My winner for video of the year
Posted by spooneybarger Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:18:54 GMT
The Saturday Evening Movie Review Hash
Posted by spooneybarger Sun, 08 Oct 2006 00:00:00 GMT
_brought to you by The Fleshlight _
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force Volume 1 – 5/10
Face it, season one wasn’t real funny but volume 1 starts to pick up steam on disc 2.
- The Last Picture Show – 6/10
Solid movie. CS was a hottie. Needed more Cloris Leachman. Basically, it never developed any of the characters enough for my taste. Almost 3d, not quite.
- The Bicycle Thief – 6/10
I get the feeling that if I spoke Italian, I would have liked this more. With subtitles, the emotional punch ebbs and flows and this movie is all about emotional punch.
- A Streetcard named Desire – 8/10
Great movie. Brando… jesus well… yeah Vivian Leigh is also incredible and Karl Malden’s performance is pretty snappy too. But, it is T. Williams afterall so what would you expect. There were a lot more comedic moments in the film than I remember from the play. Do watch the director’s cut as it makes the sexual tension between Stanley and Blanche obvious rather than hinted at by when a scene gets cut. Trust me, much better with it obvious.
- Twelve Angry Men – 10/10
It doesn’t get much better than this. Incredible acting performaces by a large % of the cast AND the story is remarkably poignant in our current cultural and political climes.
- Treasure of the Sierra Madre – 7/10
This could have been a great movie but the characters end up a shade from 3d. Bogart’s descent into a murderous paranoia just doesn’t make a ton of sense given what you see. Too much is left to the imagination. Reminds me of a MacBeth lite.
Dennis Cooper's Frisk
Posted by spooneybarger Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:50:00 GMT
The first half of Frisk was so good I had already started plotting out a wonderful review of it. It was twisted, taunt and featured such lovely themes: gay sex, drugs and violence. The 2nd half of the book totally changed my opinion and basically reduced my review down to:
If you have some spare time, go ahead and read the first half of the book but just stop, for the love of god, stop when the protaganist gets to Europe. It is a slow downhill slide from there until the last 5 pages when you are just dumped into one of the stupidiest endings ever.
Bridgeport
Posted by spooneybarger Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:22:00 GMT
Sometimes it is just easier to let someone else say it for you.
Now might as well be one of those times.
Beatallica
Posted by spooneybarger Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:01:00 GMT
It’s the Beatles!
No,
It’s Metallica!
No, shit…
it’s Beatallica
some of you easy fuckers are going to like this…
( hint hint G )
Fancypuss McLitter
Posted by spooneybarger Tue, 14 Mar 2006 06:50:00 GMT
Genius and insane raving maniac are so tightly wound together as to often be indistinguishable. Where it not for this connection and entire genre/formula of movie wouldn’t exist for Hollywood to repeatedly shove down our throats… witness say A Beautiful Mind. Fancypuss McLitter continues this tradition, be it in the musical vein. His myspace site lists a dizzying array of influences that your average artist such as The Strokes or Interpol would never even consider getting near:
milk, of course, mew, sitting on window sills, staring into space with my eyes half closed, getting fed delicious fancy treats, sleeping, clawing furniture, throwing up hairballs, wiggling my butt before i pounce
Indeed, who doesn’t love ’wiggling (their) butt before (they) pounce’?
Suggested Tracks: milk please! and Milkytown
Does this milk taste spoiled to you?
Posted by spooneybarger Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:08:00 GMT
Sometimes the description leaves you not wanting to get any closer. Like for example, this bit from a myspace splash page:
Take Jimmy Eat World and stir in a little James Taylor, add a little Get Up Kids and top with a pinch of Phil Collins and out comes Brighten. They are rock and roll boys that you can take home to mom.
That sounds about as appealling as Ripe was in person. Is Brighten as bad as Ripe? Probably not.. but still I’m not going near it…
Oh right, I never told you about Ripe… they are without a doubt the worst band I have seen live in a long long time. Back on March 3rd I went to the Pussycat Lounge to check out S’s band Full Tank at the hated Pussycat Lounge. Lee and the rest of Lo-Fi Entertainment certainly outdid themselves when they put the flipper-esque Full Thank together with Ripe.
Ripe has about as much edge to their music as a basketball and is way whiter. I should have known it was going to be bad when they started by having just the drummer on stage who started the show with a “aren’t we as funky as hootie” drumbeat, few measures in, the keyboard player starts in on an acoustic guitar then the bass player makes his way onto the stage and starts playing… you get the idea… all 7 of them come on this way… of course Captain Shred the guitar player couldn’t actually get his equipment working properly so that did add a bit of amusement. How exactly, do you manage to set up an entrance like that and not be positive that all your gear works? I could go on but really what is the point… the music was predictable, most of the singers seemed to not know what their diaphragm was AND the 3 of them had outfits that matched just enough to be annoying in that they didn’t really match…
So Brighten ( and myspace ), thanks but no thanks, I do not want to experience your ripe form of rock and roll. Good day to you.
health quickies
Posted by spooneybarger Thu, 02 Mar 2006 16:25:00 GMT
- Three more bird flu cases in Germany
- Study ranks womens access to contraceptives state by state
- Two more Indonesians die of bird flu
- Soft drinks linked to cancer
- Faking it as good as the real thing when it comes to curing migraines. Tell me something I didn’t already know…
And if you haven’t seen The Origin Of Aids check it out. I saw it a couple weeks ago on Sundance, very good movie about a subject that has been fighting for legitimacy for close to 20 years now. Unfortunately all you Netflix people, they don’t carry it, so you will have to find it somewhere else. More must see than most things I say are must-sees.
Brando
Posted by spooneybarger Tue, 14 Feb 2006 21:38:00 GMT
Brando. Shit. Brando. Karl Malden excellent; Lee J. Cobb better still; Rod Steiger and Eva Marie Saint both excellent; compared to Brando? Nothing. Brando could act. All the bolding of text won’t come close to making it overstated. See On The Waterfront and discover it for yourself plus you can enjoy great lesser known exchanges of dialogue such as:
Terry: You know, I seen you a lot of times before. Remember parochial school out on Paluski Street? Seven, eight years ago. Your hair, you had your hair uh…
Edie: Braids.
Terry: Looked like a hunk of rope. And you had wires on your teeth and glasses and everything. You was really a mess.
Very good movie until the last 5 minutes when theytry to shove 30 years of Ray Charles’ life into that miniscule amount of time. Apparently, not much happened after he stopped doing heroin OR they should have just cut it when he cleaned up. The ending was really a disservice and the constant ‘hallucination/waking nightmares’ involving water and his dead brother’s body… overkill…
REVIEW: High On Fire @ Bowery Ballroom 2/3/05
Posted by spooneybarger Sat, 04 Feb 2006 15:43:00 GMT
RAWR!!!
RAWR!!! RAWR!!! RAWR!!!
Ra, rawr. Ra, ra, ra, rawr. Ra, ra?
RAWR!!!
Banksy
Posted by spooneybarger Sat, 21 Jan 2006 07:34:00 GMT
Check out the entire site.
It gets 3 spooneybargers up…
Thanks to C for sending me to the site.
http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/06.5.html is particularly good. Very powerful stuff.
Be Here To Love Me
Posted by spooneybarger Wed, 04 Jan 2006 07:37:00 GMT
- The Late Great Townes Van Zandt
I saw the Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here To Love Me
with I recently. Very good movie. We both had a couple sparks while we were watching it- being drunk and a little speeding is definately the way to watch a movie about an alcoholic. I saw the Bukowski documentary Born Into This with M last year- sober; that was a bad idea. It was a great movie but, I had this nagging feeling that something was missing. And like light dawning on marblehead, I get it now.. ‘I was fucking sober’...
Wrong, wrong, wrong
I will obviously be punished.
But at least not for the Townes movie…
It was a bit of an odd experience, I wasn’t ready for the audience:
- They didn’t act like drunks or reformed drunks
- They didn’t act like people who knew drunks or reformed drunks
- They seemed like slumming yuppie or hipster fucks
I certainly wasn’t ready for the sideways nasty looks I got from some of the more prissy ones; Can’t a man drink in peace?
When I saw Fear and Loathing with G years ago; I was drunk, stoned and tripping by the time that sucker was over AND I came into the theatre completely sober. The guy behind me gave me a hit of acid when I sat down and right after the lights went out, the joint made its way around to me, top it off with my bottle of cheap red wine and I was a happy camper. Hooting, hollering, deathly afraid of killer lizards- that was a proper audience with an appreciation for how things should be…
The Cooler
Posted by spooneybarger Wed, 04 Jan 2006 07:28:00 GMT
- William H Macy is excellent. You can feel the schmuck coming from the screen
- Estella Warren is sexy like a real woman with flaws both physical and emotional
- It will make you wistful for falling in love
I.E. Rent it folks.
Dangerous Ideas
Posted by spooneybarger Wed, 04 Jan 2006 05:26:00 GMT
The Edge community have written 117 original essays (a document of 72,500 words) in response to the 2006 Edge Question — “What is your dangerous idea?”. I’ve just started working my way through these but there is some real good, thought provoking stuff here, you should check it out. Below Haim Harari’s “Democracy may be on its way out”...
Democracy may be on its way out. Future historians may determine that Democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).
Falling boundaries between countries, cross border commerce, merging economies, instant global flow of information and numerous other features of our modern society, all lead to multinational structures. If you extrapolate this irreversible trend, you get the entire planet becoming one political unit. But in this unit, anti-democracy forces are now a clear majority. This majority increases by the day, due to demographic patterns. All democratic nations have slow, vanishing or negative population growth, while all anti-democratic and uneducated societies multiply fast. Within democratic countries, most well-educated families remain small while the least educated families are growing fast. This means that, both at the individual level and at the national level, the more people you represent, the less economic power you have. In a knowledge based economy, in which the number of working hands is less important, this situation is much more non-democratic than in the industrial age. As long as upward mobility of individuals and nations could neutralize this phenomenon, democracy was tenable. But when we apply this analysis to the entire planet, as it evolves now, we see that democracy may be doomed.
To these we must add the regrettable fact that authoritarian multinational corporations, by and large, are better managed than democratic nation states. Religious preaching, TV sound bites, cross boundary TV incitement and the freedom of spreading rumors and lies through the internet encourage brainwashing and lack of rational thinking. Proportionately, more young women are growing into societies which discriminate against them than into more egalitarian societies, increasing the worldwide percentage of women treated as second class citizens. Educational systems in most advanced countries are in a deep crisis while modern education in many developing countries is almost non-existent. A small well-educated technological elite is becoming the main owner of intellectual property, which is, by far, the most valuable economic asset, while the rest of the world drifts towards fanaticism of one kind or another. Add all of the above and the unavoidable conclusion is that Democracy, our least bad system of government, is on its way out.
Can we invent a better new system? Perhaps. But this cannot happen if we are not allowed to utter the sentence: “There may be a political system which is better than Democracy”. Today’s political correctness does not allow one to say such things. The result of this prohibition will be an inevitable return to some kind of totalitarian rule, different from that of the emperors, the colonialists or the landlords of the past, but not more just. On the other hand, open and honest thinking about this issue may lead either to a gigantic worldwide revolution in educating the poor masses, thus saving democracy, or to a careful search for a just (repeat, just) and better system.
I cannot resist a cheap parting shot: When, in the past two years, Edge asked for brilliant ideas you believe in but cannot prove, or for proposing new exciting laws, most answers related to science and technology. When the question is now about dangerous ideas, almost all answers touch on issues of politics and society and not on the “hard sciences”. Perhaps science is not so dangerous, after all.
Take Me Video
Posted by spooneybarger Thu, 15 Dec 2005 16:22:00 GMT
Check out the video for Dirty Lenin’s Take Me .
Its a little weird… but not butthole surfers weird… still they are drenched in enough acidy goodness to get the spooneybarger seal of approval.
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