the highland cinema

Ouch! Gave me the not so willies.

Billed as a history of the fuzz sound, but really just interviews with the creme de la creme of boutique pedal execs. What a bunch of nerds. Interesting how half of 'em are striving for a decades-passed Platonic ideal while the other half are busy inducing migraines. "Meh," we said as we collectively shrugged our shoulders. Totally not worth your time no matter how much you shred. Check out the ZVex demos instead.

We've been into horror flix for a good while now, but it wasn't until we made some super great friends at our super shitty job that we became the Highland Cinema you know and adore today. It wasn't that long ago (only a coupla years) when all our screenings were John Sayles and Woody Allen. It wasn't that long ago when we thought of our "Splatto Jacko" worship and MonsterVision pantomiming were little more than relics of our teenage past. But before we knew it we found ourselves with brand new compadres making the trek for every new blood encrusted zombie-fest we could get our hands on. Pretty soon the Fangoria convention was a necessity. Pretty soon Riki-Oh was on perpetual repeat. Before long we decided most of them other movies were fucking boring; the only thing worthwhile in this life was the brutal depiction of the epic Hobbesian struggle.

Cemetery Man is truly outstanding all by itself, but we loved it even more than you ever could just for reminding us of our own genesis.

Dave Attell's the best goddamn comedian of my cognizant life. Really, who else'll do a bit on couch fucking or drop a punchline about a crime-solving vagina? We like Captain Miserable less than Skanks for the Memories, but both are soooo much better than anything you're laughing at it's not even funny.

Classic Troma, they say. We liked this one okay we guess, but we really expected more badass and a lot less slapstick. Rick Gianasi gives great performance as a NY cop possessed by the kabuki spirit and we especially dug that Toxic Avenger inspired hero montage where he turned them crooks into California rolls.

Yep, nothing like a mother's love.

Okay, I take it back. Spike Lee did a few good movies. Kinda cool how the Million Men marched on my actual birthday and then Get On the Bus came out exactly one year later, again on my actual birthday. You may fondly remember how a bunch of us drove to that discount theater in town on opening night just to watch this movie before it left the cinema a week later. Maybe it's the ten years of nostalgia talking but we here still think The Bus is some quality storytelling with fantastic characters and top-notch actin'. Recommended for your weekend afternoon!

It surprised EVERYONE when I told them Sex -- The Annabel Chong Story was the most disturbing thing I'd ever seen.

But they haven't seen it.

See, most people think porno is pizza deliveries and mustaches, wah-wah guitars and zebra prints. They're wrong.

Annabel Chong made a name for herself by trying to fuck 300 men on camera in a single day. Her freak show adult cinema feat put her in television interviews the world 'round where she sat, a fidgeting speed casualty, peppering her ex post facto feminist theory rationalizations with nervous tics and uncomfortable laughs. Sex tells you the whole story behind the World's Biggest Gang Bang, how Chong didn't get any of the money promised her (a cool ten grand), how 10 hours of unshorn fingernails made her call it quits at 250, and how once the vid hit the shelves a Florida stripper set a new record and relegated Chong to the forgotten annals of extreme pornography.

What makes Sex more difficult than the rest of the depraved garbage we've shown at the Cinema is that this whole thing is real. Honest to God, one hundred percent live and in the flesh. Chong's interviews show her as a delusional, damaged, emotional wreck whose own college-informed interpretation of her career as a living exercise in gender role reversal is both pathetic and unconvincing. Equally unsettling is the film's footage of adult industry mavens, sleazebags of the highest sort only out to push the human body's limits while ignoring all notions of dignity and respect. Hey, they chose to do this, right? Jesus, gimme a break. This is bad stuff, people. There isn't enough therapy in the world to correct wrongs like this.

Wait, you still want to see this? Go ahead. Stomach this primer and be one your way. Godspeed.

Spike Lee did one good movie. This isn't it.

I saw this right when I turned 20 and it made me feel so enlightened the way it had me thinking everything I'd ever enjoyed did nothing but perpetuate hateful stereotypes. The older I got and less undergraduate I became, the more I thought a second time around Bamboozled viewin' would annoy the living bejesus out of me. And sure, Spike approaches Mencia-like territory the way he dumbs down and then ad nauseumly reiterates the cultural commentary, but I was quite impressed that I didn't want to throw things at the tv like I thought I would. That the offensively simplistic satire is the point doesn't necessarily make it digestible or effective, but the whole thing was strikingly less painful than the me of 2007/nascent '08 expected it to be. Thankfully there's some real power toward the film's end and a couple of great performances by Cinema fave Tommy Davidson and co-leading man Savion Glover.

Helvetica doesn't fuck around. Capitalist, socialist, ironic, sophisticated, straight, round, cosmopolitan, Continental...you name it and it's right there. Just try and find me something that's that built to last. Go ahead, punk, try it.

And take those fucking serifs with you.

These gorefests sure are boring. There's no story arcs or interesting characters or suspense, just lots of talk talk talking punctuated by poor schmucks getting their stomachs torn apart by loin-clothed savages. But are they ever fun to talk about! See:

You're probably thinking, "Hey, Highland Cinema, what the hell kinda flick is this? Now I already saw Lucio Fulci's amazing Zombi 2, the one where the New York eggheads sail to the tropics to find out why Manhattan's getting chewed up by the living dead, the one where that zombie goes mano a mano with a killer shark and that lady gets a stake jabbed right through her retina. The one that gave me the supremest case of the supreme heebie-jeebies since I faced off with Dom DeLuise at the 15th Annual Westchester County Boysenberry Pie-off. So what's this Zombie Holocaust? More New York wimps sailing to Haiti? More gruesome killings? More spleens left on the front porch next to the Daily Herald? Now why in hell would I want to sit through the same golddern movie all over again?"

'Cause this one's about cannibals and not just zombies goshdarnit! Director Marino Girolami throws a handful of living dead stumblers in the coda for good measure, but most of this flick follows these dubbed-over PhD know-it-alls as they traipse around a jungle isle searching for the secrets of primeval human sacrifice rituals...rituals that made it all the way to New Yawk and started leavin' docs and dentists chewed up on the 5th Ave pavement.

Hmmmm, okay this does sound a bit like Zombi, but ya gotta wait til the second half when Girolami treats us to this crazy ex-pat doctor whose hellbent on reanimatin' corpses, swappin' brains, and removin' vocals cords. And stay tuned for the lovely Alexandra Delli Colli, an Italiano vixen who decides to spend most of her time prancin' around all nekkid and unashamed and givin' us the most ultimate of homina-hominas. See, dear readers, how can ya lose? Ya cain't! Especially when that wind-blown Redford understudy grinds up a zombie's face with an outboard motor. Suh-weet.

Now wasn't that fun? Lookit all the great convo-sations we just had over Zombie Holocaust, a movie we're not even sure we liked!

Joe Bob, we loves ya.

A double feature! This one courtesy of a dear friend who hates on Priest, but digs on zombies!

Feast was chock full of the kind of bloody, sloppy, and gloopy effects that just tickle us pink, so even if its standard Living Dead stuck in a house setup was, well....standard we couldn't help but smile. We really liked it when that Best Week Ever guy oozed maggots and monster puke, and the way that newly-pubescent creature humped that lady's face before being blown to smithereens was truly inspired. Feast also hit us with gratuitiuos Jackson-esque fluid sprayin', hip fourth-wall commentary, and tough actin' talents of Young Guns II's Balthazar Getty and the ever-classy Henry Rollins. In fact, ol' Hank's the only reason we watched this in the first place! We chuckled at his pink sweatpants and wept at his demise. Recommended!

And while we're doling out the accolades we'll also recommend this here Cradle of Filth concert. Here at the Highland Cinema we're seriously into the spooky black metal. Our lobby's been blasting the Wolves of the Throne Room, the Mayhem, the Watain, and even the mighty Frost during the many moons of '07 and now that we've upgraded our theater's specs we've decided to screen every concert clip we can get our hands on. So when the of Filth came our way how could we say no? These guys and their corpse-painty Robert Smith style never appealed to us, but it turns out they have many things we do enjoy, specifically things like blastbeats, tremolo pickin's, and glass-shattering screeches! We don't thinks we'll ever get behind their limey Poe-boy shtick, but when the stage spectacle has acrobatic ladies, comin'-to-life gargoyles, and headbanging demon robots we can't help but give 'em the benefit of the doubt. We're also glad the castle lore and lacey vampires didn't scare our guests like that Carpathian Forest concert did. Yeesh.

Isn't it funny how it all seems so quaint? This Golden Age of Pornography, why it was nothing but lovemaking strangers and super-8's. Everyone having a good ole libertatin' time 'til Big Brother came in to rain on the parade. At least you wore your coat!

For a movie I don't remember watching as a child it sure gave me a weird sense of nostalgia.

Ostensibly about pet cemeteries, but really a film about your own fucking miserable life. I don't like this nearly as much as The Rog does, but he's right in saying it's unlike anything he's ever seen or ever will see. Sit in awe and witness regular, mundane, nice people inadvertently reveal their deepest hopes, vulnerabilities, and disappointments when all they're trying to do is talk about burying the family dog. Heartbreaking.

Maybe this Svankmajer immersion wasn't such a hot idea. The Cinema got bored an hour into this and turned it off to download more black metal from eMusic.

We watched the rest later on, but wethinks your interest in the Svank's surreal portrayal of the pain and anxiety of childhood fears is much better satiated with his fifteen minute "Down to the Cellar."

This modern internet age is turning all us regular folks into degenerate slimeballs. It really wasn't that long ago that you had to hunt around to see naked ladies, autopsies, and guys with weird diseases. You really had to have luck on your side to come across that third generation Faces of Death dub or that wrinkly sun-bleached Playboy. But now, in this here twenty-first century, you can see all kinds of gross stuff without even trying! Goatse, tubgirl, lemon party -- all things I had no intention of ever seeing in my entire life and there they are posted right there on some idiot's MySpace page or Photoshopped as some dork's avatar. Just cruising Digg every few days I've seen a whole ton of stories about a sad freak of nature like this poor asshole. Jesus, I can't even imagine what kind of horrible things I could witness if I really, truly, sincerely tried to find 'em.

Oh wait, yeah I do.

Now hold on, that's art it is, and besides, I read about stuff like Cannibal Holocaust ten years ago. The kind of degeneracy I'm talking about is the kind of stuff you'll find in this nice little movie Zoo. Stuff like (you guessed it!) animal fucking! I know the guys in this movie go on and on about how they really love them horsies, but who among us is honestly interested in the demarcation between bestiality and zoophilia? I mean, it's goshdarned gross any way you slice it! Zoo spends the first half of its run time giving you narrations and dimly lit reenactments of guys from all over the globe getting together and bonding over their shared love of the intimacy unique to a man-beast relationship. And where, you ask, did these guys meet? Why, online, of course! Just think about it, while you're here reading 'bout some of the finest feature films ever made, a handful of creepy dudes are IM'ing each other stable-cam pics and swapping stories of equine pillow talk. Yuck. Most striking to me isn't that strange fetishes exist, but that there's a community of fetishists for absolutely anything you can imagine. And the grossest thing you can think of? There's already a community of people totally bored with that! This here internet has made the world so small that nothing is off-limits and no matter what you're into there's a number of other cats out there into the very same thing.

Even if its taking a cock the size of a paper-towel roll up the ass.

Yeah, it's a fucked up world we live in.

Hey, did I mention this movie was really good? No? It was!

Wow, what an okay band! Carpathian Forest is sick and creepy Scandinavians who took Sepultura's Motorhead cover to heart. These tunes, they are the good! They are the hate of the Christianity, the necessity of the sadomasochism, the fervor of the scat-pr0n, and the overwhelming of the pain and suffering of your bullshit existence so fuck you, you goddamn piece of shit! They are also a sandwich of moderate rock tempo'd grind riffs and hellish screaming that's sure to make ya say "badass!" before boring ya with its tedium.

I didn't like this. It was boring, I didn't find it disturbing, and Haneke's attempt to say something about filmic violence and audience participation doesn't work. Surely you will find this flick brutal and/or repulsive with all the matter-of-fact sadistic torture and tension, but my life would be better if I had these two hours back. Keep your eyes peeled for next February's entirely unnecessary shot-by-shot remake.

French entry into the modern arena of "torture porn" that's totally unremarkable plot-wise, but cinema-wise features a final thirty minutes that typify such a sense of mayhem and frightening uncertainty we had to change our overall opinion from "meh" to "hey, not half-bad!" Vincent Cassel's enthusiastic performance as the creepy inbred caretaker was so powerful it nearly overcame our overwhelming hatred of the film's protagonists, a Kant-violating group of discothequeing sleazebags so unlikeable that rooting for their collective demise would be a complement. We're not really sure how much we appreciated this movie and even we were a little surprised at how the film's light peppering of misogyny offended even our sick little sensibilities (especially considering we sat through this whole thing without even batting an eye), but somehow we enjoyed Sheitan's arty hipster aspirations enough to recommend it your way.

Outstanding. This is the first time I watched something nightmarish and surreal and enjoyed what I saw instead of worrying about what every little thing meant. One of the best things the Highland Cinema has shown and I'm even taking the scratched-disc delay into account!

You did say you needed more material for you Queer Studies thesis, didn't you?

They're destined for painful deaths, but at least they made us laugh.

The Isle illustrates what should be a more common characteristic of The Highland Cinema's more erudite screenings, precisely that if we watch something smart without prior knowledge we probably won't get it at all. Chances are we'd have enjoyed this one a whole lot more had the idea that it was "a beautiful, haunting parable about a man in a woman's watery world" been planted in our brains before we dimmed the lights and grabbed the popcorn. Instead we dug the contemplative static shots while we scratched our heads wondering what this whole thing was about. Usually when we sit back to watch something ponder-worthy we already know what to expect and have our extrapolation caps firmly in place, but this time we were left all alone without any guidance and we paid the price.

But that part where the guy swallows those fish hooks and then yanks on 'em and the blood starts pouring out his mouth? Man, that was sure cool.

Crispin Glover's performance was too consciously campy to earn my praise, but that those two twelve year old kids who got high, broke and entered, and conspired to kill the Keanu Reeves did a damn fine job. What a couple of fuckers they were.

Also stars Ione Skye, the former cheese to some guy's macaroni!

I think it's funny how my desire to visit the Czech Republic stems from my amazement with this piece of Polish animation. It's like I think anything weird is automatically Slovakian even when I know damn well it ain't. Little Otik, by the way, is both Czech and strange so maybe my borderline irrational assumption isn't entirely off the mark.

Errol Morris is a genius.

Honesty's the only thing that matters, right? People like Johnston 'cause he lays out all his vulnerability and romance and sadness and doesn't hold anything back. His proto-Oberst quivering and ham-fisted chord strums are charming, but the fact he had no choice but to sit in a basement and record hours and hours and hours of naive mash notes made the cool kids swoon and lecture their friends about genius, goddamnit.

Or maybe they just like the mental illness, demonophobia, and XXXL sweatpants.

Reviews were never the intention of the Highland Cinema. What came to mind, now that was the intention. So here's a few thoughts I had during this one:

(1) There's no reason you should listen to shitty music. None. You have no excuse. I'm not here to convince you Roky Erickson is some genius or visionary or that he's the reason you shouldn't listen to shitty music, but in this sad and beautiful world where there's so many fucking bands out there you're a real idiot if you're gonna listen to junk like "Ridin' With the King." See, here at the Highland Cinema we thought we knew everything we needed to know about the cool and angry post-punk rock music of the 1980s. We had all the Big Black and Butthole Surfers records. We knew the names of the guys in the Birthday Party and the Swans. But you know what? We found out there was a whole shitload of music we didn't know anything about! Nothing. Turns that before Reagan took office there was a whole lot of fucked up proto-industrial noise and weird rock bands out there. Whitehouse, NON, Helios Creed, Chrome, Throbbing Gristle...the list goes on and on and on and on. And how about Jandek or Can or Keiji Haino? Guys who've been putting out wicked strange records for a long long time. There's a TON of really really really interesting music out there, music you may not like or get, but music that you might as well expose yourself to since you're just gonna die pretty soon and no one wants to hear you complain about Nickelback all day. Lucky for you, this modern age has rendered your musical pretension only a few clicks away! Why, just look at me! Thanks to Mark Prindle, Electrical Audio, and Steve I listen to all kinds of stuff I never would've found on Clear Channel. In just the past few months alone I bought a super-girlified pop record, the Pig Destroyer catalog, and sat through two hours of shrieking bass feedback. I might just pick up some more ambient drone before I listen to even more black metal. Keep in mind that all this stuff is completely new to me and I didn't think I'd ever dig any of it. It's all stuff I found out about as an adult and then really enjoyed as an adult. There's no reason to grow out of anything.

(2) Just like Crumb, this Erickson family is fucked up. If you just peruse Roky's bio you'll see a big ol' tragedy of mental illness, but when I sat here and watched this thing I had a hard time getting past the fact that Mama Erickson has some serious problems of her own what with her hoarding and religious fanaticism and vehement distrust of the medical industry. And then there's younger brother Sumner Erickson, a guy who seems so noble the way he fought a court battle to get custody of the middle-aged Roky just so he could get the guy's schizophrenia under control and turn him into a productive citizen. Looks like it all worked out so well, right? Not three months back Roky played right down the street at Bumbershoot like a real functional music-makin' adult would. But watch You're Gonna Miss Me's bonus feature and catch how Sumner talks about how mental illness is a way of acting rather than a chemical imbalance. Wait, what? Are you serious? His story's just as much documentary fodder as Roky's is, no doubt. Picture it: younger brother of nutcase cult rocker rises out of his dysfunctional family to become wealthy Philharmonic tuba player and New Age devotee. Wow! Sign me up!

(3) This movie was really good. It's always nice to know that you started a movie feeling like you didn't know shit about someone and by the end feel like you truly got it. All of it. Why the music was important. Why the story was important. Why Thurston Moore, Byron Coley, and the fucking Austin City Limits give two shits about the guy. Bravo.

Zombies and yakuza! Yakuza and zombies! Man, what a sales pitch! Has anything ever sounded so cool? Of course not! Fortunately for us, Versus is a pretty darn good flick, a great story of an escaped convict as he's chased by legitimate businessmen through a forest that both brings the dead back to life and is a portal to the netherworld. Yeah! Here at the Cinema, we found the extended sequence of the undead rising from their arboreal graves to terrorize their mafioso killers to be as outstanding as anything to ever come out of Japan. And the Peter Jackson-styled comedy and even more Peter Jackson-styled blood flow?!?!? Unbelievable!

There's this guy on the Electrical Audio forum who has the Pixote poster as his signature. That means that three or four or (most likely) five times each and every day I see that weird lookin' movie pic with the even weirder lookin' kid staring at me. Eventually I figure, shit, I oughta look up this Pixote flick to see what the deal is, and thanks to the magic of these here Internets I find out it's a critically acclaimed picture about Brazilian street kids! Real life kids plucked right off the street and told to play fictionalized versions of themselves just for your viewing pleasure. "Whoa, sign me up!" I said.

Unfortunately, the US of A has yet to make this one available on the home market.

But, hey, that's no prob, right? Resourceful guy that I am, I decide all I need to satiate my filmic favela fever is some of them other flicks directed by Hector Babenco. Surely he'd have something else (and something easier to find) that'd help me pass my time. So I click on them imdb hyperlinks and settled on 2003's Carandiru, a picture that I thought would be all about the 1992 Sao Paolo prison riot so famous Sepultura wrote a song about it. Problem is, this movie is more a fictionalized account of fictionalized accounts of some of the inmates and their woeful stories of poor heat of the moment decision making. Turns out only the last half-hour involves the Policia, the rest of the thing is the noble tale of a doctor who wants to quell the HIV wildfire, the sweet tale of a guy who marries a drag queen, and the sad tale of a nice kid who shot some guys that messed with his sister.

So, yeah, I was a bit disappointed. I mean, wouldn't you be? Keep in mind that Carandiru is still a pleasant way to spend your IFC-viewing time. It's got lots of over-saturated lighting and sweaty overcrowding, and with all its dingy prison stuff and subtitles you're bound to feel better about yourself, like you're real smart and liberal and you actually care about the plight of foreign peoples and the charisma of their not-so-different-from-us cultures. And as an added bonus, this flick is tame with the brutality so you won't feel like a total scumbag!

Holy shit, this movie is so fucked up the DVD player broke for two days when we tried to watch the bonus disc. The goddamn bonus disc! The one with the interviews and biographies and making-ofs. We're still scared about what may have happened had we popped in the regular feature disc, the one with all the grotesque animal slaughter, impalement, castration, dismemberment, ethnocentrism, bludgeoning, and bloody misogyny that made Cannibal Holocaust the deplorable exploitation classic it is today. Nope, before we could even push play on any of that stuff our Bose 321 took five and stepped out for a smoke. We hope he'll recover.

Yay, more Dwarves! And this time they want to fuck! Want to fuck! Want to fuck, eat, and fuck you up! Enjoy, if you will, two differently-rated versions of the 2005 tune "FEFU," a making-of feature, and a bunch of hand-held live and interview footage. Y'know, you don't actually have to enjoy it by watching this DVD, you can just read the Prindle review and pretend. That sounds like more fun, don't it? We think you'd probably enjoy it more! We love the Prind and think his synopsis and opinions on this here video collection are so appropriate and comical that we'll send some clicks his way. (We like that "FEFU" song way more than he does, by the way.)

Now if you do watch the DVD the Highland Cinema recommends you don't skip the interview segments, segments which we're certain we liked so much since we got to see the sheer sleaziness of these guys. And it's some sleeeeaaaaze. Not necessarily over the top in its misogyny, but just kinda gross. Sure, Blag seems like a smart feller what with his book-writin' and tunesmithery, but every now and then there's a sliminess that just can't just be part of some shtick. Yeesh. And keep in mind that He Who Can Not Be Named has to be a legitimately creeped-out motherfucking psychopath. Seriously, what kind of person delights in shaking his penis around and cracking skulls with his guitar? Hmmmm...hopefully not the same kind of person that'd delight in watching such things.

I never got into Burma even though I saw 'em on the first reunion tour and I've had Vs. for the past seven years. I get it. I can hear the influence these guys had, I can understand why they get them glowing accolades, but I just haven't boarded that Mission of Burma train. Which is too bad, I suppose. They seem like really nice and super smart older dudes who finally get to enjoy the luxury of playing interesting songs to people who are dying to hear 'em. I found it pretty remarkable that prior to this reunion Clint Conley hadn't touched a guitar for years and years , but I found it even more remarkable how intimidated I was by Roger Miller.

Look, we've all been watching Behind the Music these past ten years. We've all seen Nikki Sixx talk about shooting up and dying and then OD'ing immediately after. We all know how Zeppelin put a shark in that lady's special place and how Def Leppard enjoyed mother-daughter teams under the arena stage. So why should anyone care about Phil Varone? He played with..who?...oh, yeah, Saigon Kick and then for the post-Baz Skid Row. Wow. He's addicted to coke and has less than $2 in his bank account, and all he wanted to do with his life was play the drums. Hey, it's not like I'm saying his story isn't sad or unfortunate, but I think it's safe to say that if any one of us wants to hear about the perils of rock and roll decadence there's a ton of better places to do so.

So I'm listening to a lot of Dwarves lately. A lot. Come Clean, How to Win Friends, Must Die, Are Young and Good Looking. Sure, it's all Dwarves of the past ten years, Dwarves that sound like the Ramones, but I think this stuff is aces. Maybe not as mean-spirited or blatantly misogynist as the Dwarves of yesteryear, but them studio knob-twiddlings make these pop furies sound so good.

To go along with the band's kinder and gentler recorded sound is a kinder and gentler live show. Whereas internet legend has led me to believe that early early 90's performances were ten minute sets of thievery and bloodshed, the Dwarves shows of 2004 are apparently tame affairs. They last 30 minutes(!) and no one gets in a fight. Singin' man Blag Dahlia doesn't even give us clever raps, only a "yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...fuck yeah" between every single goddamn song, and the bassist looks like a tennis pro. At least resurrected guitarist (and assuredly insane motherfucker) He Who Cannot Be Named still wears a speedo and lucha libre mask. Yes, these Dwarves hardly fuck(ed) me up when they got live, but I still really liked the setlist.

The interesting sidenote to all of this is that I actually saw the Dwarves in October of '04 so chances are I saw an exact replica of this Fuck You Up show. I wish I could reminisce more, but I honestly only went to the gig to catch the Cruel Romeos.

We've been here in Seattle for over a year and this is the first time we've watched this one. Keep in mind that even if Hype! wasn't a really good flick we'd still love love love it since it'd hearken back to our junior high Come As You Are-readin' days. This viewing taught us that the so-called "grunge" scene is such a part of us that everything we've wanted from rock music comes straight from the apparent NW band aesthetic: regular dudes havin' fun, playin' riffs, and not givin' a darn. Whoa!

What a fantastic movie. TV, I love you.

Y'know, "Predator" really didn't do it for me at first. I mean, I liked that opening grumblin' riff and cymbal crash, but those vocal lines during the verses just sounded so clumsy and awkward. But then in no time, I wised up and realized "Predator" was the greatest song by the greatest band of all time. Stick around? You bet.

I really like how no one likes this movie and I fucking love it. So sad and so well shot. Thanks, guy who works for David Cronenberg!

They pronounce it "Go-jeer-a" but I say "Go-here-a." I think I'm right.

From Mars to Sirius is such a great record that now all I listen to is Archgoat, Dissection, and Cephalic Carnage.

Yeah, I'm not surprising anyone by saying we outsourced this to the 7th Ave cineplex, but we defend this post since it's the kind of thing the Highland Cinema loves. Since we're down with Herzog we were obviously down with Rescue Dawn even though we're not sure how triumphant we'd have found it had we not seen the documentary version first. The story in and of itself is rather amazing (pilot escapes from Laotian POW camp) and there's plenty of beautiful camera work to keep cinephiles amused, but if we were unfamiliar with Dieter Dengler's pre-war biography we'd probably find his harrowing jungle trek embellished, unbelievable, and utterly preposterous. But as it stands, we think this the Dawn works awfully well as a Needs to Fly companion piece, but if it ever came down to a Herzog-filmed Dengler-themed Thunderdome we'd know the documentary would exit unscathed.

Hahaha. That picture's gonna give you nightmares.

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