In Between Days (Redux)

So hopefully the Blogger monster doesn't eat this one. Right now I'm watching Dark City, listening to the Roger Ebert commentary track, and it's terribly interesting, though it doesn't really help me to make any more sense of the movie than before. Dark City is a wonder of production design, but I'm fairly lost, otherwise. That's pretty much for lack of effort on my part. It probably doesn't help that I haven't seen Dark City since its theatrical release, and here I am watching Roger Ebert's commentary with no point of reference from the last six or seven years. It's a terribly interesting commentary, though, and I'm going to have to get Citizen Kane and Casablanca for his commentary, too.

Beyond that, Alex Proyas is really a very good director who spends ... I almost said too much time between movies, since I'd like to see him work more, but then again, the amount of production involved in Dark City and I, Robot really ends up being worthwhile. Oh, sure, everybody likes The Crow, but Proyas' other two theatrical releases are really pretty fucking great, if you haven't seen them. And, with regard to Dark City, most of William Hurt's work is usually pretty good (he was even almost convincing in Lost in Space).

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Japanese anime that runs for twenty-six episodes, and ends in the span of about ten seconds. Sure, you know it's the last episode, but you get to the last one and you go, "What the fuck, is this the end?" and, in about the span of time it takes to ask the question, the show goes, "Sho nuff!" and it's over. And I went, "What the fuck!!!" Sure, it gets really existential at the end, which generally beats your standard Japanese giant-robo kind of thing, but at least Robotech had a satisfying ending, where the humans beat back the aliens, the guys got the girls, and they did this three times. Evangelion basically just sits there and goes, "You have just watched twenty-six of the best-written cartoons you will ever see in your entire life, and... it's over! Haha! Fooled you!!!" Maybe in a couple of days, I'll watch it again, and I'll be able to make heads or tails of it.

The Only Funny Memorable Thing from Class This Week:
It wasn't even written by me, but I came up with the variation listed by the second bullet, which shows why a single word can take a funny situation and drive it to be considerably funnier. Case in point, where one of the other guys wrote the initial situation:

• His: A man sits on a stranger's lap on a crowded L-train.
• Mine: A man sits on a stranger's lap on an empty L-train.

Grosse Pointe Blank is one of those really horrifically bad DVD-transfers that I'd say really deserves a special edition, if not for the fact that it doesn't necessitate a commentary track or anything along those lines, because the movie's just light and fluffy, and it's all there in front of you. But the video isn't anamorphic, and the stereo track (yes, stereo is as good as it gets) contains a lot of hiss at the high end, which just annoyed the hell out of me. Of course, maybe part of that was the fact that I had an open microphone channel on my computer, but it's still fairly awful. Great film, horrible DVD treatment. At least it was only ten bucks or so.

... Yeah, I got nothin', so I'm going to go.


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