Author: tedmills

Apart from being the master of stick figure animation, Don Hertzfeldt has been posting poems on his blog made of nothing but spam text. Enjoy.

enjoy the status of platinum today
building vicodin shut
enhanced penis pill is amazing
why arent you watershed goblet
if pizza be the food of love
i can hardly feel the device under my pants

and

what would your family do if you died?
Allow us to show you our quality operation
see the fish come alive!
mature lesbians rubbing their armpits
Find that special someone!
Tooth whitening of the stars
With exclusive peeing Belgian girls
if you don’t wish to receive these offers, go here

Really, you should check out the rest of the blog. Can’t wait to see the new film, four years in the making!

Dir. Edgar Wright
2004
After many a year of bad, bad, bad zombie films (running zombies=wrong! Resident Evil=where’s the gore?), “Shaun of the Dead” gets it so right, and understands its genre so well, that I immediately want to put it up in my list of Top 10 zombie films (including the first two Romero films and Jackson’s “Dead Alive”).
The key is that the filmmakers aren’t making fun of the genre–they’re placing characters from another genre (slacker comedy) into a zombie film. Big difference. I don’t usually like comedy in my horror, but here it works, because the makers are sniggering “Aren’t horror films stupid?”
Shaun (Simon Pegg) and his useless friend Ed (Nick Frost) spend most of their days lounging about the house they rent, playing XBox, going down the pub, assaulting each other with farts. Shaun has a dead end job in an appliance store, at least, and has a girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), but his idea of a good time is…taking her down the pub. With Ed.
No time is wasted setting up the zombies–taking his idea straight from Romero, the zombies are activated by a satellite re-entering the atmosphere–and much of the pleasure of the opening third is seeing how long it takes this workaday drone to cotton on to the fact that the dead now walk the earth. (“Sorry mate, I don’t have any change”) he says to one young flesheater as he walks home from the shops. Anyway, Shaun is too wrapped up in his heartache from being dumped to notice.
The rules have been studied well. There’s a rescue attempt (girlfriend, her friends, his parents), a journey across familiar-now-hostile territory, then refuge in a safe haven (the pub) that slowly turns into a trap. Members of the team get bitten, and slowly turn into zombies. There’s a finale of humans vs. overwhelming numbers of zombies.
The television acts as a reality check and a framing device for the horror elements, like in the original Night. There’s a nice scene where they channel surf and we get to see all the cable channel logos, all with the same “standing by” message. In the end, television culture turns out to be as resilient as the humans.
There’s no holding back on the gore in the latter half of the film, and we get a nice homage to Day of the Dead’s stomach-buffet scene. Thank goodness for that–I had nearly given up all hope.
Apparently, Romero loved the film enough that its said the lead and his writing/directing partner will appear in the upcoming fourth installment of the director’s series, called Land of the Dead.
For sheer pleasure and laughs, you gotta go see this.
(If you have a multi-region DVD player, you can already buy this from Amazon UK. I doubt if the American release will retain its many extras.)

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
1979
Though I am very much against bootlegs, I couldn’t say no when this box set fell into my hands. Originating somewhere in China, this 14-DVD set contains all of Studio Ghibli’s work. That means not only all of Hayao Miyazaki’s films up to Spirited Away, but works by other directors such as 1994’s “Pon Poko” which I originally caught in its theatrical release in Japan all those years ago.
This is over $350 worth of DVDs here, and rumor has it that the box only cost $9. Yep. (I already own ‘Mononoke’ and ‘Totoro’ on DVD).
So, I’ve decided to watch all of these films in order, starting with this one from 1979, the first film that Miyazaki wrote and directed for the big screen. The director had already been directing episodes for the TV series of this very popular character, and this feature is not the first to feature Lupin III.
But a lot of Miyazaki’s future style can be glimpsed here. While this is mostly a rock’em sock’em adventure tale, with the Bond-like Lupin III rescuing a princess from a evil count, there are moments when the movie pauses to take in the countryside and you can feel Miyazaki’s love of nature.
A lot of “The Castle of Cagliostro” turns up in his later “Castle in the Sky: Laputa”: the same princess, a powerful trinket (a pendant in the latter, a ring here), a post-lapsidarian Eden-like castle, a dizzying habit of setting action sequences high above the ground; flying cars.
The film itself is a rollicking good adventure, with several great scenes. I especially liked how Lupin gained access to the castle through the water supply, and the final fight inside the machinery of the tower clock would have made Disney’s clock-cleaners proud.

Prod. David Chase
2002
The fourth season is the first Sopranos to be written in the shadow of 9-11 and brought home those feelings of doom and anxiety that accompanied the months following. Now, of course, we’re so used to living in this world that we’ve become used to it. This season Tony tries to circle the wagons and just rely on “blood,” that is, his immediate family, but as the season progresses it shows even this is unreliable. Chris, his nephew is addicted to heroin. Uncle Junior is under house arrest and facing his RICO trial. And domestically, bonds start to fray and break, as Carmella asks for, then secretly takes, more control over the household finances. Tony directs his affection to all the wrong places–Ralphie’s goomah, Ralphie’s horse, his ex-mistress’ cousin. And one by one, he loses these things too. It’s a very sad season, and probably my favorite so far.
Part of the reason that we like gangster films is that we like to see a subculture much like our own but with strict, old fashioned rules. In this way, the way of the Mafioso crosses paths with Asian ideas of “saving face” and “honor”. We feel these things are missing somehow, yet our true delight comes out of seeing how these rules are broken and punished, not how they are followed. One of the plot threads of Season 4 involves Johnny Sack and how he seeks justice for a fat joke Ralphie has told about his wife. The idea of besmirching a woman’s honor marks this plot as almost medieval, and much of the tension of this storyline comes from Sack’s intractability in the matter. We like our codes of honor, but this is getting too fundamental.
This medieval way also plays out in Furio’s unrequited love for Carmela, which costs him much heartache, not unlike the traditional romance. When he returns to Italy for his father’s funeral, he is told that in the old days, such a predicament would mean that he’d either have to kill the woman’s husband, or exile himself (as memory serves). And he does think about doing the deed at one point.
These medieval storylines are contrasted with the more modern threads–Bobby Bacala’s grief, Janice’s manipulations, Paulie’s divided loyalties. So, in a way, the whole season gives us both glimpses of a post 9-11 world without being didactic about it: the hard, fundamentalist way (and not in a Islamic sense), or the equally painful, soul-searching modern way. (Note that the female characters have to ask this a lot: Carmela choosing self-respect over marriage, Adrianna choosing a law-abiding future over the crime family).
Favorite episodes: “Christopher” (for the final scene in the car), “Whoever Did This” (so many great images: the wounded child, the bloody dispatch of Ralphie, Tony’s solitary walk through the Bada Bing, empty and hollow inside and out), and “Whitecaps” (nothing sums up a breakup like watching the inflatable mattress go up.)
Now we’ve exhausted all the Sopranos DVDs, we can now get back to watching anything and everything else. Phew.