The Short List (Link Roundup)

–Crash. Manipulative and engineered to illicit a heart-felt reaction. Anguished slow-mo screaming at the sky to an ambient moantrack makes me want to do the same. Few lessons. Guns destroy people quickly and carelessly. Automobiles can do the same. Pride trumps violence. Amores Perros is remarkably similar, and superior.

–Primer. Any film where you need an engineering degree to grasp the dialog is cool in my book. I love the garage tinker ethic, geniuses hacking away at mechanical dreams. The resultant plot twists are dense, it might help to lay them out on paper – tackle it as an engineering problem. The 7000 dollar budget and efforts by writer/director/actor/composer Shane Carruth mirrors the “geniuses in the garage” feel the film explores.

–Brokeback Mountain. The short story is blunt, brutal and terribly well written. Highly doubtful the film will paint these broken cowboys with such hard colors, more likely pastels to the same old orchestrated score. And personally I’d rather not see the gratuitous sodomody heh. I’ve seen the glory of those same mountains (Wind Rivers, Absoroka Beartooths, etc), so watching them on the screen wont be new – reading them was.

–Second Renaissance. Along with the original film, Animatrix represents the artistic pinnacle of the franchise’s efforts. The reinterpreted historical events are brilliantly integrated, and part two has some horrific imagery of Armageddon, destruction, subjugation and slavery. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

–Chapter Eight. Been doing this gig two months now. The two storylines are about to converge, and hopefully some legitimate excuse for a quest will present itself. Can’t party up the scoundrel and the young hero and all the love interests without a conflict machine, can we?