live the life you please

Suicide Club.  What can I say?  I think a plot description would just completely fail for this movie.  I mean, as can be gleamed from the title, there are a lot of suicides, often mass suicides, over the course of like a few days.  All I can say is that there's a lot of gore (some of it totally fake-looking, some of it pretty convincing and graphic), a J-pop group of little girls that everyone idolizes, creepy children, rolls of human skin and other skin-like things, small animals, red and white circles on disturbing web sites, sliding sports bags, hysterically absurd teenagers, telephones, a lot of trains, and a lot of crazy people as seen in the above picture.

It's like: Gozu + David Bowie + Happiness of the Katakuris + Silent Hill + Battle Royale + Akira + Picnic at Hanging Rock + Marebito + Pulse + Visitor Q + Being John Malkovich + Kontroll.  It's all shot with very grainy, pseudo cinema-verite camerawork, which makes the movie all the more real and eerie.  Some scenes, such as the ones involving the psychotic copycats Genesis (above), are truly some of the most disturbingly bizarre scenes I have ever seen - not because of anything that is happening per se (unlike in, say, Gozu) but because of the juxtaposition of images that just should not be.  A lot of disturbing things in movies are disturbing because they are grotesque, violate social taboos, appear painful, etc., but these scenes were disturbing because they were genuinely uncanny, and that's the best way I have to describe it.  On the one hand it's very blackly comedic, very absurdist, but on the other it's also - good old Japan - full of metaphysical, philosophical advice for a broken society.  I swear, no filmmakers seem to think so badly of their own culture as the Japanese. 

SSDD: same shit, different day

So I've never actually seen a Limp Bizkit video - yes, Limp Bizkit - but I was forced to turn to YouTube when I got a random craving to listen to "Break Stuff" - ah, brings back memories of homecoming. I'm not even kidding. And now I'm completely obsessed with this video. I love music videos that feature "regular people" saying the lines of the song - see System of a Down's Boom! and Placebo's Running Up That Hill - they can get a little myspacey at times but I think that's worth the effect: showing the universality of the song.

Anyway. Here's "Break Stuff".  If this song isn't universal, I don't know what universal is.

goodness overload... cannot handle.

Uh?  Do not get the hate for Viva La Vida at all.  What a great album.  Also, "Lost!" and "Yes" and "Death and All His Friends" are the only Coldplay songs that I've been able to add to my Ilium playlist.  Ugh, I had no idea Coldplay could make such good instrumental shit. 

I have this theory about Coldplay's albums (it's a personal interpretation, okay) - and it has to do with the Zen theory of water drops and expanding circles of influence (at the center is the family; the outermost is the world, etc).  I mean this both in terms of the sound and the lyrics:

* Parachutes is the individual album: as evidenced by "Trouble" and "We Never Change", the lyrics are about people caught up in their own heads, obsessing over their own fears and mistakes; there's a thread of loneliness and destitution in Parachutes - and of course you can only parachute yourself, and you parachute down into an unpopulated wilderness or enemy territory. 

* A Rush of Blood to the Head is the small-group album: most of the songs are very relationship-oriented - "In My Place", "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face", "Green Eyes", "A Warning Sign", "A Rush of Blood to the Head", "Amsterdam" - and sound like a hopeful but bittersweet conversation with another person.  Probably because Chris Martin was all in love with Gwyneth Paltrow around now. 

* X & Y is the global album: the social consciousness thread begun in the previous album by "Clocks" gets picked up in a major way in "Square One", "White Shadows", and "Twisted Logic".  It's like the Human Instrumentality Project except more spiritual and positive and less literal and bad.  Even when the lyrics seem to address another person they sound less emotional and more therapeutic or guiding, like a religious guide-to-life.  Grand generalizations applicable the planet over abound. 

* Viva La Vida is the universal album: I'm not sure how I can describe this, but it's like when Shinji rejects Instrumentality after all (I don't know why NGE is so involved in my metaphor).  We are definitely looking outward in this album, and this might be in part because of the slicker sound - but it just feels like another level (that cannot be understood?) has been transcended in songs like "Yes" and "Lost!" and "Death and All His Friends".  Interestingly, the individual has been revived, but if you're heading off into space, loneliness is inevitable.  Maybe it's the "only God knows" in "Yes" that makes me think this: instead of doling out advice for a ready world, it's laying down your arms and admitting your smallness before the universe.  

So really, I don't know where they can go next. 

Totally unrelated:  WTF wikipedia?  The xenomorphs do not have a hive mind!  Just because they have a Queen does not mean they all share a consciousness, dumbasses.  Also, why am I obsessed with xenomorphs?  They're a scary fictional alien species that bleeds acid, engages in "alien interspecies rape", and chestbursts out of unlucky hosts.  I mean, I would definitely kill myself if I met one.  I have a feeling, though, that my fascination lies in this: "the alien's combination of sexually evocative physical and behavioral characteristics creates [according to Ximena Gallardo], 'a nightmare vision of sex and death. It subdues and opens the male body to make it pregnant, and then explodes it in birth. In its adult form, the alien strikes its victims with a rigid phallic tongue that breaks through skin and bone. More than a phallus, however, the retractable tongue has its own set of snapping metallic teeth that connects it to the castrating vagina dentata.'"  Oh yeah.  Sigmund Freud, analyze this shit!  Also, if they really are "planet purgers", as some critics theorize them to be (used by the Space Jockeys and/or the Predators)... well, that's another point of interest, isn't it?  As Lindsey says, I'm so predictable.