Intrigued by what feel more and more like deliberate nods to Joseph Merrick, AKA "the Elephant Man," in descriptions of Mario Incandenza. The oversized head topped with sparse hair, for instance, and the sly repeat notes about the piles and piles of pillows the bradypnea-afflicted Mario must sleep upon.
( The connection is interesting in part because of Wallace's obsession with David Lynch... )

Dear Jennifer Dawn Graham ( Read more... )

This Tuesday the 8th of July, PBS will feature The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez, a film by my fellow Michener compatriot Kieran Fitzgerald. It's a documentary about Esequiel Hernandez, a seventeen year old American citizen who was shot by Marines in a Texas border town in 1997. None of the Marines were ever prosecuted for the crime, nor were they ( Read more... )

Much of the movie was spent singing, very quietly:

"Indiana...Dr. Jones...Indiana...Dr. Jones Jones Jones..."

...to the tune of John Williams' music. I believe this joke (if you can even call it that) was started a few years ago when
( Read more... )

Tonight we saw Big Man Japan at the Alamo Drafthouse and I highly recommend it. It's a mockumentary about a sixth-generation tokusatu-style hero (think Ultraman in a fallen age). Sato is pitiful, broke, and his ratings are down, but he's still up for the daily grind: in his case, a jolt of electricity that makes him grow to thirty feet tall in ( Read more... )

...I have two wishes.

One is that someone, somewhere (perhaps the Alamo Drafthouse?) will do semi-annual showings of Grindhouse in its original format. Because I love it enough to watch it on my TV but any day, any time you want to show it in a theater I will be there shelling out money to do so.

And two is for someone to make me a gif animation icon ( Read more... )

So I was actually relatively pleased with Burton's imperfect Sweeney Todd, in spite of my unreasonable expectations (are we surprised zenithblue has a Sweeney obsession? No we are not.). The performances were all pretty great, though Burton shows a surprising inability to fulfill a musical's need for spectacle (when did Tim "Inventor of Large Marge ( Read more... )

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For your viewing pleasure, a short video by
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30 Days of Night, like many quality horror movies, is not a horror movie so much as a survival movie. This is a trope more often found in zombie films, like Night of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later, than in vamp flicks: the humans must band together to fight the outside menace, usually hiding out in microcosms like isolated farmhouses or malls. ( Read more... )