Somebody’s got to remind me not to go to the Kabuki for movies. For some reason I’ve got it stuck in my head that it’s perfect for dinner and a movie afterwards, and I always forget how they stuff you into cramped seats in a tiny 100-seat theater with a screen not much bigger than my TV. They run a disclaimer now before the movie, promising a big renovation with stadium seats and everything else to update it to the late 1990’s, so maybe that’ll change. But I’m boycotting it until I hear otherwise.

Tonight’s pick was Curse of the Golden Flower. This is a very, very silly movie. Absurd, even. For a lower-budget, action-heavy movie, that would be charming. But with as much pomposity as is in this movie, it just comes across as bloated, tedious excess.

Now, I’ve seen two of Zhang Yimou’s other movies: Hero, which was beautiful, full of intermittent action sequences, and completely nonsensical; and House of Flying Daggers, which was beautiful and exciting for the first 20 minutes and then turned into relentless tedium. So I’ve seen two and didn’t like either, but went ahead for the third; you’d be right in asking, who’s the idiot now?

Well, although both were ultimately bad movies, they did succeed on the visuals, so I expected more of the same. And when you’re going for spectacle, you want to see it on a big screen. The problem with Curse of the Golden Flower is that the spectacle just never lets up, so it all cancels each other out and leaves nothing memorable but a bright, blurry excess.

Every single scene is another designed and built to impress. Most of it is shot after shot of elaborately-dressed people walking down the hallways of the Forbidden Castle, past rainbow-colored doorways and pillars that look more like Willy Wonka’s factory than feudal China. Occasionally it cuts to a scene with hundreds or thousands of people working in the background while two people reiterate a plot point that’s already been established a dozen times over. For the more tranquil moments, it cuts to a Chinese stronghold in a dramatic mountain crevasse being besieged by dozens of ninja assassins. Every shot either has a million people in frame, or one person and a million set decorations.

Of course, this all works with the theme of the movie, such as it is. The story is about the Emperor’s dysfunctional family, and to convey the idea that they’re trapped by all the excess and ritual and tradition and political intrigue, you’ve got to show them bearing the weight of obscenely excessive wealth. But like everything else, that theme is explicitly repeated several times; the movie even has the two leads write it out on paper with English subtitles. Looking for deeper meaning in something so gratuitously silly and excessive is pointless, so the whole thing comes across like set designer porn.

Reviewers who are up to speed on Chinese cinema are always lamenting that everything released now gets compared to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but you just have to bring it up. There’s no denying that that movie changed how Chinese movies are perceived in the US. The problem, as I see it, is that that was a genuinely artistic movie — it took a form of popular art and used it to tell a truly adult story, subtly hiding its theme of freedom vs. being locked into expectations and roles behind over-the-top special effects and action scenes. It was high-art substance told with a low-art style.

As a result, movies like House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower are being distributed by Sony Pictures Classics as if they were art movies, when they’re really just pure style over substance. A lesser movie reviewer would make some comment here about how the Emperor has no clothes, but I’m above that. So I’ll just repeat my main point: this movie is hella lame.

I wasn’t a big fan of Jesus is Magic. In fact, it managed to do what I never would’ve thought possible: by the end of it, I was kind of sick of Sarah Silverman and wanted her to go away.

If you want to read somebody who can write say what I’m thinking, Stephanie Zacharek’s review once again lays it all out, Mouth of Sauron-style. I’d add that it wasn’t just the musical numbers that were unnecessary and went on too long, but the routine itself. At the time I saw the movie, I’d just seen Silverman do a short set at a benefit concert in the city, so I’d already heard all her material.

Obviously, that’s not her fault — that’s what comedians do. And her delivery is perfect, which is actually part of the problem. When she’s so good at making her routine come across as spontaneous, it ruins it when you realize she’s just performing well-rehearsed material.

And that’s why I’m really looking forward to her Comedy Central series, which starts in February. She’s just brilliant in small doses, and a half-hour time limit will just about do it. And most of the material’s got to be new every week, so there’s a bonus.

Plus, I’ve watched the intro about 12 times now and it still cracks me up:

Before I give anybody the wrong impression, I should point out that the past few months have been just great for me. Being under-employed suits me just fine, and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I’m on top of everything and just plain content.

Still, it’s getting really hard to be single these days.

Not for the obvious reasons — I’m really digging having so much time to myself and keeping completely to my own schedule with little-to-no obligations to anyone; so much so that I’d even go so far as to call it awesome. And when I go to the store, right there bang as soon as I walk in there’s a long aisle of Valentine’s Day decorations and candy and cards and all that, and I actually get a little spring in my step, knowing that I don’t have to fool with any of that nonsense.

No, the problem comes after I get past the Valentine’s aisle and just try to buy food to keep me alive and blogging. They make it really hard to buy just enough food for one person.

You might think those frozen microwavable dinners are the key, but I swore those off not long after I graduated college. There’s just something inherently depressing about buying them. Plus, they’re generally bad for you. It’s a vicious cycle, no doubt perpetuated by a grocers’ conspiracy — single-serving food makes you fat and unsuitable as a life partner.

“But what about those Healthy Choice deals?” you may be asking. Well, I can’t bring myself to get those, because I have a penis. Don’t blame me, blame the marketing department. I buy a Healthy Choice dinner, and the next thing you know I’m at a cafe table in the city chatting with my girlfriends about shoes while pouring myself a big bowl of Special K.

I’ve lived alone for about 15 years now, and not to toot my own horn (something else you do a lot of when you live alone), but I can make a mean cheeseburger. I’m talking about something so perfect it’ll make you weep and unless you’ve steeled yourself or have superhuman self-control, maybe even pee a little. But making hamburgers means committing yourself to at least a pound of ground beef and eight buns. And then the race is on: you’d better be ready to get your Wimpy on, because you’re going to have to eat a pound of hamburgers in less than a week before it all goes bad.

Tonight I went with my old college standby: English peas, corn, and a couple of those Pillsbury crescent rolls. Simple, easy to make, relatively healthy, and a perfect alternative if you’re tired of meat (or too poor to get meat, which is how the ritual started). At least, it used to be. When I was in college, they had single-serving cans of peas, corn, and the rolls in a 4-member pressurized canister. I could stock up on dozens of them, perfect for the eventuality that I have to lock myself in a bunker and finally have enough time to read, but then ironically break my glasses and just have to sit there eating peas.

Apparently Corporate America didn’t cotton to my corn-eating ways, because now they only sell it all in Jumbo Why Haven’t You Started A Family Yet, Loser? sizes. Huge cans, big beefy American cans, enough to feed a pre-casino Indian tribe. And good luck finding any kind of pressurized pre-formed bread dough product in sizes smaller than eight-per-can.

I started making dinner with the best of intentions, but of course ended up eating it all, the caloric equivalent of a whole bag of cookies. On corn and peas. What a cruel world this is.

It all reminds me of a joke that everybody’s heard but I’ll type it here anyway: when I was checking out at the grocery store, the clerk said, “You must live alone.” I said, “Oh, because of all the single-serving stuff I’ve bought.” She said, “No, because you’re fucking ugly.”

Tonight I saw the live RiffTrax show at the San Rafael theater. It was the awesomest, which is lucky for me, since I’m going to be seeing it again tomorrow night in the city.

A year or so after I graduated college, the MST3K guys did a Comedy Central-sponsored tour where they’d show one of their episodes (”Zombie Nightmare”) to a live audience. It was a blast; watching the show was always funnier with other people around, even if it’s just one other person.

This show is even better, because the guys do the whole show live, sitting on stage in front of the movie. Even though they were reading from scripts, the whole thing felt spontaneous, and they did a great job of gauging the audience’s reaction (and recovering from missed cues). And there wasn’t a single joke in the entire movie that didn’t work; there was no reference too obscure for at least a couple of people in the audience to get. For a long-time MST3K fan, there’s just no better way to see the show.

The guys (Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Mike Nelson) did a Q&A session after the show. Not too much of interest was revealed, but it was just a relief the fawning crowd didn’t get out of hand. I’ve been to plenty of comic book convention panels and other forums where obsessive geeks (like myself) are given free rein to make everyone wince and cringe uncomfortably, but the gang did a good job of fielding questions.

Now I’m going to go to Netflix and move Roadhouse higher up in my queue…

When I was in the shower this morning afternoon today, I thought of a sure-fire idea for a new Web 2.0 service that is guaranteed to make billions. I’m giving it out for free on the internets so some enterprising young web developer can take it and make his fortune on paper until the next crash.

It’s based on two facts:

1. I get tons of e-mail and web-based “alerts” from all kinds of businesses giving me information they assume I know what to do with. Because I bought a few shares of Apple stock at one point, every week I get an e-mail telling me that the CTO of some silicon company in Saskatchewan just announced his retirement to spend more time with his family. Supposedly I can use the information to buy and/or sell at just the right time to take advantage of the dip and/or surge in stock price, which based on the paltry number of shares I own, will end up making me a cool $1.75. Instead, I just feel a little envious that some other guy I don’t know has made enough to retire while I still have to work.
2. The older you get, the more likely it is you’re going to meet people who are really, truly awful. People who manage to make your life so unpleasant you’d swear they were actively working against you, but when confronted, act as if you were making a big deal out of nothing and just go on being awful.

But with our increasingly busy lives, who has time to hold a grudge? That’s where Schadenfreudr© comes in.

Sign up for the service, and give it a list of awful people. Powerful computers will scour the internets for mention of these people, enough to gather their current sense of well-being. This isn’t stalking, because only public, legally-available data will be gathered — i.e., it won’t try to get at their bank account, but it will look at the stock performance of their company.

Every morning, you wake up and get a concise but comprehensive report of all the bad stuff that’s happened to the people on your list. If their stock price plummets, you’ll be the first to know. Layoffs at their company? It’s in there. Along with the heartfelt blog post about how their girlfriend and/or boyfriend left them. And vacation pictures that were poorly composed or were taken at lame places because the place they wanted to go to was all booked up. And awards they were nominated for, but lost. Not to mention negative and lukewarm reviews, bad-mouthing on internet message forums, and police reports.

Even targets who are having a lucky streak will provide material. Using advanced language-recognition technology, the service will analyze writings and send you only the bad parts. Your awful person puts up a blog post about how he was walking to work and found a $20 bill? Schadenfreudr© Digest tells you the story of how your target has to walk to work instead of driving a car as nice as yours. (For an extra fee, you can get a semi-fictionalized account of how crucial that $20 was to the person from whom it was so carelessly stolen).

And there’s image recognition as well. A flickr photo of your target’s wedding becomes a zoom-in on the dark clouds over the horizon, or your target’s new husband’s obscenely hairy back.

And even when the service can’t find something bad to report, you’ll still get an e-mail alert. Schadenfreudr© Reminders choose a random entry from the list of grievances you provide at registration time, re-opening old wounds by describing once again what your target did to earn your wrath. It’ll also include a chart showing how many internet sites it searched, giving you detailed, accurate numbers of how many millions of people aren’t talking about your target.

As a paid subscriber, you’ll have access to the exact number of other people who have put your target on their own hit list, for those pesky cases of a person you can’t stand but everybody else just seems to love. And of course, your target won’t be able to check his own status on the service. (And if you upgrade to platinum service, your target will simply get a report reading “Nobody cares enough about you to be angry at you.”)

It’s obviously an idea whose time has come. Definitely better than anything that bitch of a college advisor could’ve come up with.

You’ve got to be in the right frame of mind to watch Pan’s Labyrinth and enjoy it. I’m not sure what that frame of mind would be, exactly, but I wasn’t in it.

I want to make it clear up front that it’s a very good movie. The story is very well told, imaginative but grounded in a real-world setting that makes it relevant. All the performances are excellent, the effects and costume design and set design are perfectly balanced between fantasy and reality. There are several scenes that are masterfully done and literally unforgettable. So I acknowledge that my failure to enjoy it is exactly that — a failure on my part.

My theory is that a big part of it is knowing what you’re getting into. Yes, I’d read up on it a little bit, and I was aware that it was rated R. But I purposefully avoided reading or seeing too much about it, because so much of the enjoyment of a fantasy movie depends on being surprised. I only read one review, from Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, because we’ve got a 90% solid track record of agreeing 100% about movies. She usually can perfectly describe my reaction to a movie in just a few paragraphs what I can ramble on about for pages and still not quite get right.

So if you read her review, you’ll see lots of talk about fairy tales and imagery and fantasy and you might take away the idea, as I did, that it’s like a more adult version of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Be aware that it’s not. I was even prepared for that to some extent; the faun as shown in the promotional pictures is clearly much creepier even than David Bowie, and a movie with a guy with eyes in his hands is clearly going to be darker than the Muppets.

I did notice that most reviews of Pan’s Labyrinth classify it as “horror/suspense,” but I didn’t put much stock in that, and I still don’t. It’s not a horror movie; it’s definitely a fantasy. But you have to watch it as if it were a horror movie. For me, as someone who really doesn’t do well with horror movies but is still convinced I’ve got some kind of manly image to maintain, that means being hunched over uncomfortably-but-trying-to-look-casual in the seat, head averted, trying to see just enough through peripheral vision to be able to follow what’s going on.

But despite my squeamishness, I realize it was essential for the movie. Because it isn’t horror movie gore, or over-the-top effects-driven fantasy violence, but sudden brutality, and torture, and emergency field medical procedures. The kind of stuff that goes on during a war, and the movie is set during (or immediately after?) the Spanish civil war. And almost all of it is necessary; there are only a couple of sequences towards the end that I thought were gratuitous. (And I wrote those off as being an after effect of Guillermo del Toro’s horror movie background, not quite as well-integrated as the B-horror-movie sections of the Lord of the Rings movies).

The gore and violence perfectly sets up the mood. This isn’t a story that starts in the real world and then escapes to a fantasy land; it’s a war story told from a child’s perspective, where fairies and fauns and nightmare monsters exist in the shadows. And it’s because of the horror movie elements that the movie just feels right throughout — in the real world, violence and horror can come at any moment, so you’re waiting for the moment when the good guys will be found out, and something terrible is going to happen to them.

The relatively few fantasy sequences feel like genuine escape; there’s plenty of gross stuff to see, but it’s all child-level gross. The feeling isn’t one of horror or impending disaster, but of adventure — you’re tense not because you’re thinking someone’s gonna die! as much as oh, she’s going to get in a lot of trouble! It conveys the mood and transition so much more effectively than going through some magic doorway to a sparkling fairy world.

And the more I think about the movie, the more I appreciate it. If nothing else, that’s the surest sign of a classic. There’s one scene in particular, where Ofelia looks into her magic book for guidance only to see swirls of red, that I could only describe as a master work. (Obviously, there’s more to it, but I don’t want to ruin the scene for anyone).

Until now, my opinion of Guillermo del Toro was based only on the few movies of his I’d seen — Mimic, Blade 2, and Hellboy — and a ton of promotional interviews for Hellboy. And I dismissed him as being a smart guy who has a great sense for what’s cool, what makes a cool story, and can articulate why it’s cool, but still somehow ends up making average genre movies salvaged only by one or two memorable images.

Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t just a good movie. It might even lend a little credence to the auteur theory and show what can happen when an imaginative moviemaker isn’t hobbled by the archetypal Hollywood Machine. And even though I didn’t enjoy watching it, I’m glad I saw it.

This year I plan to bitch about the iPhone one day every day until its release. This article on Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop journal links to confirmation that the iPhone will be closed to independent developers, because Steve Jobs wants it that way.

That article makes plenty of good points, but the best was raised in the forum discussion. One poster mentions CoverFlow. That’s the feature that Apple’s making a big deal about in regards to the iPhone. Turn the thing on its side, and you get to flick through all your album cover art with an incredible interface that the geniuses at Apple invented.

Except, wait, they didn’t. It was made by an independent developer and released as freeware until Apple bought up the IP to incorporate into iTunes 7. What could be better proof that independent developers come up with good ideas? And how can you get off demanding total control over a platform and still insisting that you’re leading in innovation?

I think it’s every blogger’s duty to make sure as many people see this as possible. The best scenes from Wicker Man.

I haven’t seen the movie, but by the looks of it he was just asking for the bees. What a dick.