Month: September 2006

Youth of the Beast: (1963) – a Yakuza movie that is mercifully unlike many others from that time – or even of the more recent vintages. Very fast moving, great colors, and a kind of double-cross by way of Last Man Standing / Yojimbo. But it also has the frustrations of trying to figure out a friend’s murder ala The Big Sleep, complete with a crushing ending. It also features a gay pimp with a switchblade, a sadist gangster wearing horn rimmed glasses cradling a cat as if he was a James Bond villain, and a zillion other stylish visual features. I’d recommend this very highly.

Short Cuts: (1993) – I was curious how this would hold up. When I last saw it, I had just moved to Los Angeles, and its depictions were nothing at all the city that I was living in – other than the helicopters.
Continue reading Youth of the Beast / Short Cuts

I watched a documentary (Comedian) about being a stand-up, with Jerry Seinfeld in the foreground and an intriguing mess called Orny Adams as counterpoint.

Right off the bat, let’s stipulate that there isn’t too much of the actual stand-up, and, frankly, while I often find Seinfeld amusing I’m not sure he is someone I’d seek out for the funny. The same is true for the array of folks around him–we see Colin Quinn, Mario Joyner, and a few others pop up and discuss “work”–but we get little of their acts, beyond a small clip of Quinn and (oddly) Joyner’s entering or leaving the stage. We do see actual comedy from Seinfeld, and from the young car-crash Orny Adams who seems to be playing note for note Tom Hanks’ brittle comic from the film Punchline. What is interesting is that we see them build a joke up to success; we see, as well, their uncomfortable slips, failures, even outright freezes. Continue reading Seinfeld?