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, February 05, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Conjure, Wife meets All The President's Men! I've always been a sucker for magical thinking. So when Edi and I watched Three Kings last night, it made me wonder if the Republicans hadn't somehow cast a, a, a goddamned spell to put us back in 1991. Three Kings was a pretty good movie when it first came out--now it seems like an amazing movie, in part because it's so fuckin' topical. What's changed? Nothing's changed. When George Clooney is boondoggling the Iraqi guard into giving him a fleet of cars by hollering, "George Bush wants you! And you! And you! We are a coalition of brothers and President Bush wants you to help us! God bless you! God bless the USA! And God bless a free Iraq!" Edi and I looked at each other and I could almost see the gooseflesh, like a centipede, running down her arms and up mine.How else but fucking voodoo magic? It's 2005, but it's really 1992--George Bush is our President, he just won the second term, we're eyeing Iran like it was a piece of prize meat. The big question is: will we repeat the horrible tragedy and just leave the Iraqi people to be slaughtered? I suppose the other big question is: if we hadn't cut and run and given Sadaam ten years to crush the opposition we had fomented, would shit be so fuckin' hard in Iraq now? Our next stop in our magical time machine was 1988, as we rented the first two episodes of The Singing Detective. Edi and I had both seen it on PBS around the same time (separately, of course) so it was fun to see which scenes each of us remembered vividly and which we didn't. Oddly, we both remembered, down to the cadence, young Marlow's speech in the trees about what his life will be like when he grew up, although neither of us remembered it until we heard it. It was like remembering a long-lost but very vivid dream, with the bonus of watching the face of the person next to you as they remembered it, too. Separate and apart from that, it's extraordinary stuff--puts even the best TV from today to shame, and most of the movies. Having a certain masochistic curiousity, we intend to rent the movie after we've re-watched all the episodes. Because we're watching them on hoary old videocassette, the picture quality is total shit--or maybe that's the miracle of BBC TV. But the grungy quality alone summoned up that miserable era where we were both young, reading the same books and watching the same TV and not even knowing the other person existed. Kinda fun. I have promised Joel (a.k.a., "The Guy Who Loaned Me Ong-Bak") I'd loan him both Metal Gear Solid 3 and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time next week. So by Friday, those games will be out of my hair. "My girlfriend is going to hate you, dude," he said when I promised him. "Yeah," I replied, "but maybe my girlfriend will stop hating me." I rented The Punisher, by the way, and felt like I was playing a hobbled version of Max Payne--not worth battling my way through to get to the cool Interrogation scenes (which haven't really seemed all that cool yet, although they show some promise). And then it's just GTA and that's it! No, really! I won't even blog about video games--hopefully. posted by Jeff Lester | 4:50 PM | |
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