16 mm Shrine

One of my guilty pleasures: The 16mm Shrine, subtitled thus: "An examination, exploration, and celebration of what drives society to create things like Rocky and expect us to watch them. God, I hate movies. And now you will too." Ash Karreau usually reviews dvds so awful I would never see them. Warning: ugly nastiness abounds, enter at your own risk.

From review of Dark Water:

Finally, a movie about the horrors of plumbing. I’ve been waiting for a film like this ever since moving into my apartment, which has pipes like a heroin addict has veins. The water leaves a brown residue, and tastes like copper and dysentery, which I use as an excuse to make Kraft dinner with Coca Cola. Plus, the perpetual gurgling reminds me of an old person dying, which does not help with my insomnia.

That’s not the only problem with my place, either. The hardwood floors are warped, I can hear the neighbors yelling at American Idol, and any corpses I try to stack in the closet eventually liquefy due to the poor ventilation and stifling heat.

From review of House of Flying Daggers:

Foreign films, in particular, contain a great deal of information for the attentive viewer. Not only do they visit upon the audience the ultimate message of the film, they also provide a peek into the particular culture that created the work.

En Folkenfiend, for example, taught me that Norway has a significant portion of the population who aren’t church burning sociopaths.

Canadian cinema, on the other hand, is so boring I finally understand why the country’s the size of maybe two-thirds of the known world yet contains roughly the population of a particularly well attended Patriots game.

House of Flying Daggers is no different. Not only was I deeply touched by its message of the addictive and destructive nature of love, I also learned that Chinese people can fly.

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