fine whine

Enough of haikus
I will go back to writing
at least 'til tax day.

Incidentally, somewhere along the line it was passed to me the information that a haiku is not just a haiku because it follows the 5-7-5 syllables rule, but also if and only if it somehow alludes to the seasons; thus my somewhat stilted ones these past few days. I figured I could get away with a haiku instead of something real, though I may never know how many poetry haters my little stunt has weeded out of my readership. That worries me little, as it is so nice to have an audience I can count without needing to remove my shoes.

So back to my audience. I too play an audience much of the time, though I prefer to do so for movies more so than web pages. This weekend (and some of my haiku days too) I have watched many a movie and will now expound at length about them.

First, though, I feel I need to come clean about yesterday's "entry" regarding my cigarette email. That message in fact arrived this morning so to say that I received it yesterday is a fabrication, an untruth, a lie. Please forgive me. Last night I had intended to write something about the intentions of moviemakers but was foiled by a random mySQL socket error and this morning I felt less like blathering on about film and more like getting something posted before anybody noticed my lapse. After all, I've got something of a streak going, having posted something (if only a haiku) everyday since around Christmas.

I'd had one of those less-than-sleepy feelings and had thrown in my copy of Fight club to pass the time. Little did I know that it ran over two hours, but little did I notice that because it's such a great movie. I've read Palahniuk's book of the same name but only after seeing the movie and I still like both, and wish I could write or film something as cool as either.

Not that I'm trying to write a movie. No, no no not me, no just thinking about stuff. Really.

I've been thinking about how some of these movies to which I am subjected end up being made. Namely City of the living dead, one of a many known hack-job distributions of Lucio Fulci's gore-fest The gates of Hell. It's a bad movie. I found nothing in it to recommend to anybody, and what's worse is that it was the wrong bad zombie movie! I had been looking for another bad zombie movie with "city" in the title, but this wasn't it which meant my time was even that more wasted.

It makes me wonder how these movies are conceived. Are there truly people who sit around and say, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to show somebody's head getting drilled all the way through? And how about spraying maggots in through a window for five minutes? What kind of movie can we slap together around those scenes?"

I think this is the way David Cronenberg, Paul Verhoeven and the Troma crew all have had their bit in the head mashing/exploding/etc. genre of films.

But really, is that all it takes to craft a film? How do these people get to be so powerful as to be able to subject the rest of us with this dreck? And, more importantly, how can I do it too?

Not to say that I've only watched bad movies lately. School of rock was very good and even threw in a curveball to mess with me and my preconceived notions. Tremors 3 was eons ahead of the second, but not as good as the first, but still a labor of love and enjoyable enough to watch. Another labor of love was Paul Simon's Murder by death, though that "of love" might be a stretch as Simon has some pretty dead-on criticisms of the murder/mystery oeuvre. They were some of the same complaints I've made,
but that lucky playwright
made a movie of his and
I have just this site.

Oops, that one wasn't seasonal. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find out what a non-weather-specific 5-7-5 verse is called.