Cat Soup
ねこぢる草 (Nekojiru-Sou)
dir. Tatsuo Sato
2001

After having dinner with Sam, Ramona and Régis at Hurry Curry, Régis and watched a bunch of random episodes of anime, including Masaaki Yuasa's "Beatbox Bandits" episode of Samurai Champloo. Then we watched my Liquid Art Limited Edition DVD of Cat Soup because Régis had never seen it but he'd heard of it because Masaaki Yuasa was the Animation Producer.

I think the last time I'd watched this super trippy anime short was when I had it on in background at one of my parties (I think it was after the Falling Lizard screening in 2004 cuz I remember Dan McLaughlin was there while Cat Soup was playing).

As much as I love Cat Soup, it's a bit frustrating to learn that the director, Tatsuo Sato, went on to direct the disappointing Ninja Scroll TV series (Régis and I started to watch the first episode tonight but we stopped halfway thru cuz it was so bad... they flipped a background and reused it immediately... WTF?!).

Cat Soup (Liquid Art Limited Edition)

The Aristocrats
dir. Paul Provenza
2005

My favorite comedians being raunchy as fuck... it doesn't get much funnier than this.

Wen and I saw it on opening night in a packed theater which turned out to be distracting because everyone was laughing so hard that we couldn't hear many of the rapid-fire jokes.

I guess I'll just have to watch it again and again when it comes out on DVD, which will probably be loaded with tons of extra scenes. Speaking of "loaded", Eddie Izzard and Chris Rock were drunk as fuck during their interviews.

UPDATE 09/12/05:
I was wrong about Eddie and Chris being drunk... see the COMMENT from the director himself, Paul Provenza ( OMFG, how crazy is that!?!).

[watched at the Loews Cineplex Odeon at 3rd St in Santa Monica with Wen]

Hana and Alice
dir. Shunji Iwai
2004

Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story!
2005

You know what really grinds my gears? Being disappointed by something that I've been waiting for a long time... something that should be really freakin' sweet, but instead is really fucking lame.

The newest season of Family Guy has been awesome. Sure, each episode is just a series of raunchy jokes and random culture references strung along a ludicrous plotline, but they're 22 minutes of rapidfire gags that make me laugh so hard that I shoot milk out of my nose.

Sadly, the direct-to-video Family Guy movie, Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story!, just lacks the breakneck pacing of the TV show to carry a full 90 minutes. Timing is everything, especially in comedy and in animation, and while the comedy is raunchier and the animation has slightly better production values, the timing of both are way off.

And the plot is just plain lame. It might've worked as a single TV episode, but it seems like Seth MacFarlane and his crew stretched one episode plot into three, and then slapped them together into a feature-length movie just so they could say "FUCK" with the being . I for one am a huge fan of profanity. I fucking love cussing. But hearing the Family Guy characters say "FUCK," especially Stewie, just doesn't seem justified in the context of the movie. One of the most groundbreaking aspects of the TV series is how blatantly they dance around the censors, but when they are uncensored, it just doesn't feel right.

Maybe I'm being too hard on the FG movie. Maybe my expectations were just too high. Maybe I'll enjoy it more when the DVD officially comes out in September, which I'll still prolly buy despite my disappointment.

Arakimentari
dir. Travis Klose
2004

Arakimentari is a fascinating documentary about groundbreaking Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, who continues to blur the line between art and pornography.

The film features interviews with Björk, Takeshi Kintano, and several of Akari's nude models, but the real star is Araki himself. The man is a roly-poly ball of vibrant energy. He's been called many unflattering things over the decades, like "monster," "pervert," "criminal," "misogynist," but most people around the world who truly know and understand his work will recognize Araki as a "genius."

Arakimentari gives a behind-the-scenes look at the artist at work as he grooms pubic hair and waxes philisophical about the social implications of his craft. The film also showcases many of Araki's photographs in several "slideshow" sequences set to original music by DJ Krush. Araki is so incredibly prolific that director Travis Klose probably could have made several feature-length slideshows of just Araki's nudes, not to mention his photos of Japanese faces, cats, flowers, clouds, and other less erotic but equally beautiful images. Some of the most beautiful and emotionally engaging are the photos of his late wife Yoko.

Official Film Website:
http://www.arakimentari.com/

Araki's website (Japanese):
http://www.arakinobuyoshi.com/

Yakuza Horror Theater: Gozu
dir. Takashi Miike
2003

Takashi Miike has directed some of the weirdest films I have ever seen, and Gozu is his most surreal film to date. The film is very reminiscent of David Lynch's work, particularly Lost Highway, and after watching the special features on the DVD, I now know Miike was intentially eliciting such allusions.

Reviews:
Midnight Eye
Onion A.V. Club

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky
dir. Ngai Kai Lam
1991

(yes, that's right, I gave it HALF a star out of five!)

Remember these images?!

Craig Kilborn used these gory scenes as part of his "5 Questions" segment intro on the Daily Show back in the day before Jon Stewart replaced Kilby as host and made the show all funny and informative. He might've even used it on the Late Late Show too, but I prefer Conan so I only really watched it when there was a band or a comedian on that I liked, although I watch the Late Late Show a bit more now that Craig Ferguson is hosting cuz that guy is hilarious, but I'm getting sidetracked.

Anyway, after watching a gory video clip that was circulating around the internet under the false pretense that it was Bruce Lee clip, I discovered that the clip, as well as the 5 Questions clips, is from a Gore-Fu flick called Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.

Riki-Oh is far and away one of the worst movies I've ever seen, and yet, for some reason, I couldn't stop watching it, even after I knew it was complete shit.

It's an 90 mins of blood, guts, mutilation and gore, gore, gore. Well actually, there's probably less than 5 minutes total of genuine gore. The rest of the film concerns a sappy revenge plot in a "franchised" prison. The drama is idiodic, the humor is retarded, the action is weak, and the gore is beyond cheesy. Even the music is crappy (check out this clip from the theme song). The film is all about shock, but most of the "shocking" stuff is downright laughable.

The climactic fist-fight between Riki-Oh and the warden-turned-rubbery-monster is so cheesy that it makes all the preceding plastic heads and limp dummies look realistic.

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

I wish I'd read this detailed film summary at I-Mockery.com instead of wasting an hour and a half on this shit...

... oh alright, it's not THAT bad. If there's anything redeemable about the film, Riki-Oh is probably an ideal film to have on in the background at a party. No wait, I take that back. There's too much unnessecary muscle flexing, lame-ass flute playing, and mind-numbing filler dialog in the film to be interesting enough no matter how high your blood-acohol level gets. Maybe if just the gory parts were editted together with some other clips from other GORE-FU films, if such a genre really exists, it'd make the perfect party background video loop.

Rescue Me
Season One

In many ways Rescue Me is basically The Job all over again, only in this show, instead of playing an Irish, alcoholic, philandering, hard-working New York cop, Denis Leary plays an Irish, alcoholic, philandering, hard-working New York firefighter. Like The Job, Rescue Me features an eclectic cast of characters, including Job alumni Diane Farr and Lenny Clarke.

While I could spend all day drawing comparisons between the two shows, the biggest difference is that Denis Leary and his co-creator Peter Tolan have skillfully infused the comedy in Rescue Me with a healthy dose of drama (sometimes even melodrama). Leary's self-destructive behavior in The Job was always a source of laughs, but in the post 9-11 world of Rescue Me, Leary's boozed up benders, though often quite comedic, are indicative of a grief-stricken death wish. Tommy Gavin is quite literally a haunted man, (but I would argue that the ghosts he sees are entirely in his head and not meant to suggest the existence of supernatural phenomena which are so popular in TV shows these days).

Wedding Crashers
dir. David Dobkin
2005

I had no plans to see Wedding Crashers in the theaters, but Lisa DelVillar had already seen Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and the AMC in Century City wasn't playing March of the Penguins.

I had very low expectations going in considering how disappointed I was with the last comedy starring Vince Vaughn and a Wilson brother, and while Wedding Crashers wasn't great, it at least made me laugh a lot (something that Old School failed to do at all).

I think the main reason the movie is so funny is that the really hilarious lines are totally random. Most other recent comedies like this rely on jokes that are so completely set-up and obvious, but I don't think there was a single person in the audience who expected Vince Vaughn to shout "She was my first Asian girl!!!" If only the romantic part of the plot wasn't so clichéd, the film could have been more than a bunch of really really big laughs.

[watched at the AMC in Century City with Sam and Lisa DelVillar]

The Job

During the Barrington years (1999-2001), I really got into angry white comedians like George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Lewis Black, and Denis Leary. Looking back, Leary was by far the most immature among the other acerbic social critics, but as an apprentice asshole myself, Leary's "FUCK YOU" attitude really resonated with me. I'd listen to No Cure for Cancer and Lock 'N Load over and over.

As a Denis Leary fan, I watched The Job religiously, even when ABC kept moving it around to different days and times. I was pissed when they canceled the show, but I'm happy that now I can watch it on DVD.