I saw All the King's Men on Saturday. Overall, I liked it, but it is flawed, too many subplots, too much "telling, not showing," and my head really hurt at the end, what with all the anvils falling. Sean Penn was great, and I liked his use of his body to show his charactor becoming drunk with power, or so it seemed to me. It's beautifully shot. I did have some quarrels with historical inaccuracy, inaccurate even for the 1950s, in which this version is set. I haven't read Robert Penn Warren's book, nor seen the 1949 version, so I can't compare.

I saw The Last Kiss over the weekend. I wanted to shake Tom Wilkinson's and Casey Affleck's characters and yell at them to get out of Dodge and build fulfilling lives elsewhere, and crack all the others over the head with a 2x4 so they couldn't follow and mess things up with their psychodramas.

My sister? Fucked in the head. Her favourite movie? Oldboy.

I'm not saying I didn't...let me not say "like"...appreciate it. But it's not a well movie. It's a mentally twisted movie. Perfect viewing partner to The Audition, and we're entertaining suggestions for a third to make up the "Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin...the torture." trilogy.

The Fan?

Have you seen Oldboy? She posits you're not going to see its like in mainstream Western cinema. Here's a synopsis:

Man gets kidnapped and kept in a small room for fifteen years. When he's anonymously set free (he's never seen his captor/jailor, since they gas him when they need to do stuff-stuff including hypnosis) he meets a girl, falls in love, and proceeds to try and find out who did this to him, and why. Turns out, in the end, after some blood and gore, that it's this guy he witnessed having sex with his sister (the guy's sister, not the protagonist), and the sister subsequently killed herself because of the rumours that spread and grew based on our protagonist's mention to another high school friend.

What he doesn't know is that the girl he's fallen in love with (and fucked) is his own daughter, and that they were both hypnotised to make it a done deal. Daughter is being held remotely and is about to have the truth told to her. As part of his self-abasement our protagonist cuts out his own tongue, and the bad guy calls off the reveal. And then shoots himself in the head. The movie ends with the protagonist finding the hypnotist and having the memory of all this twisted stuff excised. And he walks off into the (snowy) sunset with his daughter, PRESUMABLY TO KEEP FUCKING HER WITHOUT ANY GUILT.

Oh, and there was some other gross stuff too.

I'd be surprised if The Fan lived up to that (or down), but I've never seen it.

I am, however, buying my sister the DVD set of Profit. I think she'll dig it.

Just watched Nightwatch.

Some great imagery, but that movie made no fucking sense. You reach a tipping point in movies when the critical mass of the non-sense making is achieved and you start to question even the things that you'd thought were basic assumptions at the beginning of the movie.

So I guess watching Nightwatch is a lot like living in Russia.

Some great imagery, but that movie made no fucking sense. You reach a tipping point in movies when the critical mass of the non-sense making is achieved and you start to question even the things that you'd thought were basic assumptions at the beginning of the movie.

OMG--YESSSS! I'm so glad I'm not alone in this.

I'm so glad I'm not alone in this.

You're not. The imagery was very cool, and I loved the subtitles. I even grasped the basic plot and I still had no idea wtf.

You got subtitles? I got dubbed. Which was interesting, because the English was Russo-fied: "What building you in?" I always prefer sub-titles though, so I can hear the actual actor saying the line.

Yeah, the subtitles weren't just yellow text, but actually were worked into the film. They'd change color, or turn into mist and float away, or the actor would move in front of them. Very cool, but didn't help a whole lot with the sense-making.