Having trouble posting to the movies thread, so I'll start a new one.
Last night (thank you, NetFlix!) saw "Kiss kiss, bang bang." Both thumbs up! You will love this movie (even Nic -- actually I think this is very much a "Nic" movie, though it's lots of others' too). The script is smart, and very funny. The acting is great (Robert Downey, Val Kilmer -- very good together -- and why can't Downey get his act together and do more good films?). And it's full of all sorts of postmodern formal twists -- highly original narrative (who says voice-over is clumsy?). Also it's it's full of really hilarious dark (did I mention DARK) comedy. Or is it dark? Hmmm. It certainly skates around on the borders of bad taste, but I think it deftly manages to keep from falling over the edge. At a number of points you think you really ought to be grossed out and offended, but you're laughing too hard. See what you think. Anyway, I enjoyed it.
What have you seen lately?
Once again, the poetry thread has become so long its attracting spam, so I'll start a new thread for you. Rather than write anything more, I'll just give you the only cue you folks seem to need:
POETRY!!!!
Hi All. I hope your summer is going swimmingly! The summer reading thread seems to have petered out, so I thought I'd see what you had to say about movies. Anyone seen anything really good? or really bad? I saw Superman Returns, and liked it, though Superman's extreme superness is always a problem. How much tension can you generate if the guy is invulnerable and can lift continents and use heat vision and ice breath and see through walls and hear everything on the planet? He's kind of like God, and as anyone who's read Paradise Lost knows, God makes for kind of a boring literary character. I guess I liked the personal conflicts in this Superman -- the poor orphan, the thwarted lover, the mighty alien having to pretend to be a nebbish. What'd anyone else think? I haven't seen much else. The X-Men movie was tedious, I thought (since the writer/director of the first two, Bryan Singer, fled to Superman). Superhero stories always get out of control when the superpowers get too huge and everything blows up and the whole universe is threatened. Yawn. Maybe Spiderman will restore my faith in comics movies. I saw Da Vinci Code too, but that was a while back. It's definitely my favorite movie with a huge albino killer dressed as a monk, but large parts of it seemed even dumber than the book. What's good out there?