Their exploits were as black as sky-kissed crude showering down on the souls of harsh labourers who know nothing beyond their own mean sensory needs; as dark as leathery wings set against the midnight sky of a foul and stinking city rotten with crime. They were men of strong liqour and sharp edges; men who walked with purpose and furrowed brow; men grappling with righteousness in the dirt of humanity's soul, with lost, bright eyes glaring out into impenetrable doom.

One was an oil man. The other was Batman.

On Friday night we screened There Will Be Blood and The Dark Knight (in that order), something I've wanted to do since July and maybe since the day I was born. The results were mixed. While the company was excellent and the egg nog milkshakes were divine, the collision needed to be more seamless and I think the pairing probably required some discussion questions, perhaps in a little booklet, to be handed out. (Is the oil fire sequence in There Will Be Blood a September 11th touchstone, and if so are the two halves of the film, before and after, comments on the then-and-now states of America, and if so what is the significance of the image of the flaming eye?) I wanted to introduce Daniel Plainview to the Joker and see them move in a straight line - they share the same theme music, after all, and glare at one another from separate corners of the emotional and moral void of post-apocalyptic America - plus, I really wanted to sink into those thick blu-ray images. The blizzard outside was a good idea. But starting two two-and-a-half-hour movies back-to-back at nearly 9:00 robs the evening of a certain frisson. And starting with TWBB, though deliberate, is a little like what the Joker says about starting with the head - makes the victim all "fuzzy."

Next time.

Yesterday Sarafina and I went shopping on the busiest shopping day of the year, which was exhausting but surprisingly enjoyable. We found a Chairman Mao alarm clock that we could have had for peanuts, and enjoyed samples of a rather amazing vodka at the LCBO. (This is a thing now? Handing out free vodka in the middle of a Saturday afternoon? Our world is improving.) After mooning over a blu-ray copy of When We Left Earth at HMV and looking at more pairs of earrings than I know what to do with, all of my Christmas shopping is actually, really, genuinely complete. Nothing left now but to take the orphans to breakfast on the 24th, attempt to devise a gluten-free cheetsa recipe once I've made the regular version with my mom, and watch sixty movies on Boxing Day starting with Superman II. I wish the snow would stay. I am feeling snuggled.

Posted by tederick at 8:15 AM in batman! & jedi antics & movie night
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Last night the 3QF cinematheque hosted perhaps its final double feature of the season, Krull vs. The Machine Girl. In an odd bit of unintended synergy, both films featured the same five-bladed starfish weapon. The latter, though, also featured a schoolgirl with a machine gun arm. It's tremendous what they're doing with movies these days.

Food on hand for screening: Crullers and sushi.

Coincidentally, around the same time we were doing all that, Warner yanked Where the Wild Things Are from its release schedule altogether, after having previously shoved the release to late '09. The bulljive is in full swing in the press release, and lord knows I'm no great Spike Jonze fan anyway, but I wonder if we're now ever going to see what he conceived as the proper approach to this unmakeable film - an approach which, regardless of how it turns out, is inherently way more interesting to me than anything that "delivers for a broad-based audience." It's a feature-length adaptation of a 15-page children's story, and if the rumour mill it to be believed, it's gonna have giant walking puppets. Honestly, I don't care if it sucks; I just want to see it. There just aren't enough amazing things in the world any more.

Admonitions like that, however, lead to Hellboy II. And it is, unfortunately, time to report that I don't want any more things to lead to stuff like Hellboy II. I am declaring a moratorium on underwhelm: let's get back to kicking some ass, shall we? Review snippet follows thus:

For all his prodigous gifts with the look n' feel, Del Toro has always suffered from recurring skill gaps in his writing: an over-reliance on form; a lack of substance in his English-language dialogue; a tendency to see hererosocial relations from only the male point of view; and what's with all the clocks? Pan's seemed to herald the completion of a successful leap upward from the young director of able adventure stories like Blade II and even the first Hellboy. With Hellboy II, sadly, all of Del Toro's weaknesses as a writer have come roaring back, and have brought some friends. The thing looks fantastic, but goddamn, this is some piss-poor storytelling.

And full review is here. I can't help but notice that I'm writing a lot more bad reviews these days than good ones. I do hope this isn't because I've become an asshole, which I admit is becoming more and more possible with every film I see. I suppose it's unlikely that every single goddamn thing sucks. HB2 has many admirable qualities and means well, if "meaning well" means to plumb whatever street cred Del Toro has amassed in order to make a nice chunk of summer-movie coin. (I don't even begrudge that. Who wouldn't want to make coin? Coin buys condominiums.) I just want a flick to have appreciable achievement in all areas of filmcraft, not just one or two, y'know? Or at least, transport me so spectacularly into its own idea that I come out unable to help admitting that yeah, that thing was a movie, a thing of the world worth making and bestowing upon others. (Like Wall-E, and in a completely opposite series of ways, like The Machine Girl.) I'd like to stop rounding up.

Posted by tederick at 11:42 AM in 3QF & movie night & movies & reviews
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Nothing to report.

Posted by tederick at 1:58 AM in 1MFVF & 3QF & movie night
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Last night we screened The Illusionist and The Prestige back to back at 3QF. (I've seen Prestige before but not the other one, and we had a variety of similar combinations in the crowd on the couch.) Of all our movie matchups at 3QF this seemed the most obvious and uninteresting yet it drew the largest crowd. Funny that. Anyways it was pretty much no contest; I thought The Illusionist was pretty terrible, digital intermediate and Paul Giamatti notwithstanding. I spent most of it waiting for The Prestige to start. Which itself is, of course, a whole other movie once you know the secret... and still so fucking good. There's that line in the flick where Batman tells the kid that you should never reveal the secret of the trick because as soon as you do they won't be interested in you any more, but I dunno, I was still pretty spectacularly interested in watching the way Nolan manipulates the language of cinema to misdirect and redirect and generally smoke out the series of assumptions he's going to need to you to have in order for the climax to work. After the film was over we had a rollicking conversation about it and about Batman and Wolverine and Bizarro Wolverine and Alfred/Alfie/Michael Caine and the guy with the jowls. And also about whether old people should be videotaped all the time, which admittedly has very little to do with magic.

Sort of irritated that the Prestige score is not available in iTunes or, apparently, in Canada. I'm tired of ordering stuff online. In the plus column though I've pretty much paid off my credit cards at last, including Molly the Macbook. So I guess a $12 CD isn't too much to worry about.

Hey speaking of 3QF, The Girls (downstairs) smoke a lot of pot. During the movies last night it kept wafting up through the vents like we were in some opium den in the 1890s, which fit the mood of both flicks rather precisely. Beats the fuck out of the incense anyway.

Still waiting on shaving the beard.

Wuh oh: the buncha guys from Spart look to be dominating. It's going to be one of those weekends...

Today is Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV show)'s tenth anniversary. Fancy that!

Posted by tederick at 10:52 AM in 3QF & joss & movie night & movies
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Today Chris, Brandy, Steve and I are watching The Lord of the Rings all the way through. I will be updating this blog post as it happens, to keep you abreast of the ring's progress.

10:30 p.m.: "The End" hit the screen at 10:11. Then we sort of sat around for twenty minutes and let our heads spin, because spinning they were. Then we discussed the Watcher in the Water. Then we talked about whether we know too much about the making of these movies given that in bringing up the Watcher in the Water, Chris and I immediately said "enormous sphincter" in a Richard Taylor impression. Then Steve called Bridget. And then... now we're trying to figure out what we're doing for New Year's. Yeah it's sort of hard to concentrate right now.

We sort of all agree that we alpha-waved through the entirety of The Two Towers but that Fellowship and King were pretty kick-ass. Also I'm a extended edition boy through and through now. I know it took me a long time to get to this point, but I'm on board. Don't think I'd ever need to watch the theatrical cuts again except to explicate some unforeseen point about something.

Here's what the living room looks like post-flix:

Note Chris on the far left holding his head in his hands. That's how we all feel right now.

This concludes LOTR '06. Fuck.

8:09 p.m.: The hammer of the underworld is out, the battle has started, the home stretch is in sight. Good thing this thing's ending can be described as "succinct."

I tell you what: that Bernard Hill guy is one tough old son of a bitch. I am behind that guy 100%.

6:30 p.m.: We just concluded a discussion of who we think is the hottest person in the trilogy (Chris: Eowyn; Brandy: Aragorn; Steve: Gimli) with me saying "I'd like to have Arwen for a wife and Pippin for a plaything."

6:00 p.m.: Steve just threatened to not let us start King until we'd positively determined which mid-film disk break was the best (Pippin's "Where are we going" in Fellowship, Faramir's speech in Towers, or Grond showing up in King.) But we shot him down.

Also: there's rum now. Music's starting, film is going, shut up!

5:53 p.m.: Hey, if you ever need to reboot your head after too much flickwatching, try brushing your teeth. It's totally effective. I'm going to try to remember this for the next film festival.

Where are the others?! I should be balls-deep in Frodo right now, and instead I'm sitting here blogging like a chump! Wait I just heard the door open.

5:48 p.m.: Becoming impatient... becoming impatient with all the... well the word my brain wants to say is "waitnapping." But that can't be right. Although if "waitnapping" were a crime where you abduct waiters I think that would be pretty cool. (But what's the upside of abducting waiters? Or waitresses? They work for shit salary and basically live on tips. It's a tough life, folks, being a server. Tip high whenever you can. You have no idea the difference you'll make.)

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GET A CHEESEBURGER?! Fuck!

5:34 p.m.: I've been abandoned while the rest of the Fellowship goes for food. Chris and Steve went to Lick's and Brandy went to Pizza Pizza. I never want to eat again. Brandy is bringing me back some wings though because I think I need protein and not salted snack foods. Wait I guess wings are salted snack foods too. Fuck.

MAN I hate having to take a protracted break in the midst of the proceedings but that's how it goes. And hoochie mama, all of our brains are in desperate need of a bit of freshening right now anyways. I think I'll go out on the back deck and get some air.

Towers done, King beginning...

3:39 p.m.: Faramir, a young captain of Gondor, has just appeared. I rather like that chap. I like his outfit, I like the cut of his jib, and I covet his hoodie. It's all about the hoodies right now. Hey why don't they do "dramatis personae" type things at the beginning of movies? "Faramir, a young captain of Gondor" is the type of thing that should appear at the head of this flick, along with "Frodo Baggins, a hobbit," "Elrond of Rivendell, an ageless elf," and "Gollum, a small homunculus man."

3:34 p.m.: People keep calling, and we keep ignoring the phone...

2:45 p.m.: Ian McKellen is back. Fuckin' A.

You know, that poem Treebeard recites is like something you'd hear a stoner say at a party at 3 in the morning. The first hour of Towers is always really hard for me. It's not that there's anything wrong with it, just that it seems to be where my brain finally collapses into an alpha wave. Talking trees... dreamy stuff.

1:38 p.m.: You know, the battle scene at Amon Hen at the end of Fellowship is a master class in cinema editing. I don't think I'd ever really had a full appreciation for just how brilliantly constructed that entire scene is. Every single technique of editing is used to brilliant effect - particularly the impressionistic elements. Eisenstein would split his britches watching that thing.

It occurs to me that if PJ ends up making The Hobbit we're going to end up having to do this again. And if it's in fact 2 three-hour movies then it's going to be a really, really, really long Complete Lord of the Rings screening when all is said and done.

11:59 a.m.: I have taken additional vitamins as a precautionary measure.

11:51 a.m.: We're done the first disk. Everyone's talking about which movie's their favourite. Brandy can't decide if she likes the first one better or the extended cut of the second one. Chris thinks the first half of Fellowship is the best half of a movie ever made. And me, I don't know why I ever thought the extended cut of this film was weaker than the theatrical cut. It is fucking exempliary. It was the scene with the Gaffer that convinced me of this. You need that shit, man, you need it.

But I'm a Boromir man. I think Sean Bean's is my favourite performance in the entire trilogy. As soon as he rides in his horse it becomes a whole different film for me.

Anyways now there's talk of lunch. We've also told Steve that he is essentially a member of the household for the rest of the day, because he keeps asking if he can have water, snacks, etc. There's no room for that kind of politeness in a viewing marathon like this, sir. No.

10:13 a.m.: That is the best opening of any film ever. We'll probably get into the Peter Jackson Hobbit situation later but for now let's assume that he will make the film(s) and that he will use the X3 gizmo to allow Ian Holm to play Bilbo, as it should be.

Now Ian McKellen's here. Fuckin' A.

10:03 a.m.: OK we're starting now.

9:58 a.m.: We're almost ready to go. I have been to the IGA to get provisions. We have salted pork. Actually salt seems to be the mainstay of most of the foodbits, there's also a lot of chips and pretzels and so forth. But that's okay. You know back in the medieval days, what they used to keep meat fresh? Salt. We shall hope it does the same for us.

There are two complete copies of Tolkien's work on the coffee table, including The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. This is in case there is need of immediate referencing at any point during the day. I also have Wikipedia's LOTR section open on my Macbook. For gear I'm wearing ripped jeans and a Revenge of the Sith t-shirt (iconoclasm!), along with my elf-green hoodie. I also have my glasses cleaning cloth, for the inevitable moment when the lenses mist up when Sam is cradling Frodo in his arms on the slopes of Mount Doom.

For toys for the day's proceedings I have brought the Mouth of Sauron, the King of the Dead, Samwise Gamgee, and Gimli (son of Glóin). In the Gimli/Legolas scrap I'm a Gimli man, always have been, that fellow amuses me. So many axes!

This is what the room looks like right now:

Brandy isn't here yet. She said that laundry takes precedence over The Lord of the Rings but that she'll be here soon. Chris is making a pizza because that's how he deals with stress.

Posted by tederick at 9:58 AM in 3QF & movie night & pj's playground
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Woot! Bonus hour! TAKE AN HOUR LONGER TO DO SOMETHING TODAY!

Last night, sleep-deprived Brandy put together a Hallowe'en viewing marathon at 3QF; we watched Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Cabin Fever, Ghostbusters, and I got through half of Night of the Comet before I had to bag it and go to bed (I left right after Chakotay showed up as a young street tough). By that point my brain was a shimmering potion. Not least because it was the first time I watched Nightmare 3 since the first time I watched that movie, and the first time I watched that movie, I was ten and it was the first horror movie I'd ever seen. Bear in mind, I was a kid who was completely fucked up by Toht's face melting in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Zolo getting his hand eaten off in Romancing the Stone. I even got freaked out in E.T. when Elliott cut his finger on the radial saw. So essentially, Nightmare on Elm Street 3 is the primal scene of my entire horror psychology. I was the most unpopular kid in my class, inexplicably invited to somebody's birthday party or Hallowe'en party (I can't even remember which kid it was), and I got inducted into a universe that I simply did not have any language to comprehend except that it both revulsed and enthralled me. And so, so, so much about sex. In a time before I even knew what French kissing was, one of the inmates of the mental hospital in the film dreams that the pornstarish nurse takes him into one of the private rooms, removes all of her clothes (I can still remember the triumphant hooting of the pack of boys I was with, when those Playboy-quality tits became our first experience of onscreen nudity), and sticks her tongue down his throat... before she becomes an incarnation of Freddy, and her tongue becoming an appendage as thick as an arm, and it starts fisting its way down the boy's throat. Again: no language to understand this. No context to put it in. Just the raw terror and arousal of this collision of adult imagery and the lasting damage and laying of bricks that they did to my psyche. And oh, gee, the raven-haired goth girl with a thing for needles and knives who fights it out with Freddy in a dreamscape back alley? Have I been into anything like that lately???

Posted by tederick at 9:27 AM in 3QF & movie night & movies
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3QF hosted another one of our mentally and culturally destructive double features (1, 2) tonight. I dubbed the pairing Extreme Iron! Extreme Iron!! Extreme Iron!!!, and matched asian berserker horror anthology Three Extremes against flawless spiritual masterpiece 3-Iron. (It was our third such evening, natch.) The whole thing was originally concocted to celebrate the release of Extreme Steve, but we are big procrastinating assbarges so it ended up being an informal going-away for Rwanda-bound Dave. It was pretty extreme. Actually I quite enjoyed Three Extremes even though I sorta hated the last segment (which disappointed me to a surprising degree given that it was made by one of my least favourite directors of all time, Takashi Miike). The first two bits, though, one featuring fetus-laden dumplings and the other a dude tied to a wall by a gigantic rubber band, were more my speed. I thought I was all on board with the other audience members, but when the lights came up we discovered that rarely has anything screened at the 3QF generated such utter dissent. Of the five people present, every single one of us had a radically different opinion of the relative merits of the anthology, with almost no overlapping sentiment at all. It got pretty extreme in there for a while. But then, thankfully, we watched 3-Iron, and Dave and I got to grin at each other time and again. Oh, mirth.

Next up: Prospero's Books vs. The Muppet Christmas Carol. Or something like that.

I got up just after the crack of dawn (actually it was 8:30) and my father and I tried for the cottage... but it was a damned shitty day weather-wise. I got to visit my pile of wood, though, which is mulching nicely, and otherwise I sat inside and read Half-Blood Prince, which I enjoy more and more, even if the Hermione and Ron thing still makes me a bit sick to my stomach. Mmm incest. I did some writing and some organizing and some thinking to myself, or at least, enough of these to notice that I really oughta be doing more of all of the above. Oh: and there was a hammock, for 25 wind-blistery minutes.

On the way home from the cottage we got stopped by a very long train, and I spent quite a bit of time considering a nearby horse and his rather prominent horse penis. I have to say, in the exemplification of the sheer pendulous magnificence that is the swaying cock, horse penis is hard to beat. It really gives you every single thing you want from a large penis, even insofar as it is, in fact, connected to a horse. As if sensing my prying glare, the horse eventually galloped away. Then the train was out of the way and we were gone, too.

Jeez they're still going downstairs, even as I write this. Extreme?

I'm very tired. Yesterday was a stunningly complex day at work, the day prior had its share of emotional upheavals, and tonight proved that too much rum and ginger ale and cookies makes the inside of your mouth feel like chalk. Now it's 2:30 in the morning and I seem to have lost the ability to type. Why am I still typing? Stop typing. STOP TYPING

Posted by tederick at 2:30 AM in 3QF & h-pot & movie night & movies & sex (theoretical)
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On any given evening if I can just get the number of e-mails in my inbox down to five or less, I actually feel like I can go on with the rest of my life. Until then it's like trying to tame a brush fire with a shot glass with a hole in it.

Anyways. Tonight Daniel came over with Brenda and Demetre, and we tried for Round 2 of our Fucked Up Asian Cinema / Fucked Up Early-80s Animation double-bill dealie. This time we paired Cure with Twice Upon a Time. I didn't really like Cure. If I had seen it at the film festival I would have walked out after fifteen minutes, because it was monotonous and boring; then a guy jumped out a second-storey window which was kind of cool, but ultimately bore no fruit. The rest of the movie stayed monotonous and boring. After that, Twice was definitely not monotonous and boring, in fact being probably the exact opposite of that but not necessarily in good ways. It was frenetic and overwhelming. And vaguely ingenious in its own sort of way but very slapshod. (Is slapshod a word? Am I combining two other words into something only I think exists? Too tired to check dictionary.com right now.) So on the whole I'd say Round 2 was less successful than Round 1... but then, Round 1 had Old Boy. Incest always gives you an edge.

Furthering last month's craziness, Mark ran into the Mighty Kelter today. Whatthefuckupwitdat. I suppose I should try to track down Tut at this point? That would be the next logical step? Anyways, KK has always had some kind of weird psycho-neurotic hold over Sexy Mark Brown, so it was good that he finally got to meet her in person and realize that she's (in his own words) not a ghost, just a person. Too many damn ghosts, generally. I'm all for the living right now.

Forward-thinking, that's the ticket. Slithering between the flannels being the immediate order of business. It is a dark and quiet night, and for once, lonely in the good way.

Posted by tederick at 1:10 AM in 3QF & miscellaneous crap & movie night & movies
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April: You know who he reminds me of?
Brenda: Who?
April: Gary Oldman.
Brenda: ME?!

A couple of months ago D-Coc was over with Brenda and we were talking about Oldboy for some reason and how freaky it is (I hadn't seen it yet and they had) and then we were talking about The Secret of NIMH and how freaky it is (we'd all seen it when we were kids and had the kiddy-panties scared clean off us) and so naturally we decided that at some point we should do an Oldboy/NIMH double feature, which is what we did tonight. The idea was to basically use the vengeance/slaughter/incest/fucking craziness of Oldboy to try to speedball NIMH and see what happens. They turn out to complement one another fairly well, though I think the entire affair would have been served a hell of a lot better on a consciousness-expansion protocol. Still it was fairly hefty when Freaky Mouse was voodooing her children out of the swamp in a big wooden box, and I started wondering if the box would turn out to contain photographs proving that she was, in fact, in love with her own son. No such grim luck.

But man, NIMH. Wait, first Oldboy: awesome. Just skullfuckingly awesome. And hey, erotic ickyness that actually sells; and also a guy taking out a corridor full of thugs with nothing more than a hammer and his rather bad mood.

But NIMH: that is some fucked-up shit. They made this thing for children? As much as I thought that my fear had completely erased the flick from my memory, it turns out that there's about twenty-five seconds of it that are seemingly tattooed on my brain because as soon as they started, I pretty much started shaking like an overcompensated crank shaft. (What does that mean?) Rats in a lab. Mind-enhancing chemicals. Mutation! Consciousness! LIFE!!! You do not show this shit to a six-year-old!! Man between that, The Green Forest and Dr. Snuggles (the river was afraid of the sea!!!) it's amazing I don't spend every single night of my life curled up in the fetal position sweating my weight into the dank, urine-soaked sheets.

I am gonna kick my mother's ass.

Posted by tederick at 1:56 AM in 3QF & movie night & movies
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