Total Recall

I've got a lot of work to do. Deadlines looming, various plans and projects swimming around in my head. But fuck it--tonight I let all of those intangible thought fetuses fall to the wayside and opted instead to cook up a tasty curry and watch TOTAL RECALL, which was so, so, amazing.



Paul Verhoeven rarely disappoints. It makes me kind of sad to think that movies like that are basically extinct now, and we'll probably never again see a blockbuster with special effects involving jello. (I do want to check out that new James Bond movie, though). Seriously--people tend to dismissively classify '80s/early to mid '90s movies as unerring trash--and they're right. But some of that trash was sublime. It's a slippery slope, because I'm not simply referring to pure camp here- or trite nostalgia, or empty kitsch. It's just that Verhoeven somehow projected his [genuine] sleazy foreigner idealism through the most decadent excess in ways that continue to surprise me. Plus I've said it before, and I'll say it again: movies like BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, TOTAL RECALL, and I don't know, THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE?, HOWARD THE DUCK?- I'm running out of examples here, but some of those movies are the closest you're going to get to true experimental cinema. I mean what the hell is really going on in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA? And don't tell me if you know, because I'd rather hold on to my own neon green-infused impression of it.

I guess I'm going a little off track here. I set up this BLOG as a venue for my useless musings about prog rock and responses to Michael Anton Parker, but I haven't got around to that yet, and at the moment I'm not being very proggy--right now I'm listening to George Harrison's guitar gently weep. It's crying out, telling me to go to bed. Maybe tomorrow I'll accomplish some official business. .