Went to see Elephant last night. I’d heard quite a bit about it and seen the trailer and I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to like it but I was intrigued enough to see it to find out.

Even having been warned that nothing really happens for much of the film it was still surprising how little does happen. Whole scenes consist of one character walking down endless empty corridors, others show the sky slowly darkening or pause to watch a character doing something entirely ordinary. But this does a great job of introducing us to all the characters and the locations, giving us the time to get to know them and the school and showing that all days begin as ordinary days. Their paths round the school interweave with each other so that we see the same scenes from different viewpoints. The languid pace and lack of action gives you plenty time to look around and see glimpses of other rooms or hear snatches of conversations and classes.

Some boys sitting behind us seemed bored to tears by this, obviously expecting action and gun-totin’ excitement and unwilling to put any more thought into things. Their continual interjections of stupid noises during the quiet bits, jeering at ugly people and their horrified disgust at the gay kiss only seemed to add an extra level, this being probably the only aspect of high school that wasn’t included in the film. Their confused disbelief as the credits rolled after the sudden ending was a sheer delight to behold.

There’s such a sense of incident throughout, all these little moments that had no real importance to the story but made you understand and care about these characters and hope they’re not going to die – ‘Ugly girl’ Michelle cringingly changing after gym class, Eli developing his film, John’s ass-slapping photo moment. Even the scenes where Alex is walking endlessly through corridor after corridor seemingly frustrated by the lack of people left to shoot. There’s just so much time to notice things and to think about them and consider things. It’s interesting as well how we get so little closure – you’re left with a lot of questions about who died and what happened afterwards. When one of the main characters is stood outside of it all, you half-expect something terrible to happen, that as a main character he needs to go through some life or death situation. But it’s not an easy film and it’s not out to give you answers.

So go see if you like thinking. Don’t go if you get bored easily.

We finally got to see Lost In Translation tonight and it didn’t disappoint. Powerful and understated. Bill Murray is truly the man. Miles better than The Virgin Suicides if you ask me, if only for the lack of Josh Hartnet. We also rented Ichi The Killer which is sure to be crazy as hell.

Chris had a good point about the cheap records thing. I hit a jackpot (by my standards) the other day when we stumbled across a sackload of cheapo vinyl at a store down the road. I got two GodheadSilos, a Blind Idiot God and a Mick Turner for $1.99 each (all new) and a Clikitat Ikatowi and a JAMS/Timelords for 99c each. I was beside myself with glee, especially at the GodheadSilo, a band who had been on my list of stuff I should own for years. They rock too, especially their Scientific Supercake LP, which is superb. The JAMS 12″ is shit obviously, but I’m unable to resist anything vaguely connected with The KLF. Side note: I discovered recently that my mum went to school with the guy who sang the chorus on their 1992 hit ‘America: What Time Is Love?’. He was also in Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, but neither of these points impressed me nearly as much as the KLF thing.

Apart from that, record buying has been infrequent for some months. Having said that, I did receive copies of Sunn 0))) – Veils It White and Harvey Milk – Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men in the post the other day. Two exquisitely packaged records which didn’t cost an arm and a leg, which makes a change.

[Did you like the amount of bold titles in this blog? Hopefully it will now become a contest.]

You know, I’ve been trying to think for almost 10 days now about actors I like, and I can’t find reason to fault Ollie’s list. I’ve only actually seen Vincent Cassel in one film (La Haine), so I can’t comment on that one, but the other four actors are all very close to my heart. In fact, me and my flatmate spent one evening debating over who we loved more: Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Steve Buscemi. We came to the conclusion that whilst Buscemi has been in loads more excellent films, he’s also been in loads more shit too – I mean, he once shared screentime with Sandra Bullock. Whereas the only blemish against Mr Hoffman to date would be having anything to do with Scent of a Woman. I don’t care if it was his breakthrough into Hollywood… It’s. The. Worst. Fucking. Film. Ever.*

However, I do have two words that could bring Ollie’s list shaking to its knees: Judge Reinhold.

REINHOLD IS GOD.

Ahem.

Man, it’s goddamned cold.

[*Apart from Dude, Where’s My Car? I couldn’t even muster ten minutes of that beauty.]

my two cents: i thought punch drunk love was okay, pretty decent perhaps, but that was about it. my main problem was that i really couldn’t take adam sandler seriously. i know that’s kind of lame, but you can only forgive the guy so much for making so many films that consist of nothing but silly voices and fart jokes. i thought the main redeeming factor was the appearance of phillip seymour hoffman who is undeniably an incredible actor, and who always brings something special to every film he’s in. hey, there’s a handy excuse to do my current favourite actors list:

01 vincent cassel (always)
02 phillip seymour hoffman
03 bill murray
04 william h. macy
05 steve buscemi

any one of those names are more than enough to make me see a film, and usually, in my opinion, enough to make the film great. hey, new blog idea; actors we like. go on.

I was just logging into Blogger to put a message up to say I just saw Punch Drunk Love and I wish I’d voted for it but hadn’t seen it in time. It’s fantastic.

We’ve got the Great Diskant Round-Up of 2003 finally on its way to your desktop in the near future, and I figured it might be a nice warm-up to proceedings to have a whinge about why not enough of our staff voted for Punch Drunk Love to get it into the top ten films of last year. (Possibly because it came out at the tale end of ’02 in the USA, but oh well.)

So what was wrong with it? Here you had a film that looked absolutely sumptuous, engorged with colour thanks to some extremely canny over-exposures. It was made by the man who made waves with the edited-to-shit-by-the-studios-but-still-excellent Hard Eight, appeared to be God after Boogie Nights, and who managed to divide audiences all over the world with the ridiculously ambitious Magnolia (me, I think it works, but I do have a propensity for three hour films not made by Peter Jackson). It had Adam Sandler in it, and he even acted well and wasn’t annoying for a second of the film. PT Anderson won best director for it at Cannes 2002. It was about love. And it had a harmonium.

So how come it got ignored? It seems that everyone’s into huge stories that arc over many films these days, and that it’s all about EPIC VISTAS and ACKSHUN, or awful “teenage comedies”. Critics said that this film was somewhat idiosyncratic, but it only seems that way because of what Anderson’s done before. Sure, it’s not entirely predictable and doesn’t feature ‘average’ people acting ‘normally’ for authenticity; instead it revels in the slightly anachronistic world that Anderson presents us with.

I feel like a right sap writing this gooey stuff, but I really value the kind of film that Punch Drunk Love represents in these days of increasing tendencies towards Blockbusters and Vomit-Worthy “Sure Fire Oscar Winner” films (check the horrifically bad adaptation of Philip Roth’s ‘The Human Stain’ that is obviously being held back for release on our shores until just before the ceremony in the spring). The idea of a personal touch on a film that does any kind of business at all is so rare these days that you have to keep your eyes open. My favourite film of 2003, which will be fairly obvious when you read our Round-Up, got a whole bunch of decent reviews in all the broadsheets, but I never heard of a cinema outside of Soho that screened it before it promptly disappeared without a trace. The only way I got to see it was by taking a plunge and importing the Region 1 DVD. Thankfully, it was worth it. But Punch Drunk Love was probably the best film I saw in a cinema last year (apart from a random one-off screening of Godard’s A Bout De Souffle).

Bring on the Round-Up…

So in an effort to get back into the swing of things in the world of BLOG, I have recently been dedicating my time to GOING OUT and DOING STUFF. This has opened my eyes to the fact that MANY THINGS are better than sitting around doing very little while OUT OF YOUR BOX. It also has had the bizarre side-effect of writing a lot of random words in ALL CAPS while blogging. I only discovered this two minutes ago.

Last night, Kat Kitten and I toodled along to see the Xmas buster-of-blocks known as Elf. Since admitting intending to see this film I have been on the receiving end of much ridicule, though I understand not the reason. It features Will Ferrell getting hurt a lot while wearing an Elf costume. Let me run that by you again: GETTING HURT in an ELF COSTUME. It degenerates into a bit of a Christmas Sapfest(tm) toward the end, but that’s totally acceptable, what with it being Christmas and me being a sappy muthafucker at heart. Plus, we had ice-cream and smuggled in muffins and milkshake, despite knowing that we couldn’t possibly eat another bite after our hugest ever dinner. Kat had a dish named Ultimate Fish and Chips. Which i guess is kinda like The World’s Best Cup of Coffee. Life imitating art imitating an Elf getting hurt a lot. You don’t know what i’m on about, because you haven’t seen the film, and you probably won’t because you’re too DAMN COOL to go see a sappy Christmas film. And you probably won’t be fortunate enough to have hysterics before the film starts, when a group of Big Rugby Lads walkshout over to you “Is the the screen for SWAT?” and you have to tell them that it’s not, they’re in the screen for Elf, and they go on to explain that “I thought it was a bit strange that the tickets said Elf on them”. Sheesh.

Next Week: Brother Bear!

Sapfest!

Hah, that Wolves! (of Greece)/Gringo news not being online is all my fault. I forgot to upload the updates Matt sent me. Duh. Go see here now: www.gringorecords.com. Lots of Gringo in the new, final Careless Talk Costs Lives which I’ve only browsed through quickly so far. Looking good though. I will surely miss it (if you can miss something when you could never find it in the first place..) but ET and Steve’s new projects sound Exciting so it’s not so sad.

I’m also putting a record out on my new Asking For Trouble label which is involving way too many forms and jargon. I’m normally great with forms (I could win a fastest DSS form filling competition for certain) but this is like suddenly losing all your brains. I had to go tackle some MySql databases to make myself feel clever again.

I watched the new Ghibli film, The Cat Returns, the other night after being told it wasn’t being shown at the GFT after all. I’d forgotten how difficult it is to keep up with subtitles while eating your dinner but the subtitles were pretty random so it didn’t matter too much. Once the story reached its climax the subtitlers obviously got bored and stopped subtitling for ages, leaving me highly confused. I ended up having to check the synopsis at Nausicaa to find out what the hell had happened. Anyway, translation traumas aside, it’s a fun little film though nowhere near Miyazaki standards. It’s all about a girl Haru who saves a cat’s life. Only he turns out to be the Prince of Cats and lots of cats from the Kingdom of Cats offer their thanks in many bizarre ways, eventually kidnapping her and turning her into a cat so she can marry the Prince of Cats. Oh no! etc. Luckily more cats in the shape of the Duke and his fat friend (who drowns temporarily in a vat of jelly in a truly Homer-esqe scene (Mmmm, jelly)) come and save the day. Cue elaborate escape scenes. Actually it’s got a similar feel as The Castle of Cagliostro, if everyone was cats.

I want to watch Totoro again now, particularly after reading an interview with Nintendo Hero Shigeru Miyamoto at Zelda.com (Flash required but it is lovely) where he mentions that he based much of the look of Zelda WindWaker with the Amazing Eyes on Totoro. Best film ever inspires best looking game ever. Speaking of, I completed Zelda Link to the Past the other night and now I need a new game. Suggestions please.

Like:

Irresponsible impulse-buying of things we can’t even begin to afford and really don’t need

Castlevania on the PS2 (see above)

Pilsbury Toaster Strudels (you can ice them yourself!)

Wolf Eyes (still)

No like:

Irresponsible impulse-buying of things we can’t even begin to afford and really don’t need

Insane weather (it was in the high 70s at the start of this week and now it’s a couple of degrees above freezing or something)

The idiots who apparently haven’t found the time to give me a work permit yet

The price of beer

Elsewhere this week: We saw Birdland who are two people who used to be in Love Life and Jaks. Katrina sang and shimmied around while Sean played organ and guitar at the same time which was very impressive. They also had an odd looking centrafuge type thing behind them which had lights and made a funny noise and seemed like it might be something to do with the organ. If anyone knows exactly what the purpose of this was, other than to look nice, we’d like to know. They were very good though.

We also saw The Matrix Revolutions which was a marvel to look at but was disappointing as a climax to the trilogy. I never liked anything to do with The Matrix before this summer, but after seeing the last one I was hoping for big things, which it didn’t deliver, at least not in terms of storyline. Some of the action is truly incredible though, and it’s probably worth seeing just for that.

Nice to see Chrisummerlin posting, now it won’t just be me who swears far too much. It’ll be quite something to finally see that Wolves record too, about time!

Aw, everyone’s been doing much more exciting things than me. My weekend was mostly spent putting together exciting new content for diskant (lots on the way, keep an eye out), playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time (yes, I know it’s taking me actual years to complete) and managing quite well not to spend money even when faced with records and hamtaro things.

We did also go and see Pirates of the Caribbean in random Saturday night ‘want to go to the cinema, what’s on?’ thing. It was the only film on at the right time that we both kind of wanted to see and it was surprisingly fun. I only realised after it finished that I hadn’t found any spare time during it for my mind to wander on to other things. The plot’s very Disney (a happy-go-lucky mix of pirates, treasure and CURSES) and at times made no sense at all but it was all highly enjoyable and a bit stupid. Johnny Depp mightily fun as Bad Pirate Who Is Also Kind Of Good (a complex character for Disney there) and Orlando Bloom does ‘Orlando Bloom pretends to be a pirate’. Jeez, the guy can’t act. He just does ‘Orlando Bloom pretends to be an Elf’ and changes it slightly. I kept expecting him to peer through the rigging and shout, “They are taking the Hobbits to Isengard!”. He is very likeable though in a sort of dumb puppy falling down the stairs way. The last twenty minutes had enough plot ‘twists’ to keep anyone entertained but the actual ending was unbelievably lame like they realised the film was actually getting too fun and exciting and they better quickly simplify it into ‘boy gets girl, THE END, GO HOME NOW’.