One day several years ago I was waiting for a bus near a book store, and in the window there was a book about the philosophy of THE MATRIX. There’s more than one book like that, and I can’t remember which one it was that I saw that day, but it got me thinking: there should be a book like that, except it’s entirely about THEY LIVE.
There’s a long-running series of books called 33 1/3, little pocket-sized book length essays about classic albums. I have one for Stevie Wonder’s Songs In the Key of Life, for example. And I’ve long thought there should be a series like that for movies, and I should write the one about THEY LIVE.
Well, too late, buddy. Soft Skull Press is starting a series just like that, although if I understand correctly they’re all gonna be written by novelists. #2 is on DEATH WISH, #4 is gonna be LETHAL WEAPON. THE STING, HEATHERS and THE BAD NEWS BEARS IN BREAKING TRAINING are also coming up, but it all starts with THEY LIVE by Jonathan Lethem, author of the novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. His approach is very different from what I would’ve done/could still do some day, but it’s an interesting, quick read and makes plenty of points that I hadn’t thought of before, making it a good first book about this particular subject. (read the rest of this shit…)
Is it just me, or do some of these movie titles start to blend in together after a while? The ones I have trouble with are: I’M STILL HERE, I’M NOT THERE, LET ME IN, and NEVER LET ME GO. Well, now that I’ve actually seen one of these maybe I’ll remember which one that is and it’ll help me straighten out which is which between the other ones by narrowing the choices a little. I hope so, because I’m not sure what else I got out of this one, exactly. I mean, I got something, I think. Just a something that’s hard to identify.
I didn’t have cable in the ’80s so I never saw 
I want to tell you guys about a new book I got called DESTROY ALL MOVIES: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO PUNKS ON FILM, edited by Zack Carlson and Bryan Connolly. I guess you might’ve already heard about it because some of the other movie websights beat me to posting about it, but you know what? The tortoise ate the hare, the boy who cried on the wolf, etc. Anyway I’ve been looking through it for a few days and I want to discuss it with the ladies and gentlemen of the outlaw community or whatever, because this is one of those passion project books printed with special blood sweat and tears based inks, and those deserve recognition.
Ever since the runaway Hong-Kong-equivalent-of-best-picture-Oscar success of the Donnie-Yen-starring biopic 
It’s not clear yet when ROLLING THUNDER can be ordered, but THE OUTFIT is already available 
They got this new extended cut of 
The first 
SQUIRM is an odd duck. (note: come up with worm pun, save “odd duck” for killer duck movie, or DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING.) This killer worm movie pulls a bait and switch (get it, bait? not switch though, that’s not part of the pun) where it’s setting up the characters before it gets to the killer worm mayhem, then it starts to reel you in (reel) to what’s going on with these characters to the point where you don’t even care that it doesn’t show the worms much or kill very many people.
