I've spent the last few days with inever and it's been a lot of fun. We went to a gay bar on Friday, or whatever day that was, and danced with various people. I saw the queen who I thought was cute from when she was working the bar the Wednesday before, except on stage. She's such a hot slut. ¬_¬ inever got really close with this girl who seemed to be having issues with her boyfriend.. very close indeed. 

We saw The Dark Night last night and it was better than your average super-hero movie. I don't get all the hype, though, aside from it being BRANDON LEE'S LAST FILM.. I mean.. Whatever. It was really a pretty average action movie, which is to say it had an immature plot and lots of splodey stuff. The Joker was played pretty well, ~lick~ but he spoke a bit like Jack Nicholson's Joker at times, except without the commanding boom that Nicholson can project. The Joker's fleshed out thought-experiments made the movie a little tedious, since there were several of them. I still liked Batman Returns best.

I ate too much yesterday, and now I feel terrible. Here's a muxtape for you.

I'm going to go to the Journey to the Centre of the Earth today, to watch it in glorious 3-D. I'm hoping my friend and I can go out for drinks or something afterwards. Is The Dark Knight really a "cultural milestone," or "as near to perfect as a movie can get?" My friend said it was as good as Star Wars (but for different reasons.) Can a Batman movie really be this good? I give you the transforming owl.

This is a link to spoil Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Please click on it and laugh maniacally.

Last night, neVer and I watched the Woody Allen movie, Scoop. In it Allen plays a successful stage magician who meets his co-star, a promiscuous, would-be journalist, during his act, calling her up on stage for a disappearing trick. While she is in the "de-atomizing box" she meets the third star of the movie, a famous dead journalist, or his eternal spirit. 

This is one of Allen's better plots, being a cohesive murder-mystery, but lacks the aesthetic beauty of some of his earlier works, although there are some rich-looking shots on an English estate. This is not to say I didn't like it, in fact I laughed more at this movie than I have for years, and in places Allen wanted his audience to laugh, at anything that wasn't a predictable, trite, and badly-written script.

One question I have about this movie is: Is Woody Allen the one talking into his co-star's breasts, or is it his character, Splendini the Magician? I get the feeling that it's a little of both, as sexuality is always a strong device in his movies.

I saw a Woody Guthrie documentary full of rhetoric and lies. His early, rambling, desperate, hungry, painted, reckless years is who I've wanted to be for probably about 8 years. It seems to take pain and euphoria to make a person whole. I haven't had much of either.

I get the feeling that this Hideshi Hino's Theatre of Horror is a sucky TV hour in jp just as Friday the 13th is in N America. I saw Lizard Baby from the same line of movies and it was terrible. It wasn't suspenseful and reminded me of an ep of the Twilight Zone except it didn't have a twist at the end. Maybe I will try watching the Ringu series or Ju On next instead of subjecting myself to this series.

I have been watching a show called The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱) and it's really pretty interesting about a girl named Haruhi and her obsession with supernatural occurrences. Haruhi seems like some kind of catalyst for a larger plot involving alternate space, time travelling and the Earth coming into existence four years ago. At any rate it is still airing in jp and I have four more eps to watch before I am caught up to the current story line (the last ep aired was 13.) It's based on the Nagaru Tanigawa's Suzumiya Haruhi series of novels which I haven't read and, indeed, don't even know if it's been translated officially, unofficially or at all. Though if I actually do enjoy the TV series enough I will seek them out. I am actually learning a bit of jp. じょうずじゃありません。。。 But I'm not very good. If I get good enough I am thinking about doing some translation for a fansub group or two.

I just finished watching a movie called Dead Girl Walking which is a japanese horror movie about, well, a dead girl.. Walking. It was rather like a french art film (not that i've seen many of those) in which the main girl is put through travesty after travesty. It is done almost entirely in black and white and has a rather low production value, which I like. There are no real twists or anything, just a few very powerful images (it's not a gore fest or anything, so i don't mean dismembered girl bits strewn all over the place.) It's part of a series of movies produced or at least endorsed by one of my favourite mangaka, Hideshi Hino, called Hino's House of Horror or something equally obvious. I would recommend it, though I don't think it's actually very widely available. I got it in an obscure corner of a not so obscure imageboard and it was, luckily, subbed. I also got another movie called something something blah in the same line of movies that was absolutely terrible and boring. Low budget horror walks a very fine line, it seems.

Also, Mushishi is an anime I have been watching. About a race of creatures that exist somewhere between life and death and can be inexactly described as ghosts and the hunters who try to understand and kill them. It is rather well written and well drawn, more so than most anime, I find. It has only been subbed up to ep 21 though there are likely supposed to be 24-26 episodes in the series. I wish one of the numerous fansub groups doing a lesser anime would finish the hell up and resume work on this masterpiece of a show. Maybe i will just d/l the japanese language versions and hope that it is self explanatory enough to follow the story.