#113 Catch Me If You Can

I caught my friend Mike smirking at me this evening when I told him that I was enjoying watching Catch Me If You Can on DVD. When I asked him what was so funny, he said, "Well, you're talking about Spielberg without being cynical." Sadly, that's what it's come to with my childhood heroes Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Aside from Minority Report, I can hardly look at their recent work without cringing. Imagine my surprise when Catch Me If You Can turned out to be such a well-told film. For the first time in as long as I can remember Spielberg keeps it simple. There are no special effects and hardly any action for that matter - just two characters struggling their way through their fascinating lives. Most importantly he keeps his film school gimmicks to a minimum. Keen eyes will still be able to spot these flourishes. In one scene a Gump-esque dollar bill rides the draft from Leonardo Dicaprio's escape window. It glides under the gap beneath a closed door and across the sightline of Tom Hank's FBI Agent who is in pursuit. At that moment Hanks knows his quarry is long gone. He doesn't even need to enter the bedroom to see the curtains blowing in the wind. Catch Me If You Can is proof that Spielberg still has the capability to capture movie magic without beating audiences over the head with his wand.

#112 Taxidermy Federated

Some friends and I have started a little company that sells original t-shirts and pins. The concern is called Taxidermy Federated. Those with an interest in history will likely be enlightened and entertained by our company's rich past. Right now we have one shirt design and several pin designs with many more planned for the future. Please check our products out and, if you like them, by all means, buy many of them.

#111 Kill Bill Vol. 1

It's been eleven years since I first experienced a Quentin Tarantino flick. Since then copycats have done their best to tarnish the director's reputation. The hundreds of half-assed Pulp Fiction rip-offs that we've been plagued with has made it easy to forget what made QT's movies so great; Tarantino has a bone-deep love for movies. Not just the classics, the Oscar winners and the critic's faves. No, Quentin loves trash. He loves movies that take cheap shots. Movies that thrill you like a shot in the arm or draw your eye like a smoldering car crash on the side of the road. I was incredibly relieved last Friday to find that that Quentin's filmmaking still could make me grin from ear-to-ear.

Somewhere along the line my faith in Quentin Tarantino faltered. I started second-guessing my interest in his first films. I harbored a mild embarrassment that my walls were once covered floor to ceiling with his movie posters. I figured that I'd grown up since then. The funny thing is that Tarantino has grown too. He's a better filmmaker than he's ever been. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is beautifully shot, brilliantly scored (with a killer mix job by The RZA) and most importantly, incredibly well conceived. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is a love letter to the off-beat genre film. It's a revenge picture that hopscotches across the bloody sidewalks of grindhouse, samurai and kung-fu films with glee. The film is unrepentantly exploitative. It's violent. It's gory. And, believe it or not, it's quite funny.

After my first viewing of Kill Bill Vol. 1, I walked out of the theater and told my friends, "This is how every movie should be." I stand by that statement. I'd love to live in a world where every Friday another exhilarating serving of celluloid junk-food was served up at the local multiplex. Movies have become sanitized and safe. Stylists have polished action down to the nub, snipping away the visceral punch the films of the '70s and '80s once had. Fans of gonzo horror and nutty karate have been forced underground. The dusty aisles of mom and pop video stores and the bootleg bins at comic book conventions are the only place to find films that once openly bled on theater screens. Kill Bill Vol 1. is a glorious return to a time when an R rating actually meant something. The MPAA's Restricted label meant that you'd probably see some titties. It meant that you'd better be a grown-up, and even if you were, you still might just barf all over yourself, be scared shitless or at the very least feel a little uncomfortable.

There may be more artistic movies out there. God knows, there are definitely bigger and better moviegoing experiences coming. But I still don't think any of them have a shot at making me as happy as Kill Bill Vol. 1 has.

#110 Dollz

My friend Mitch just wrote a story for Salon about the fascinating internet subculture of dolling. Dollers, who are mostly girls and young women, create two dimensional characters that bear a striking resemblance to the characters in old-school, 16 bit video games. It's quite rare to see a video game influenced, software oriented movement on the internet that isn't dominated by men.

To read the entire Salon article, select the "daily pass" option and click through the commercial.