TONIGHT'S DEBATE IN FIVE WORDS: Get a room, you two!

(Sorry. Still an Obama guy, but I suddenly don't hate Hillary anymore. That may change.)

"NO SUBSTANTIVE POLICY DIFFERENCE" REDUX: After watching that debate--I'm convinced! The differences were: "I'll be long-reaching change" versus "I'll be safe change." But change is apparently on the table! Nobody was taking Wolf's bait to fight either. I think the Hillary campaign has decided that anything that looks anything like dirty trickses is not going to fly this year, and especially not against Obama, and the new strategy is: kill with kindness. It might be enough to stop the bleeding.

"NO SUBSTANTIVE POLICY DIFFERENCE": I keep hearing this (and if I wasn't a lazy, bad blogger I'd go find some links) and I'm not sure how true it is. I mean, isn't Hillary (based on Bill's record, and I guess her war votes too, and just the general Clintonian preference for taking the politically more expedient path) more likely to blow some shit up then Obama?

(Hey, if your main issue is the drug war--and it's pretty close to mine--who do you vote for? I imagine Obama would be better on it, just because--again--you know the Clintons aren't going to anything different in general, so at least with him you got a chance at something different. But Stop The Drug War says don't get my hopes up. And the Hillary people tell me Barack's an ordinary politician that the media's in love with, so I might as well just vote for Hillary. How very inspiring....)

ETA: Obama has made some noise about marijuana decriminalization, so that's something.

YEAH, JUST TO PILE ON HERE: With Giuliani out now the number one worst possible presidential scenario has been avoided, and we can all be thankful for that. Now the question becomes, who's more awful out of Hillary and McCain? (Which is why I'm pro-Obama, it's an easy decision with him versus anybody.)

IF I MAY GET EASTERBROOKIAN HERE FOR A MOMENT: The Patriots are the defining team of the Bush years. Being introduced as a team in the first post-9/11 Superbowl, just a bunch of blue collar guys not given much of a chance against the Greatest Show on Turf--it was such a feel-good moment when we needed a feel-good moment. And here they are now, the most hated NFL franchise since the 70s, having been convicted of cheating and not having to pay a competitive price for it. It's a Bushian arc! (If only in terms of approval ratings. Look--it's an Easterbrookian analysis. It doesn't have to make sense.)

The above probably makes Eli into Barack Obama, so it's utility as a metaphoric explication of the Patriots is questionable. Still--Patriots, Patriot Act, amirite?

"TESTOSTERONE TO ME IS SO IMPORTANT FOR A SENSE OF WELL-BEING AS YOU GET OLDER": Your quote of the day that made me laugh for some reason.

THAT'S JUST POLITICS LOL: I swear, there is no more annoying defense of the Clintons than that. At least Talk Left tried to make an actual argument defending their latest shenanigans--though I myself am unconvinced by one link to somebody's diary from three months ago.

A week ago I could have gone with any Dem candidate, but things start looking a little bit bad for the Clintons (Iowa, the ambiguous Nevada result) and they react like they have been....I don't want people who govern like that in power again. End of line. So let's go you-know-who (now available in Hebrew.)

MAN, THIS COULD BE TOTALLY UNFAIR: But it seems like a lot of your bigger lefternet blogs have steadfastly refused to pick a candidate, I guess so they don't say something they regret later, and it's annoying. You're telling me, lefternet, that you really don't have an opinion on Bill making skin color campaign issue number one of the moment? Or Hillary's Reagan bullshit? I feel like only the wonkier blogs have stated their preferences at this point, like Kevin Drum's Hillary love or the gang at ObWi trending Obama.

It's the ObWi gang who's got me in an Anyone But Hillary mood at the moment. Publius, then hilzoy then hilzoy again. And they'll probably end up supporting Hillary if she gets the nod, but I'm not a durn demmycrat and if anybody can get me to vote Republican in '08 it's the Clintons.

Not that I won't change my mind in the next 10 months, McCain can be a legit scary dude and "President McCain" sound like the name of a fictional President in your average 80s low-budget science fiction dystopia (the ones where the United States is strangely depopulated and most of the movie takes place in abandoned factories.) But as for right now there's an Obama beanie with my name on it just as soon as I get paid.

CAN YOU NAME A GREAT TEAM GRIMMER THAN THE 2007-08 NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS?: What are "Questions Bill Simmons would be asking if he wasn't from Massachusetts," Alex?

(Note: If he has mentioned this, I apologize. But he's become unreadable for obvious reasons so I can't really check for myself.)

MEMO TO THE PS3-OWNING INTERNET: If you're trying to format your external hard drive to FAT32 so the PS3 can recognize it, just use GParted. It's graphical, easy to use, and doesn't give you the opportunity to screw things up like with the terminal-based partition editors. Take it from one who knows.

Then again, I'm like, "Why am I bothering? You know how many copies of Q*bert you'd need to fill up 50 gigs?" But maybe I'll stick a bunch of movies in there and never have to take a DVD out of the case again. I dunno.

(Q*bert actually available at Playstation Network, the sick man of next-gen console download services.)

OH YEAH--SINO-MEXICAN WINGS: These are amazing. Via wing enthusiast Henley.

YEAH, SO REMEMBER WHEN I WAS WATCHING ALL THOSE 80S MOVIES?: Of course I crapped out on it, but I managed to finish seeing nearly everything from 1980 I wanted to at least. Ah, half-completed ambition, the Internet is littered with it.

Anyhoo, Hollinger is finally getting the DVDVR 80s Project moving again, so I might start recycling movie review content again. Note: I will not be watching every movie I want from 1981 through 1989. I will not even attempt this. I have learned my lesson. Hollinger says the deadline is November 30th, so I pretty much cannot watch--say--every Dabney Coleman or Stacey Keach movie ever. But I'll do what I can.

GRINDHOUSE REVIEW: AKA recycled message board content, but if you're coming here from Henleyland or something, I want you to know I'm still alive.

Good Grindhouse linkage:

The Outlaw Vern review.

Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich debate Tarantino.

The Dennis Cozzalio appreciation.

As for me--I thought the whole thing was fantastic. Planet Terror is closest I think Rodriguez has ever come to making a movie involving, and evoking, actual human emotions (so of course it makes sense that he legit fell for Rose McGowan while making this thing.) Something about that final scene, with Cherry and the baby on her back, and her in the role as leader of her people, sealed the deal for me. Plus he succeeded admirably at calling up the feeling of watching a very good Carpenter film, down to the Carpenter-esque scoring which was really perfect. Something about the restraints of the Grindhouse project really helped Rodriguez here, I think; he couldn't just sit down at the computer and play around because he had to think about recreating that cheap 70s aesthetic. So most of his CGI choices were in melting people, something that looks just as good using 70s technology as it does with computers, and Rose McGowan's leg, which--on the one hand--is way too impressive an effect for an actual exploitation movie, in the sense that it just looks too perfect. If they did this in the 70s, there'd be angles where you'd see Rose's leg tied up behind her to acheive the stump effect or whatever. Or they'd hire an actual legless actress. On the other hand, it's such a perfect image for the kind of movies they're trying to celebrate--hook for hand's been done--let's do leg for gun!--I can see why they cheated on the specifics. I think I read somewhere that "girl with gun for a leg" was one of the first ideas they had in mind when they were creating this thing, so there you go. Anyway--I dug Rose, I dug Rose and Freddy, I dug the scene with the one brother finally giving up his barbecue recipe to the other brother. Don't get me wrong, Planet Terror is in large part drenched in that persistent (and annoying) Rodriguezian sense of unreality (which is some combination of Bob Clampett minus the exuberance and Carpenter minus Carpenter's empathy for his characters) but there's enough of the former kinds of moments to make me think Robert is finally learning how to make movies that might mean something.

Trailers: Zombie > Roth > Wright. None of them were perfect, but Zombie had Nic Cage as Fu Manchu and seemed the most respectful of the (actually nonexistent) source material. Roth's had a lot of the details right (washed-out look, bad camera angles, ridiculous premise) but the narration was so, so wrong--it sounded like Roth himself was doing it in a really deep voice and thought that would be funny. Ugh. Wright's started strong but got too self-knowingly goofy towards the end. Perhaps it didn't help that I already knew what the gag was.

Ah, Death Proof. What a beautiful conundrum you are. If Kill Bill was his Leone I think Death Proof is his De Palma, or at least the Dressed To Kill/Blow-Out De Palma: killing off lead characters half-way through a la Psycho, exposing the guts of how a movie gets made as part of the movie (the tour inside Stuntman Mike's car, and, less plausibly in terms of the point I'm making, casting an actual stuntwoman as one of the leads; and don't forget Monica Staggs, the driver of the doomed car, is also a Kill Bill stuntwoman), just the general hey-let's-tear-a-genre-film-open-and-see-how-it-works sense I got from it. It's got the De Palman ambition of confusing the audience while entertaining the audience. But De Palma was riffing off Hitchcock (not only Hitch, of course)--Tarantino is riffing off a whole different set of genres and directors, many of which I'm sure De Palma never took seriously. Nick Schager says Death Proof is a synthesis of the serial killer movie, the "dragster flick", which I guess is where he's accounting for the Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry namechecks, and the cheerleader film, and the latter two are nowhere in the De Palma filmography. But here's Tarantino, grinding (HA!) them all together into a pretty hearty meal. The serial killer and car movie markers are obvious; the cheerleader thing is stated twice: literally in the second half (Mary Elizabeth Winstead playing an actress dressed as a cheerleader) and functionally in the first half (all the short-shorts and ass shots of women who are not cheerleaders, but it functions as T&A.) Plus the opening credits that introduce "The Girls" are like the credits of a sexploitation picture. I would argue that there is a fourth genre at work here (and I know the female revenge picture is in there too, but I haven't seen any of those so no comment,) kind of a Shaw Bros-style morality play with martial arts replaced by stuntwork, where bullies are always exposed as cowards and where the need to humiliate and defeat a villain is unquestionable. This narrative takes over right about the time where Zoe Bell says "Let's go get 'im," and I think that final freeze frame--victors raising their hands in celebration just as the villain lies defeated--is straight out of Shaw Brothers. Of course, Tarantino has to put his own little twist in by having Rosario Dawson crush Kurt Russell's face right after the freeze frame, but that's Tarantino--there's always that little nudge in there to make you think to yourself, "Say, why am I enjoying this?" Like, when Kurt Russell gives that grin to the camera and we're like, "Yay, Kurt Russell!" at the same time we know he's going to go kill Vanessa Ferlito, not too mention Rose McGowan's Pam who was the only person in that bar to give him the time of day. So, is it OMG KURT RUSSELL!!!! or is it "Stuntman Mike is an evil bastard who would rather kill girls than get lap dances from them" (the Ferlito lap dance actually exists, allegedly, but Mike is supposed to not enjoy it), or (later) is it "poor Mike, he's crying like a baby and those girls won't leave him alone"? Knowing Tarantion, it's both, or all three. His is the cinema of contradicting ideas and conflicting genre traditions presented at the exact same time, and that is why I am a Tarantino fan.

Two things "took me out of the movie," as they say: First, Tarantino's cameo in Planet Terror. All I could think of was, "any reasonable character actor/formerly famous person/70s icon would be a better choice than this." Because he was a bad, bad choice for that role, but I'm thinking now it was just part of the general mirroring between Planet Terror and Death Proof--double Tarantinos, double McGowans, double Earl McGraws, Sheltons, whatever more there were. Plus I'm sure Rodriguez enjoyed CGI-ing the hell out of him, and Tarantino returned the insult with the absolutely non-computerized car chase in Death Proof. Second, in the Tracie Thoms versus Kurt Russell duel she completely masculinizes herself--the dialogue is all "tapping that ass" and "busting a nut in that ass" and so on and we get it, she's a woman saying the lines of a male porno actor and she is strong and Russell is the real wuss, it was just too explicitly calling attention to the general role reversal of Kurt Russell from hunter to hunted. A lot of things Thoms said were a little off, but this was the most jarring to me.

(As an aside--Sydney Poitier seems to be getting all the press, but Vanessa Ferlito's Butterfly seemed to be the most fully-rendered of the doomed women, and was the only one who had that little closeup as the accident happened--the quick shot of her closing her eyes when Stuntman Mike turns on the lights at the last second. Poitier got all of the foot fetishizing--which is part of the huge self-parody undercurrent in Death Proof, along with the extra-long diner scene--but Ferlito got the massive closeups and the whole "iconic" treatment. At least where her face was concerned, and of course she was the only one of the girls who had her face destroyed, just like Poitier was the only one to be dismembered. David Edelstein mentioned something about Tarantino getting off on the contradiction between loving onscreen mayhem and being revulsed by his own reaction to it--wait, here's the exact quote: "It's also a small masterpiece, dredged up from the psyche of a movie freak who loves women onscreen almost as much as he loves to punish women onscreen, and who (this is what makes him an artist) gets off most on his own ambivalence." And that idea is pretty vividly illustrated by the buildup to the crash and the crash itself.)

So. Best time I've had at the movies in I don't know how long. Hopefully the Weinsteins release it on DVD as it was in theaters, in addition to the split versions; I really think it functions well as a total cinematic experience. Which obviously you can't replicate at home, but it would be nice to have the option to try.

JUST IN CASE MY PARENTS STILL READ THIS BLOG SOMETIMES: See--I haven't totally left the flock!

You know the Bible 88%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

And that's without having consulted the Good Book in what feels like five years. I thought I was going to get a 50%.

(Via cleek.)

WINTER ASIAN GAMES FEVER!: Catch it!

THE IRONICAL THING ABOUT FLORIDA'S BASKETBALL AND FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS: Is that both were overshadowed by historic wins by semi-unheralded teams--George Mason and Boise State, respectively. Well, I thought it was worth mentioning.

[1981] MAN ON THE BRINK: Hey--New Wave undercover cop drama! Infernal Affairs twenty years ago! Or one half of Infernal Affairs--poor Ah Chui, an undermotivated cop mysteriously picked for undercover duty. (Mysteriously because I found it mysterious that they picked a guy who was shown thinking about quitting the force in a previous scene, and let an old lady get away in the opening scene because he felt bad for her. Wouldn't you want somebody completely committed to police work for your undercover guy?) He doesn't turn out to be a particularly good thug, either--he's not quite brutal enough--but just being with the thugs begins to turn him rotten. He drives his girlfriend away as he gets more casually violent, and then he's fired from the force when he organizes a hit on his ex's new lover's jewelry store and is left a thug in name and in deed. That's just the one-sentence summary, there's a bunch of twists and turns, plus some unfortunate moments of bad comedy and errant sentiment. But overall this is an unusually character-driven film, not an exercise in plot one-upmanship or style like a lot of Hong Kong crime movies. Ah Chui isn't a bastard, but he isn't noble either; he's kind of a cop everyman who gets his girl and eventually his life stolen from him because he's forced to walk between two worlds (there's your title) and in the process of falling between the two and staggering back to his feet he gets run down to nothing. In the end he gets beaten to death by a bunch of vindictive apartment-dwellers after a botched raid, his final words something like "Is this a heroic death?" And the final freeze-frame is a friend of his screaming in rage at his friend's death--a raw ending for a generally raw film, aforementioned tonal lapses aside. A lot of the New Wave was powered by raw anger, wasn't it?

[1981] TRAGEDY OF A RIDICUlOUS MAN: Mild Bertolucci movie about the owner of a failing cheese factory (Ugo Tognazzi) whose son gets kidnapped. Or does he? Doubt begins to creep in about whether the son staged the whole thing to finance his leftist buddies, and when there's a rumor that the son has been killed that's doubtful too. All the owner knows is--if his son is dead, he can reinvest the ransom money back in his factory. His wife (Anouk Aimee--and Bertolucci loves the Anouk Aimee closeup) is of course constantly erring on the side of hope and constantly has to prod her husband into following the ransomer's wisher. And there's two of his son's friends who may be part of the kidnappers, or may be acting in his son's best interests--who can say? Bertolucci makes sure everyone's motivations are muddled or opaque (with the possible exception of Anouk Aimee, who--if she wanted anything other than her son's safe return--I didn't see it) and so when the son turns up alive in the end we have no clarification about the particulars of his kidnapping. All we know is that Ugo Tognazzi's character is one confused, passive-agressive dude. And that's what we're left with, Tognazzi running from the camera like he evaded thinking hard about anything throughout the movie (he's the ridiculous man of the title.) Like I said--it's a mild film about a mild little man that you'll enjoy but not especially rave about. It's, like, the safe artistic foreign movie retired people see at the local arthouse matinee.

[1981] ENTER THE NINJA: What?? Directed by Golan and produced by Globus? Of course that's a must-see! And it's plodding and artless and terrible, one of those things that doesn't function as trash or as art or as trash-art. Well--there are comically exaggerated death scenes, but that's the only thing this movie does well. I don't know how this thing launched the ninja craze and Sho Kosugi's career, but it did and I'm mystified. Reviews I have read have seen something menacing in his performance that I did not see at all. What kind of ninja cackles maniacally while doing a job? Maybe just the very idea of a ninja was enough in 1981? Ninjas and blood and cockfighting and Franco Nero saying "I'll be back." I will say that the variety of death dealt by Nero in the final fight was entertaining, if badly executed due to his lack of martial arts talent. And the Golanian love of nutshots was in full display in this film. But some decent death is not enough to make this even close to good trash.

[1980] FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES: Decent enough and entertaining Bergman film about nice, unhappy Peter Egermann (Robert Atzorn) who has a sudden moment of violence and kills a prostitute to the shock of everyone who knew him. Marionettes starts with the murder and spends the rest of the movie jumping around between the police investigation and sessions with Peter's psychiatrist (back when Freud was still taken seriously) and scenes from Peter and Katarina's marriage (Katarina played by Christine Buchegger--and the Egermanns themselves are supposed to be characters from Scenes From a Marriage.) Everything scene is presented--I don't know--formally with title cards indicating where they took place in relation to the murder, like Bergman was stringing together pieces of evidence and leaving it up to you at home to determine why Peter kills. And there's blame for everybody--Peter, Katarina, his mother, the psychiatrist, Katarina's business partner who introduced him to the prostitute. Their marriage was a big culprit too, one of those hate each other/can't get enough of each other kind of deals. There's almost too much evidence; in the end, all that matters is that Peter has been trapped by life, wiling away his days in a locked room in a sanitarium playing chess against a computer. I liked this more than I thought I would, given Bergman reputation for being depressing--not that this wasn't depressing, but it was pretty vital too. It's a very watchable little character study--not must-see by any means, but if you run across it give it a try.