Americana

the smoking bogey

American movies. No no, no such thing. Individual sensibilities. And yet and yet. Movies watched over three days, half bullied or fully bullied by the foster kid, also an easy way to assuage guilt, for not going bowling gokarting arcade gaming paintballing macdonaldsing laser skirmishing. Movies made in America. Movies featuring Americans at least. Four over three days, Kill Bill One, Kill Bill Two, Very Bad Things and Thank You For Smoking. All full of death and flippancy but at least no blood in the last. 

They bleed into each other in my mind. Kill Bill's silly manga. Know nothing about though. David Carradine's Kung Fu face looking more like his old man. Trailers and Mexico and the Japanese mafia, what they call them, Yakuza. Jacussi. Steamy stuff. Long Uma Thurman's face, changeable as Cath's in its way. Two long films, too long, superheroes, fight scenes, uninteresting superinflated characters, but I liked the trailer guy. Long tradition of multiple heaps of dead baddies, especially in cartoons. The buried alive scene, always a consciousness raiser, killed by the silly fist trick. How would you feel? Might've made the effort to surface, when a young bud. Now no longer. Relax, don't panic, slowly use up the oxygen, slip away. But really who gives a, with the unbeatable sword, the old master, the squished eye, the cardboard baddies, the unreal realism. Getting jaded perhaps. Still, always prefer good old fashioned character development. Always been weak on plot myself. Those dance fights, heads popping like corks, fountains of blood jizz, startling at first then diminished returns, slipping down in the chair, consciousness fading.

And before or ofter that, who cares, Very Bad Things, men behaving badly, Jews and Gentiles, all boorish noisy, unlike my charming mens cooking group. Obnoxious then jawdroppingly horrible, but my boy insists its a black comedy, stay with it, don't give up, improves after the first couple of deaths. Black comedy, a new concept for a teenager, he had to explain and explain. Accept the early deaths of innocents, a balloon boobed pro, a black security hotelman, as foreground to more self-destructive shenanigans led by whatisname, well-known actor, the prime nasty. Whatisname featured in that movie whatsitsname, Heathers perhaps, with weird Winona, my old flame. The Very Bad Things chopped up the bodies, disposed of them in kosher fashion and proceeded inevitably to fall apart at the seams, so with whatisnames help they dwindled in number until Cameron Diaz disposed of whatisname because she wanted everything to go right for her wedding. It was a satire. I laughed twice. 

Thank You for Smoking was a satire too about an advertising exec or maybe a lawyer, anyway an apologist for Big Tobacco, Nick Naylor, I only recall that name because the foster boy mentioned it after, and the theme was, is it really a good thing to pursue a job because you're good at it without really reflecting on wider implications? Peter Singer would not approve. Nick's young son adores his wiliness and wants to be just like him which puts us into a very very slightly tense and worried state, and that's what the film's about, why are we laughing, but we do, which is probably healthy. He has regular pub confabs with a very sexy woman representing Big Booze and a fat fuzzball representing Big Guns and they compare notes on who is responsible for most deaths. An unlikely theme for a movie, almost makes it admirable. Asked to recall what happened in the end, I couldn't. Not as unfathomable as the last batman movie, indeed not unfathomable at all, but not too memorable either, apart from that sexy alcohol woman.  Oh that reminds me of Katie Holmes, a journalist who fucked Nick for a story, for the mortgage because everyone has a mortgage, they say but I don't. Anyway again I gave the movie ticks for audacity, and for Nick being more or less unrepentent in the end, but of course Big Tobacco finally lost Big Time but not as much as Yul Brynner or Humphrey Bogart.