Bay Area speed freaks, represent!
This defines crazy. I have an adrenaline rush just from watching it. If you're not feeling it when one of them screams "WHOOOOOO! DIG IT!! DIG IT!!!" at 6:59, you need a heart transplant.
Thanks to SFist. Check out the topo map of the route.
And shooting people is really bad. However, fake guns are fun. And pretending to shoot people in games is really fun. Real guns and fake guns have nothing to do with each other. Real life and games have nothing to do with each other. So let's stop banning cool XBox ads and pretending that will do anything to stop actual violence.
Disclosure: I don't own an XBox and don't find the idea of playing video games in my living room appealing. But put me in an arcade with one of those stand-up, shoot-'em-up games and a sack of quarters, and I'm a menace.
Was reminded of this flick today, and how much it affected me. Recommended viewing anytime you're questioning the choices you've made in life.
Knock off that hippy shit, strap on a helmet, and start shooting. This is Malibu, Emily…I want you to storm that beach like it’s fucking Normandy.
Finally got around to Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Not as good at The Royal Tenenbaums, but in the same baroque/deadpan style. Weighed down by Owen Wilson's so-bad-it's-just-bad "Southern" accent (and overall superfluousness), Anjelica Huston's so-deadpan-it's-just-dead performance (in a small but central role), and so-cheesy-they're-not-ironic-they're-embarrassing CGI effects (which feature heavily in the climactic scene.)
Buoyed up by Bill Murray's brilliant reinvention of the same fuck-it-all character he's been playing for years now (not that I'm complaining); fantastic small parts from Willem Dafoe (simultaneously wrapped too tight and unhinged), Cate Blanchett (smart and sexy and, if anything, underutilized), and Jeff Goldblum (unctuous as ever); a handful of great scenes; and Anderson's usual deft touch with understated dialogue.
Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm is the video version of those sour candies kids like--it's so excruciating it's hard to watch. But if you're an occasionally irritable, mildly misanthropic, middle-aged married man who's been known to embarrass himself or say the wrong thing at a dinner party every once in a while, you can't not watch either.
Although Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven came out in 1992, I saw it for the first time just the other night. It's not perfect (for starters, Lennie Niehaus' score is the worst I've ever heard in a serious movie), but it pulls off one very impressive trick: At the climactic scene (a shootout in a bar, of course--what'd you expect?), I didn't know what was going to happen, and I didn't know what I wanted to happen. I was filled with uncertainty and ambivalence, and what's the last Western that did that for you?
In that scene, Eastwood's hardened gunslinger-turned-hardscrabble farmer faces down Gene Hackman's shady sheriff and a passel of deputies. But that simple description ignores the situation's moral complexities. Eastwood is ostensibly the hero, and at that moment he's driven by a vengeful wrath you can sympathize with, so you're rooting for him. But he's also a man with a truly wicked past, and you feel--he feels--that his repentance is somehow insufficient, and that he should suffer as he made others suffer.
Hackman is ostensibly a villain, and his loose interpretation of justice sets the movie's plot in motion, so you expect him to pay a price. But he can also be seen as a pragmatist, a man simply making the best of many bad situations, and paying with his life seems grossly unfair.
Westerns are thought of as insubstantial because so many are set in a flat, featureless moral landscape--good is Good, bad is Bad and never the twain shall meet. They substitute grand vistas and action for complex storytelling--which, as Eastwood shows, can still be intensely dramatic. Eastwood can't pull it off the whole way through--the coda is perhaps inevitably disappointing after the climax--but I'm still thinking about "Unforgiven," days later, wondering how I feel about what did happen in that bar.
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