Reviews from the past

For some strange reason I decided to do movie reviews for a short stint. Then I realized how pointless it was and quickly stopped. I'm gonna toss them up here for remembrance rather than keeping them in this annoying text file.

Blow=7

Review: Blow seems like a half-drama, half-comedy. It's not that realistic about the cocaine industry, and the characters are often off-the wall, but I don't know much about the cocaine industry, and there are all sorts of characters in real-life. It reminded me of "Goodfellas". Johnny Depp plays his character George pretty well, even though George seems fairly shallow and boring to begin with. He's rather faceless, now that I think of it.

Enjoyable, but not deep.

"Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it. Throughout my lifetime, I've left pieces of my heart here and there, and now there's not almost not enough to stay alive. But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent. There are no more white horses or pretty ladies at my door."
-Johnny Depp, "Blow"

Donnie Darko=8.5

Attempt to understand: I'm going to write this down before I start reading what other people think. I largely didn't understand the physics behind it, and I don't think they really matter. You can't draw practical conclusions from them, really. The physics was just a medium for expressing something else. It's the ultimate Outsider movie. Donnie Darko is one who stands for truth, and sees lies wherever he goes. He sees the craziness of the world. Partly it is because he's slightly insane, but there's also the fact there's reason in his insanity. That isn't realistic, but it is intriguing. Nietzche was also insane. Many great artists have been insane.

The universe is insane and meaningless. Humans spend their lives thinking with their sex organs, even though their minds can tell them that such striving is ultimately pointless. Donnie Darko is a desperate attempt to find meaning in all the random events - some deeper meaning behind all the nonsense. Ultimately, we can go 'round and 'round debating it... and find nothing. Everyone seeks their daily-feel good, but in the end they die alone, all their efforts pointless.

Should write a book about this sorta stuff, and have my main characters be destroyers. Might sell.

Fahrenheit 9/11=7

I think some of this ugly mood stems from watching this documentary. I laughed quite a bit in it, but it was bittersweet, astonished laughter. I just can't believe that things are this bad, or that Bush is quite this bad. It never really sunk into me before. Maybe I'm just being swayed too much by a hugely partisan attack on the Republicans, but for some reason I think he's right. The attack on Iraq was unjust - I've always known that, but I didn't realize how terrible its consequences were until now. The half-assed domination of Afghanistan has always pissed me off, but now it sickens me. If we'd focused all our forces on Afghanistan instead of Iraq everything would be much better. The tragedy of the deaths there hit me rather hard, surprisingly. I'd blame it partially on the music. I've always been rather deadened to "tragedy" of others, and death. I've never felt the death of someone I knew hit me hard. Perhaps now I'm just forcing myself to be empathic. Is that a good thing? I dunno.