Dear Pillow: 2004, dir. Bryan Poyser. Seen at Alamo Village (Sept. 19).
It’s more difficult for me to write about very good movies than about stinkers. It takes longer, at any rate. I saw this movie nearly a month ago and I truly enjoyed it, and have thought about it a lot, but am just getting around to typing my thoughts about it now.
I think if Dear Pillow had played another week at Alamo, or if I’d seen it earlier in its run, I would have written the review earlier to encourage people to see it. But I didn’t see it until its last week in theaters, which was still two weeks longer than it had originally been scheduled to play at Alamo anyway.
Dear Pillow is about a 17-year-old boy who wants to write porn, such as the kind he reads in a Penthouse-letters-style magazine called Dear Pillow. His neighbor, who writes for this magazine and who used to direct porn movies, acts as his mentor. Meanwhile, Wes (the kid) is living with his dad, with whom he has some complicated issues, and lusting after the apartment landlady, on whom he is eavesdropping.
Month: October 2004
six babble-icious years
It was six years ago today that I started posting entries to Anhedonia, the Web site that my friend Columbine set up for me on his domain. Whatever I wrote that day wasn’t particularly memorable, but it was great to use a CGI script to type in whatever I liked and then hit a button and poof! All the navigation was correct and I didn’t have to hand-code a lot of fiddly little things. I could update my Web site whenever I wanted! Wow.
Thus began my foray into online journalling, or blogging, or whatever we’re calling it this week. At the time I just called it “updating my Web page.” I’d had a Tripod page before Anhedonia, called am I blue?, but it had been meant as an exercise in Web design and writing that I could perhaps show to potential employers when I was job-hunting earlier that year.
movies this week: the puppets are here
The big movie event in Austin this week is the Austin Film Festival. Several movie theaters in town have screens dedicated to showing festival movies. However, there are so many cool movies playing in town this month, even if you don’t make it to the festival, you can see a different movie practically every night. Yeah, even if you skip the lame ones.
There are all kinds of new movies this week: heartwarming, quirky, melodramatic, bursting with big-name acting talent. But only one of them has irreverent puppets fighting terrorism, and that’s the only one I particularly want to see. They’re not Muppets, but that’s all right.
Re-Animator (1985)
Re-Animator: 1985, dir. Stuart Gordon. Seen at Alamo downtown (Oct. 11).
I decided I had better see Re-Animator because it’s one of the better known horror cult films, because I hadn’t ever seen any Stuart Gordon films, because I don’t see enough horror movies, and because this is one of my little brother’s all-time favorite films and he would just die if he found out I missed the opportunity to see it in a theater. Not to mention it was Dollar Night at Alamo Downtown (part of a tribute to the film’s art director, Robert A. Burns, who recently died).
I don’t always agree with my little brother (he adored Napoleon Dynamite) but I definitely enjoyed this movie. “Enjoyed” is kind of a weird word to use about a movie that contains graphic images of brain surgery, the use of a bone saw to kill a reanimated corpse, a very sad and gory little cat, a decapitation with shovel that eventually resulted in a reanimated severed head, sexual assault involving the aforementioned severed head, reanimated decomposing corpses with gore streaming from their mouths, and other nasty stuff. But I had a good time and even laughed a lot at some of the more outrageous gore.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Night of the Living Dead: 1968, dir. George A. Romero. Seen on DVD (Oct. 9).
It seems that October is, appropriately, Undead Movie Month for me. Mostly the movie Shawn of the Dead is to blame. My boyfriend and I want to see the movie, but we decided that we should see a couple of the Romero films beforehand so we could appreciate all the jokes. He suggested it and he is not even a film geek. Perhaps I am a bad influence.
Also, Alamo Downtown is showing a lot of horror movies this month. No other theater chain in town seems to be acknowledging Halloween very well, but at Alamo they’ve got all kinds of goodies planned. I’m really pleased about this.
I thought about lumping all my thoughts on these undead/horror movies into one big review but first of all, it would be way too long and second of all, when in the hell would I finish that? And should I include all the horror movies I see this month, or just the ones with undead/re-animated corpses/evil dead? So I’m splitting up my thoughts on these movies by movie, but will probably have a lot to say about my general feelings on the genre.
House of Games (1987)
House of Games: 1987, dir. David Mamet. Seen on DVD (Oct. 6).
My boyfriend rented this one, and watched it alone, but advised me to see it because I like heist films and caper films and con films. I thought it looked interesting but I really had to talk myself into watching it. It is difficult to get in the right mood to deal with Mamet’s particular style of dialogue.
It was worth the effort, though. I liked House of Games a lot, more than my boyfriend did. It was a little cold and distant, in the way some noir films are, but without the morality of noir (arguably dictated less by the genre than by the Production Code of the 1940s).
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
The Bourne Supremacy: 2004, dir. Paul Greengrass. Seen at Gateway (Sept. 18).
Oh, lord. How long has it been since we saw this movie? I didn’t write about it right away because I didn’t have much to say. I don’t have much to say now, either.
This was a summer action movie, but we didn’t see it until the end of summer, at which point it lost a lot of its allure. I feel like movies like this should be seen in the middle of the day, so that part of the enjoyment is that you have walked across the glaringly hot parking lot into a dark, cool theater. Instead, it was dark outside when we went, and we saw it at Gateway, which has a theater lobby that sounds like a bus station.
movies this week: hmmm. interesting.
It truly has been one-week-on, one-week-off in Austin theaters. Perhaps this is a nice gesture on the part of film distributors to allow us to catch up on the good films during the off weeks.
Most of the movies this week look interesting. Not loads of thrills, not full of stunning visuals or amazing special effects, but the kinds of movies that keep your brain occupied and absorbed for a couple of hours. (I’m not counting the Hilary Duff movie. I’m ignoring it. Or the Jimmy Fallon movie, for that matter. Okay, maybe this was a dumb generalization to make, but I can’t think of anything better right now.) And if you want something a little more fun, there are good movies still playing in theaters from previous weeks.
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
Napoleon Dynamite: 2004, dir. Jared Hess. Seen at Alamo Village (October 2).
Okay. Hands up. Who has seen Napoleon Dynamite?
Okay. Who liked it? You did?
Why, in God’s name, why?
And why did some of you tell me to see it? Were you drinking? Were you partaking? Did you have your hand up someone’s skirt? Were you suffering from Friends deprivation and desperate for some sitcom, any sitcom, to make you laugh?
movies this week: go back to last week
I think I was spoiled by last week’s movies. I cannot muster much enthusiasm for the movies opening in Austin this week. Fortunately, last week’s movies and some other goodies are still in theaters, and since I didn’t get time to see them then, there are plenty of good movies available for me in theaters.