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Memo, May 11 2004 TO: CSB I have decided to set the record straight. Both of you who read this on a regular basis have probably been wondering: what happened to that feckfuck who wrote the memos on LookSharp? Perhaps there were rumors. He Type-A'd himself into an early grave. The vein on his forehead burst and he was sent to an early grave. The authorities took him away, to a place where he will undoubtedly be sent to an early grave. He was sent to a well-timed grave. But none of these are true. I have just been away for a while, and upon finishing this memo, I will be going back there. But before I go, I just wanted to set the record straight. Ahem. For the record: --I liked Kir Bir Volume 2 just about a hundred million times more than Volume 1. Which means I liked it okay. But here's the big difference: Q settled on picking single music cues for each cinematic beat. Thank you, Quentin. Also, for all the "humor" that fell on its ass and cracked its tailbone in Volume 1, even the Pai Mei clichés in Volume 2 got laughs. The movie was funny. And David Carradine, whose most admired work to me before was as Frankenstein in Death Race 2000, was great. So was Budd. I loved the trailer fight, right down to the endless Leone cut-betweens, and thought it deserved the hyperbolic praise heaped on the flat plateau of a Crazy 88 sequence in the first one. And the punchline to the two movies (revealing Tarantino to truly be the closet romantic he is) was very nice. So it turns out that Kill Bill was, all along, revenge movie as a metaphor for hating those that we once loved? Awww... BUT What the fuck, Sally Menke and Quentin Tarantino? WHAT THE FUCK!?! Does EVERY SCENE HAVE TO BE THAT FUCKING LONG!!! DOES EVERY PAUSE HAVE TO BE THAT FUCKING LONG!!! DO I REALLY NEED TO SPEND THAT MUCH TIME WATCHING A WHITE MAN DO A MEXICAN PIMP IMPRESSION!!!?!!!!! DO I!?!!! DO I!!!!!!!?!!!!!! Anyway, ultimately the movies are Quentin at his most masochi- at his least imaginative. Everything is cobbled together from other flicks, but besides the punch to the Elle Driver fight, I never felt Quentin pushing the envelope and the boundaries of where this material can go. It was just all so underwhelming. And when he literally buries his story, I can buy how she got out of the coffin, but how the fuck did she get out the ground? Oh, wait, I forgot... it's just a movie. But... doesn't that mean I don't give a shit about the characters? Then why am I spending so much time listening to these characters emote if I-- aw fuck it. Fuck fuck fuck it. Everybody who loves these movies loves them, and I'll just have to be one of those people who doesn't. I swear, Tarantino acts as if there's this rulebook out there that we all have memorized that films should all follow. He should piss on that rulebook and take something from his life and say it cinematically. There's probably a reason that the only scenes in Kill Bill with any conviction involve a washed up redneck and a guy with a broken heart. And probably a reason why those scenes were the ones I liked the best. For the record: --Club Dread contained several moments of Fuckin' Awesome Paxton. If those people who died of heart attacks during The Opiate of The Masses had instead died while watching Coconut Pete have a meltdown over his paella recipe, they would have been received by God with open arms and a clap on the back, instead of going straight to hell where they will be sodomized with corncobs for all eternity. No, really, I read that if you die while watching The Passion of the Christ, you go straight to hell! It's true! You have to see the part where he dies for your sins before you can get to heaven. Anyway, that's what I heard. Personally, I believe that as soon as that Jesus flick hits video, the earth while open and swallow everybody involved in that production and take them straight to hell, even Caleb Deschanel. Why, you ask? Because it would be funny. As for the movie, I didn't see it. I predict that it will win Best Picture. For the record: --Lost In Translation contains good performances and is as boring as watching a donkey chew. As in to say it gets really boring after about ten minutes. Bill should have won the Oscar. For the record: --Mystic River contains the single most ridiculously bad Tim Robbins performance I've ever seen. All he did was look wide-eyed and talk through his nose. It's nothing he hasn't done before and better. I'm glad he won the Oscar. As for Sean Penn, he gave a great, honest performance that I think Clint fucked up with his staging, which ranged from dull and static to grandiose and inappropriate. I like Clint a lot, but it was gritty source material shot by a far too old-fashioned film-maker. "Is that my daughter in there," should have and could have been the most heart-breaking moment in the movies, if Clint just held that fucking scene a little longer and not let the music swell and the crane lift. Fucking movies. Anyway, Sean was good, but disappointing if you put Mystic River next to God-like brilliance in Dead Man Walking and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But he should have walked down those steps and given the Oscar to Bill. Or at least dropped his pants. For the record: --What would happen if we knew nothing about directors? Not even their names? If film had no publicized ownership for the general public? If we didn't know the ethnicity, gender, age and background of the creator? I know that I like American Psycho that much more because it was directed by feminist Mary Harron and co-written by lesbian (and feminist?) Guinevere Turner, but there's a wonderful film called Jesus' Son that was directed by a Canadian woman named Alison MacLean who hasn't done many movies, but I love this one like it was my own (as opposed to great films like Boys Don't Cry that I don't want to go through again). I just wonder what would happen if we could only judge film from the film itself and not factor that it was made by an Indian Woman or a White Man who lost a loved one in real life. Kill Bill would still not be very good. For the record: --Russell Crowe does a good Richard Burton impression. If they ever make a Richard Burton biopic, it would be a perfect role for him. Which is why they should cast Keanu Reeves. For the record: --A friend of mine recently made a video comprised solely of his going to the video store with a camera and a microphone and renting eight porno movies. He then cut it into a segment that the student TV station has since refused to air. I have seen it, and in seven minutes it is more artistically satisfying and has more to say about humanity than the entire length of Seabiscuit, Cold Mountain, and The House of Sand and Fog. Funnier too. Well, maybe not as funny as The House of Sand and Fog. But made at a fraction of the cost. For the record: --The trailer has just been released for Spielberg's next movie, called The Terminal, loosely based on the real-life experiences of an Iranian man who was not allowed to leave the airport during whatever our problems with Iran were in the '80s. So they cast Tom Hanks. As an immigrant from a fictional country. This might not even be so bad, except that Tom Hanks at no point in this trailer comes off like anything besides Tom Hanks Movie Star doing a Russian accent (at least grow a beard, goddammit!), and the movie appears to be a love story (the romantic interest is Catherine Zeta-Jones. As a flight attendant), and there's a cover of "Leaving On a Jet Plane"- anyway, I have to applaud Mr. Spielberg for having the opportunity to make a story that breaks down stereotypes and maybe reveals a piece of humanity that we don't see enough in the movies, and using his considerable clout to make it as a romantic comedy with Tom Hanks. Imagine absolutely anyone even remotely Middle-Eastern looking in the lead while watching that preview and realize how culturally and artistically bankrupt Mr. Spielberg is. It's fucking offensive. And yes, I'm pre-judging. But I'm right. The movie will make a hundred million dollars, which will be approximately twenty million in profit after marketing costs. For the record: --Summer movie season is upon us, and my last memo from the last summer is floating around here somewhere, and once again, this season is completely the same and last summer's memo is completely applicable. Let's hope for some bright spots. Summer movies have a way on insinuating themselves into our consciousness in unexpected ways. Hell, I watched X2 at a matinee, came home and watched Secretary on DVD, fell asleep and had a dream that Nightcrawler had Storm and Rogue bent over a desk, slapping their asses with his floppy azure-hued penis, streaking their bare buttocks with his blue-tinted semen. Rogue: "Oh my God." And if writing that down doesn't land me in jail, then certainly nothing I write in these memos will. And finally, for the record: I still love movies. I still love films. I still love flicks. And I hope to spend the rest of my life making my own, in whatever shape, form, or context that means. For the last year, I have been sitting at a desk from 12am to 8am in the morning of every weekday, trying to stay awake with a mixture of caffeine, sugar, and the internet; a combination I call HulaCrank. I do this for money, and I was paid by the very college that sucked me dry over five years of parking tickets. Somewhere along the way I discovered the password to the parental control on this computer's DVD player, and since that time I have used it to watch 24 Hour Party People, Max, The Last Detail, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Amores Perros, all three Evil Dead Movies, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 1 & 2 &: Remake (SUCKED), both versions of Solaris, Married to the Mob, The Good Girl, Bloodsucking Freaks: Special Edition, Narc, The Party, Intimacy, Highball, A Decade Under the Influence, Moonstruck, The Verdict, Comedian, Water Drops On Burning Rocks, The Office: Series 1 and 2, Jason X, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, The School of Rock, All the Real Girls, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, Not of This Earth, Joe Versus the Volcano, Schizopolis, Gray's Anatomy (Cheers to the late Spalding Gray), Kids in the Hall: Same Guys New Dresses, In the Cut, Intolerable Cruelty, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, Melvin Goes to Dinner, The Confessions of Robert Crumb, Crumb, Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 1, Go Fish, Love Serenade, The Thing Remake, To Live and Die in L.A., The Housekeeper, Body of Evidence (DaFoe's face in Madonna's crotch! I'm there! Aaarrrgh!! It's as scary as I thought it would be!), Training Day, Fright Night, Cabin Fever (KINDA SUCKED KINDA!), Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Nightwatch (a special experience, watching that movie at work, since that's basically my job... Security guard in an empty building. And pouring other men's jizz on dead asses), Sunshine State, Swimming Pool, Super Troopers (COX!), Freddy vs. Jason (SUCKED HILARIOUSLY!), My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski (Liked it a lot, but it didn't make me want to see the films) American Wedding (REALLY REALLY SUCKED!), HULK(!), Altered States, Lakeboat, Made (my brother hates this movie), The Last American Virgin (This is one strange dickpunch of a film. See it sometime), Videodrome, Something Wild, Carlito's Way, XX/XY (I've seen Mark Ruffalo in four films and I still don't know who he is), May (Loved it, see May, don't read the back of the box), Excalibur (is it okay that I think Excalibur is kind of a sucky movie? Merlin kicks ass, though), Bound (commentary is annoying and hilarious), S.O.B. (Mary Poppins' boobs!), Willard Remake, Body Heat, Croupier, Essex Boys, A Rage in Harlem, Women in Film, Best of The Muppet Show: Peter Sellers, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, Spider, Laurel Canyon, Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter, Straw Dogs (still hate this film), Cotton Comes to Harlem, Run Ronnie Run, Scanners, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Jaws 1 & 2, Chopper, Eaten Alive, Ginger Snaps, Into the Night, The Cheerleaders, Revenge of the Cheerleaders, and, of course, The Cheerleaders Walk Among Us, Shampoo, Re-Animator, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Don't Look Now, The Fortune Cookie, Chinatown, Ran, Glengarry Glenn Ross, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon, Touch of Evil, Psycho (original), The Fisher King, An American Werewolf in London, Swimming With Sharks, Amelie, Ghostbusters, Brazil: Director's Cut, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and all available-on-DVD episodes of Futurama and Mr. Show. I also wrote and completed a feature film script, as well as two short ones, and I began writing my memoirs. In the midst of all this movie-watching and HulaCranking, I also wrote a few memos to my brother, hoping to make him laugh as well as expunge a few pent-up opinions. Sleep deprivation plus the various stimulants often caused these memos to be created in a tidal-wave filled, vortex wind-tunnel of thundering brain activity, and I usually followed their completion by cranking up the music and barreling like a madman around the little lobby of the building I am being even now being paid to protect. Next week, my hours change to a much more reasonable 4-midnight shift. I will no longer have to rely on HulaCrank to stay up, nor do I intend to waste my energy moshing with myself in the lobby of a building that is likely to contain various programmers working late. I intend to waste it after I get off at midnight. I also intend to start sleeping on a normal-during-the-night schedule, and be awake during the day, the complete opposite of the entire last year of my life. What I'm saying is that these memos are going to stop. I'll no longer be the insane ranter I once was, and I'll begin to have far more discretion, so why bother? I might actually make sense and create reasonable thoughts. And who wants to read those? Instead, soon this spot on the clock will be replaced by a much more predictable website designed to promote myself as a film-maker. For those of you who are fans of the ol' LookSharp memos, bookmark them now, because I ain't going to leave them out in the open (I'm betting that Ratner three-parter will hinder my ability to sell-out a bit if the right people read it). But I'll always leave them up on the net somewhere, for you special people out there who want to have something to quote next time you pop in that Red Dragon DVD, only to be stared at by the people who are trying to enjoy the movie. Who, by the way, are complete asses. And for those of you wondering if I'm ever going to put my money where my mouth is, next time you come here and this memo is down, in its place will be all the shit that I've been making all during this time that you all only knew me as a maniac jackass. It's then that I hope for feedback. Throw the first stone, motherfuckers! Thanks, everybody, for the time spent reading my whackfuck bugass rantings and ravings. And always remember.... no matter where you are or who you are with... always, always, ALWAYS Paxton. |