Reviews

You wouldn’t expect a movie about corporate espionage among multinational anime porn to be a bad viewing experience… well, OK, maybe you would. Still, I thought Demonlover was worth my ten bucks. Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep got excellent reviews, and Demonlover stars Connie Nielsen and Gina Gershon, so there was potential there. I pretty much liked the first half. Chloe Sevigny was tremendously callow, and whether or not her character was meant to be played that way, her performance left me cold. The rest of the movie was fine, though. Very stylish, shot in blues and greys in a kind of 70s futuristic aesthetic. The plot was nicely tangled. ...

George Alec Effinger fans will want to be making their way to “Golden Gryphon Press”: and picking up a copy of Budayeen Nights. Nine pieces of fiction, all set in the world of Marid’s Budayeen. Four of them are Marid stories, including one which is just the first two chapters of the never-finished fourth Budayeen book. One of them is the first few pages of what would have been the last Budayeen book. One of them is a Honey Pilar story, and it rocks. ...

The NBC version of Coupling is incredibly bad. I know, everyone said it was bad, but I wanted to see for myself. I lasted about five minutes before screaming in horror and deleting my TiVo season pass. The sad thing is that it uses the same scripts. It practically uses the same sets. But the acting — it’s like Shakespeare performed by earnestly dull high school students. Not that the original Coupling was Shakespeare, but the American cast isn’t really up to the standards of high school students either. ...

Quicksilver is so damned big. My god, it’s big. It’s 900 pages, and it’s really really big, and it’s the first volume of three. And it’s Neal Stephenson, so you know it’s going to be even more wordy than that. I’m about halfway through, thanks to an early shipment to a bookstore which will remain nameless. The book’s divided into thirds, more or less. The first third is Daniel Waterhouse’s story, which can in no way be considered to have a plot. Halfway through the second third, one character mentions the picaresque genre, in which a random character wanders through an interesting landscape without direction. That would be the first third of the book. Just to put a cherry on top of it, the story opens quite late in Waterhouse’s life, and then proceeds to tell us all about his earlier history in flashback. So no tension, unless you count the pirates. ...

Bravo finished showing the first season of The West Wing, which seems like as good a time as any to talk about it. I’m gonna keep watching, and I might even buy the DVD set. When you get right down to it, Aaron Sorkin knows how to write really good dialogue, and he knows how to pluck the heartstrings. The closing moments of “In Excelsis Deo” are really drop dead beautiful and touching. I care about the characters, too. ...

Poolhall Junkies is top of the line fare, as Christopher Walken B-movies go. We’re talking The Prophecy quality here, albeit in a completely different kind of flick. The star of the movie is a guy named Mars Callahan, who also wrote and directed the thing. His sister is America Martin, which is completely irrelevant but I thought it was cool. Anyhow, he overdirects about half the time — it’s way too stylized in places, and some of the jokes are dead corny — but when you get right down to it what you’ve got is a hustler movie with some good dialogue and an excuse for Walken and Chazz Palminteri to swagger around and do that macho cool thing they both do so well. ...

Whoops, I forgot to natter on about Bend It Like Beckham. Well, let me fix that. It’s a cute little romantic comedy about a cute Sikh lass who wants nothing more than to become a football player. (It’s British, so not the NFL.) There’s love, there’s an improbably attractive (original) football coach, and there’s a remarkably sexy best pal. Family concerns get in the way of our heroine’s needs but all is resolved in the end. I’d call it a sterling example of the genre and recommend it.

Comic book pick of the week: Scarlet Traces. Ian Edington wrote it, and D’Israeli did the art. The story is a nifty little murder mystery, and the gimmick is that it’s set in England ten years after Wells’ War Of The Worlds. “The Martians’ unwitting bequest to their would-be slaves was a form of technology as then undreamt of by mankind. Within a decade our brightest minds had unravelled its secrets, their machineries of war and subjugation adapted and assimilated into our everyday usage. The noble steed — our companion and carriage for millenia is replaced by a clockwork toy! Homes are heated and lit by a version of the once-dreaded heat ray. The great mills and factories of the North are now vast, mechanized estates. The British Empire is now truly a world power without peer, but I cannot help but wonder if we have lost something in the process.” ...

I finally got around to reading David Neiwert’s book on the Patriot Movement, In God’s Country. I’d expected it to be scholarly, given the publisher, but it turned out to be a pretty journalistic work. I suppose that’s not surprising, given that Neiwert’s a journalist. Anyhow, it makes for a really accessible read. The bulk of the book is comprised of stories about Patriot Movement members of various stripes in the Pacific Northwest, from Oregon to Idaho. Neiwert is from the area, which makes a big difference. It’s never a book by some outsider telling stories about the rural whackos. Rather, it’s a book by a guy who knows what the area is like, and knows what independent-minded people are like, and can explain what’s different about the extremists who’ve come to infest the area. He speaks with an authority that (say) an East Coast journalist would lack. ...

Without my TiVo, I’d never have gotten around to seeing Audition, which would have been a pity. I think. As is, I spent half the weekend severely creeped out. For a movie without any supernatural trappings, it was about the most horrific thing I’ve seen since The Blair Witch Project. (Pre-hype.) Confessional: I normally find Japanese movies a bit slow. I know it’s part of the cinematic culture in Japan and all; I just don’t have the mental pathways I’d need to appreciate the style properly. I’d been hearing about this Takashi Miike guy for a while, though; he cranks out five or six movies a year, he’s supposed to be totally transgressive and daring, and people either love him or hate him. So I snagged Audition from the Sundance Channel, cause what could it hurt? ...