Motion Picture Mail

For some reason, I’ve been getting rather a lot of video material in the mail this past couple of weeks. Mostly non-fiction stuff, with one notable exception. And since I’ve been backed up with work and sickness, I haven’t really had a chance to catch up on it.

But I thought I could share some of the stuff with you and see if anything caught anyone’s interest.

Clicking the thumbnail picture above will take you to a larger version, where you can actually see the items, but I’ll go over them here, so you don’t really need to see the bigger picture.

Top Left is the Laserdisc of Love and Human Remains, a movie now 12 years old. The movie is based on Canadian playwright Brad Fraser‘s play Unidentified Human Remains And The True Nature Of Love. I have a soft spot for this play, since a production of it was the first live theatre I attended at university–and I remember being both stunned and a little shocked when I realized that was an actual naked girl on the stage.

(An aside: I later saw a production in Toronto with Erica Ehm playing the Benita role. Like all Canadian guys of my approximate age, I had a fantasy relationship with Erica as a teen–for all intents and purposes she was MuchMusic, and at the time when it was something new and exotic. Mia Kirshner does a much better job in the role, but it’s not the same thing at all.)

The play can be amazing, and the movie is a decent adaptation of it to the screen.

This was an eBay purchase, and I got the laserdisc only because there doesn’t appear to have been a DVD release–and I still have a working LD player. (The fact that the LD cost me $1.50 is a definite bonus.)

Just to the right of that is a video (remember those) of a concert Milla gave in 1994. That was the same year she released The Divine Comedy. Milla was 19 at the time, and was mostly performing songs that she wrote at 16.

I bought the album mostly because the guy at the CD shop said it was “kind of Kate Bush-y”, and she was cute on the cover. At the time I didn’t realize she was a model/actress, or I wouldn’t have bought the album, especially if I knew the songs were written at 16. Still, it’s a pretty decent album, especially The Gentlemen Who Fell and Bang Your Head.

I was at Sacred Cow Productions to get the new Bill Hicks DVD, and I noticed they also sold this video, so I ordered it for nostalgia’s sake. And, let it be admitted, because Milla is painfully hot.

Starting the second row is Maybe Logic, the biographical piece on Robert Anton Wilson. You know, the guy that wrote The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which you surely read as an undergrad, and quite enjoyed. Fnord!, 23, and what not. (The later Historical Illuminatus Trilogy includes the best use of the “I’m sorry, I thought this was Paris” joke in all known fiction, by the way.) If you go to the Maybe Logic site, be sure to check out the trailer. I feel better having watched it–like my philosophy was running a quart low on ludicrousness.

Just to the right of that is the aforementioned Bill Hicks DVD. This has three different Hicks shows and the It’s Just A Ride special. One of the shows is the Revelations show, which was my first exposure to Hicks, just after he died, and which I have wanted to own since then. It’s about time.

I know the really trendy kids are all about the Hicks backlash these days, since he has been overquoted around the Internets, but fuck it–he was a genius, and I’d rather enjoy these shows than maintain my Hipster Card.

That brings us to Breakfast With Hunter, the feature length documentary on HST. I mentioned I was waiting for this when the news about Hunter’s suicide was released, and it arrived last week. I haven’t had a chance to screen it yet.

Beside that is the DVD release of the award-winning documentary arising from Romeo D’Allaire‘s book about his time as the head of UN forces in Rwanda during the massacres.

I’ve been gruesomely fascinated with what happened in Rwanda, and the global shrug of indifference about it since I first read We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, and I bought D’Allaire’s book the moment it came out. I’m quite looking forward to watching this movie as soon as I get a night free. (If you’ve seen Hotel Rwanda, the Nick Nolte character is D’Allaire. There are some pretty big… um… difference of opinion between the movie and D’Allaire’s accouts.)

The two movies to the right of the D’Allaire doc, and the two below them, are a group of documentaries. You might call them “Anti-Bush” documentaries, speaking loosely. All four are DisInformation products, although I only got three directly from DisInfo.

Those three are:

OUTFOXED – A documentary that looks at Fox news, and how it is anything but fair and balanced.

UNCONSTITUTIONAL – A documentary looking at the destruction of civil rights in post 9/11 America, with an emphasis on the Patriot Act.

UNCOVERED – A documentary that analyzes the actual reasons for the war in Iraq. “Go behind the walls of government, as CIA, Pentagon, and foreign service experts speak out, many for the first time, detailing the lies, misstatements, and exaggerations that served as the reasons to fight a ‘preemptive’ war that wasn’t necessary.”

The fourth one, Greg Palast‘s documentary on some of the shady exploits of the Bush Family, is also carried by the Disinformation Store, but I got it via Palast’s site. After reading Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, I knew I would need to get a copy of this.

I may have to have a little W-bashing film festival sometime soon; get some of the lads together for stout and documentaries. Watching these on my own has just reinforced a lot of my perceptions, and I’d like to go through them in company, for some alternate impressions. Maybe even follow up with a screening of Manufacturing Consent for the hearty ones. I never get tired of watching that.

What does that leave? The almost-complete set of Eddie Izzard DVDs. I first saw most of these (the first four) year’s ago at Neil Gaiman‘s place. I was skeptical at first, but the gag about poking a badger with a spoon–“now that’s an original sin”–was where I realized I was fully converted. At the time the only DVDs available of these shows were PAL/R2, so I had to make do with just buying CDs of the shows. I was quite pleased recently to find that there are now NTSC/R1 DVDs of the four older shows, which also motivated me to get the CIRCLE DVD and complete the set. Annoyingly, it appears that the most recent show SEXIE, is still only available R2.

And that leaves only SHOCK AND AWE, the most recent Rollins spoken word DVD. I was shocked to realize the other day that I have been following Rollins’ spoken word for something like 13 years–since the first release of THE BOXED LIFE. In that time I’ve accumulated 14 CDs (many 2-disc sets), 4 DVDs, and a VHS tape, of Rollins spoken word. Whenever something new is produced, I order it from the 2.13.61 store pretty much immediately. I got a kick out of this, and I think it’s funny that Hank is mellowing as he ages.

That’s a lot of video stuff, but when you live in the boonies, you need to get interesting mail.

Maybe sometime I’ll really scare you and show you what a couple of weeks worth of book mail to this place looks like.