servicedevice

is this flick not good. i had read elsewhere that it was boring, tedious and unrewarding, but i usually have more stamina for "boring" things than most. that just usually means someone was expecting something different. so i was expecting just long periods of inactivity while the band waited around to play, and not much music--but you know, with some point, or method of entertaining me. and it even failed with these expectations! it's horribly shot on black and white gunky-looking video. when someone does mutter something it's often hard to hear. this could all be forgiven, but...mike mills, who shows creativity with the videos he did for air--thankfully included--has no instincts or ideas for a music doc. periods of watching the air guys sitting saying little or nothing are broken up by banal man-on-the-street interviews about what music means to people, etc. i have seen a doc he did about paperboys which also failed to elicit much from his interviews that was not trivial and uninteresting. it just isn't his forte (the interviews in one of the air music videos did manage to get by with the charm of their banality, somehow). oh yeah, his other idea is to rip off godard's stones doc ("sympathy for the devil") by slowly panning around in a circle a lot. while this works pretty well onstage (as it did with the stones' sessions), it is just retarded during interviews. the camera drifts off to the side and stays there, recording nothing of visual interest, while part of the subject remains on the edge. it's just pretentious and pointless. at least he cops to the ripoff by duplicating a scenario from the godard film to show it's quite intentional. but what was the point? he seems like an extremely creative and talented guy, esp. with graphics. but i do not think he is at all good with documentaries, and this movie is the calling card for that idea. fanatics only! (the casual fan will be better served with the dvd magazine circuit, one issue of which--i think #6--features air and can be rented. it doesn't offer a lot, but it's a handful more than this.)

I bought a dub of the english-language version of this rather obscure movie to see the footage over Six Flags over Georgia. While the film is Italian, it was shot in north Georgia, and it's a good visual record of the area. But I was surprised to find a very entertaining movie as well. It's a silly romp starring the action star Bud Spencer and the little kid from Close Encounters, a few years older than he was then. They are a perfect match, clearly enjoying each other, even as the Spencer character is being driven crazy by his pint-size friend. Basically the kid is an alien and Bud is a sheriff (this is a sequel to The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid, which I now also have gotten from ebay on the strength of this) who is protecting the kid from the government. Bad aliens set up shop in the same small town our heros wind up in, and it is up to these two to bust some heads. The violence can be a bit extreme, but in a cartoony way. The movie is colorful and fun (with a fantastic theme song), and sweet without being at all saccharine. It seems loopier and less facile than an American production probably would have been. The small dusty town has several maraudering gangs (like cowboys who throw dynamite around and bikers who wear silly costumes) and the aforementioned themepark is shot as though it were simply a section of town. A very endearing film that adults will watch and wish they had seen as kids.

But that's what i did. We were at the mall, having just come from my orthodontic appointment, and I was supposed to go back to school. However, once the title "Hell High" caught our eye, we had to see it. I remember a goofily inane, low-budget horror movie that featured a scene of a beautiful teacher becoming vocally aroused just taking a shower (because when women soap up their breasts, they are helplessly turned on.) And that's almost all I remember. But I guess I fared better than a friend who, a few years previous, had seen Revenge of the Nerds with his little, old grandmother. And, thinking on it now, I saw Clash of the Titans when I was like eight or something with my grandfather. A chaste shot of a woman leaving a bath was pretty exciting then. Later on, at dinner, my sister yelled out that I had told her there was a "tushie" in the movie. I was mortified. I could hardly deny I had said it, after all, as her knowledge of said tushie was proof enough. A shadow fell over my grandfather's face and not another word was said for a long time. A horrible memory.