15 February 2004
movie mania
Sunday afternoon has always been the prime time for crappy movies, hasn’t it? Pretty much everybody I know has fond remembrance of watching cheesy Japanese monster flicks or equally cheesy Hollywood action movies on Sunday afternoons. Back home we had local personalities Big Chuck and Little John to introduce them (this also was the town of Ghoulardi, but before my time) though I can’t recall watching too many of them then as I was generally playing outside, riding my bike and trying to panic my mother.
By “riding my bike” there I mean “pedaling like mad down the street and, while still clutching the handlebars, standing on the bar”. It was fun.
Anyway, I thought of such afternoon fare as Jessica and I sat down to see Bruce Lee’s last film, Enter the dragon after lunch.
Going in with no expectations probably helped, but I can’t say I disliked it. In fact I think I might even have enjoyed it, though I did more than a little bit of mocking it (as did Jessica). I’ve only had limited exposure to Hong Kong/martial arts movies but would be willing to entertain other suggestions as long as they don’t too prominently use slo-mo or wire-fu. One guy from the film that I’ll be looking into further (other than Bruce himself, of course) is soul man Jim Kelly, who played Williams. Damn, he was cool. And he had a black power poster of the fist on the wall in his room, which is a nice touch.
Those posters are damn cool. I want one, though it would look no better on the wall of a white, non-aggressive person (like myself) as does my “I want you” Uncle Sam poster. Which is fine by me, I’m just a fan of iconography.
Speaking of that symbol, we also recently watched The spook who sat by the door, a classic Black movie (that capital B is courtesy of others, not me) that has some controversy surrounding it. Evidently, due to its “urban guerrilla warfare is good” sort of message, all prints of the film disappeared after only a week’s run. Conspiracies aside, the film does get in its fair share of heavy hits and doesn’t pull any punches (all the more appropriate that it has for cover and disc image the fist) and is worth watching. My library had the DVD of it (as well as the source novel) and damn, even the menus are cool. Check it out.
Also today I took another stab at The parallax view, and this time I stayed awake. For some reason I couldn’t give it my full attention, so I guess I failed again. The library loaned it to me until Wednesday, so I might have to give it another go just to be figure out if it’s any good or I should just stick with The Manchurian candidate for a conspiracy/politics/assassination film.
Oh, and our new con friend Twah called again at around ten o’clock this morning, and this time we were able to hit the six and keep county from collect calling us again. After all, we don’t know if they’re using 1-800-COLLECT or CALL-ATT or whatever other options are out there to save us a buck or two. Nor do we know anybody named Twah. And we can only wonder where he got our number and what he will ultimately do with it someday.