The first part of the film, though only nearly half as long as the second part, was pure Solodnz -- incorporating his subversive humor with captivating characters. The acting was flawless, the structure of the story was strong, and the characters were well-developed and clearly motivated. The last line of this part of the film, the professor tells Vi the only redeeming quality of her story was that it had a beginning, middle and an end. Sadly, the second part goes to show this can not be said of Soldonz's film.

In the end it was Aileen that really made the decision to die, not the courts. She said, "Let God be my judge." She didn't fear death. Aileen Wuornos lend a lonely life, clinging to the only intimacy she ever saw, and when that was taken from her too, she took her sentence, and cursed out the judge that gave it to her.

The cinematic seventh seal has been broken with Bill Murray’s deconstructionist Karaoke version of Roxy Music’s "More Than This" in Sophia Coppola’s second movie, Lost in Translation. Murray plays the role of Bob Harris, a fictitious character mimicking his own real-life stardom, struggling with the both success and ultimate meaninglessness of his grandiose life. While filming a multi-million dollar whiskey commercial in Japan, Bob meets a young American woman named Charlotte also staying in his same swanky Tokyo Hotel. Charlotte, a young twenties-something Yale graduate is struggling to find her identity within in her new marriage to a glitzy photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) who remains out of focus when it comes to their seeming incompatibility. Bob, a married man of 25 years, is always trying to come to grips with his struggling relationship coupled with a career crisis.

Can masturbation cause blindness? Does being a homosexual mean you are insane? Is it normal for your boyfriend to touch your anus? Does cunnilingus cause birth defects? These are the questions the students struggle with as they line up at the door of Professor Alfred Kinsey's office. What is perhaps most shocking about the film, Kinsey is not the discoveries he makes (most woman orgasm by stimulating the clitoris not the vagina) but the level of ignorance about sex in the 50s. Viewing the 50s from the present, it never occurs to us that the Cleavers might have assumed, as did the recently married woman interviewed in Kinsey, that babies come from a woman's navel, as newly weds.

So I'm sitting in the theatre, already content on giving a couple more bucks, and wasting a couple more hours, out of pure loyalty to the guy, just because of record. I figured, why not, he might have something up his sleeve. I didn't expect that much from him, but Kill Bill Volume 2, I gotta say is fucking awesome. There are some drawn out monologues like the one Bill (David Carradine) goes on and on about some comic book for two minutes that made me bored to tears. Monologues about comic books, are no longer clever subjects about a subculture, but sound more like generic banter from Clerks. Then there's the part where Uma is getting trained by her Kung Fu expert, that though are entertaining often drag and should have been shortened. But even with all this, the movie was great. Not because there were some good parts to outweigh the bad. It's just that the good parts weren't just good, they were fucking amazing. I mean, amazing like they should be shown in every film school to every film student to say, hey, this is fucking cinema.

I'll never know what it feels like to live

with the dead...

One of the biggest problems in American Cinema is the lack of minority representation, especially of Asians and Latinos. These groups have been systematically shunted to the sidelines of contemporary American cinema. The African American community has enjoyed more exposure than other minority groups. Black males on television are represented three times more than they are in the general population. Of course, the roles they are given can be -- and often are -- criticized as stereotypical. Asians are hardly seen in movies at all, not even in stereotypical roles. And, for the most part, when you see a Latino in a film, you only need to wait a couple of seconds before a crime goes down.

Bob Dylan needs me to be writing about his book like he needs an armadillo in his cornfield: he doesn't, and would hardly notice it only by chance, by looking at one specific spot at a chance time, anyway. Probably wouldn't even know about it. But that's what so much of life comes down to anyway, if you're going to see it, it's because you're really just really looking at what you can see when you can see it, if you've got a smart eye for looking anyway, and so a friend asked me to write about this book that Bob Dylan wrote about himself, and the book, Chronicles, Volume One, is itself what people call a non-linear narrative relating primarily the circumstances of three transitional periods in the artist's vocation. Since Bob Dylan is such an honest writer and I am too, I said that I would write about his book, even if my words about his words don't matter to anyone.

Not God describes itself as "a play in verse," and accomplishes this by alternating short poem-monologues between two dramatis personae called "Patient" and "Doctor." Under scrutiny, however, it is neither play nor verse. As a play, it sacrifices any and all chances at dialogue by stringing together a disconnected series of anecodes. It lacks the crescendos and dénouement one expects of drama. As a collection of poems, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, it fails to do what could not be done better with good prose. I can imagine Not God as a funny and perhaps even lucid memoir, but as a book of poems? Not so much.

Zhang Zali began working in the 90's with a black spray can tagging his profile in his neighborhood slated for destruction on the outskirts of Beijing. He became more aggressive when he etched out his iconic profile surrounding the holes punched through walls with a wrecking ball. His tag changed to AK-47, the early Russian model of the automatic assault weapon used by revolutionary armies globally.

Reading The Curtain will improve the reader's enjoyment of Kundera's novels, and vice versa. He praises Herman Broch's daring use of lengthy essayistic passages in The Sleepwalkers, and this is certainly true of his own works, with their essayistic and tangential anecdotal passages leaping out of the character's concerns or leading up to some new revelation. It is a wider conception of the novel than the English speaking world generally accepts, and it's one that Kundera has consciously expanded beyond the limits of his fictional works.

Thomas Pynchon wants you to take a month off from your complicity-inducing corporate entertainments and enter a dream-world best approached with the mind wide awake and hypercritical, a world where nothing, certainly not the reader's aesthetic comfort, is guaranteed. Don't beg the boss for a vacation, though, because days spent in morally ambiguous drudgery for plutocratic forces such as Pynchon's latest antagonist, "Scarsdale how-about-you-all-go-live-in-shit-and-die-young-so's-I-can-stay-in-big-hotels-and-spend-millions-on-fine-art Vibe," are a good preface to nightly dream-sessions in this writer's anarchic romance.

In her aptly-titled new book, Duchess of Nothing, Heather McGowan proves that, dazzling ironists such as Flaubert aside, banality can withstand literary treatment without undergoing much change. What ensues is a dreadfully boring book, a book about nothing that never attempts to create the sort of aesthetic atmosphere in which this vacuous subject matter might be rendered at least beautiful, if still devoid of meaning.

For a writer of Leonard Michaels's exuberance, it is stunning that it is his knowledge of where to stop that makes the deepest impression. The elliptical finale, the lacuna at the core -- these are the magnets that sweep on the electricity in these otherwise verbally and visually overfull explorations of alienated life.

One almost feels decadent in mentioning that Wallace Shawn's performance in the current revival of his one-person-show, The Fever, is beautiful. This is because the play works unremittingly to break down any connection between amoral beauty and bitter but much-needed social and economic truth.

"You can show the kindest person in the world, who's in America, and show him being destroyed by it,"

Without that the old power will unexplain to the people what you've already explained. All the things that seemed obvious in the 60s, by 07 are in the mist. It's the cultural organization that's important to maintain any political struggle. We need to rebuild both right now.

You have to follow the path of your blood. -- Garcia Lorca

Because that gift was life. Because the beat is selling time.

It never stops.

It never stops

It never stops.