9/1 - The Capitol Conspiracy
9/5 - First Blood | Rambo: First Blood Part II | Rambo III
9/6 - Wimps
9/7 - Menno's Mind
9/10 - CJ7
9/11 - The Prophecy
9/12 - The Prophecy II
9/13 - The Prophecy 3: The Ascent | Burn After Reading | The Prophecy: Uprising | The Prophecy: Forsaken
9/14 - Righteous Kill
9/19 - Harold and Maude
9/20 - The Invasion
9/21 - The Thing About My Folks
9/25 - Redbelt
9/26 - The Devil's Backbone
9/27 - Choke
9/28 - Steamboy | Separate Lies

September was quite movieful for some reason. Selected commentary:

• Don "The Dragon" Wilson, star of The Capitol Conspiracy, is my favorite bad action star. I'm particularly fond of his emotional range, which goes all the way from sleepy to constipated.
• Finally saw the Rambo movies. They were full of punchy explodey.
• I expected Wimps to be a Revenge of the Nerds knockoff, but instead it was an awful riff on Cyrano de Bergerac. IMDB informs me almost every female in it was an ‘80s porn star working under a different name.
• CJ7 is the most depressing version of E.T. ever, but it wasn’t meant to be.
• The Prophecy series was disappointing. I was expecting delightful sacrilege, but it was really more like Left Behind for goth kids. The last two moved that way a little, but they also had Kari Wuhrer and no Christopher Walken.
• It’s about damn time I saw Harold and Maude.
• Redbelt is like an understated Rocky. I think I’ll add Chiwetel Ejiofor to the list of actors that herald a good movie for me.
• Choke was okay, I guess. Except for Kelly MacDonald. Adequate as she was in Trainspotting, the performance she gave here was worse than many in Wimps. It was as if she were reading her lines for the first time, and they were written on a notepad by an epileptic and held 50 feet away from her.

I am no longer one of those "HR people." They can take their team-building exercises and De Bono thinking hats and do some generic obscene thing with them to illustrate my disdain.

This doesn't really change anything for me in any real, observable sense, of course. But I'll take meaningless good news over no good news at all.

I haven’t really looked into it, but I’m hoping that John Updike is less respected outside of Pulitzer pop-literature circles. Not that the Pulitzers don’t pick some winners occasionally, but I’ve come to view them as Oprah’s Book Club with just a bit more credibility.

I finally read Rabbit, Run, the first Updike I’ve read, and if I were the sort of chauvinist to use the term, I would derisively refer to this as women’s literature. The dreary sex and squalid lifestyles overlaid with some of the most pointlessly overwrought descriptions of nature and unconvincing beauty are supposed to add up to something profound, but, of course, they don't. Mundanity is mundane, and Updike’s approach to it seems to involve nothing more than mild sympathy and a resignation that occasionally borders on contentment.

Not that the prose isn’t affective. It’s adequate to his project. It seems somehow over-adequate, verily bursting with adequatulence, as his lump of a world-view is conveyed with a big flowery lump of prose smeared with fetishistic care across more pages than are warranted.

The end was strong, in a Lifetime movie sort of way. Or maybe I just enjoyed seeing something genuinely bad happen to these people.

Updike fits snugly into a category of fiction that I have little use for, the irrelevance of which Michel Houllebecq summarized so quotably in his book about H.P. Lovecraft:

"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more."

I don't care to know any more about Rabbit and will not be reading any of the many, many sequels.

• Django may be the ultimate metafilm. And I never thought I'd say this, but Quentin Tarantino's role made the movie.
• Steve Railsback (Lifeforce) is like the anti-Steve McQueen (The Getaway). This is bad for Railsback.
• Cheerful Bergman annoys me a bit, so Wild Strawberries may be my least favorite part of my recent Bergman binge.
• Sometimes I watch movies just to hate them. Hence Mr. Woodcock and The Comebacks.
• I finally watched all of The Godfather movies. So get off my back.
• Slapstick of Another Kind must be the worst adaptation of Vonnegut ever, and it deserves to be out of print.
• If you ever want to see an espionage sequel to a movie that had nothing to do with espionage, and that focuses on translations of forgeries of a book that may never have been written, watch Fay Grim.
• The Night God Screamed didn't quite live up to its title, but it was some Grade A shock regardless.

• A pickup truck with totally bitchin' Iron Maiden graphics.
• Serj Tankian, who I watched maybe 10 minutes of before deciding air conditioning is better than.
• A wicked cranial Jesus tattoo that is sure to help this individual in the job market.
• A girl with a piercing through the back of her neck, which is not a place I've seen pierced before.
• Ozzy Osbourne spraying people with water.
• Blurry Ozzy and his band.
• Blurry Metallica.

• I was coerced into watching Down to You by my stepsister. It was bad even by her standards, and she doesn't have the same searing hatred for Freddie Prinze, Jr. that I have.
• There are still only two good Philip K. Dick adaptations, and Next isn't one of them.
• I really liked Mishima's approach of interweaving short adaptations of his stories with the biographical elements.
• They left out the most important event of Genghis Khan's life in Mongol - when two dudes from San Dimas took him on a most excellent adventure.
• Ed Wood cohort Conrad Brooks "directed" Blood Slaves of the Vampire Wolf. It was shot on video, and Brooks didn't even have the editing skill to remove those recording lines you get in the first seconds after hitting record on a VCR.
• The Highlander anime was pretty entertaining. It had a guy with a giant chainsaw who would press it to the ground and zip around.
• I was glad to fill in some gaps in my Bergman knowledge. His movies from this period seem to be invariably great.
  
• My copy of Return of the Streetfighter was the R-rated cut, so I didn't get to see Sonny Chiba use his gun to stab a guy after he ran out of bullets.

But too vividly remembered not to type up.

• Chuck and Larry was as worthless and awful as it looked.
• So was The Bucket List.
• I don't think anyone has ever put as much effort into being low brow as Ralph Bakshi, and Heavy Traffic showcases this wonderfully.
• Characters in The Strangers all suffered from the terminal stupids, but I almost liked it anyway. The big payoff at the end fell flat, though.
• I do not like the Death Tunnel creators' method of compensating for their low budget with a surfeit of awful video effects.
• I do, however, like the Altered creators' method of showing intestines a lot for no reason.
• Nobody warned me that Behind the Mask was so ho-ho-hilarious. Dane Cook could've played Leslie Vernon. Blech.
  
• Zombie 5 had Robert Vaughn. Barbarian Queen had Lana Clarkson. Both B-movie greats, but one was a lot prettier than the other.

• One minute of Daughters being awful
• Five minutes of Russian Circles not being that
• Photos (i.e., blurry smears of color)

• Evil Roy Slade starred John Astin, Dick Shawn, Mickey Rooney, Henry Gibson, Edie Adams, Milton Berle, and more in a made-for-TV, comedic western. I couldn't not watch it. At least Dick Shawn's guitar had a gun in it, and Mickey Rooney kept singing a song about his finger nub.
• Iron Man was passable. I enjoyed seeing The Dude ride around in a mech.
• Flashing colors + Explosions + Random, out-of-place scatological humor = Speed Racer
• Indiana Jones and the Raping of the Franchise
  
• Lethal Games starred Frank Stallone. Enough said.
• Shinobi was a pretty good adaptation of the same source material as Basilisk.
  
• Trapped Alive was not the girls in prison movie that the cover of the VHS made it appear to be.
• Postal featured entirely too much of Dave Foley's genitalia, but at least Uwe Boll finally admitted that his movies are financed by Nazi gold.
• Clearly the winner of the month, Machine Girl had a drill bra and some of the highest-pressure arterial spray I've ever seen.