FILM: GREEN ZONE [USA?] Dir. Paul Greengrass

GREEN ZONE ****     Bourne is temporary, class is permanent?

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, British-born Middle Eastern actors pretending to be Iraqi working class, Jensen Ackles

 

   It’s interesting, this film, if you look at it from inside Matt Damon’s head. I mean, I know we can’t ever know exactly what he’s thinking, but I think I might have a pretty good idea. Think about it. He’s famous from Bourne, he wrote the Will Hunting film so he’s a smart guy…Affleck wrote it too, and he’s got some smarts, but I figure Damon as being the prime mover…he’s a good actor, he plays well with the Clooney-Pitt publicity dynamic…you know when they fuck around in the press conferences and never give a straight answer and Pitt calls Mel Gibson ‘Sugar tits’, that kind of thing? But Damon goes a little further…he’s getting a reputation as one of the best character actors out there, edging ahead of Clooney I’d say…Clooney’s good, but I don’t think he’s got the range Damon has…so, Damon, he’s smart, he’s making good films, he knows all the right directors, yet there’s one thing he can’t shake. Bourne.

FILM: THIRST [KOREA] Dir. Chan-wook Park

 

THIRST *****     The loneliness of the long distance Korean… [Spoilers?] 

Director: Chan-wook Park

Starring: Kang-ho Song, Ok-bin Kim, Rodney Dangerfield

This is the kind of film that takes me a while to watch. In fact, I still have the director’s last film, Oldboy, on my shelf, unopened. It’s not that I don’t want to watch it, I do, and I know it’ll be good, but for some reason I’d rather watch shit like Wolverine first. It doesn’t really make much sense…it reminds me of the time I had Raging Bull and Showtime in my hands, and I watched Showtime first. It’s not logical. But that’s the way it is with films you know will be good, but will take mental energy to watch. And that’s the kind of film I thought Thirst would be.

The Klaus Kinski Solution to Poverty

I was in a bar just off Lan Kwai, not far from another bar called Yumla, and I wasn’t really drunk, but a friend of mine was and he wanted to leave so we got up to leave and as I stood up a guy hit me with an inflatable banner.

 

The guy looked a little like a more respectable version of Klaus Kinski, even though he was drunk, and the words on his inflatable banner, which was quite long, were in Chinese. I don’t think he knew what they said.

He hit me again and laughed and said we should take the banner and go and hit people outside, and I said no, I’m leaving now.

He hit me again.

I said, ‘Where did you get the banner?’

‘I don’t know, I think it came with me.’

‘You brought it with you?’

‘Or…no…or it brought me…or it, it bought me…bought me.’

GUPTER PUNCHER: Issue 5 preview

The next issue is almost done.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’ll be out by Feb. 25^th. But there’s usually a fuck up in the printing department, so who knows?

But when it does come, the theme will be religion.

Probably not Islam though. I don’t want to die for a magazine read by five people.

Would extremists find a copy of Gupter Puncher?

It’s unlikely, but…as soon as you satirise something, the something will find out…

So, no Islam.

But there will be other things.

Like:

Donald Barthelme goes to Church, 2^nd floor. – an anxious man goes to a church gig in Hong Kong and lets his anxiety run away with itself.