Backwoods of the Twilight Zone

More Arr!

I posted this a year ago. Here it is again. Ben, you can sit on my lap if you need to. Let's see this movie together!

Guillermo del Toro discusses getting an R rating for "Don't be Afraid of the Dark"

Not About Factory Farms - Clarification

My "kitten" post wasn't really a dig at vegetarianism. I'm a functional vegetarian. I've probably eaten less meat in the whole of last month than Chris ate in a single day. Still, I've cut the heads off of chickens in my backyard. I know what it means to take life to enjoy good food. My post was more of an attack on you guys acknowledging that kittens being swung around by their tails onscreen is felt to be more horrendous than human males having their scrotums removed with a butter knife. There's something strange about being upset by any depictions of animal cruelty while at the same time imbibing an abundance of images of humans being subjected to terrible cruelty. I'm just saying.

1...2...3...6 Whiskies!!!! This man's kidneys have exploded.

I figure I owe Chris a Simpsons post. Here goes...

Bart the Mother is sometimes sweet, sometimes sour. I liked the bird-eating lizards.

The Treehouse or Horror episode was a disappointment, even if the Itchy and Scratchy part was fun. Toupees aren't scary, though that first story might be the most solid of the three. Jerry Springer is always stupid- never funny.

When You Dish Upon a Star is about as interesting as celebrity's private lives.

I hate the '60s and distrust adults who idolize the '60s as a Golden Age. I'm not sure if it was because of this or in spite of this that I enjoyed D'oh-in in the Wind so much.

Lisa Gets an "A" has so many great moments. Mostly the toothpick lunches rings true. I can't count how many times, up in Buffalo especially, our meals were served on toothpicks. Good times and good eats.

Homer Simpson in "Kidney Trouble" is my favorite episode so far. Part of it is the WestWorld fun. Part of it is just the nice one-liner jokes like "Don't harvest me with your eyes." The entire episode is fun.

Here's how I would rank the (8) episodes I've seen so far (with the obvious caveat that I could change this order at any time in the future):

Season 10, so far....

1. Homer Simpson in "Kidney Trouble"
2. Lisa Gets an "A"
3. The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace
4. D'oh-in in the Wind
5. Bart the Mother
6. Lard of the Dance
7. Treehouse of Horror IX
8. When You Dish Upon a Star

PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals

I've been working on an idea to pitch to a major motion picture studio.

Two kitten friends hike across Europe. While they are experiencing a world of naughty freedom in the wild, they find out about an undocumented animal shelter filled with cat nip.

Once there, they are captured and forced to make an obscene amount of outrageously cute YouTube videos in the basement of the shelter. They are adored so much that they can barely stand it. In the meantime, the broader human world is domesticated and emasculated. Adult men stop eating rabbits and start eating carrots. No more pork, but these men roll around in sour milk pig slop to show their solidarity with their porcine brethren.

Should horror and gore films exist? Only if we can move past our sacred kitten religions and start watching some extended kitten torture scenes. This would all be simulated, of course, just like human torture in the movies is now simulated. No one is endorsing the actual torture of any living creature. We're only advocating for our unqualified right to enjoy simulated acts of torture against kittens as much as against humans.

Anyhow, here's the trailer:

Windy

Trade Winds is a nearly perfect romance/comedy/detective story/chase movie. The film is both funny and sweet while also anticipating serious noir dread. There are a few great visual moments that I won't spoil. Jeff, it's definitely worth watching even in a degraded YouTube version. The only YouTube version I could find had yellow Spanish subtitles. Yikes. La Fugitiva de los Tropicos.

Ben, I forgot to mention a couple of weeks ago that Abby and I watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. It's a lot of fun. I'd be happy if Whedon did nothing but musicals for the rest of his career.

Brandon and Jeff, sorry that I haven't updated the lists pages lately. I'll get it done sooner or later.

Malick-a-thon @ Cornell

Terrence Malick: The Works
http://cinema.cornell.edu/series_EarlyFall2011/terrence_malick_the_work.html

Do I smell an upcoming Film Club event that you cretins might actually get out of bed for? I only wish that they had planned a couple of Malick double feature nights instead of spreading them out like they did. I'd be much, much more likely to make the drive out to Ithaca if I could see Badlands and Days of Heaven together instead of Badlands and Bridesmaids and Days of Heaven and Conan O'Brien Can't Stop.

There are a lot of other good movies playing besides the Malick series. Brandon's been hounding me to see Vertigo for a long time and I've had his DVD for a long time now. Maybe I'll get out to see it at Cornell. I'm definitely interested in the Dracula/Bellflower double feature on Oct. 3rd.

Check out the full schedule:
http://cinema.cornell.edu/schedule-EarlyFall2011.html

I cancelled Netflix on August 7th.

I haven't watched a single movie in close to two weeks.

Are these signs of the end of film club? Has Jeff's near-suicide forced me to re-evaluate my film-blogging ways? Have I been secretly working on a detailed frame-by-frame analysis of Gibson's Passion? Am I just burned out after two months of excessive film clubbing? Did the Tree of Life literally blow my mind? Or did Cowboys and Aliens fulfill every genre trope from two genres that I love so dearly that I no longer need to ever see another film again?

I'm not sure.

At least there's always TV Club to fall back on.

I've watched a little bit of TV. What follows is a boring list with some brief commentary.

I've watched two episodes of Breaking Bad and re-watched parts of the first two episodes.

Thirty-Eight Snub is my favorite episode of the season so far, probably for the gun buying scene alone. Is Chris the only other clubber up to date on Breaking Bad? I enjoyed how this last episode, Bullet Points, ended. As Chris has noted, Jesse's not likely to die, but I do think that the tension is real. What's amazing about this last episode's ending is that the tension is slow, relaxed, and sad; magnificently opposite of what most popular action films/shows have conditioned us to expect. Okay, one last thing about Breaking Bad- the moment when Jesse asks Walt if he wants to ride Go-Karts is tops.

I've tried watching a couple episodes of The Simpsons, but I either get distracted or I fall asleep.

I've watched a couple of episodes of The Colbert Report. Colbert continues to run the best Circus in the country.

Besides the above, I've watched The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast of James Stewart. It's definitely worth watching. Lots of laughs and a great moment of sincerity from Orson Welles.

You can find a torrent here:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4407537/Dean_Martin_Celebrity_Roast___Jimmy_%28James%29_Stewart
Or you can watch the whole thing posted on Youtube starting here:


The Youtube version has an overall better video quality than the torrent does, so I'd recommend just watching it that way.