Separating the Friday Posts

This is pathetic. Here it is Thursday night, and the last post on this thing is last Friday's iPod random ten. Pathetic! I am at least glad I started posting iPod lists every Friday - it forces me, every week, to realize what a sluggard I have been. (Last week, for what it's worth, I had an excuse - the flu; irritating work developments. But this week, I have had - well, I guess I have had something like an excuse - Wong Kar-wei series at the Brattle - I went to a couple of those - makes for long nights... But should give me somethign to write about.... sad.)

Enough! The movie world is getting interesting - this weekend, Oldboy is opening - can I believe the hype? Soon we will find out. Next weekend, it's Kung Fu Hustle - Stephen Chiao is always good for a laugh, and sometimes more... Can't be bad!

Last weekend, I had to settle for Eros. Not horrible, but given the talent, you could expect a bit more. The first episode - Wong Kar-wei's - is pretty good, though a bit repetitive and formulaic. I think the handover ruined poor Wong Kar-wei’s artistic reason for living. His recent films keep going back to the 60s, but with a mournful, nostalgic tone, which is a change for the worse from the much better, much more urgent movies he made before the handover. Even the ones set in the past were made with a sense of a deadline - they were dominated by time, and the sense of time running out. That sense is gone. It is completely missing from "The Hand", and not as compelling in In the Mood For Love as it was in any of his other films. So - much rides on 2046 I guess - he needs to find something, do something to move forward. If he keeps remaking In the Mood For Love he is not going to be a great filmmaker again.

The rest of Eros is not much. The Soderburgh episode is funny, but kind of a toy, a kind of in-joke . . . and not very sexy by any standards . . . The Antonioni piece is vile - a parody of Antonioni, with bad acting, bad dubbing, bad dialogue, naked models running around in fast cars and riding horses, fucking each other in crumbling towers and dancing naked on a beach . . . atrocious! No amount of FFN can make up for the inanity of it all!