Am I possessed?: "(Vatican) Students received a paper detailing a 10-point guide to recognize and prevent interest in the occult. It included a suggestion to parents to monitor whether their children were wearing strange pendants or T-shirts, if they listen to loud music on their home stereos, or watch too many horror movies."

Um...I think I hit the mark on strange shirts, loud music, and horror movies when I was a teenager. Me, and just about every other teenage boy I knew.

I'm most of the way through Takashi Miike's "Gozu". Imagine a Yakuza movie, crossed with "Visitor Q" (the particular aspect of that movie I will leave to your viewing pleasure), crossed with David Lynch. This one is plain bizarro, with a lot of great dialogue. I was even left wondering if one character's pursuit of "glutenous rice" was somehow a nod to Seijun Suzuki's "Branded to Kill."

Ozaki: "It's a Yakuza car, modified to kill Yakuza!!"
Minami: "There's no such thing as a Yakuza car."

or...

Ozaki (to Minami): "Your wiener looks like Frankenstein's."

Generally speaking, the translating is pretty good (well, maybe not, I don't speak Japanese. However, the English is well-formed, not the humorous translations we got in the early 90's wave of Hong Kong action flicks), so I'm guessing that's more or less what he said in Japanese.

My recommendation -- watch the movie, don't ask too many questions, and just enjoy the ride.

I can also recommend "Suspect Zero". Ben Kingsley just chews up the scenery. It's also about remote viewing, which is a pretty interesting phenomenon in its own right. For some reason, this movie didn't get great reviews, maybe due to a similarity to Seven, but I liked it.

You gotta love Kanye West. "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Mike Meyers looked as if he were reliving the SNL skit he did w/Heather Locklear, which spoofed a QVC-like shopping network. Locklear would joyfully promote products with lines like "so easy even a Puerto Rican could use it!", while Meyers would writhe uncomfortably.

I have to disagree w/West in his comment about if it's a white family, they're looking for food, and if it's a black family, they're looting. The only footage I saw of people described as looters was of people stealing as many pairs of basketball shoes as they could carry, loading their cars full of beer, etc. The only person I know of who has ever eaten a shoe is Werner Herzog, and that was the result of him losing a bet. To my knowledge, shoes are not a recommended component of the food pyramid, and should not be considered part of a normal, healthy diet.

Did I really see this commercial last night? It starts out posing the question "So what do 'Sex and the City' and Toyota have in common?" It then actually ends with something to the effect of "and if you think it looks good on the outside, just wait until you check out the inside."

"Advisory: Foul language and vivid descriptions of incest and coprophilia."

Any time you find a statement like that one at the end of a review of a movie, it's going to raise eyebrows.

Mid-day checkpoint...

Listening to: Lucinda Williams in Concert
Reading: ummm, not a hell of a lot these days.
Latest movies: Intermission, Open Water

A friend who I regularly email about all the random genre movies I stumble across suggested I put something online. For lack of a better place, here it goes. And for lack of any better content in this (not-updated-for-over-two-years) blog, why not here?

On to the movie...

It's not often that I misread a movie's title. Star Wars... well that's Star Wars. How hard could that be. I can't actually recall any time in the last decade that I've misread one, until now.

Ok, in my defense, I misinterpreted an abbreviation. I read a description of Takashi Miike's "MPD Psycho" and, seeing that it had as its central theme multiple personality disorder, assumed that the D was for "disorder".

No, not so simple as that. One of the main characters, a former cop who gets involved in certain crimes that the police need help with, suffers from multiple personality disorder. This makes him the...

Multiple Personality Detective

(yes, I looked on the disc, and it clearly spells it out. D-E-T-E-C-T-I-V-E)

MPD Psycho is yet another "What the fuck?" from Miike. Not just in the crimes they're trying to solve, but the fact that the main guy has three or four different identities, and nobody is really sure who he is at any given time.

William Burroughs wrote about language being a virus in "Cities of the Red Night". In Miike's adaptation of this manga, a psychiatrist suggests that one of the personalities itself is a virus and is being transferred around from person to person (or host, as is the case here). This makes for a hell of a premise. There's even talk about the personality "metastasizing". At some points, the personality transmits itself over the phone, or through headphones -- I'd say that he stole the idea from the Matrix, but at least he tacitly cops to that by stealing a visual effect from that movie as well (the cascading waterfall of green).

I've only seen the first episode (it was released as a TV-miniseries in Japan), which makes up the first half of the DVD. The remaining four episodes are being released later this summer on DVD.