So the Loren posse and I caught Apocalypse Now Redux on Imax at the Metreon. Having never seen the 1979 theatrical cut, I went in expecting to dislike the film, as terms like "overlong," "undisciplined" and "self-indulgent" are often used to describe it. But I didn't dislike it.

Which doesn't necessarily mean I intend to sit through its three-plus hours again anytime soon, but I appreciated the generally febrile proceedings -- which are by turns narcotic, necrotic and neurotic. Save for a protracted detour at a French plantation, and a truly dullsville political dissertation thereupon, the Heart of Darkness progression is fairly well paced, with Coppola choosing to portray the American campaign in Vietnam as a surreal cocktail of human desire and commercial interests, with an inscrutable antiquity bearing mute witness to the horror of war. The USO sequences in particular unfold like science fiction -- flares, blinking lights, flesh, darkness.

Nit pickiness: Marlon Brando's Kurtz actually emitting "the horror, the horror" as his dying gasp is way overkill. He had us at "hello." And the musical score, save for some classical sampling, is god-awful -- synthetic, inappropriate and highly intrusive. Turns out it was composed by Coppola's father ... need I say more? (More: ditto Coppola's daughter in The Godfather: Part III, for anyone keeping score. The man is ill-served by his nepotism. There are other examples, but those are the most glaring.)

Silver lining: Walter Murch served as editor on Apocalypse, and now that I've seen it, I have an excuse to drop him a note. He emailed me once several months ago about something I wrote, and I wanted to, um, drag out the exchange a little because he's so cool ... but I didn't want to seem inane. Well, at least not inane insofar as it's in my power not to seem inane. The rest is situation comedy.
8/30/2001 12:30:17 AM 0 comments

I'm constantly reminded how quixotic it is to pack "bags of mostly water" into what are essentially space-age diving bells, to hazard the sundry and steep gradients of environments where palm trees and poodles fear to tread.

Bionic augmentation and android emissaries, where are you?
8/28/2001 11:39:48 AM 0 comments

Okay. Who the fuck would wear these?
8/26/2001 02:18:05 PM 0 comments

Today was about Monterey and Big Sur and Carmel and Ventana, and I'm very very tired. I took some pictures. Hopefully the doofus at Walgreens will remember that when I ask for a Picture CD, I mean one of those metallic platters that sometimes hold music, and not those square-ish floppies that used to hold term papers but which hardly anyone uses anymore. Barring the latter outcome, I'll share some with you down the line.

My good friend B at Disney also mailed me a couple of cool David Koepp screenplays. Movies have been so bad lately that even the textual promise of something better is sweet sweet relief.

Have you seen the trailer for From Hell? It looks promising (which is hardly a reliable indicator these days, I know -- but ...). That line near the end -- "One day, men will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth century" -- dark and beautiful: fatalistic. And apt, considering the context. Johnny Depp-wise, the film seems almost to be the yang to Sleepy Hollow's yin. Apparently the role was originally Jude Law's (another interesting choice) but he backed out for some reason. Also: Heather Graham as a strumpet? What's not to love?
8/26/2001 12:27:38 AM 0 comments

Not to be one-track about it, but I think it's pretty much official: the Olsen Twins are the nucleus of a new order in the evolution of the universe. I've seen so many unrelated links about them lately that I have to figure them for a nodal point in the continuum, a swell of itinerant activity coagulating around a null space, a quantum singularity: the beginning of The Next Big Thing. My money's on a cataclysmic matter-antimatter reaction. Only one twin will survive. She will be the antichrist. We will be judged.

So stock up on scrunchies and lip gloss, kids -- there's heavy weather on the horizon.
8/22/2001 09:55:50 AM 0 comments

Sometimes I'm greedy. Greedy for time. Greedy for antiquity, futurity.

Lives overlap like stacked polarizing filters, communion occurring along interference patterns, and I wonder about those lives, the wherefore and why of before and after. I feel hemmed in by biology, by the finite wonders of evolution in a universe of infinite possibility.

And yet this sense of some fundamental inequity is so broad, so abstract, that I can't quite connect it to my ordinary life. It exists like the darkness of closed eyelids -- essentially overlooked. It leaves no emotional fingerprint -- or any fingerprint, for that matter. It does not bear upon my conduct in any discernable way. It's just a feeling I have, occasionally, when I start to wonder about people's childhoods and all the things that are bigger than a human lifetime. A little late-night existentialism.

As always, a quote -- perhaps more tangential than directly correspondent, but its heart is in the right place:

"What she tells you is enhanced by the increasing animation of her gestures and facial expressions and becomes a vivid image of this childhood Arcadia.... You imagine her as a child carrying a bucket of sand down to the beach. You see yourself watching from the bluff, through a time warp, saying: Someday I will meet this girl. You want to watch over her through the interval, protect her from the cruelty of schoolchildren and the careless lust of young men. The irrevocable past tense of the narration suggests to you some intervening tragedy. You suspect a snake in the vegetable garden." (p.94)

There's a lot going on everywhere, all the time. Light trails, latent on the retina.
8/21/2001 01:21:19 AM 0 comments

A couple of observations on this unseasonably warm Disney/MGM sorta day:

About an hour ago I saw this dude holding up traffic at the intersection of Van Ness and California. He was a vagabond in the Mr. Glass from Unbreakable mold -- spindly, angular, very Jack Skellington; and as he stood in the middle of the street, somewhat akimbo, his musculature spasming in an infinite loop, his seizure was an inertia bomb, ripping through the line of cars attempting to circumnavigate him.

I wish I'd had my camera, because a freeze frame of that tableau would not have conveyed Mr. Glass' presumable physiological distress so much as it would have implied an impromptu outburst of "Smooth Criminal" choreography. His deportment was heyday Moonwalker Michael Jackson. Vintage. Taken out of context, his discombobulation was a study in whimsy.

And I've finally figured out why the Transamerica Building skeezes me so: it looks like a giant metronome. Surely, no good can come of that.
8/18/2001 05:58:49 PM 0 comments

There are days when all the usual people in my life are somehow independently and otherwise disposed, so that the hours are filled with new and different people, familiar only in their anonymity, or by the tasks and services they perform. As if character actors have been substituted for the marquee talent in the movie of my life.

Towards the end of such days, childhood intuition wells up and I speculate that perhaps I awoke in a parallel universe that morning. It only stands to reason, since things invariably assume their routine proportions by the time the sun has come round again.

When I was very young, but not too young, I had this coping mechanism, something that kicked in whenever a grown-up reprimanded or scolded me. I used to figure I was an amnesiac fallen from the stars, a key figure from another world, caught up in some nefarious plot perpetrated by the denizens of this one. Rules and mores were alchemized (rationalized) into something a little more heroic than being told to please use my indoor voice while we learned our multiplication tables. Censure was a form of mind control, a way of keeping me from my true calling.

Recalling that now makes me smile. Do you remember when you were a superhero?
8/15/2001 03:01:58 AM 0 comments

Jailbait!
8/14/2001 12:33:43 PM 0 comments

The Others is a good old-fashioned ghost story in the best sense, with a couple of post-modern subtextual flourishes and a solid eleventh-hour twist that had me grinning from ear to ear. The audience I saw it with was more than game during the plot's various machinations, responding with greater fervor to its modest mind games than to all the pixel-putty nonsense of Jurassic Park III and The Mummy Returns combined. And Nicole Kidman hands in her most engaging performance in over a decade.

A classy popcorn flick, director Alejandro Amenábar's English-language debut is the most enjoyable offering this great big flaccid cock of a moviegoing summer has thus far managed to ejaculate. Bank on it. Go see it.

I'd tell you more, but some surprises are best left intact. And for those of you who've already seen it, I invite you to consider this quote by Thomas De Quincy; it ran through my mind as I watched the movie: "Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man."

Food for thought.
8/11/2001 02:36:03 AM 0 comments

This is, easy-peasy, my favorite Altoids ad ever.
8/10/2001 05:38:49 PM 0 comments

I've got an itch that needs scratching. Would any of you demographically kindred Bay Area types be interested in setting up some sort of guerilla digital video production troop? I'm just thinking out loud here ... the shape of this speculation is indistinct at best, and I have no formal filmmaking experience, let alone immediate access to the necessary equipment, but these circumstances are easily remedied and I'd like to learn, and hopefully create something interesting in the process. Just throwing it out there. Splish splash. Ideas? Suggestions?
8/7/2001 09:33:18 PM 0 comments

Guilty pleasure-dome: Original Sin is by no means a dud. It will flop at the box office, and the critics will eviscerate it, but -- disingenuous trailer notwithstanding (it's not a sex thriller, folks) -- Michael Cristofer's Caribbean potboiler is an atmospheric trespass through a world of richly appointed interiors and period detail. The cinematography is sumptuous, Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas are never less than comely, and the plot, while hardly ingenious, manages to cohere long enough to justify the film's conclusion, which alone raises the production head and shoulders above the logic bombs Hollyweird has lately served up. It's the kind of movie, not unlike 1999's Thomas Crown retread, where you enjoy the scenery. Watching it, you might think to yourself, "I wouldn't mind being a coffee magnate in Cuba, circa 1880, with Angelina Jolie as my mail-order bride." The tone is occasionally uneven, but by and by a mood of erotic intrigue, dark and lustrous, is sustained.

My only objections are a couple of glaringly obvious matte shots and an incongruously cornball, soft-core-Skinemax-y act of simulated sex early on. Otherwise it's swank trash all the way, a nice, breezy, fucked-up love story. And ya gotta love a fucked-up love story.

Plus, it beats standing in line to see Rush Hour 2, the automated success of which will only serve to protract Brett Ratner's unnecessary career.
8/4/2001 11:59:28 PM 0 comments

There are nights when San Francisco isn't just the city I live in, but the city that lives in movies. When the fog rolls in, and the harbor lights become diffuse, and you half expect to see ghosts.

Like tonight.
8/3/2001 10:05:31 PM 0 comments

Happiness is a good buddy who finds a pristine mpeg of your favorite music video for you. "Bad Girl" -- Maddy on the vocals, David Fincher behind the lens, Chris Walken as a softshoeing guardian angel. The angles, the editing -- it's all absolutely perfect, an exemplar of economy and grace: one of the finest music videos ever made, with nary a trace of gratuitous CGI or rhetorical muddle.

There's this one shot, among many that I love, a close-up of M placing a can of cat food on her kitchen counter and picking up a wine glass in one fluid motion -- not a single wasted tremor in her movement, or wasted microsecond of film. Perfect.

Other vids on my shortlist: "Coffee and TV" (Blur); "Bachelorette" (Björk); "Let Forever Be" (Chemical Brothers); "Who Is It" (Michael Jackson); "Jump, They Say" (David Bowie).

And you?
8/2/2001 02:11:19 PM 0 comments