Last year, I celebrated by birthday by staying at home and watching movies all day long. It was such a success that I did it again this year, and made the day just a little more gluttonous by EATING TACOS FOR EVERY MEAL.
I discovered the one true recipe for that delicious, creamy taco-cart green salsa, which made this the best birthday ever.
The first movie I watched was Onechanbara: Samurai Bikini Squad
Apparently, during the zombie apocalypse, there’s going to be a woman wearing a bikini and a feather boa, who fights with a samurai sword. They don’t get into why she’s in a bikini, but I think it has something to do with how she projects her ki. I’m sure that Cormac McCarthy was going to have more bikinis in his post-apocalypse story, but he just never got around to it.
Continuing the Japanese school girls with swords genre, I watched Blood: the Last Vampire
I’d seen the anime version, which was half an hour shorter. They expanded this with more emphasis on the American heroine, but it generally worked well in live action.
I was reminded that I hadn’t seen all the works of Stuart Gordon, namely Dolls
This was one of Gordon’s lighter and funnier works, with none of his trademark genitalia abuse. I recently had a long conversation about how much CGI sucks, so it was good to see a movie that makes effective use of puppetry and stop motion to create imagery that’s both creepy and neat to watch.
Tony Jaa is of course awesome. His sequel to the breakaway star-vehicle movie, Ong Bak 2, has almost nothing to do with the original. It also makes little sense.
But it is chock full of action sequences that are wonders of filmmaking.
I regretted missing Singh is Kinng in the theaters. And even more so after I saw it. It’s funny, beautifully shot, relatively fast-paced for Bollywood, and it has a credit sequence that features Snoop Dogg. It also is filled with Bollywood in-jokes.
When I was browsing through my friendly neighborhood art video store (actually it’s pretty surly, but it is in the neighborhood), I noticed a couple of things. First, nearly all the American films in the new releases sucked. The blockbusters sucked, and the independent direct-to-video options looked like they sucked even worse. I think it’s because all the talent in America is busy making TV for the premium cable channels. The other thing I noticed, is that there were a lot of videos available for things that were either just in theaters or were just coming out in the theaters. For instance, House of the Devil was in the theaters just a couple months ago.
It’s a horror film shot in the style of 80s fright night films. I’d forgotten just how worried people in the 80s were about satanic cults. The head satanist in this film is a dead-on impression of one of the local Austin writers with similar religious beliefs.
When I was down at Domy books the other day, I impulsively bought some DVDs. One of them was called Kure Kure Takora, and it appears to be some sort of Japanese Sid and Marty Croft-esque children’s program about an octopus who gets bopped on the head alot.
I don’t particularly feel obligated to watch the whole thing.
Speaking of apparently insane Japanese entertainment, there’s the wrestling film Oh! My Zombie Mermaid
You could watch this trailer, but I honestly think the less you know about the movie the better. You just need to know that it’s a movie about a wrestler struggling against adversity the only way he knows how.
I also saw Our Man Flint, but I didn’t get through it and I don’t know if I ever will.
In summary, I had as many movies and as many tacos as I could possibly fit inside me.