Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
It really does feel like weeks since I wrote something, and I’ll confess... I’m jonesing for a hit of AICN. I miss you guys when it gets like this, and taking that trip up to Vancouver was a nice reminder that I need to get busy and write something.
The problem is, the more I put off working on my articles, the more stuff stacks up. As a result, I’ve got a lot I want to wedge in this weekend, and I’m going to try to be fair to all of it. I’ve got a fistful of film reviews and a piece about a certain Internet flash cartoon to get out of the way before I can get back to transcribing those ELF interviews.
So, without further ado, let’s get to it...
ALL THE REAL GIRLS
GEORGE WASHINGTON, the first film by David Gordon Green, is one of those lyrical little miracles that you know can’t possibly happen again, the best Terrence Malick film that Malick never made. The most remarkable thing about Green’s new film, ALL THE REAL GIRLS, is just how close he comes to pulling it off a second time.
One of the things I love most about independent directors as they develop is the way they introduce us to new actors. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro were so closely linked for the early part of their careers that it seemed odd when they didn’t work together. A good recent example of this is Neil LaBute and Aaron Eckhart. In the case of Green, he’s got Paul Schneider, who played a supporting role in GEORGE WASHINGTON and who is the lead here. He also co-wrote the story, which might explain why he seems so incredibly natural and at ease in this film. If there were any justice, this guy would be a star. He got an easy charm and charisma that are hard to deny.
GEORGE WASHINGTON unfolded as if by sheer luck. It feels like a documentary in a way, but as shot by a poet. There’s not a single performance in that film that feels like someone performing. Both films start the same way, with a boy and a girl facing each other, talking about their relationship, but the age differences make it immediately apparent that the films have very different agendas. With ALL THE REAL GIRLS, Green works in a slightly more formal style as he tells the story of Paul (Schneider) and Noel (the adorable Zooey Deschanel), a young couple trying to figure out exactly how they fit together. Not if... just how. They can both tell that there’s something special happening between them, some sort of intimate line of communication that’s been opened, and as the film starts, they share a very unusual first kiss. What ripples out from that tiny, sweet, unforced gesture is both wrenching and entirely mundane. It’s not like Green’s out to redefine the entire experience of young love. He just adds a few interesting wrinkles and then takes delight in the details of the thing. His movies are all about behavior. They’ve got their own dreamy, languid pace.
Even when Green brings in stumbling blocks for Paul and Noel, he doesn’t play things out the way you’d expect. For example, Noel’s older brother is Tip (Shea Whigham), who has been Paul’s best friend for a long time. Because they’re friends, he knows what kind of guy Paul is. He knows that Paul has fucked pretty much every eligible girl in their small North Carolina mill town, and that he’s treated them all fairly poorly in the process. That’s not a problem until Tip realizes that Paul and Noel are starting to connect. She’s been away at boarding school, so she has no idea who Paul is or what his reputation is. Tip is furious at the idea of Paul doing the same thing to his sister that he’s done so many times before, and in most Hollywood films, things would be set up for a giant showdown between Tip and Paul. Not here, though. Green just lets things sort themselves out in a fairly natural way, and once you realize that you’re not going to get some formula romantic drama, you can settle into this film’s particular rhythm and just enjoy. There’s a lot fo humor in the film, and Schneider’s comic presence can’t be underestimated. Wes Anderson should harness this guy’s particular charisma, or maybe PTA. He manages to show us how he would have been able to charm one girl after another, even with a bad reputation growing up around him, and we end up willing to forgive him almost anything.
The great irony of the film is that Paul isn’t the one who ends up needing forgiveness. It’s Noel who has spent years locked up in a boarding school, away from her family, unable to make the normal mistakes every teenager makes. Yes, Paul has left a lot of unhappy girls in his wake, but it hasn’t been due to any sort of intentional malice. His reputation is nothing more than the public accumulation of experience. Noel mourns missing all of these opportunites, and Paul responds to that untouched quality in her. She offers him several chances sexually and, for the first time in his life, Paul hesitates. He wants everything to be different with her. He wants to do the right thing, never understanding that Noel wants him to share his experience with her. When she freaks out and acts out in an effort to understand what it is she’s missed, it destroys Paul, and for the first time, he understands the pain he’s caused others.
The film digresses any time it can, and Green seems enamored by some of his supporting players, like Danny McBride as the apty-named Bust-Ass or Patricia Clarkson as Elvira, Paul’s mother. Some of these digressions work, and some of them are too precious for their own good. If Green’s got a major flaw as a filmmaker so far, it’s his indulgence. He seems smitten by eccentricity for its own sake, and what worked magically in GEORGE WASHINGTON feels slightly more calculated here. Considering how average this mill town is supposed to be, it’s a little jam-packed with oddballs.
Still, any time Green wants to collaborate with his cinematographer, Tim Orr, I’ll show up to watch. Orr’s work is breathtaking, and he manages to find a way into the hearts of these actors. I’ve seen Zooey Deschanel in a number of films now, but she makes a whole different level of impression here. The way she and Schneider engage with one another brings out the best in both of them. As Green gets more rigid with narrative, it will be interesting to see if he can focus his particular gifts. As it stands right now, he’s a fascinating filmmaker who seems to be finding his voice and following his instincts, and I hope more audiences tune in and take a chance on him.
LOST IN LA MANCHA
Terry Gilliam is cursed.
That’s the only explanation for it.
Maybe God doesn’t have a sense of humor about the way he was portrayed in TIME BANDITS. Maybe it’s just dumb luck. Maybe Terry’s a modern-day Job, and the universe is testing his strength of character and his artistic drive by throwing one insane obstacle after another in front of him. Maybe Karma’s making him work off his scathing indictment of the bean counters and the suits and the system as a hole by BRAZIL, wearing him down with the very things he is so obviously afraid of.
Whatever the case, Terry Gilliam seems doomed to never make another film. Since FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, he’s been tied to a number of projects that have almost happened. GOOD OMENS keeps getting reannounced with various potential casting mentioned, but it’s an expensive film and they always come up short when they crunch the numbers so far. THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE is a great script with more than a few thematic similarities to TIME BANDITS and BARON MUNCHAUSEN, but it’s never gotten to the point where they were actively casting the picture. We keep hearing reports about a possible TIME BANDITS sequel that he’d have some sort of involvement in, but all that talk so far has been just that: talk.
The film that came the closest to happening was the now infamous THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE, and I still remember the thrill I got when we ran the first photo of Jean Rochefort in costume as Quixote. A world where Gilliam can’t get a film made is a world that doesn’t make sense to me, and seeing that photo was reassuring after all the false starts, proof that it was really happening. When the rumors began not long after about the film shutting down, I didn’t want to believe it. It’s one thing when development falls apart. It’s an unfortunate fact: a lot of what gets developed never makes it in front of the camera. There are a million different reasons that’s true. Once things start filming, though, it’s a pretty good bet that it’ll get finished, and in form or another, find distribution. After all, it’s Terry Gilliam, right? He made 12 MONKEYS and THE FISHER KING, right? This is a visionary, a guy with an amazing, unique voice, and the film starred Johnny Depp. That’s got to count for something... right?
Watching LOST IN LA MANCHA wasn’t something I’d say I enjoyed. The first half of the film is often very funny thanks to the dark wit of Gilliam and the remarkalbe degree of access that was granted to Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. The laughs dry up as reality sets in, though, and the film becomes an artistic death march. Even though it’s hard to watch, there’s enormous value in seeing what went wrong. If this can happen to a filmmaker this talented, then it can happen to anyone.
One of the lessons that the film offers most clearly is a simple one: pick your collaborators carefully. The producers of QUIXOTE seem ill-equipped to actually deliver the proper support to Gilliam, and they also seem unprepared for his oft-reported manic attention to deail. Maybe they should have watched THE HAMSTER FACTOR, the documentary that Fulton and Pepe made about 12 MONKEYS. Unlike most behind-the-scenes films, THE HAMSTER FACTOR seemed to be absolutely honest, and it painted Gilliam as demanding and a bit obssessive, able to get hung up about things that would never matter to even the most eagle-eyed viewers. When we see producers Bernard Bouix and Rene Cleitman dealing with Gilliam on the set of QUIXOTE, it’s obvious they are in over their heads. There’s a more significant language barrier than just French versus English. Gilliam’s one of those guys who gets possessed by his vision for a film, and he doesn’t seem to care about excuses or budgets or limits once he starts rolling.
There’s a ghost that follows Gilliam around during the film, and its name is BARON MUNCHAUSEN. That movie was one of the most expensive failures of the ‘80’s (the only film that lost more money that decade was EMPIRE OF THE SUN), and it seems like the wounds are still fresh for Gilliam. He tries to laugh about it a few times, invoking the name in the hopes of avoiding repeating the mistakes that made the production such a nightmare. To his credit, he seems to make all new mistakes this time out. We hear that strange, high-pitched giggle of Gilliam’s less and less as he begins to figure out what a train wreck QUIXOTE seems to be. Despite hearing over and over that this is the most expensive film ever made entirely with European money, I couldn’t help but think that what we see looks cheap and shabby and poorly designed. In a way, I’m almost glad we didn’t see a sub-standard Gilliam film. I’d hate to see him tarnish his record with something half-assed, even if it means he was disappointed like this.
His collaborators certainly have excellent credits to their names. Benjamin Fernandez has served quite ably as production designer on films like THE OTHERS, DAYLIGHT, DRAGONHEART, and TRUE ROMANCE, but the glimpses we get of his work here don’t really inspire confidence in what might have been. Nicola Pecorini, his cinematographer, has only shot a few films himself (RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, FEAR & LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, the upcoming SIN EATER), but he got his training as a steadicam operator working for Dario Argento on films like OPERA, PHENOMENA, and TENEBRE. There’s so little finished film that it’s impossible to judge what his work would have been like. We see a lot of the work of Gabriella Pescucci, his costume designer (VAN HELSING, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, NAME OF THE ROSE), and even though she worked for him before on MUNCHAUSEN, she seems easily frustrated by the way he expresses what he wants, rolling her eyes at almost every request.
And then there’s Phil Patterson, the film’s assistant director, who comes across in a decidedly mixed light. He’s worked on Gilliam’s last few films and there seems to be a real rapport between them up front. As things wear on, though, Patterson seems ready to quit at the slightest provocation. It’s a hell of a shoot, no doubt. Flash floods, the ill health of Rochefort, and endless delays would tax the patience of anyone trying to keep things organized, but that’s what an AD is supposed to do, isn’t it? Deal with the unpredictable? Find order in the creative chaos?
In the end, this isn’t a film about finger pointing. It’s a film that confirms how difficult filmmaking is, and that shows just how fragile dreams can be. Even as I write this, Dimension and MGM are issuing press releases about Gilliam’s next film, GRIMM, which is supposed to shoot in Prague this summer. Right now, Gilliam’s got offers out to Matt Damon, Heath Ledger, Jonathan Pryce and Robin Williams aboard, and I hope all goes well. Just this week, we were getting rumors in from people in Prague saying the film was about to implode under its own costs. If that ends up true, then Terry’s losing streak continues unabated, making LOST IN LA MANCHA even more painful.
NID DE GUEPES
Y’know what my favorite thing in the world is?
Stumbling onto a great film with no prior warning. Before last Friday, I had no idea who Florent Emilio Siri was. Now, after a week of research, I still know next to nothing about him. I found a grand total of three English language articles about him. One talks about how he was recently hired to direct the new cutscenes for the PS2 version of SPLINTER CELL, although they incorrectly identify him as a Hong Kong filmmaker. The other two articles were here on AICN, courtesy of our Euro-AICN correspondents, including an interview with the director and a very enthusiastic review of the film.
Well, guys, in the future I’ll pay closer attention when you tell us to keep our eyes open for something. What confuses me is how little noise there’s been regarding this kick-ass action picture that plays out like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 as reimagined by a first-person shooter addict. This is a film that rarely pauses for breath, a full-throttle action movie that will shake you. I know Lions Gate owns the North American rights to the film, but I hear they’re more interested in a remake than a proper release, and that’s a damn shame. So much of this film is communicated on a purely visual level that there’s a real chance here for a mainstream hit.
The first twenty minutes or so are intentionally confusing, cutting back and forth between two storylines. In one, we meet Abedin Nexhep, a legendary Albanian warlord who is notorious for his war crimes, most of which involved raping women and carving numbers into their backs. He’s been arrested and is set to be transported to his international trial by a group of cops who are armed to the teeth and driving state-of-the-art armored transports. In the other storyline, we see a group of young friends preparing for some sort of mission, arming themselves as best they can and picking up a special transport truck of their own. At first, it looks like these kids are somehow tied to Nexhep, like they might even be out to free him, but the two storylines come to a head at the same time and we realize we’ve been massively, expertly misdirected. The stories collide more than anything, and when they do, a good chunk of the characters we’ve met die right away.
The ones who are left end up barricaded into a warehouse, surrounded by faceless Albanian troops (literally faceless, since they all wear night vision gear and face masks that make them into anonymous video game bad guys, one of the film’s smartest touches) who are determined to get in, rescue Nexhep, and kill everyone else. Everything from about the thirty minute mark to the end of the film is concentrated on just that, and the result is enormous tension, expertly orchestrated. The bursts of violence in the film aren’t played like your typical action movie, either. It’s not “cool” and it’s not “groovy” and it’s certainly not fun. Instead, it’s jarring and it rattles you, like in BLACK HAWK DOWN. The sound work in this film is amazing, and the cinematography by Giovanni Fiore Coltellacci is crisp and cool, never overselling what we’re seeing.
This isn’t a movie that’s overladen with subtext and deeper meaning. Nexhep is menacing because he barely says anything in the film. His henchmen are frightening precisely because they never appear human. The characterization in the film is done in quick sketches, a few lines here or there. I don’t want to argue that this is “significant” world cinema, but it is a damn fine action film that manages to work no matter how much or how little French you speak. Even if you saw it without subtitles, the storytelling is so confident that you’d be able to follow it perfectly. Florent Emilio Siri is obviously a director of enormous natural storytelling skill, and it’s small wonder he’s become a hot property here in Hollywood in recent weeks. Whoever lands him for his first film stateside has a chance to break a major talent here, and if Lions Gate would wise up and release this film to theaters, they could beat everyone to the punch.
800 BALAS
What does it mean that the most interesting films I’ve seen so far this year aren’t English language? So far, I’m smitten with CITY OF GOD, NID DE GUEPES (or THE NEST), IRREVERSIBLE (which I’ll review this week), and this effortless charmer, which translates as 800 BULLETS. This one was almost guaranteed a good review from me, though, since it deals with one of my very favorite subjects in the entire history of cinema, the spaghetti western, and does so in a way I never would have expected.
I’ve got a long-standing aversion to films about the film business, so maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t know what 800 BALAS was about before I walked into the Egyptian last Saturday night. I’ll confess that sometimes when Harry sees a film I know I won’t have a chance to see for a while, I avoid his review because I don’t want him to color my eventual experience. I knew that the movie had placed pretty high on his list for last year, but I didn’t know anything beyond that. As a result, this movie snuck up on me and won me over, surprising me more and more as it unfolded.
Louis Castro is the main character in the film, an 11 year old boy named Carlos, and he’s a holy terror when we first meet him. He’s moving into a new house with his mother Laura (played by the great Carmen Maura) and his grandmother Rocio (played by the equally great Terele Pavez), and as they move in, he wages a holy war on the movers, declaring himself an Islamic terrorist. And, yeah, in spite of the world around us at the moment, it is pretty funny stuff. See, Carlos isn’t a bad kid at heart. He’s just frustrated. He knows that his mother keeps secrets from him about his father. As they unpack, he finds a picture of his father and his grandfather on the set of a western film, faded, torn from a magazine. Even with this sort of physical evidence, he can’t get his mother to tell him about what happened, and he has to turn to his grandmother.
What she reveals to him is that his father died while working as a stuntman on a Western film shot in the south of Spain. Contrary to the nickname “spaghetti westerns,” most of those films weren’t shot in Italy. Some of the key creative team were Italian, but the locations were frequently Spanish. Other classic films like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and CONAN THE BARBARIAN also used those same locations, but the region is still most strongly associated with the westerns. In many cases, the sets were left standing, and when Hollywood packed up and went home, they left behind a group of people who had become infected with the dream, people who preferred this world of make-believe to the one around them. In a few cases, these people refused to let go of the dream, and they continue to perform western stunt shows on those same standing sets to smaller and smaller groups of tourists each year.
Although Carlos is upset to learn that his father is dead, he’s fascinated to learn that his grandfather, Julian Torralba (Sancho Gracia) is alive and still running one of the stunt shows. When his class takes a holiday ski trip, Carlos takes advantage of the opportunity and, using a credit card his mother gave him for “emergencies only,” he heads south to meet his grandfather. As soon as he reaches the western town, the film comes to life with a cast of eccentrics that are expertly written and beautifully played. Julian is a remarkable, charismatic old rascal who charms Carlos right away, even though he doesn’t mean to. The kid can’t help but be enamored of the life he stumbles into. Everyone’s so colorful, so different than the people his mother knows in her drab corporate lifestyle. To Carlos, this life represents adventure. It takes him some time to convince his grandfather to let him stay, but eventually a real bond seems to grow between them.
This entire section of the film is so beautifully handled by director Alex de la Iglesias that you never want it to end. It feels like you could just go on and on watching these people, all of them just barely scratching by. Barely any tourists come anymore, so they’ve taken to selling hash out of the town’s bank, but even that doesn’t help much. The chemistry between Gracia and Castro is wonderful, and Steven Spielberg himself would be jealous of just how natural and unaffected a performance the kid gives. Spielberg is one of many international cinema figures who cast long shadows over the characters in this movie. There’s a photo of George Lucas and Spielberg that stands in the middle of town to commemorate when INDIANA JONES & THE LAST CRUSADE was shot nearby. Clint Eastwood’s poncho from the Man With No Name films is treated as a holy relic. In a way, Hollywood ruined these people. Julian talks endlessly about how he and Clint became friends when he was Clint’s stuntman, and people just accept it as another one of Julian’s fabulous lies. To him, though, it’s the cornerstone of his identity. He wants desperately to be the person who doubled Clint fearlessly, and not the person who was so drunk he got his own son killed because of a stunt gone wrong. When Laura finds out where Carlos has gone, she flips out and decides to not only get her son back, but to punish Julian. She’s still hurting from the accident that took her husband all those years earlier, and she lashes out by arranging for her company to buy the land where the western town stands so it can be redeveloped as a theme park.
I don’t want to ruin the film’s final and best twists for you. I’ll just say that the 800 bullets from the title come into play, and the line between fantasy and reality gets blurred as Julian decides to go out as the hero he’s always imagined himself to be. In a perfect world, some brave American distributor would pick this up and try to turn it into a family hit. Certainly no film has made me smile more since I saw SHAOLIN SOCCER for the first time. There’s such enormous heart here that I think it transcends language completely. However, there are a few moments where the director’s European sensibilities work against him in terms of a U.S. release. Carlos is initiated into the wonders of the breast by one of the women who plays a whore in the western show in a hiliarious (and fairly innocent) scene, and the eventual payoff to the film is bracingly sad. Iglesias doesn’t feel the need to soft-pedal and give us the Hollywood ending to things. Instead, he has enough faith in us as an audience that he reaches for something deeper and sweeter, and it is quite beautiful when it all comes together. I asked the director about an American release after the film, and he told me that he was showing it at the American Film Market to try and raise some interest in it. He didn’t seem optimistic, though, and I hope someone steps up to prove him wrong. It’s a great film, a great piece of entertainment, and it would be a crying shame if no one had the balls to share it with a wide American audience.
”THE DREW MCWEENY SHOW”
Okay, let’s make it official. You can stop sending me mail to tell me that someone has made a cartoon about me. I know. I’ve seen it. And, despite what you might think, I laughed.
It’s not like it was a big surprise when it appeared online, either. For the last year or so, The Facer.net has taken particular pleasure in roasting my balls. Not mine, exclusively, of course. Harry takes plenty of heat, they seem to have a strange obssession with Garth Franklin, they managed to piss off the normally level-headed Nick Nunziata, and webmasters like Chris Gore and Christian “Spermbath,” as The Facer calls him, regularly get jabbed as well.
But there’s no doubt about it. The Facer lives to try and goad me into some sort of Internet Battle Royale that he believes will either validate his site or destroy my credibility or reveal me for what I am.
Which raises the question... what am I?
Well, in many ways, I am exactly what my harshest critics say I am.
Thin-skinned? There’s pudding with thicker skin than me.
Quick-tempered? I can go from calm conversationalist to frothing loonie with one ill-timed Talk Back where someone takes shots at my last name or my girlfriend.
Cruel? Petty? Unfortunately. Absolutely. Without a doubt, and pleased to have access to a major media outlet where I can abuse my platform freely, thanks.
I am fully aware of these faults of mine. I’ve tried to be fairly honest about them. I don’t know that I ever meant to open myself up to all of fandom as a public figure. The “Moriarty” thing was awfully appealing while it lasted. There was something delicious about the anonymity, the speculation about my identity. There simply came a point where I wasn’t able to maintain the identity any further. I was outed, exposed, named for all the world to see.
Don’t get me wrong. I still love doing this.
If I didn’t, there would have been a million reasons to quit over the last few years. There are days where it feels like all the work I’ve done over the last six years has been for nothing, like I don’t get to claim it at all, like it isn’t really mine.
Like when I get my name misspelled in the closing credits to the AICN TV pilot.
Twice.
So, yeah, I’m ripe for satire. I’m an easy target, really. I lay myself out there time and again, like my much-ridiculed ADAPTATION review last year.
I encourage you to go take a look at the guy’s site and his cartoon version of me. It’s not the sharpest satire ever. It’s enormously derivative of SOUTH PARK, for one thing, and if you really want to slow-roast me, there’s more effective ways than making fart jokes. Hell, our own Cartuna worked with Harry to make a cartoon that was shown at the start of Butt-Numb-A-Thon 3 that was fifty times more offensive and insulting than anything The Facer’s managed to do here. I still don’t know what the point was of me being ass-raped by Smurfette in a Swedish movie. You’d have to ask Harry or his therapist what that means. For a first effort at Flash animation, though, it’s got its moments, and both Harry and I laughed at the use of the GODZILLA theme to herald Harold’s entrance.
The reason something like this doesn’t bother me now the way it would have a year ago is because I’m realizing that I don’t own your perception of me. And I can’t control your perception of me. Each of you reading this right now have some degree of opinion about me. Good, bad, indifferent. It’s shaped not only by what I write, but by what is written about me. It’s shaped by your experience with the site. The Facer, for example, loves to tell the story about how he was banned from this site’s TalkBack section, and when he wrote me to complain and say that it was unfair, I replied with a terse, “Start your own fucking website.” To his credit, he’s done exactly that. Of course, it’s easy to mythmake when you hide behind anonymity, the way I did at first. The Facer prides himself on being secret, on the fact that no one knows who he is. He says he keeps his identity secret to avoid becoming the center of a “cult of personality,” but that’s an increasingly silly position to maintain. A name is just a name. Whether his readers call him The Facer or call him by his real name doesn’t matter. He’s still attracted a small and rabid fanbase, and they most certainly have him up on his own particular platform.
In the end, the public perception of me is just that... a perception. It’s one version of me. I don’t pretend to know or understand writers or directors or actors because of their work, and when I do end up meeting people on a personal level, I’m almost always surprised by them. No matter how intimate someone’s writing is, you’re never getting the whole picture, not even here where we’ve turned film criticism into something akin to blogging.
I say bring on the satire. Bring on more episodes of THE DREW MCWEENY SHOW. Bring on more appearances by Harry Know-less in Brian Lynch’s savagely funny ANGRY NAKED PAT strip. When and if MORTAL KOMBAT 3 or POSTHUMAN make it to the screen, I am fully prepared to withstand the withering scrutiny of each and every fanboy on the planet, and no matter how closely the films hew to my scripts, and no matter how good or bad the final product, I am sure I’m going to have my ass roasted, sliced, and served up to me on a plate. I’ve made myself a target because I have chosen to share my thoughts and opinions with you for the last six years or so. The main difference between me and The Facer seems to be the capacity to get over things. There’s not a single person working on the web who I would call an enemy. Not Chris Gore. Not Ron Wells. Not Patrick Sauriol. In every case where I’ve clashed with someone, there are two sides to the story, and I don’t doubt that people acted out of what they felt to be entirely justified motivations. In many cases, I’ve been wrong about things. Good lord, I’m the guy who not only swore to you that Chris Walken was in STAR WARS EPISODE II, I also asserted that he’d never won an Oscar. I’m extra-fallible. I fuck up time and again. And then I pick up and I continue, and I try not to make the same mistakes twice.
That’s all I can do, and if it makes you laugh, then so be it. At least I got a reaction out of you. I’ll start worrying the day there’s no response at all. Silence is the one thing every writer truly fears. Everything else is just the price of doing business.
... SO IN CONCLUSION...
Next time, we’re going to hit the bookshelf with three new novels of note, and I’ll finally get a look at Gaspar Noe’s controversial IRREVERSIBLE. Later today, I want to post a separate report about a new Marx Brothers movie that might be making its way to screens next year... yeah, you read that right... but for now, I’m sick, the Nyquil’s kicking in, and I need to lay down.
But it was nice talking to all of you.
"Moriarty" out.
