It's a special birthday edition of Bought Read Watched. A year ago today, we were all running around Balboa Park on a scavenger hunt, today, I'm in Fucking Dallas. I watched Top Chef tonight, so I am happy. This weekend will be the drunkfest that one expects when talking of my birthday. Also, I will be in town from une 20th-26th, so get ready for that. I got a room at the Solamar, and Friday the 20th I'll be at Petco Park with my 5 dollar ticket, and I hope to see you there. Every night will be an adventure, every day will be the beach. See you soon!!
MAY:
Books bought:
The DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore
A Farewell To Arms
Scud the Disposable Assassin # 24: Death of the Over-Used Muse
DVDs Bought:
Boiler Room
Almost Famous
Primer
Hard Eight
Books Read:
Haunted
Scud the Disposable Assassin # 24: Death of the Over-Used Muse
Kitchen Confidential
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Movies Watched:
Primer
Iron Man
Speed Racer
The Last Dragon
Hard Eight
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Time for another installment of Bought Read Watched. I hope I have the fortitude to keep this up, since I really like writing it. Let’s go on a filmtastic and literary adventure!
Starting off with the easy stuff, the films. This month was a big movie month. This is because I’ve found a way to go to the movies without wasting two valuable hours on a Sunday: Midnight shows. In this way I saw all three of the theatre released movies this month. I’d go after work, meet some buddies, drink a few, smoke a little, and then sit through Iron Man. Which, by the way, is utterly fantastic. Robert Downey, Jr. is the shit. He makes the movie. I’m sure you’ve seen this by now, right? It’s a solid film, more so than Speed Racer, which was cool but not good.
That’s all I can say for Speed Racer: Cool but not good. The box-office for that movie was disappointing, I guess, but if I was a kid watching that movie I’d be building a soapbox racer the minute I left the theater and on the fast track to a broken neck. Since I am an adult, I recognized the fact that the movie was just a highly polished turd, and because of that, and because I was high as a kite, I liked Speed Racer. Especially in Imax.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was just what I expected, and I had a good time there, too. But since it seems like everyone in the country has seen Indy at this point, I don’t need to go into it too much. Plus it was simple and straightforward, unlike the next movie I’m gonna talk about.
Primer is a movie I bought off of Amazon.com without having seen it. I’d heard a few things about it, namely: a) It was written and directed by a highly skilled independent filmmaker, b) It was made for $7000, and that amount includes film stock which, if you know anything about the price of film stock, means that they didn’t make a single mistake filming, and c) It was an indecipherable mindfuck of a movie that is still being hotly debated about in the nerdier areas of the internet. So I was in. After watching it all I can say is that I’m not quite sure what happened, but I know it was cool. It’s about two guys who invent a time machine in their garage, and what they do with it. Suffice to say that the kind of space-time paradoxes that these two guys get into would make Marty McFly shit himself in confusion. It’s worth watching, but just make sure to block enough time to watch it again as soon as it ends.
As a big fan of P.T. Anderson movies (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love) I was eager to see is first film, Hard Eight. I don’t know why more people haven’t seen it, it’s a tight little movie, a simple story with great dialog and a good story. It also had a couple of actors that would end up being regulars in his future films. If you like a character driven story with enough little touches in it to make you remember it with a smile, throw it in your netflix queue. If you like P.T. Anderson’s stuff, you’ll see the beginnings of what would eventually become his style.
The other movie I saw this month was a blast from the past that I had somehow managed to miss when growing up. I’m talking about The Last Dragon. Holy shit. What a corny 80’s schlockfest. What an awesome movie. It has it all: Bad 80’s hair and clothes, a mystical quest, martial arts, terrible acting, magical glowing punches, and it’s very own theme song. The scene in the movie theater with Sho’nuff (The Shogun of Harlem) is worth the price of the rental alone. Here it is, actually:
Got through three proper books and one comic book this month. I’ll start with the odd man out. Scud the Disposable Assassin # 24: Death of the Over-Used Muse is the ceremonial end to my post-high school dorkiness. I was a full-on comic book geek, and one comic towered above all others, and that was Scud. It was cinematic in style, ultra violent, and funny as hell. The premise: In the future, robot hitmen can be hired out of vending machines. When the robot kills whoever it was sent to kill, it self destructs. No muss, no fuss. Well, the star of this comic book is a robot hitman that is in the process of murdering his target when he sees his warning label and realizes what will happen when he accomplishes his mission. So he blows the arms and legs off of his target, puts the target in ICU, and starts freelancing to pay the hospital bills. Hilarity ensues. This comic was my favorite, and one day it just stopped. On a hell of a cliffhanger, to boot. That was 10 years ago. The creator moved to Hollywood, wrote some movies, and about a year ago decided to give the fans a conclusion. I was not disappointed. In four issues, he finisished of the series with comedy and style. I know that no one reading this will probably ever read Scud but I don’t care. I gotta give props to the comic book character that I almost tatted myself to look like.
Chuck “Fight Club” Palahniuk’s books tend to take one good idea and string them along into a crazy story. Haunted takes about 20 of his lesser developed ideas and puts them into a collective narrative that is all kinds of cool. A group of would-be novelists go to a writer’s retreat that goes horribly wrong, and the novel is built out of the stories they tell. If one story isn’t clicking for you, hold out for 15 pages and the it’s a whole new story. They’re sometimes funny, but mostly it’s horror of the highest degree. It’s a good read.
Time for another installment of Bought Read Watched. I hope I have the fortitude to keep this up, since I really like writing it. Let’s go on a filmtastic and literary adventure!
Starting off with the easy stuff, the films. This month was a big movie month. This is because I’ve found a way to go to the movies without wasting two valuable hours on a Sunday: Midnight shows. In this way I saw all three of the theatre released movies this month. I’d go after work, meet some buddies, drink a few, smoke a little, and then sit through Iron Man. Which, by the way, is utterly fantastic. Robert Downey, Jr. is the shit. He makes the movie. I’m sure you’ve seen this by now, right? It’s a solid film, more so than Speed Racer, which was cool but not good.
That’s all I can say for Speed Racer: Cool but not good. The box-office for that movie was disappointing, I guess, but if I was a kid watching that movie I’d be building a soapbox racer the minute I left the theater and on the fast track to a broken neck. Since I am an adult, I recognized the fact that the movie was just a highly polished turd, and because of that, and because I was high as a kite, I liked Speed Racer. Especially in Imax.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was just what I expected, and I had a good time there, too. But since it seems like everyone in the country has seen Indy at this point, I don’t need to go into it too much. Plus it was simple and straightforward, unlike the next movie I’m gonna talk about.
Primer is a movie I bought off of Amazon.com without having seen it. I’d heard a few things about it, namely: a) It was written and directed by a highly skilled independent filmmaker, b) It was made for $7000, and that amount includes film stock which, if you know anything about the price of film stock, means that they didn’t make a single mistake filming, and c) It was an indecipherable mindfuck of a movie that is still being hotly debated about in the nerdier areas of the internet. So I was in. After watching it all I can say is that I’m not quite sure what happened, but I know it was cool. It’s about two guys who invent a time machine in their garage, and what they do with it. Suffice to say that the kind of space-time paradoxes that these two guys get into would make Marty McFly shit himself in confusion. It’s worth watching, but just make sure to block enough time to watch it again as soon as it ends.
As a big fan of P.T. Anderson movies (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love) I was eager to see is first film, Hard Eight. I don’t know why more people haven’t seen it, it’s a tight little movie, a simple story with great dialog and a good story. It also had a couple of actors that would end up being regulars in his future films. If you like a character driven story with enough little touches in it to make you remember it with a smile, throw it in your netflix queue. If you like P.T. Anderson’s stuff, you’ll see the beginnings of what would eventually become his style.
The other movie I saw this month was a blast from the past that I had somehow managed to miss when growing up. I’m talking about The Last Dragon. Holy shit. What a corny 80’s schlockfest. What an awesome movie. It has it all: Bad 80’s hair and clothes, a mystical quest, martial arts, terrible acting, magical glowing punches, and it’s very own theme song. The scene in the movie theater with Sho’nuff (The Shogun of Harlem) is worth the price of the rental alone. Here it is, actually:
Got through three proper books and one comic book this month. I’ll start with the odd man out. Scud the Disposable Assassin # 24: Death of the Over-Used Muse is the ceremonial end to my post-high school dorkiness. I was a full-on comic book geek, and one comic towered above all others, and that was Scud. It was cinematic in style, ultra violent, and funny as hell. The premise: In the future, robot hitmen can be hired out of vending machines. When the robot kills whoever it was sent to kill, it self destructs. No muss, no fuss. Well, the star of this comic book is a robot hitman that is in the process of murdering his target when he sees his warning label and realizes what will happen when he accomplishes his mission. So he blows the arms and legs off of his target, puts the target in ICU, and starts freelancing to pay the hospital bills. Hilarity ensues. This comic was my favorite, and one day it just stopped. On a hell of a cliffhanger, to boot. That was 10 years ago. The creator moved to Hollywood, wrote some movies, and about a year ago decided to give the fans a conclusion. I was not disappointed. In four issues, he finisished of the series with comedy and style. I know that no one reading this will probably ever read Scud but I don’t care. I gotta give props to the comic book character that I almost tatted myself to look like.
Chuck “Fight Club” Palahniuk’s books tend to take one good idea and string them along into a crazy story. Haunted takes about 20 of his lesser developed ideas and puts them into a collective narrative that is all kinds of cool. A group of would-be novelists go to a writer’s retreat that goes horribly wrong, and the novel is built out of the stories they tell. If one story isn’t clicking for you, hold out for 15 pages and the it’s a whole new story. They’re sometimes funny, but mostly it’s horror of the highest degree. It’s a good read.
I’m a big fan of Top Chef, especially when Anthony Bourdain is a guest judge. His book, Kitchen Confidential: Tales from the Culinary Underground is really the best anyone has ever explained the inner workings of a restaurant kitchen. It’s the kind of book that you dog-ear pages of so you can reread your favorite parts over and over again, even sometimes forcing friends to read them. If you work in a restaurant, this should be required reading. Growing up with a Chef for a dad meant I always respected the kitchen, but servers who never pulled a shift prepping or working the line would do well to read this book. It really is funny as hell, and if you’ve seen Bourdain’s show No Reservations, you know he’s a snarky motherfucker. Reading the book is like having him sitting next to you telling the stories. I’m sure the audiobook is a real laugh riot.
Just under the wire I finished World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, by Max Brooks, who I think is the son of Mel “Blazing Saddles” Brooks. Max wrote that Zombie Survival Guide a few years back, but World War Z isn’t funny at all. It is presented as a series of interviews taken a decade after a full-on zombie invasion. The “interviews” deal with the initial outbreak, the spread of the mobs of living dead, their eventual takeover of most of the planet, and humanity’s fight to take it all back. The stories are scary as hell. Every interview is with a different survivor, the flow is perfect, and whenever an interview leaves questions unanswered, subsequent interviews fill in the blanks, unfolding the full story one grisly bit at a time. My favorite thing about the book is the thoroughness of it all. I love zombie movies more than most people, but when they end, I’m always saying “Now what?!” Since all of the zombie movies focus on a small group of survivors, the big picture is seldom expressed, and furthermore, the plague of ghouls is never explained. Do people win? Or do we all just become walking dead? A movie going into this kind of thing would probably suck, so this book is just perfect. It handles a global story in the most personal way, and the interviews add up to cover the full story without being too broad. In this way we get to flee urban centers when the dead first attack, we get to huddle in the massive camps set up for refugees where the threat of infection is always present, we get to spend three years on a submarine that left when the shit hit the fan and returned with guns blazing, we get to be there when the first shot is fired in what turns out to be the beginning of the end of the zombie apocalypse. I heard the audiobook won all kinds of awards, and I can see why, these stories told with different voices would be chilling as hell.
Well that’s it for May. Three great reads, four if you count the comic book, and movies galore. What will I consume in June? We will see.
Until next time…
