some quick reviews

Last weekend, I rented Wes Craven's last offering -- My Soul to Take Take.
What could have been a pretty decent teen slasher film turned out to be little more than Wes Craven trying to remake Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, by way of Virginia Woolf's The Waves -- a group of teenagers connected through a superfluous "other;" in this case, it's a Freddy Krueger-like mass murderer (the Riverton Ripper) with multiple personalities. The main characters of the story were all born on the night the Ripper supposedly died, and are believed throughout the community to each be an embodiment of one of the Ripper's various personalities.
It starts off interesting and with potential, but loses steam halfway through and then gives up completely by the end, leaving some gigantic plot holes in its wake.





I followed that one up with the Bava/Argento production, Demons.
I don't know why I got it into my head to check this one out; I'd attempted to watch it on numerous occasions, but always gave up about 20 minutes into it. But this time, I stuck it out and kept with it -- and I'm glad I did. While it does move at a slower-than-glacial pace at the beginning, it really picks up after a while and becomes a pretty damn fun, gory mess of a classic. And it even has a killer soundtrack to go along with it.
I recently found out there is a sequel to this one, so I'll probably pick that one up soon.

What? Me cultured???

Growing up in the culturally-void wasteland of Mobile, AL (which seems to be slowly changing, from what my mom tells me), I spent a good deal of the last ten years of my time there trying to seek out new and interesting things, and glean some sort of self curated education of culture.
Music seems to have come first: heading out to as much live, local music as I could; reading musician interviews and articles to find out about old bands that were then unheard of to me; trading music with people; taking more chance on unknown bands.
Then Literature: college mostly oversaw that one, though I did occasionally try to lose myself among the shelves at the local city library (which is how I chanced to stumble upon Murakami).
Then Film: working in multiple video stores; scouring all the Criterion editions from the library's DVD collection; heading out to every indie/artsy movie I was able to, no matter how tedious.

And now, it seems as if my brain has finally made it's way around to an interest in Art.
First, there was this book.
And then this one.*
And tonight, I picked up this one. I don't know why I got a bug up my ass about Impressionism all of a sudden, it just happened.
We'll see what comes next. Probably Theater.



*This is not accounting for my Mick Rock, Nicholas Zinner, or David Horovitz photography books. I file those under Music.