 January 2009
06 January 2009
01 January 2009
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