- No, this is not a photo of me on my friend's bathroom floor after midnight on New Year's. HOSTEL, the new film from horror director Eli Roth, hits theaters today, in the midst of about a dozen Oscar contenders that I've already seen. Roth's last movie, CABIN FEVER, started out as a really, really good movie about young campers getting a flesh-eating virus, but then it devolved into this ridiculously bad redneck comedy that didn't appear to know how to end. I'm not sure HOSTEL will be better, but my remaining choices at the theater are now this, WOLF CREEK and CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN 2. And since Tom Welling doesn't strip down naked and dance in CHEAPER, I'm not seeing it. I figure it's probably better to see a movie about torture than to see a movie that actually is torture.
- I bought Death Cab for Cutie's album PLANS on Thursday, and I've not been able to get past this one song on it since I opened the CD case. "Soul Meets Body," for some reason, has become my favorite new song to play while driving. I don't know about the rest of the album, but that song is really catchy.
- Of the books mentioned in USA Today's "New Year, New Fiction" reviews yesterday, the most interesting, entertaining one sounded like A TAXONOMY OF BARNACLES by a woman named Galt Niederhoffer. The premise sounded sharp, funny and a little bit cruel. An eccentric, rich father raises six bright, wholly individual daughters in a quirky Upper East Side apartment. When the youngest reaches 10 and the oldest is 29, the father - with a taste for Darwinist experimentation - announces to his girls that he's going to prove "nature versus nurture" once and for all. He then tells them he'll leave his entire fortune to one of them, the one who finds a way to best make the Barnacle family name live forever. So it's like a modern Jane Austen novel, except all the daughters are competing against one another for their father's love, approval and money.
- My store manager Chuck fell in love with this CD by big-voiced soul singer Bettye LaVette called I'VE GOT MY OWN HELL TO RAISE, where she makes tunes from the '90s Lilith Fair-woman-singer-songwriter era entirely her own. (The album title comes from a Fiona Apple song.) LaVette's playing a jazz lounge show here at the Five Spot on Jan. 27, and the premise of the new album is too cool to pass up.
- Winston and Roger, two guys at my store, have announced to me that they hate my Top Ten Films of 2005 list and think I'm a snotty bitch because they don't believe that any six-hour Italian movie could be better than STAR WARS: EPISODE III - REVENGE OF THE SITH. Winston said that to suggest that any movie other than STAR WARS was the best was blasphemy. He actually used the word "blasphemy." I said SERENITY was more fun than STAR WARS, and Winston scoffed. When I attempted to disprove them by re-enacting the scene where Padme brushes her hair on that Coruscant balcony, Winston said to me, and I hope I'm getting this quote right, "I don't fucking care. It's fucking STAR WARS! It's a goddamn cultural milestone. George Lucas could've filmed a scene of himself taking a dump somewhere while reading a Playboy, included it in the movie, and it still would've been the best! It's fucking STAR WARS!!!" His rebuttal was so impassioned, I had to mention it. (Besides, the EPISODE III moment when George Lucas actually takes a dump is the moment JarJar Binks appears on the screen, methinks.)
- My friend Liz's birthday costume party is this weekend, and Liz, the quirky film student, wants everyone to come dressed as a character from either THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS or THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU. I asked if I could come as a character from my favorite Wes Anderson movie, RUSHMORE, but she said that she'd polled the people coming to her party and that not many of them had actually seen RUSHMORE. And I'm thinking, "What kind of people prefer TENENBAUMS or LIFE AQUATIC to RUSHMORE??? Why haven't people seen RUSHMORE???" I almost asked Liz this, complete with indignation, but then I remember that Liz saw LIFE AQUATIC six times in the theater. Since Liz says I'm not allowed to wear an oversized LaCoste shirt, hold a pack of cigarettes and say I'm Gwyneth Paltrow, I don't think I'm going to dress up. RUSHMORE is way better than TENENBAUMS and LIFE AQUATIC, damn it.
- So, in terms of New Year's resolutions, I think I wanna be hot when I turn 30 in six months. Like as smokin' hot as possible. Of course, barring that, I want to write the Great American Novel. THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: What's your New Year's resolution?
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