TV Head

Either a tropical monsoon or hot-as-balls this entire weekend, which made it a good one for movies/netflix/tv obsessing. I had a couple of hours to kill before Shauna's birthday party on Friday night, so I used one of my movie passes to finally see Land of the Dead, which was not nearly as good as I'd been led to believe. A nothing plot and I-don't-care-about-you characters, turned it into 90-minutes of special-effects and zombie makeup watching, which still ain't bad way to kill some time. I did love, though, that Romero's way to immobilize the zombies in this one was to mesmerize them with fireworks. Nice subversive touch. Pretty crappy film, though. I much prefer Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later which I just rewatched on HBO-on-Demand, and could be one of the scariest zombie movies ever.

Saturday night I started my viewing festivities with Maria Full of Grace, which left me slightly disappointed, despite the awesome acting and sometimes-beautiful photography. There were scenes that were so perfectly acted and shot that I was literally squirming in my loveseat. But ultimately, I just never really cared about how things were going to turn out for the characters. There wasn't enough at stake for anyone, especially Maria, and I was left with a feeling of: "well, that was good. but so what?" I also felt like it was trying to be "gritty" like City of God, but could never quite overcome the fact that it was 'trying', and still not able to just give us a good story which is, at the end of the day, all we really want.

Right after MFOG, I tuned to IFC for the premiere of Don Lett's new punk documentary: Punk:Attitude, an even bigger disappointment. One redeeming aspect of this film, however, is that it focused on punk in the context of the EVOLUTION of Rock - instead of presenting punk as an anomalous movement that sprang up all on its own, as other filmmakers have done. I'm so sick of the boring "who started punk?" argument, which will never ever be resolved, because it CAN'T BE. In The Filth & The Fury (Julian Temple's Pistols doco), it's almost laughable how many people try to take credit for "starting" punk rock, all the way down to Vivienne Westwood (sic)! It was evolution, a spiral not a line, but no-one really seems to get that, or want to get it. The best line about all that was from Johnny Rotten in TFATF: "Punk was something that should have happened, and did". Thank you. So Punk:Attitude was unique in that it began its timeline with Chuck Berry and Elvis, and continued through post-punk genres like No-Wave (James White, Lydia Lunch, et. al.), throwing the spotlight on often-ignored bands like Sonic Youth and Agnostic Front, and ending with the rise and fall of Nirvana. In all other ways, the film was unremarkable - concert footage interspersed with talking-head interviews with former band-members, none of which gave the audience much insight into the meaning all this ultimately had for them. Henry Rollins was featured quite heavily in the movie, which terrified me at first. For the most part, I think Rollins is a meathead who wrote some good lyrics in his time, but I don't find him nearly as fascinating as the programming staff at IFC obviously does. He seems to rear his tattooed head on EVERY show on IFC, and has never struck me as an interesting TV personality. However, he did end up having the most interesting things to say about punk in this movie, in particular calling out a fact that most other books and movies have managed to ignore, ie that punk started out with experimentaiton and idealism, but very quickly became yet another bandwagon for assholes to jump on. And after the assholes, came stagnation and inevitible death.

I spent the day today with my other Netflix DVD: The O.C. Season One, Disc two. What can I say? Episode 7: The Escape (aka the "TJ" episode) is perhaps the finest hour of television ever aired. Marisa's OD sequence alone was gut-wrenching. After watching, I immediately found the script online and downloaded it, for a possible staged reading on some future rainy downtown day. I've also been keeping my eyes open for the evolution of the famed "bench-sitting" convention used so heavily in season 2, but in the first 8 episodes the closest you get is a little curb-sitting. Not the same thing at all.