So on my way to dinner, I ran into some people who were planning a trip to the Capital Theater in downtown Olympia. It's a little film society- they show movies usually like two weeks before they come out on DVD. The movies they're showing right now- Shattered Glass and All The Real Girls. We would make it a double feature.

I go, and, because of the whole "them-being-retarded" bit, we go after All The Real Girls showed. So we watched Shattered Glass. Jason recommended it, but my expectations were still pretty low.

Didn't like it. Bad acting. A lot of it, like the ANNOYINGASFUCK framing sequence, is intentional, and some other scenes it's intentional too. Acting within acting, it's about artifice, etc. But there are other scenes, like some big scenes, where the acting seemed weak, like something was being held back. My brother's really big on the acting-within-acting- he cites Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys, but I'm not sure that's an example of it. I got the phrase "acting-within-acting" from him, too, but I think it's a pretty self-explanatory concept. Bad acting, no real visual style besides just generic slickness. And a terrible title. The thing is, it starts off with large amounts of the bad acting, intentionally so, maybe. But because of that, I spent most of the movie going "oh dude, fuck this movie" so maybe it was better, I was just aggressively disliking it for a while there, because the, let's say the first twenty minutes, sucked. Cheesy as hell. And the director's name was Billy Ray! I giggled.

I was kind of wanting to see All The Real Girls. It got pretty mixed reviews, but it got a pretty positive one from a relatively reliable source that I saw today.

See, there used to be this internet column, called Title Bout, by one Abhay Khosla. It had a little framework of going over comics that got released each week, but that was just a vehicle for crazy stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Jokes were funny, and when they weren't, it was acknowledged they didn't work, because of the stream-of-consciousness nature, and the fact that funny people are really hard on themselves when they don't think a joke worked. So I liked that aspect- Kind of influential, especially on this post here. But another reason I liked the column was because I agreed with many of the opinions about pop culture stuff expressed therein. It's gone now, ran for a year. So my life was lacking the Abhay hilarity. But then I found out that the dude still posts on some shitty pop culture message board. So I, being a nerd, did a search, and found some nice longish rambly posts. Like stream-of-consciousness as-he's-watching-the-show reviews of The OC, and reviews of various other stuff. Anyway, he wrote up a Best-of-2003 movie list. The list was lacking the hilarity, but had an abundance of opinions I agreed with. Well, actually, it had some stuff I agreed with and stuff I would probably agree with if I had seen the movies in question. Number one on the list was Kill Bill, number two was Bad Santa, which I can get behind, because my movie memory is shoddy. Number five on his list was All The Real Girls. The list seems to fall apart after that- most top any kind of list falls apart at some point. Like Pitchfork is doing Top 50 of the year lists, which is retarded, due to scale, but results in a relatively solid top ten. Other people do top ten lists, which are just inconsistent, but Pitchfork's process resulted in a very solid top ten. But I'm getting off-topic, that topic being- I don't know what. I guess it's "Abhay's cool."

He also had a list of movies that were crap but he liked parts of, which I like. It allows people to give shout-outs to absolute crap that's entertaining at a lizard-brain level. I suppose that you could say that's what Kill Bill was, but it was that way all the way through, as opposed to say, Pirates Of The Caribbean. He pointed out that Pirates is pretty shitty but you forget about it when Johnny Depp's onscreen. When he's on the screen, you're like "Ghost pirates, that's pretty fucking cool" when, in execution, ghost pirates=retarded. Actually, he just wrote off the ghost pirate thing as bullshit altogether, but my brother was really feeling the whole ghost-pirate idea, so I feel like I should reconcile both ideas. I'm not sure my ghost-pirate stance. Sounds brilliant in theory, cheesy when actually on celluloid.

Anyway, All The Real Girls will probably be out on DVD shortly, if not already. I'm thinking that's a movie I'd watch.