With Kanon coming to a close in a couple of weeks, people have the opportunity to nominate a new series to watch. Have a show you love or have been meaning to watch for a while? Nominate it! (Also, show up and watch it with us!) There are a bunch of great shows nominated so far -- I personally have no clue which to vote for -- and more choices are always better. Get to it, everyone!
Synecdoche, New York (2008): It's a Charlie Kaufman movie, so I expected to think around corners a lot so that I could really get it, but it's tough to make sense of things at times because it is shot from the narrative point of view of the main character, Caden Cotard, who has a neuropsychiatric disorder that slowly shuts down his autonomic functions and causes him to lose track of time and the like (years go by in seconds for Caden, so there are several random time skips). The play that Caden pours his whole life into creating can also be a tad confusing: Basically it's a massive recreation of Caden's life, with doppelgängers hired to play everyone in his life, and the whole production grows impossibly large as he observes moments again and again until the inevitable end. I'm not exactly sure if I enjoyed it, but it's never not interesting.
Carlito's Way (1993): Really good crime movie from when Al Pacino wasn't a raving parody of his formerly amazing self. Carlito's Way has some great fight scenes, but what really makes it work is that it doesn't glamorize the criminal life at all -- where Carlito comes from, the criminal groups are made up of old-timers who are desperately trying to hang on and not get swallowed up, and of hungry newcomers who are either cutthroat and morally bankrupt (and totally bereft of the loyalty that is both Carlito's best quality and his downfall) or naive and destroyed by the hard, materialistically excessive lifestyle. Probably the best example of the corruption of that lifestyle is the path taken by Carlito's lawyer (Sean Penn), who is a practitioner of law by day and an insane cokehead by night. As the movie goes on, those two lifestyles erode, and Penn is really creepy.
Shoot 'Em Up (2007): It's basically Clive Owen shooting the hell out of a bunch of evil pricks for 85 minutes. I enjoyed it. Completely over-the-top, but that is what it goes for.
On the queue for this week: Nothing, actually. I'll have to find something on TV.
Total Movies: 77 (Gaslight, The Last King of Scotland, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Darjeeling Limited, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Diary of the Dead, Bullets Over Broadway, Interiors, Husbands and Wives, The Professional: Golgo 13, Lars and the Real Girl, Lolita, Quills, Hamlet, Iris, Manhattan Murder Mystery, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, The Savages, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Stranger, Love and Death, Harold and Maude, Spartacus, Scarlet Street, Sabrina, Zelig, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), Stardust Memories, Barry Lyndon, Be Kind Rewind, Radio Days, Deconstructing Harry, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Creating Rem Lazar, Undefeatable, Ninja Terminator, Ninja Dragon, Rumble Fish, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, In Bruges, The Bank Dick, Marathon Man, Clannad, Air, Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, MirrorMask, Slither, It's a Gift, Splendor in the Grass, Waitress, North by Northwest, Monkey Business, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, The Brave One, 3:10 to Yuma, Bringing Out the Dead, Gurren Lagann: Gurren-hen, There Will Be Blood, Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder, The Princess Bride, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Spellbound, Frenzy, Anatomy of a Murder, Clue, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Changeling, Shadows and Fog, Into the Wild, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Synecdoche, New York, Carlito's Way, Shoot 'Em Up)
