Netflix Reviews Part 3.

21. The Dead Kennedy's-The Early Years Live
Mix of live footage and random interview type clips. Highlights are tv spots/interviews from Jello's mayoral run. Not mindblowing, and pretty short, under an hour, but worth watching.

22. The Office-Season 2
Starting with the Dundies and ending with Casino Night, pretty untouchable. I don't want to talk about how wrapped up I've gotten in the Pam/Jim thing, and how much that ending killed/thrilled me. The current season (3) has been even more of a rollercoaster. Ah, love.
Oh, and it's fucking hilarious.

23. Surburbia
Not the Linklater one, which rules as well, but in a different way. Skinner is pretty great, and it's pretty much the archtype for any and all punk movies to come. "I hate cops to the max."

24. The Basketball Diaries
I'm probably the only guy my age who didn't see this within the first ten years it came out. The first half of the movie is all "man, being a little bastard is AWESOME!", and the second half is all "man, being a little bastard who gets into herion SUCKS!" Oh, but he became a writer, so it's a-okay. The cliff jumping part just made me wnt to go back to the Rexford Bridge. Really good movie, probably would have had a bigger impact on me if I saw it when I was 15 instead of 25. And by that I mean I would have gotten fucked up and stolen a car, then robbed a soda fountain. ON WEED.

25. The Propostion
Oh, so you think you're bad-ass, huh? You think you can kick ass and take names, huh? WELL NOT IN THE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK MOTHEFUCKER. BANG! Grittiest movie since....True Grit? I don't know, I'm basing that strictly on the title. But jesus, this movie was so good. Ray Winstone is the fucking man, between this and Mr. French in the Departed, so underrated. John Hillcoat and Nick Cave are working together again, adapting a Cormac McCarthy book, can't remember which one. Suffice to say, it should be awesome.

26. The Wire-Season 1
Pretty much the only serious show I've ever really gotten into. And, because of that, I have nothing to say about that. Essentially it's every other cop/lawyer/crime/political show if all the shitty parts were replaced with pure, undiluted, awesome.

27. Scum
I put this on my queue after somehow mistaking it for this TV show "Made In Britain" where Tim Roth is a crazy teenage skinhead. This is a movie about British reform schools/juvenile detention center type thing. Ray Winstone is really young and still hard as nails as the new kid who comes in and takes over as the "Daddy" or basically the head badass kid. He leads a revolt after one kid kills himself, but it gets put down by THE FUCKING MAN. Meeting the leader of the black kids with the pipe for the fistfight though...ridiculous. Really fucked up/great/fucked up movie.

28. Bukowski- Born Into This
Documentary about Bukowski from childhood until the end of his life. Really well put together with lots of old footage of Buk himself mixed with current interviews of people who knew him ranging from his ex-wife and John Martin to Tom Waits and Sean Penn. I watched this after reading "Charles Bukowski- Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life" by Howard Sounes, which is one of the better Bukowski bio's out there, so it was awesome to see and hear all the people I'd already read about. It's no big secret that I've got a massive hard-on for Bukowski, so maybe I liked this more than the average person would, but if you have even a passing interest in him, it's definitely worth seeing. As a side note, I just saw "Factotum", which was also pretty awesome, despite the fact that Matt Dillon is way too good looking to be Buk. But yeah, check that out too.

29. Sympathy For Mr. Vengance
I can't remember where this falls in the trilogy. I THINK this is first, then Oldboy, then Lady Vengance, but I could be totally wrong. This started out really slow, and I was pretty let down until everything fell in motion and it got awesomely fucked up, just like Oldboy. The end isn't quite as "HOW COULD LIFE EVER EVER GET THIS FUCKED UP AND SHITTY" as Oldboy, but it's close. I can't begin to fathom what it's like living inside Chan-wook Park's head. Probably kind of like a japanese Hubert Selby, but with more murdering. Fuck.

30. Fletch Lives
So for some reason Netflix doesn't carry Fletch. I blame it all on Kevin Smith and his ill-fated plan to remake Fletch that shit the bed a few years ago. Bear with me- it's also near impossible to find Fletch on DVD for less than 20 bucks, and it's the most basic DVD, with no special features, and the shitty cardboard case. The only thing I can figure is that Universal was holding out to release a special edition to coincide with the remake that never happened. And I'm going to blame that for the fact that Fletch is STILL on my "saved" list. I'm pretty steamed about it, to be honest. Fletch Lives is readily availabe in affordable format AND on netflix, so it hasn't been a total wash. Great movie either way. "We call them Klookies."

"See Mom, I DO use good judgement sometimes."

While I was putting the pictures up from the "Dudes With Beers, No Shirts and a Camera" founding on my photo blog, I was reminded of something I thought I'd share with my imaginary friends on this blog.

I'm a fairly intelligent guy (so modest!) but it's fair to say that I don't always use the best judgement when deciding to do or not do certain things. This is something my mom has reminded me of (read: gotten on my case about in a nice way) since I was 14 or 15 and stopped being a polite little boy all the time, and started to turn into what some people would graciously refer to as a jackass.

At one point a few years ago, Greg and I were sitting around doing nothing and debating about what we could do on a weeknight that was free and less boring than whatever else was going on. Somewhat out of nowhere, he suggests going out and digging up some graves. Not to really do anything with bones or whatever, but just to check it out I guess. Now, to be fair, I wouldn't mind having a skull or a jawbone or a whatever you call the arm bone. And I WAS really pissed at my dentist when he wouldn't get my wisdom teeth out of the biological waste bin after I got them removed so I could make a sweet necklace out of them. I really let him have it too, because I was six kinds of fucked up on all the medication. I guess I spent the whole ride back to my apartment telling my mom what a terrible driver she was, and how I'd be safer walking. Shockingly, she dropped me off with some pudding and left. There's a lot more to that story, as far as that night when I went to Americade (huge motorcycle/redneck rally in Lake George) still tore up on meds, but that's for another time.

Anyway. So while it's not like I'm completely opposed to having weird bones and shit, I've yet to get to the point where I'm ready to dig up peoples graves for them. I said "no" and that was pretty much the end of it. A few weeks later, I did something else stupid, and my mom was tellling me how I should really use better judgement, to which I replied "Well Mom, sometimes I do use good judgement. Greg wanted to go grave robbing and I said NO!"

She just kind of looked at me like I was a mirage, shook her head, and said "I'm glad you didn't do that Sawyer." Then she walked away, probably to go double check my birth certificate.

Greg was upset when he found out I told her this, but she still thinks he's a good kid, so alls well that ends well. But I still don't have my tooth necklace. So if you get your wisdom teeth out, please donate them to me. But you have to tell the dentist IN ADVANCE, otherwise he'll be a real hard-on about it.

Marathon Man aka "They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To."

On the train ride back to NB last night I finally got around to watching Marathon Man. On my last job we had a circle of Netflix going where we would circulate whichever disc's we had at the time, and anyone who wanted to watch them could rip them to their computer before tossing them in the outgoing mail bin. I mention this only to help explain the next useless detail to this story, which has to do with my priorities when it comes to watching DVD's.

In what passes for my mind, there are three sorts of DVD's. I'll try and outline them in succinct (yeah, right) detail right now.

The first is the largest group, the ones I own. I used to buy DVD's fairly regularly, but stopped a few years ago when I realized it was a lot of money to spend on things I rarely use after purchasing them. But around the time of my first retirement (read: September) I said to myself "hey, your disposable income is shrinking exponentially, why not find something BESIDES records, alcohol and comics to waste it on!" So I started actually COLLECTING DVD's, which is worse than just plain buying them. For instance, before I decided I HAD to own every Eddie Murphy movie, I would never have paid good currency for a copy of "Pluto Nash." Fuck, I probably wouldn't have paid in wooden nickels, because that's honesetly a kind of embarassing thing to own. But now I not only own that movie, but almost bought "10", despite the fact that I have no desire to actually watch it, because I thought it would be funny to own on the sole basis of "Dad...she's a 10!" (if you don't know...)

Now, leaving aside my already problematic collecting tendencies, I also have access to the Princeton Record Exchange, a haven for creeps and assholes who spend too much money on crap. They have a HUGE and constantly updated selection of used DVD's that range from two to five dollars, before any markdowns that may or may not take place. In my few months living in New Brunswick, I've purchased at least a few dozen movies there, and they're not exactly all Oscar Winners. While I'm not at Joe Steinhardt levels by any means, my DVD collection is growing at disgusting rates.

The second group is whatever I've burned/ripped from other people. These either reside on DVD-R's, or my computer if I'm out of blanks. I only rip movies that I want to see but don't want to own, either because I don't like them that much or they don't fit into my collecting blueprints. The number of these varies, depending on factors that aren't worth mentioning. And considering what I obviously think IS worth mentioning, that's really saying something.

The third and final group is whatever I have from netflix on any given day. I feel like there should be at least a sentence or two of useless information to go with this group too, but oh well.

So if you take the reverse order of how I just listed them, that's my priority when it comes to actually watching DVD's. I watch my netflix movies first, because then I can send them back and get more, therby getting every cent's worth out of my monthly fee. Then I watch the ripped/burned movies, because that way when I'm done I can erase/throw them out/give them away. Because anyone who has collecting problems can tell you, you don't keep a burned copy of something for your collection, because then you're not just a pathetic asshole, you're a pathetic asshole with no standards. And when I've plowed through both those groups, I move into my collection and see if there's anything I haven't watched yet/really feel like watching again. There's exceptions to this of course, like if i buy/get something new that I can't wait to watch. But for the most part, that's how it goes.

SO. I watched Marathon Man, which falls into category #2. And it was fucking awesome. Totally insane yet completely tied down and believable, at least in the little internal world it created. And it got me thinking about how they really don't make movies like that anymore, edgy, weird movies that aren't totally out there, movies that are fantastic and far fetched but stick tightly to the built in logic of the movie. Dustin Hoffman as a young man is an actor that just doesn't exist today, and Laurence Olivier as a Nazi dentist...fuck. Seriously, go out and see it as soon as you can.

I know that last paragraph was pretty pretentious and laced with too much "back in the day"-ism's for someone who wasn't around, believe me. But remember that it was written by someone who thinks Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo is one of the most underrated films of the last ten years.

"DO THE LETTERS T and J MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU????"
"Uh, I don't know, Turkey Jizz?"

"Ahh, perhaps you don't understand. Ahh... if you don't pay me now, I'm going to uhh... take this swizzle-stick, and uhh... I'll be shoving that right up your pee-hole. "

Goodnight and godbless.

Leaving Home, Going Home.


Back in New Brunswick after almost three weeks in Albany. For the first time in my life I've left without feeling like I'm leaving home behind and going to "some other place." It's not that NB has replaced Albany as home, because as much as I love it here, it's only been 3 months. And it's not that Albany is now some foreign DMZ where I'm just passing through. I suppose it's just that I really have moved away from Albany for good. I'll forever be going back and forth for shows, to visit, and god knows what else, and as long as my best friends are there I'll never be gone for long, but this summer really was it. No more semesters, no more summer breaks. I'm okay with it now, and it seems natural, but I know it's going to be hard come summer. I'm just glad I was able to fall out of the nest into such an awesome cushion here in New Brunswick. But it's a strange, bittersweet feeling nonetheless.

Well, that was fairly somber. To close, I'll recount an equally touching moment from Beer Leauge, which I watched tonight.

Dirk: "When I was in prison, I fucked bigger guys than you!"
Artie: "Did Dirk just say he fucked guys?"

Night night.