Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, August 21, 2004 The Pitch: It's Lost Weekend meets Pokemon: The Motion Picture! (Apologies for all the upcoming swears in this entry. It's only one phrase, but it appears alot.)Years and years ago, a movie played the Castro once--or maybe twice. It was billed as a Mexican melodrama musical, a genre from the '50s called cabareteras, mixing a noir plot and musical numbers. I remembered the name of the movie, L'Aventurea, but could never find anything about it on the web, which drove me nuts because I had missed it at the Castro and it never played the Bay Area again. So Monday morning, I'm sleepily perusing moviepoopshoot.com and HOLY FUCKING SHIT. There's a blurb about Aventurera, a Mexican noir musical. I don't know if it just came out on DVD, or it had been out and it just got reviewed but HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Last Friday (the 13th), this guy who shops at CE comes in and we start talking. He just started getting into comix, and he already has seriously good taste. Apparently his brothers and his friends recommended a lot of good stuff. So I recommend some other good stuff and he comes back a few weeks later and says he likes it. Great guy, affable, knowledgeable. Anyway, so this guy stops in and we're chatting again and I point him to stuff I know he'll like and he goes, "Hey, did you check into that movie I recommended last time? Ong Bak?" "Ong Bak? Oh yeah, I saw the trailer on the Web, and it blew my mind! It looked beautiful!" "Oh, yeah? Well, if you can play VCDs, I can lend you a copy." HOLY FUCKING SHIT. "Uh, yeah. You don't mind? Cuz that'd be really awesome." So yesterday, five minutes before I head out, this guy, Joel, drops in the store and is like, "Oh, hey. Here's that VCD. Lemme know what you think." HOLY FUCKING SHIT (SQUARED). Admittedly, I seem like a nice guy, and he knows where I work, but I've had maybe three discussions with Joel and he's totally lending me a VCD that he's already said he bought back on the East Coast and totally can't find in Chinatown out here. Then, Edi and I went to the Paramount Theatre, settled in to our plush comfy seats and watched the original Shaft from 1971. The print was old, the sound was seriously fucked up (for the first third, the entire audience was leaning forward going "huh?") and the movie is seriously low-budget, spending long stretches of time with Shaft just walking around New York (between this and his frequent cab rides, the first half of Shaft seems like an Italian neo-realist critique of the New York transit system). But, still, HOLY FUCKING SHIT. The soundtrack! The squalor! The unctuous self-love of John Shaft! It was pretty great. The unfortunate side-effect of all this sanctified merde being flung around? At lunch today, I went up to my cheap Chinatown source and found Ong-Bak on VCD for six bucks. Then I went that one better and found the DVD for sixteen. Then I came back to work, checked to see if DeepDiscountDVD had Aventurera for sale. Which I ordered. Along with The Honeymoon Killers, Donnie Darko and the upcoming 2 DVD release of La Dolce Vita. Wow, I have a serious case of Poor Impulse Control. Holy fucking shit. posted by Jeff Lester | 4:30 PM | |
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