EL TOJO

Resident Evil (2002)

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 12:08:12 -0800

Resident Evil (2002) For all the jackboot critical snobbery eviscerating its reputation, Resident Evil is surprisingly grim, tense, and excellently executed. Granted, it uses flashbacks like a crutch, makes a mockery of science, and lacks any flights of scriptorial wit, but damn, it's completely effective and masterfully confident. I mean, I don't know about you but I flinched.

MINUTE 24:41: OK SO BASICALLY ALL I EVER WANTED TO SEE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE WAS MILLA JOVOVICH KICKING A DOG THROUGH A PLATE GLASS WINDOW.

CONCLUSIONS:
I. MILLA JOVOVICH IS A STUD.
II.Michelle Rodriguez is Vice Stud.
III. James Purefoy, I saw your wang once in Rome*! Call me!
IV. Eric Mabius, no worries, I think they've got a cream for what you have! Keep up the good work in Ugly Betty, but lay off the hair gel.
V. Red Queen, you're the finest bitch alive.

* Lie, I saw it many times. Nice.

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American Wangsta

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:23:22 -0800

AMERICAN GANGSTER (Ridley Scott)
Bled of its original mean, grimy charm and thoroughly pre-chewed, Ridley Scott's version of Frank Lucas' life is a candy-floss version of Gangster 101. Lucas's story is heavily bruised by its meat-handed Hollywood treatment - a ferocious gangster defanged by a motion-picture neatness, with all the schemes carefully mapped out for what Scott has to consider the most retarded audience in history.

Nevertheless, despite its sometimes unbearable shlock and its stingingly unsophisticated treatment of what could have been a gorgeous gangster epic, American Gangster manages to win and keep your attention with gratuitous acts of violence and Denzel Washington's perfect, Colgate teeth.

Watch The Wire instead.

NOTE: I've gotta say, I love the whole undersaturated, 70's slide-show look of the entire movie. What can I say, I LOVE THE PORNSTACHE. Also - the soundtrack is a wet dream of trumpets and soul.

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The Martin Amis Experience

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:21:22 -0800

Experience: A Memoir

Martin Amis

Experience: A Memoir; Martin Amis

In which Martin Amis lives in a whirlwind of literary glitterari and fixates on his father, his teeth and little else.

Martin Amis inhabits an entirely different, bizarro universe. Instead of being hemmed away into boring, poorly populated university lectures and back-issues of The Gawker, Martin's authors are celebrated icons. They even get pages in the tabloids! The public cares! No one's even heard of LiLo yet! And in this world, Amis is a notoriously undependable guide.

Experience stutters from event to event, reading like a senile stream of conscience: a life-changing, monumental event here (hello death of EXTRAORDINARILY IMPORTANT FATHER), a minute detail from twenty years past (I like buttons), and then another disorienting forward charge into the future (And then my son was born!). Without the usual milestones of background information and a sensible timeline, it is hard to put Amis' anecdotes into anything resembling a larger frame. He weighs almost every issue equally, which distorts the narrative, with trials of oral surgery ballooning up and looming as large (if not larger in sheer amount of paper) with the death of a father. It reads a bit like a Ralph Wiggum narrative, which is frustrating because it's written with such meticulous and dedicated craft (with of course the obligatory acres of meta-writing on, what else, the art of writing*).

Similarly, Amis waxes poetic (uncomfortably poetic, especially since I was expecting the memoirs of a snaggle-toothed, venom-penned shrew) about the usual - children, literature, family - yet inhumanly glides over the most blatantly emotional periods of his life. Maybe it's a difference in stiff upper lips, but Amis takes news of his family's dissolution and his father's constant infidelity with all the detachment of a biographer writing a retrospective 50 years in the future. So while Experience is an artfully articulate and at times viciously funny peek into the secret lives of literary boobs, the timeline is so jumbled and the emotional timbre is so warped and unfamiliar that it becomes difficult to relate to in any meaningful sense.

*Amis has cornered the market on metawriting on metawriting

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Little Miss Sunshine

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 17:34:24 -0800

Avians

Little Miss Sunshine (2006).
Sweet at its core, but flimsy. Mistakes dysfunction for plot and quirks for character.

Lucky for it, I'm a sucker for dance montages.

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Mean Creek (2004)

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:19:05 -0800

Block Island

Mean Creek (2004). Mean kids suck, action is taken, things go awry.

Mean Creek is suprisingly deft at portraying the emotions and lives of its adolescent characters in a rural Oregon town. While the constraints of each character sometime chafe (troubled bad-boy, sensitive Aryan girl, misunderstood bully), the film, for the most part, details with perfect accuracy the discomforts of a child desperately trying to fit in. It roils along, flirting with poignancy at times and buoyed by its beautiful scenery and cinematography. Unfortunately, after its climax (a scene that veers a little too close to parody. YO DADDY'S BRAINS), the film seems to sag under the weight of the plot. It struggles to keep close to reality which is a credible boon, but the execution unfortunately shows the director's relative inexperience. The script blindly feels its way through to a resolution, disoriented by the events, and never really regains its confident portrayal from the previous half.

However, kudos to its (mostly) uncondescending look at adolescence and its excellent, excellent young cast. Hopefully a sign of great things to come.

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Love in Space

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 23:27:47 -0800

Solaris (1972).

Gorgeously and meticulously filmed, with careful attention to detail and bulging with a surprising number of petty but horrific visual details. However, fundamentally flawed in that it attempts to plumb the depth of the human soul with a cast of underdeveloped, borderline inhuman automatons of philosophy and metaphyics.

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My Lyrics, let me bust you with them

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:28:17 -0800

Lyrics Royale
Invitation to an iron cage death-match for the heartbreaking ballad, the smoking diss, and the loopy genius. Lil Jon need not apply.

No.1 3030, Deltron 3030

3030

Deltron 3030

"Del, I'm feeling like a ghost in a shell
I wrote this in jail playing host to a cell
For the pure verbal, they said my sentence was equivalent to murder."

Deltron 3030's blazing verbal boomerang. The Good Twin of Take No Prisoners English, bursting at the seams with malevolent free-wheeling verbal pyrotechnics and sneering, machine-gun delivery.

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I mean, it's practically in the Constitution

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:40:37 -0700

I figure that after you go to a concert, you're pretty much obligated to post something commemorating a joyous night of fuzzy sound, mashed bodies, and the most enthusiastic white boys in the world.

The Man

RJD2 makes it work

The Music

The Hook: RJD2 - Smoke & Mirrors
Heard on a TV show about cops (Michael Mann's Robbery Homicide Division which was beautiful, gruff, and on during seriously the worst time slot known on earth. Also, not surprisingly, mercilessly canceled and replaced with Numbers of all things. NUMBERS. CBS, YOU AND I NEED TO TALK.). Then spent about five years running through the five words I could make out on the song through Google. Spent another five years trying to download the surprisingly elusive song (said many times: THIS IS THE FUCKING INTERNET. IF I CAN FIND FUCKING VIDEOS OF A TWELVE YEAR OLD BOY FUCKING THE QUEEN MOTHER IN THE ASS WHY CAN'T I FIND THIS ONE FUCKING SONG. WHYYYY.). Now, finally here for your pleasure.

The Sinker: RJD2 - Ghostwriter
My secret weakness: horns.

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Up, Down, Turn Around

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:19:47 -0700

05 Temptation

New Order

I don't know if you know it, but this is the perfect song. Catchy, smirking, adolescent, and with enough of that earnest sweetness to end hunger, procure peace in the Middle East, and most importantly, warm the frigid hearts of all the cynical, shoe-gazing hipsters in the world.

Another person waxes effusive with more vigor and eloquence: http://www.anonymousjuice.com/print/2/neworder.html

Curls at the Concert

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Media Monday

nobody@vox.com(nohablo) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:47:22 -0700

Hear Ye

02 Rock n' Roll

Rhythmicru

Watch Me

Between

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