If you haven't had a chance to check out Seth Gordon's unbelievably absurd documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, I suggest getting your inner nerd on and heading out to the theater before this movie disappears way too soon. Yes, it's about grown men (and one really old lady) who play antique video games, like, from the eighties obsessively... and one of these grown men calls Donkey Kong "a metaphor for life" without any irony whatsoever, but these high-score junkies are actors in an epic, never-ending morality play over something so trivial and irrelevant it's literally one of the most amusing things I've ever seen. The main rivalry in competitive gaming — and it's fought out with the same passion that starts riots in British soccer stadiums — is between two men, Billy and Steve, each trying to score the world record in Donkey Kong, although it spirals into a surprisingly resonant story about nothing less than the pursuit of the American dream.

The movie's star is Steve, the movie's Everyman character, although he's anything but when he steps in with the crowd at the arcade. Steve is a nice guy who cries a lot, a loser by birthrite, and an utter failure at everything he's ever done... except for, he discovers after he loses his job, Donkey Kong.

Billy Mitchell is the film's subject, proclaimed "Video Gamer of the [20th] Century," the personification of the Establishment, and one of the best villains ever captured on film. He set a world record in Donkey Kong back in 1982 that went unchallenged for twenty years, and he's carried around a huge sense of entitlement and self-importance ever since. His life has always been full of fame (among the thirty or so people who follow gaming competitions), fortune (there's no monetary prize for any of these games), and beautiful women (another gamer disputes this, and complains about how there are never "any DDG — drop-dead gorgeous — women" in the arcade), and these days Mitchell runs a hugely successful hot sauce business, has a trophy wife, and wears a different patriotic tie every day of the week. And then Steve makes a video of himself beating Mitchell's high score (and also being a less-than-stellar parent in the process) and Mitchell loses his shit, turning paranoid and questioning Steve's game, his video, and his integrity. Mitchell literally sends some of his acolytes — okay, his two acolytes — to break into Steve's house and examine his machine. He's a stream of Machiavellian machinations, totally clueless about how petty he is, believing everybody's laughing with him instead of at him, and oddly, a loser by choice.

But along with the background cast of dorks, dweebs, and doofuses — including the folk-guitar playing referee and some dude who calls himself "Mr. Amazing," The King of Kong makes a subtle point about how we all struggle for respect in the world, and for the forty-year-olds still playing Joust and Contra in the arcade, there's no road to that respect unless you're seen first. I empathize with Steve, a misfit in the real world who even has to push hard to fit into his own little niche... but I'm also happy to say that I understand Billy. He's never going to be a great man, maybe the best he can do is be great at Donkey Kong.

Who The Fuck Is Jackson Pollock?

I've always found the modern art world just a little inaccessible, and people — well, artists — give me shit about it. Nothing personal. But I never really believed it was nothing personal, and Harry Moses's documentary Who The Fuck Is Jackson Pollock? vindicates me. The movie is your typical slobs versus snobs story, questioning the "value" of art through the eyes of unlikely critic Teri Horton, a 73-year-old truck driver and stereotypical crotchety old lady. Horton was in a thrift store when she came across a tabletop-sized canvas, "paint all over it, no picture." Teri's reaction was, "It was ugly," but she bought it as a gag gift for a friend, negotiating the price down from eight dollars to five. Funny story: Teri's five dollar painting bears a striking resemblence to the works of Jackson Pollock, whose paintings sell for twenty to twenty-five million dollars at auction.

Teri entered the privileged universe of art dealership with a simple question, is this piece legit? The answer — not that I'm surprised — is fascinating, as the painting itself becomes less and less relevant and its authenticity, or lack of authenticity, is a product of the huge social class gap between the people who regularly sell million dollar art and the people who serendipitously find it in a thrift store. The experts Teri asked, the kind of people who'd spend thirty-thousand dollars on some guy's poop, didn't say no; they laughed her out of their galleries.

The final word on the authenticity of an artwork belongs to the International Foundation of Art Research, who issues its judgments in anonymous reports. Ever notice how people who make subjective decisions affecting others always issue those decisions anonymously? Who The Fuck Is Jackson Pollock? reminds me of Kirby Dick's investigation into the MPAA ratings board in This Film Is Not Rated. The legitimacy of their power is fragile, so they issue anonymous decrees that nobody can challenge. IFAR's position is given voice by Thomas Hoving, the former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a former editor at Connoisseur magazine, and a condescending douchebag so insufferable I have no idea how he manages to walk down the street without getting punched repeatedly in the face every ten minutes. Hoving's the kind of asshole who would edit Connoisseur magazine; he introduces himself by pointing out that the opinion of a security guard at the Met is worthless, but as the curator for eighteen years, his expertise is invaluable.

I can't believe that Hoving's imperious personality is typical of art connoisseurs — he's the guy who lets Sean Hannity rail about the liberal elite, but a sizable part of the art market belongs to old-money conservatives and evil corporations. However, his attitude seems echoed all over the place. He quickly dismisses the painting; it's "neat dash compacted, which is not good." It's pretty, superficial, and frivolous — ironic words coming out of Hoving's mouth. The clincher is his evalutation of Teri: how dare she be upset that we art experts don't believe her painting is for real? Who does she think she is? I have a degree from Princeton; she isn't even a Sarah Lawrence dropout. I live in an Upper East Side apartment; she lives in a trailer park. It's people like her — dilettantes — who are ruining this great nation!

In his defense, not that he deserves a defense, the art world has changed in the past twenty-five years or so. Art for art's sake (or status's sake) has become a big business, and the art market runs on the "provenance," tracing the piece back, owner by owner, to the artist. Hoving's expertise aside, the paper trail is objective proof of a work's authenticity (assuming it's not forged). As an art appreciator, Hoving is becoming obsolete. The thrift store where Teri found her painting had some poor record-keeping, but forensic evidence strongly suggests that the painting is Pollock's. There are fingerprints in the paint proving that the same person touched Teri's painting, a paint can in Pollock's studio, and an undisputed Pollock.

So there's three viewpoints, the philistine (Teri: "There was nothing to it. It was just all these different colors all over the canvas. To me, a painting has to have something you can look at and say, 'Oh, that looks cool, like Norman Rockwell or someone like that.'"), the investor, and the erudite art-ophile, all asking the fundamental question, "Where's the value in art?" So you see Martin Creed's The Lights Go On And Off and wonder if it's good art... Sotheby's pulls out a balance sheet and checks if it's increased in value, Hoving strokes his ego by saying if you don't get it then it's your problem, and Horton's opinion is irrelevant. Art is no longer expressive; it's just a medium for intellectual masturbation among the rich and shallow.

Art is whatever comes from the hands, or out the ass, of the art community. And the art community is an exclusive club of people (or robots or elephants or whatever) that create art. It's like the Writer's Guild or Skull and Bones. Something suggests that if an elephant's brushstrokes can be (valuable) art, then my brushstrokes should definitely be considered art. I can just imagine Hoving spitting at that idea. It really is personal when those art dealers kick Teri out of their store.

And of course there's something anti-American, certainly anti-egalitarian, about the self-defined artists' community, justifying recycling itself in its abstract, meaningless gibberish. I'm offended by the hypocrisy, or the denial, or just the disrespectful pig-headedness of modern art, conflating aesthetic value with provenance. Horton got an offer to buy her still unauthenticated painting for nine million dollars, about forty percent of its worth should it be declared legit, and turned it down. Good for her, standing on principle, even if the principle is "the value triples once it falls into important enough hands."

Film Review: Across The Pond Edition

My plan yesterday was to see Hot Fuzz and Severance and write an all-British humour film review, but the movie times didn't work out for me, so I'm not going to be able to make quite as many wry observations about the differences between British and American comedy. Still, I'm glad I got the double feature that I did — I can't speak for Severance yet, although its reviews were generally less glowing than those of Hot Fuzz — I saw Once right after Hot Fuzz got out, and it was sublime. I seriously want Once singing through my head twenty-four hours a day, and I'd be a much happier person for it.

But Hot Fuzz first: It's not bad. It's pretty funny, and I laughed a good bit through it. But the creepy old guy sitting near me who coughed up his soda in the hair of the girls in the row in front of him, and who laughed his ass off during the trailer for Balls of Fury — I can see the reviews right now: Christopher Walken gives his best performance aimed at eleven-year-olds since Kangaroo Jack — he thought it was fucking hilarious. I'll grant him that Hot Fuzz isn't as, uh, subtle as your typical British comedy.

It's not as incisive a satire as the Shaun of the Dead, the previous collaboration of writer/director Edgar Wright, writer/star Simon Pegg, and awesomely laconic pile-of-blubber Nick Shore... or maybe it just doesn't translate from British to American so well. The zombie sub-genre, especially the George Romero take on it that Wright, Pegg, et al spoof, is in itself a commentary on commercialism, materialism, and other mindless patterns society falls into and individuals are too braindead to pull themselves out of. The zombies just need to be there, lumbering around in large enough numbers, to say all they have to say — Pegg's walk around London in the opening sequence of Shaun of the Dead tells us all we need to know about the non-zombies. The action genre, the kind of crap they show on TBS on the weekends, is more inane in its application. It's just a big, dumb kid talking shit about how awesome he is, Michael Bay looking for attention and believing (correctly) that if he makes an explosion big enough and films it from the right angle, you'll forget what a vacuous dumbass he is.

So the opening scene of Hot Fuzz — you've seen it in the previews — where Pegg's well-decorated police officer character is castigated (by woefully underused Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan, and Bill Nighy) for being too good at his job, that looked like there was some satirical possibility there. I don't know too much about British police, other than that they don't carry guns and wear ridiculous hats, but we've had at least one case in America where a prospective police officer was rejected from the force (or the "squad") for being too smart. Thing is, Hot Fuzz is too schizophrenic to really run anywhere with that idea... although Martin Lawrence has more or less demonstrated that "police are incompetent" conceit really doesn't travel well in the first place. The first half of Hot Fuzz targets the quiet hamlet of Sanford — I think it's supposed to be the British countryside version of Marc Cherry's Fairview: snootier, (much) older, and possibly whatever the English version of redneck is. I'm not sure if Sanford is supposed to parody a real sub-culture, like Fairview supposedly does, or if its self-parody of idealized British countryside living. When the town's Neighborhood Watch Alliance has a meeting and says that their biggest crime issue is the guy dressed like a living statue by the town fountain, I'm sure that's funny but I'm kind of puzzled as to why.

The second half of the movie is the action half, and it's much better done than the Bruckheimer crap it parodies. The characters may be deadly serious, but the people making the movie are, for once, aware of how preposterous their material is. I can't help but feel they're pandering a little bit though. Again, you've seen the preview where the town priest pulls two guns on our heroes. There's nothing inherently funny in that — it's even less funny within the context of the whole scene — but my audience, which consisted of me, the guy who laughed at Balls of Fury, the girls he coughed his soda up on, and two kids making out, thought that was a great moment. I could count at least ten better ones. In fact, I'll give Hot Fuzz more credit as an action movie — and a well-crafted one — than a comedy. I guess that Pegg and Frost are such good comedic actors that it's tough for them to top their previous work; Michael Bay is such a hack that just about anything spoofing his style automatically transcends its source material.

---

I had reservations about spending my time on Once, because its an Irish musical drama about a street musician and a Czech emigré falling in... well, uh, here's the problem with the American romantic comedy. In addition to resuscitating the careers of some of our most annoying actors (I'm talking to you, Ashton), it's also killed off the beauty of true love, keeping it alive only in a trite vegetative state. To say that Once is about these two characters falling in love over their music makes it sound much cheesier than it is. Almost instantly, you're watching two people who you really like trying to find a fleeting happiness and hoping they can carry maybe a little piece of it with them once it passes.

I almost feel like not telling you what you're in for if you check out Once. It just reads so badly. It's a musical. It's shot in digital, handheld, and usually in pretty poor light. It's totally low-key. The only conflict to speak of in the movie is, "Will he let her drive his motorcycle?" The climax of the movie is these guys recording a song. And it's not like, will they record or won't they record, or will the record be good, will he get a record deal? That crap is for lesser movies, movies that need artifice to get you involved with the characters. Once strips out everything unnecessary — the glitter, the dance numbers, the melodrama, the orchestrations — and just lets these characters grow in front of your eyes like flowers.

I'm not doing Once justice here, or maybe I'm just spewing acclaim everywhere in my first-ever case of logorrhea. Once isn't merely good filmmaking: it does practically nothing yet elicits something in you, or in me, and it overcame my misanthropy and found something human, empathizing and connecting with these people. It's art, and as it left its protagonists, the guy and girl, a little better for having known each other, it also left me a little better for having known them.

People are going apeshit for Spider-Man. Thing is, I can't think about Spider-Man without falling head-first into some gaping logical holes. Okay, he's bitten by this irradiated spider, and how does that make him half-arachnid? I've never lived on a farm, or been in 4-H, but I'm pretty sure you don't get a mule when the horse eats the donkey. There needs to be some fucking going on, and the offspring gets the magical powers, or the nearsightedness, exostosis, and sluggish metabolism, if your sire and dam are my parents. I can see a radioactive spider bite giving you cancer, maybe. Or this. (Warning: eeewwwwww.)

I don't know how other people aren't bothered by this. Are the special effects that great that you can watch the movie and not be like, "But... spider silk comes out of their butts. Why would Spider-Man's webs come out of his hands? And isn't that convenient, how the unstable radio-isotope he's infected with makes the webs come out of his fingers, and not, say, his ears?" Anyway, I went to this Spider-Man page on Wikipedia, and what starts out ridiculous just becomes insulting. Here's a partial list of Spider-Man's superpowers: he can heal himself rapidly, has enhanced resistance to drugs, has enhanced vision, has superhuman strength, clairvoyance, and — for some reason — is immune to vampirism. Yes, but can he also keep aphids from destroying crop yields? Apparently the one beneficial thing spiders provide to the ecosystem, and Spider-Man can't do it. Pathetic.

Film Review: The Lookout and Grindhouse

I want to spare you some of the disappointment I felt walking out of both these movies and totally lower your expectations. Not that either movie was bad at all, but the reviews were so glowing that both films' mere artful adequacy and eleven dollar price tags made me feel cheated in the end. Let's start with The Lookout, starring that kid from 3rd Rock From The Sun and directed by some guy. It got an 87% rating on rottentomatoes.com and a 73/100 rating on metacritic.com, largely on its success as a character study instead of a bank heist flick. A good chunk of my reaction to The Lookout was, therefore, honestly my mistake — you pick up on one stray reference to Memento in an obscure write-up somewhere and you start assuming this and that. Blatant thematic similarities to Rian Johnson's much more cerebrally engaging Brick — again, the former alien kid plays an insider-turned-outsider who becomes the center of an intricate criminal plot — also popped into my head. Despite what everyone who saw the movie before had to say about it, there just wasn't all that much to tickle my brain. I felt like I could totally disregard whole chunks of the movie, and worse, since I wasn't occupied trying to piece the thing together, or at least mesmerized by the cinematography a la Brick or (another one of my favorites I'll talk more about later) Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, my mind kept wandering back to the wrong questions, namely, "Doesn't the alien kid's mental disability seem a bit inconsistent?" I mean, with Memento, I had to watch the movie three times before I finally realized, "Hey, how does Guy Pierce remember that he has no short-term memory?"

I'll say that as a character study, looking at Joseph Gordon-Levitt's tragic collapse after breaking his brain in an annoyingly-filmed car accident and the conflict between his conscience and his desire to reclaim some his past glory — and independence, the film is truly successful, if not maybe a little too gentle. Even forgetting some extraneous scenes with a dopey comic-relief Jeff Daniels that bring the character study down, I could have done with more contrast, both internally between Joseph Gordon-Levitt's two desires and externally, between him and the stock but beautifully manipulative bad guys. It works, and all the pieces fit, but — and maybe this only because I had a different movie in my mind — I just didn't care.

---

Then I snuck into Grindhouse, which seemed appropriate, given the whole conceit of the movie. Not that that's why I snuck in — I would've snuck into a self-made Volver double-feature too — but I'd have a different justification. (I'm cheap and movies are overpriced.) Let me first say that I don't think Grindhouse is really for mass consumption, especially for anyone of my generation who's never been inside a movie theater with fewer than eighteen screens, stadium seating and reclining chairs, and Dolby 5.1 surround sound. It's for film pervs like Quentin Taratino — and I think "film perv" is an appropriate way to describe anyone who lists Manos: The Hands of Fate among his favorite movies — trying to relive the good old days when you couldn't be a hundred percent sure that the sticky stuff on the theater floor was just Coke.

Grindhouse is two full-length movies, four "previews" for fictional coming attractions, and I think there was a random cigarette ad in there somewhere too. Despite what often-wrong New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott wrote in his review, they're not funny, or sly parodies, or worth anyone's time. For example, one of the fake films is "Machete," starring Mexican Danny Trejo as the title character and some Mexican guy who looks like Cheech Marin but apparently isn't as a machine-gun shooting priest. Yes, they quip lame one-liners like they did back in the [fill-in-the-blank]-sploitation days, but so what? Those jokes started off life moldy and didn't age well. I was really hoping that "Machete" would be a slick commentary on America's attitude towards immigrants, like something South Park might do, but it's nothing more than an excuse to watch people get dismembered in various ways. Not that it's supposed to be anything more than that, but... I'll get back to this point.

The only fake trailer that I thought had potential was for a serial killer movie called "Thanksgiving," which features an old woman having sex with a turkey and not one but two scenes of some girl making out with a decapitated guy. Eli Roth (hack!) is already in talks with Lions Gate to bring it to the big screen for next Christmas. A. O. Scott found this trailer fucking hilarious. I did not. It could've been hilarious — and I was waiting for this reveal through the whole grotesque preview — if the crazed killer turned out to be a giant turkey, or a guy in a turkey costume. See, Eli, that's parody — taking something self-important and unaware of its own silliness and then mocking it by exaggerating that silliness. With these genre-blind morons, I can't fucking believe Mirimax isn't producing my serial killer movie already.

Scott writes that this old grindhouse fare has a sort of soul and individuality that the modern Hollywood focus-grouped and studio-produced Firehouse Dog crap can never hope to match. I won't disagree with him, but having seen tons of B-movie junk plus these faux-relics, it's pretty clear that the Grand Guignol tripe has a banality all it's own. Does it really matter if you liked the blurry rape and torture scene in "Thanksgiving" while the scuzzy guy two rows in front of you preferred the blurry rape and torture scene in "Werewolf Women of the SS?" There's a visceral thrill in watching gratuitous sex, violence, sadism, misogyny, etc., but let's not pretend that there's anything more profound going on. Or at least, if there is something more profound going on, let's pretend we're disturbed by it instead of inspired. (Another reason I love Lady Vengeance so much: it's got one of the most disturbing torture scenes ever in it, and most of the scene is completely off-screen. You see the elaborate preparations, and your fucked-up mind takes over from there.) The grindhouse sub-culture feels like the legions of internet porn, where there's something for everybody, but really, once you've seen one dirty website, you've seen them all.

Apparently nothing illustrates this better than "Planet Terror," the universally-acknowledged "bad" part of Grindhouse. I gotta say that the only time I really freaked out at seeing something gross on a screen was the grand finale of FOX's 101 Things Removed From the Human Body, when a doctor from India was telling us all about a surgery he was performing on a man with a distended abdomen and found a fully-grown conjoined fetal twin inside his stomach. (Or somewhere.) "Imagine my surprise," he says, "when I reached into his belly and another fully-formed hand grasped mine." Yeah, okay, that would make me drop my scalpel too. But I know people who cover their eyes at the gruesome scenes, and I can understand where they're coming from. However, a message to the gaggle of teenage girls in the Grindhouse theater with me: First, it's two in the afternoon on a Thursday. Shouldn't you be in school? And second, you don't need to freaking flip out at every disgusting thing Robert Rodriguez puts in front of the camera. It's just latex. It's not real. Chill. Like, the first time someone loses a fake limb with a hemorrhage of fake blood, maybe. (See Michael Haneke's Caché for an example.) After ninety minutes of this, can't you either become a little inured to it, or at least stop complaining about how violent video games make our kids violent? One or the other.

Okay, so "Planet Terror" was lame. Too sophisticated for MST3K, too pointless to justify itself any other way. But we knew that. I was there for Tarantino's "Death Proof," about a crazy guy who chases women in his crazy stunt car. As usual, Taratino's shit got excellent reviews — "Planet Terror" pays homage to the grindhouse, but "Death Proof" elevates the grindhouse to art, they say. But, just like Kill Bill didn't do with the spaghetti western and wuxia genres, it collects the thematic elements from its parent genre, adds a modern sophistication and Taratino's trademark constructed dialogue (which I love, by the way, and I wrote my film class final paper on) and then goes absolutely nowhere with it. Okay, not entirely true: Tarantino clearly uses his incredible film talent to satisfy his weird "Fox Force Five" foot fetish and Amazon fetish, which apparently distract him from the types of beautiful, redemptive stories he explored in Pulp Fiction and, to a lesser extent, Reservior Dogs.

I thought — I don't know — that the characters in "Death Proof" would... what's the word the formulaic screenwriters use? Grow. Here's "Death Proof" in a nutshell:

Act One. Group of women talk a lot. A lot. Stalked by misogynist serial killer stunt car driver. He drives his car into their car. 200 miles per hour. Body parts fly. Body parts fly. Body parts fly. Same shot, four times.

Act Two. Group of women talk a lot. A lot. Stalked by same misogynist serial killer stunt car driver. Crazy stupid woman ghost rides the whip out on the highway. He drives his car into their car. A lot. Big car chase. After like twenty minutes, the crazy stupid woman finally falls off the car. But she's okay.

Act Three. Group of women talk a lot. But they're in a car, driving real fast, so you can't hear what they're saying. It's unfortunate. Group of women stalk same misogynist serial killer stunt car driver. They drive their car into his car. A lot. Big car chase. Won't spoil the ending.

So back in the sexploitation era, when the women's lib movement was growing, cynical hack filmmakers pandered to both ends of the sexual inadequacy spectrum with X-rated filth that had titles like "Rape Squad" and "Hooker's Revenge" and, one of the "most depressing experiences" of Roger Ebert's life, "I Spit on Your Grave." They all have the same plot: in the first act, women are sexually degraded (dedicated to the sex fiend men in the audience) and in the second act, those women take their violent and often sexually degrading revenge (for the crazy feminists in the audience). Meanwhile, rational people might enjoy the cinematic renaissance of Scorcese, Coppola, or Lumet.

I have to say that the second and third acts of "Death Proof" are a lot of fun to watch, certainly more than the rest of Grindhouse, but what bothers me is that — especially when I combined "Death Proof" with Kill Bill — I feel like Tarantino films like he can simultaneously copy the depressing cynicism of his inspirations and transcend it because his films have the artistic credibility that the old B-movies lack. His dialogue really helps feed that narcissism. Artistic credibility, in my mind anyway, is linked to the filmmaker's expression — Tarantino clearly expresses his admiration for the grindhouse soul, which like I said above, I find feeble — but beyond that, the film is hollow, and the more I see of him, the emptier he seems inside. Given his film record, his scenery-munching role on Alias, that episode of CSI he directed, and his multiple drunken appearances on Jay Leno, what on earth fascinates this guy besides womens' feet?

I Ruin A Really Boring Three-Hour Movie For You

Lisa and I saw Zodiac this evening — because Wild Hogs was sold out :-) — and I don't get the reviews. Mainly it's the favorable comparisons to Seven and Fight Club that I'm at a loss to explain. Not that Zodiac isn't good: it's a wonderfully filmed portrait of its protagonists' growing obsession with solving the Zodiac killer enigma. But as a character study, and unfortunately, by design, it's not a study of the movie's most interesting character, it doesn't really explore any new territory, in the sense that Seven and Fight Club were, for their flaws, completely original visions. The whole theme where our otherwise irredeemable character gets lost in a puzzle for its own sake, then still fails to be redeemed, is nothing I haven't seen before, and the genre's conceit — at least the mystery is solved at the end — feels tenuously attached to Zodiac. Let's just say it's worth the ticket price, but I won't be bothering to watch Zodiac again when it makes its basic cable world premiere.

Zodiac did inspire me to reach into the newly popular "serial killer as twisted moral guardian" genre and come up with this movie pitch. Tell me what you think.

So there's this killer, right? And what he does is he sneaks into movie theaters showing important, critically-regarded films and he takes a seat behind the philistines who can't shut the hell up. I think you see where this is going. He kills the talkers in all sorts of gruesome, needlessly complicated ways, then makes some sort of wisecrack. He doesn't take himself too seriously.

I've got the first page of the script, too.

INT. MOVIE THEATER

We open in a somewhat crowded movie theater, playing the classic film "CITIZEN KANE." Near the back, we see RAY, 25, glasses, T-shirt, exquisitely good-looking, watching the movie silently because, even though "CITIZEN KANE" is slightly more boring than watching grass grow, he's polite to everyone else in the theater. Sitting next to him is THERESA, who is also respectful and quiet, and, again, incredibly attractive.

In the row behind them, there's a middle aged MARRIED COUPLE, fat, ugly, drooling slobs stuffing their fat, ugly, drooling faces with popcorn and soda. There's also three slutty, mildly-retarded TEENAGE GIRLS a few seats to the right.

TEENAGE GIRL #1
Ohmygod, I can't believe this is in
black and white.

TEENAGE GIRL #2
I know! Like, am I gonna have to read
this, too?

TEENAGE GIRL #3
Ohmygod, like you've got the cutest
cell phone!

TEENAGE GIRL #2
No, like your cell phone is so much cuter!

TEENAGE GIRL #3
Lemme take a picture of you two with my
cell phone!

MARRIED WOMAN
(loudest stage whisper ever)
What did that guy say?

MARRIED MAN
Rosebud.

MARRIED WOMAN
What's a rosebud?

MARRIED MAN
Oh, I bet it's his sled.

Suddenly, a CRAZY KILLER jumps out from the back row. He runs up to the couple and shoots both of them in the head! Then he shoots the three teenage girls.

RAY
(turns around)
Hey, do you mind? We're trying to watch the movie.

CRAZY KILLER
Sorry. My bad.

And it's just like that, over and over, for the next eighty-nine minutes. Three words: best movie ever.

"Quiet, Err. I'm transmitting rage."

I wasn't planning on seeing the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, but then came the guerrilla marketing campaign that shut down Boston and I want to be a part of the alarmist chaos! I guess the marketers didn't do such a good job lightboarding New York, cause I didn't find see Mooninites anywhere. I would've so taken one of those boards for myself, stuck it on my refrigerator or car or something, because this is the first time I can think of when I was in on the joke. Usually there's a billboard that says March 16: it arrives!!! or Are You Next?, and my thinking is, "Goddamn it, advertisement! I sleep poorly enough without your vague apocalyptic pronouncements." Then it turns out that they're selling Nikes or something and... well, I've usually forgotten about them coming on the 16th anyway.

The view from the inside, though, is hilarious, like when you hear Orson Welles' broadcast of The War of the Worlds and wonder how something so cheesy could spark that mass crazy. I'm sure I'd be infuriated if I lived in Boston, but not at the culture geeks who stuck the ads on random stuff. The media and the information presented to us is so thoroughly focus-grouped and sanitized that I'd just die if we didn't have the occasional indie sticker-sticker covering up stop signs or traffic lights.

I wonder to what extent the citywide freakout was a product of the Aqua Teens counterculture, and if they were blinking ads for mainstream sitcommery rather than Williams Street's typical dark absurdism, maybe they'd just go unnoticed. Like, would the same people be calling the cops if they were lit-up ads for How I Met Your Mother?

My Introduction to Takashi Miike (Spoiler Alert)

Since I rented Oldboy last year, I've become more and more fascinated with the Asia Extreme subgenre of film — everything about those two words, from their drawn-out vowel sounds to the mistranslation of the predictive adjective "Asia" instead of "Asian" is such a spot-on description of the genre — especially as the MPAA gives movie studios on this side of the Pacific relatively free reign to cram as much gratuitous violence on the screen as possible and American horror directors have essentially resurrected the exploitation genre, added some mindless plot twists, and sold it as "art" to idiot teenagers paying ten bucks to see pretty actors and actresses die in mildly clever and wholly implausible ways. Watching Asian film, the modern Hong Kong gangster film and the J-horror genre, you still get that visceral puerile thrill of knowing there's gonna be a ton of stage blood on screen and the only questions are when, where, and from whom, but you can also play the wine-drinking Film Forum cultural effete or the whiny, suicide-poetry writing goth chick dreaming about the erotic entanglements of on-screen sex and death.

It's not just a foreign film thing or an independent film thing, and the Asian cinema translates so well to dim-witted American studios and audiences because, like most of the horror genre, to be honest, they're fundamentally pretty inane. The Asian storytelling tradition tends to be more about the character of society and less about the character of, well, the characters, leaving room for all kinds of random ghosts or curses or deus ex machina hypnotists. We import them, we give them some pop psychobabble motive and suddenly there's The Grudge 2 playing at a multiplex near you. This frustrates me to no end, no matter where it originates, as if there aren't enough actually frightening things in the world, now someone's telling me I have to be afraid of a cursed videotape too. No, what redeems these Asian films is that unlike their unintentionally ugly American counterparts (and remakes), Asia's movies are intentionally beautiful, even in the midst of their grotesquerie. It's not merely the images that I've never seen before but also their juxtaposition with the story and the admittedly crudely-drawn characters.

I've been meaning to check out the work of Japanese gore-auteur Takashi Miike, although I was never totally sure whether I had the stomach for it. Among Asia's modern crop of violent movie directors, Miike, in particular, gets singled out for comparison when some American hack makes a movie like Hostel or Saw, where the only selling point is its myriad gratiutious, overdone death scenes. I figured that one's first taste of Miike should sort of be like one's first taste of wasabi or first taste of Pynchon: start off small and see how much you can tolerate. There's two options I saw: the Showtime Masters of Horror episode "Imprint" or the "Box" story in Three... Extremes. My video store doesn't have Three... Extremes, even though they've got like sixty copies of Stay Alive, so I went with the Masters of Horror series.

A comment about Masters of Horror: I've said this many times before, although not actually to anybody, but Masters of Horror is not scary. The series is the brainchild of Mick Garris, who directed a some horror movies with Roman numerals in their titles and also directed a bunch of Stephen King adaptations, but not any like Shawshank, or Misery, or the version of The Shining anyone actually remembers. The idea was to give so-called "masters" of horror carte blanche to make a short direct-to-DVD film in exchange for working on a small budget and tight schedule. Then Showtime came along, bought the shorts, imposed a couple of rules on the directors (which, at least for the rules I read about, probably didn't take too much away from the films), and showed them as a series without an episode-by-episode narrative but with a common theme.

The first twelve episodes, which I saw sort of as an unnecessary prelude to "Imprint," are generally pedestrian, although I did enjoy Joe Dante's political satire "Homecoming," if for no other reason than the Karl Rove character gets his head smashed to bits by a zombie. The problem is that when the horror story isn't scary, it just degenerates by default into a chance to see blood and gore, and frankly, there's not too much of that in Masters of Horror, either. "Imprint" is, supposedly, the exception, all the more tantalizing after Showtime decided it fell on the wrong side of their standards and practices line, even though Showtime doesn't have a standards and practices line. The DVD box proudly proclaims that it's "Banned from Cable Broadcast," and the Masters of Horror U.K. distributor goes a step further, saying (misleadingly) that it was "BANNED IN THE USA!" Garris said, in a New York Times interview, that "Imprint" is "definitely the most disturbing film I've ever seen," but I don't know how much of that is just posturing for the delight of horror fans and how much is Garris being a big pussy but now I've got to see this movie. (Let me say that "Imprint" is far from the most disturbing film I've ever seen; that title would go to Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, or, if we're not limiting ourselves to the land of fiction, maybe the video from the Superdome post-Katrina or the Twin Towers collapsing.)

Loosely, "Imprint" takes place in the nineteenth-century, on an unidentified Japanese island of brothels and syphilitic midgets. Billy Drago plays an American journalist searching for the prostitute he once loved... but I think a better way of describing the film is by listing the elements that Showtime found so opprobrious, and I'm sure you can piece together the story from there. So, we have:

• Incest. Which isn't an uncommon trope in Asian storytelling, so I was pretty much prepared for this.
• Child rape. I thought one of the scenes of child rape (and yes, there's more than one) was gratuitous, but at least Miike has a shred of sensibility to put these off-screen.
• Aborted fetuses. Plenty of aborted fetuses to go around. I was aware of Miike's bizarre fetishes before watching "Imprint," so I was expecting them.
• Man eating an aborted fetus. Not so much expecting this.
• Torture. So you're about half an hour into the movie wondering why Showtime refused to air this. There's been some violence, but it's been tamer than some of the other Masters of Horror episodes. We see a prostitute with a deformed face, but we've seen worse in Dario Argento's "Jenifer" episode. And then, almost out of nowhere, there's this scene, which... eeek. It's (too) long, sadistic and explicit, but I don't think that's what makes it the grisly shock that it is. What makes the scene work so perfectly is that distinction between ugly American horror and beautiful Japanese horror that I was talking about before: the contrast between the close-up shots of the victim screaming and struggling and the gorgeous wide shots with overtones of kinbaku-bi and playful bondage, and how quickly the scene goes from disgusting to erotic when you can't make out on film the needles stuck under the poor girl's fingernails and inside her gumline.I cringed while I was watching the scene — "Oh, you're gonna show another finger? What is this, like, twelve so far?" — but I'm also a little annoyed at just how histrionic, and consequently a little condescending, it is. There's this thing called subtlety, and it's like the aftermath of a car crash. No matter how bug-eyed you are when it happens, eventually the experience gets lost in the filing cabinet of your mind. Frankly, I think a torture scene like the one in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, where the setup happens on-screen but the actual torture occurs off, will haunt me for a much longer time.
• Conjoined fetal twin. Gotta say, did not see this one coming.

I don't know if I'm going to check out the rest of the Miike oevure because "Imprint" is just sort of a vehicle for watching stylized violence. I think the story itself got more street cred than it deserved simply through that trendy non-linear narration, and the characters in particular were flat. But again, it's horror, and they can't all be Se7en, can they? The real loser is Masters of Horror, because twelve more stories like "Imprint" are really what I was expecting from the premium cable series. I'm not saying it's great filmmaking (it's not), but at least here we've got something that challenges you to watch and eventually rewards you, both narratively and viscerally, and I'd like to see the Masters of Horror second season take a few more risks and be a bit more genuinely provocative.