The sterility of the computer-generated backgrounds is as repellent as the archaic gender stereotypes forced upon all the women in Sin City. Soulless excess fueled by unreasonable violence in a fantasy of a world that never should be: pah! Nah, not really. It fucking rocked. You could get bitchy about how Rodriguez just laid the comic book out on the screen, but nobody gets snotty about faithful adaptations of Shakespeare. It’s a high-octane, note-perfect accomplishment. I dunno if I’d call it great cinema, although I think the cinematography and the use of black and white was superb… hm. Maybe I would call it great cinema. It’s easy to discount the look of the film and the skilled use of spot color cause it was filmed in digital. That’s a mistake. Filming in digital doesn’t make beauty easy. Just look at what Photoshop can do in unskilled hands for proof of that. ...

The Brattle film calendar wonders how John Boorman could make a movie as good as Point Blank and then go on to make something as lousy as Zardoz. But come on: Boorman is all about the semi-surreal fractured narrative, and you can draw a clear line from one movie to the other. Point Blank is a ruthless reinvention of the crime movie. The skeleton is pure pulp, adapted from a Donald Westlake book. Westlake has been writing unpretentious genre books for decades, so it’s a good base. But you’re not more than 10 minutes into the movie before the chronology starts shattering and lines start repeating and overlapping and you have to start wondering if it’s a sequence of events or Lee Marvin’s deathbed dream. Trippy stuff. Now I know where Soderbergh picked up the techniques he used in The Limey and Out of Sight. ...

I’m moving back to California. I’m selling all my Satanic gaming stuff. I’m giving up on computers to work at the Brattle. I’ve been purchased by Microsoft. I’m dating Mitt Romney. I’m writing the next Pixar movie. I’m voting Republican. I hate Apple. I’m pregnant! I have a message from the future. I can’t believe I ate the whole Studebaker. I’m putting banner ads on the site. I just found out that I’m Mick Jagger’s long lost love child. I sold my kidney to buy a PSP. I’ve converted your favorite game to D20. I think Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are in Syria. I’ve written an RFP regarding TCP/IP transmission via prayer. I wanna be sedated. I’m looking into gender reassignment surgery. I’m giving away a wee little terrier with every Netcom account. I got to work today and found a Ferrari in the pond. I can throw a fastball at 176 miles per hour. I’m an MIT research project. I’ve launched a hostile takeover of the Catholic Church. I hear the NBA and Major League Soccer are going to merge. I’m going to be charging $12.95 a month for site access. I am Pope John Paul II. I am Sylvester Stallone. I am Britney Spears. ...

Peerflix sounded really intriguing. It’s a service that hooks up people who want to trade DVDs. You tell them all the DVDs you want to trade, and every now and then someone says “Hey, I want that DVD,” and Peerflix says “Hey, send that DVD to her!” You do so, which earns you Peerbucks, which you can then redeem to get DVDs from other people. It turns out that it’s really emulating Netflix rather than EBay, though. When you send someone a DVD, you just send them the DVD — no case or anything. The idea is more that you’re lending them your DVD (you can even automatically request the DVD back when they’re done) rather than trading. Which does not so much gratify me, since I don’t want empty DVD boxes littering up my apartment. Time to drag ‘em all down to CD Spins (original). ...

Paul Shirley graduated from Iowa State in 2001; now he plays basketball for the Phoenix Suns, a team which is arguably the best basketball team on the planet right now. He’s the 12th man on a 12 man team, so he doesn’t actually play very much. This means, apparently, that he has time to blog. And man, someone needs to sign this guy to a book deal, unless he’s ghostwritten. I hope he isn’t. I’m surprised this stuff is getting onto NBA.com — he’s unrelentingly blunt about the opposition, life as a 12th man, all that fun stuff. ...

I’m being a completist, yeah. Before One Missed Call, we saw trailers for Gozu, which was completely weird and stylized; Haute Tension, except it was under the nom de plume Switchblade Romance and dubbed into English (ick); a samurai movie which I badly want to see, but which I did not catch the name of, so all I know is that there’s a young woman who apparently trains to be a samurai when her… brother? is killed; Memories of Murder, a Korean movie that looks like it’s about a bunch of friends who share a terrible secret; and Dead and Breakfast, a zombie comedy. Looks like David Carradine is in Dead and Breakfast. ...

Terry Schiavo [has died](http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/31/schiavo/index.html). Wish I thought that’d be the end of it.

Via Twitch (original): frame to panel comparisons (original) of Sin City the movie and various Sin City comics. The impressive thing is how close Rodriquez came on some of the in-between shots — sure, he got the payoffs right, but he also got the rooftops right in between payoffs. The movie’s gonna open huge, by the way. I’m predicting 30 million.

Paul Thomas Anderson just announced his next movie. (Link will age out eventually.) It’ll be an adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil, a book I know nothing about. I’m still excited. California, corruption, sprawling story — sounds perfect.

The San Francisco International Film festival film schedule is up. There are a lot of movies I wouldn’t miss if I lived in San Francisco; in particular, I’d recommend Layer Cake and Murderball (based on word of mouth), but it all looks good. Via Twitch.