Movies

Since I wasn't in a mood for partying last night I spent most of the evening watching movies (and listening to new favorite artist AGF). I watched films that I've been planning to watch, but that have fallen in between somewhere. I didn't have any expectations about The Assassination of Richard Nixon but it was actually a good film - at least the most parts of it. Sean Penn is great, as always (mostly). Questions about prestige, work and self-deception were brought up in the film and no easy answers were given. Then again, it tended to make things too easy - especially the description of the man's relation to his ex-wife was the type of thing one has seen in movies a thousand times.
People have recommended Pan's laryrinth so I decided to watch it at last. My feelings about it are mixed. I like the unusual way of dealing with issues about war. The elements of fairy tale and fantasy worked quite well. But at the same time, the characters never really came to life and I felt they were achetypes, rather than real people. If characters turn into archetypes, then I consider that as a problem - at least in the most cases.
Even though I've watched almost the entire Tarantino oeuvre, and even though I've found most of his films entertaining, there are quite few of them that have made an impression. Jackie Brown and Natural Born Killers (which he wrote) are my favorites. Kill Bill was fun, but the motherhood part was bogus. Reservoir dogs, of course, is a film that sticks with you. To be honest, I wasn't really interested in dedicating two hours to his latest movies, but some people have tried to talk me into watching it. So I did. Death Proof was, in fact, a pleasant surprise. All right, I didn't like the sexualization of his female characters but to his defense one can say that it was not done entirely uncritically. If one wants to read the film with a considerable amount of charity, then one could say that the film is about sexualization of women, rather than being an instance of it. I think there are some reasons to read it charitably. Tarantino's slimeball asshole characters beats, I think, most of what I've seen. In this way, he seems conscious about a lot of things. Besides that, it was a very entertaining movie, well worth seeing.

It a new year and all that shit. 2007 was gone in a second. I am getting old, it seems, ready for rocking-chair on a porch, buying "the best of the 80's"-records and start whining that people should live healthier, getting a bigger flat ("get rid of that student pad of yours!"). Well, the F-word is a proper response to that.