Saw was passable but not all that and a bag of chips. The setup is brilliant: Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell wake up in a dingy bathroom, chained at opposite sides of the room. They have no idea what they’re doing there. And they soon discover that one of them will need to kill the other, or horrible things will happen to his family. It’s tense as hell. Really good. But then the movie gives up the claustrophobia and tension by going into extended flashbacks that take place outside the room. By the time Danny Glover has shown himself to be an incredibly inept cop, I’d more or less given up on the whole thing. ...

Air America has arrived in Boston (1200 AM and 1430 AM), so like the liberal sheep I am I’ve been listening to it for the last few days. Conclusions: it’s exactly the same as right-wing talk radio, except the bias leans differently. This is probably what the Democratic Party needs; it’s not really what I want, but c’est la vie. When I say exactly, by the by, I mean exactly — down to the ads, which are the same mix of adverts for herbal nostrums, local merchants, and political paraphernalia you get on right-wing talk radio. I suspect Air America will prove to be completely financially viable.

My schedule for the BFFF appears to be something like this: Thursday, 10/14 Saw (9:30) Good buzz on this. (Buzzsaw. Heh.) It’s a low budget horror flick starring Cary Elwes with a claustrophobic one-room setup — the gimmick is a serial killer who always convinces his victims to kill themselves. I was hoping this would drift through Boston sometime. Friday, 10/15 Infernal Affairs (7:30) The hot Hong Kong police thriller of the moment. The premise: both the mob and the cops planted an undercover agent in the opposite ranks. Fifteen years later, violence ensues. This series replaced the Young and Dangerous movies as the top Hong Kong action series, which is kind of unsurprising since they share the same director. I liked Young and Dangerous a lot and I’m gonna like this too. It’s currently being remade by Martin Scorsese with Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio; the remake is set in Boston and centers on the Irish mob rather than the triads. You can feel the Boston mob movie trend juggernaut gaining steam, can’t you? ...

I still have a lot of respect for Pat Tillman, and I think that Jake Plummer ought to be able to honor him by wearing a patch on his helmet for as long as he wants. Off Wing Opinion has more (original). (I think this is a general principle — if Tom Brady wants to wear a patch honoring his grandmother, he ought to be able to do so — but one crack in the wall at a time.)

As always, one of the most fascinating things about the Internet is all the little subcommunities that spring up here and there. My latest discovery is Pyroto Mountain (original), which is a fascinating little web game unlike anything else I’ve seen. The framework is an escalating series of trivia questions, but it’s way more complex than that. You start at level 0. It’s really easy to work up to level 6, but then when you try to answer another question you find out that you have to chat a little on the bulletin boards before you can try and climb any more. OK, so you go and post. Sometimes the game tells you that your posts are good — and sometimes it doesn’t. It has standards of spelling and punctuation. Eventually you get to go up some more. ...

Boston mob movie trend juggernaut: The Boondock Saints, Snitch, Southie, Mystic River, and The Departed. It’s a small juggernaut.

The Boston Fantastic Film Festival is scheduled (original) and for a second-tier fantastic film festival, this is a very impressive lineup. My thoughts on what’s worth seeing for who will come later, but I do want to note in particular Infernal Affairs and Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. I’m also very intrigued by the Nesbit adaptation, Five Children and It, which stars Kenneth Branagh and features Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.

It’s so rare that you get to watch a single surrealist coming of age movie featuring a lactation scene, I don’t quite know what to make of a day in which I got to watch two. Although when you think it over, a lactation scene is a fairly obvious bit of symbolism for coming of age, so maybe it’s not so odd after all. Gozu didn’t actually strike me as being as mysterious and weird as the reviews implied, once I’d had a night’s sleep to contemplate it. Minami, the young yakuza who’s ordered to kill his mentor Ozaki and who serves as our surrogate in the languid descent into surreal erotic madness, is a virgin. He feels out of place in Tokyo and he feels out of place in the rural Nagoya. He rejects a couple of offers to initiate him into manhood, including and probably most significantly the opportunity to metaphorically become a man by killing Ozaki. In the end, the transfigured Ozaki makes a man of him in the most primal of ways — the birth scene signifies Minami’s rebirth as well as that of Ozaki. Final significant scene: three toothbrushes sitting side by side in domestic harmony. ...

Gozu is playing down at the Brattle tonight at midnight. Anyone in the mood to see one of the oddest movies of the last few years?

Quick follow-up on how independent voters reacted to Bush last night: Gallup says independent voters preferred Kerry (original) by a margin of 53% to 37%. Hear me now and believe me later! Bush is going to spend the next month firing up his base and relying on voter turnout to win this election. But Kerry still has a better get out the vote operation.