Kdotdammit: High Voltage (2009)
May. 1st, 2009 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersFor the first time ever, as far as I can recall, I have met someone in real life who I first met through LiveJournal. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kdotdammit is up here visiting friends and Friends, and she arranged for a movie night with holyoutlaw and myself. We went to Seattle's greatest movie palace, the Cinerama, and saw Crank: High Voltage. After that, it was off to Boom Noodle on Capitol Hill for dinner and yakkety-yak.
As I told Kim in e-mail, she was exactly how I thought she would be from reading her journal and looking at her pictures and artwork. She must be pretty good at expressing herself. She is high voltage, high octane, high energy. Conversation was a blast. One of the things I've always enjoyed about her writing is that she brings a perspective of growing up working class and of a hard tumble life on the streets, but also an intense interest in both trash and avant garde art, as well as a hard-nosed experience as a working mother. Like Sharee and my niece's husband she reminds me that my own childhood was very protected, if not down-right coddled. Like them, she seizes the day. Always a good jolt to any tendency toward comfortable numbness.
Anyway, the movie was not something I would ever have seen if not for Kim. It's a sequel. It's trash. It's a frenetic action film starring Jason Statham, but it's also very avant garde in its own twisted way. Some people compare it to Looney Tunes cartoons, which seems appropriate. Others compare it to John Waters in its assault on good taste. Okay, yeah, I can see that. I imagine it also has roots in the gross-out comedies that I have so studiously avoided in the past decade. It *is* primarily a comedy, I think. It is almost physically assaulting, and there were several scenes that had me absolutely squirming in my seat. This movie is not for the faint of heart. If it hadn't been funny, I'm not sure I could have taken it. I don't know that I can really describe the effect of the movie. The plot is that Statham's stud character, Chev Chelios, has his heart removed and replaced by an artificial heart. He has a few hours to get his real heart back. He needs regular jolts of electricity to keep the artificial ticker going. (Cue diagram-heavy parody of pseudo-scientific info dump.) Did I mention how frenetic the pace of the movie is? As for avant garde, it plays around with text a lot -- including subtitles for various foreign languages done in homage to trash exploitation films of yesteryear and joking intertitles like "9 seconds later" during a chase scene or little bits of explanation of rhyming slang that aren't quite subtitles. There's a lot of sophisticated -- or at least slick -- graphics work layered onto the pictorial surface. On the other hand, the ethnic and sexual humor is rude, crude, and socially unacceptable, quite intentionally offensive. The characters use faggot as an insult, but the cavalry is played by a group of black leather dudes. Oh yeah, and there are lots of tits, and an outrageous sex scene, and lots of male genital torture. And a strike by porn stars. And Bai Ling playing an incoherent pidgin-spewing crack whore. And David Carradine in grotesque yellowface. Luke said it was One Damn Thing After Another. Relentlessly.
It was the perfect freaky trash tasteless balls-to-the-wall movie to see with Kim, in the perfect Seattle theater. A great time was had by all. Of course I was still so buzzed when I got home that it took me a couple of hours to unwind and get to sleep! Might have had a little to do with the green tea we had at Boom Noodle, I suppose.
kdotdammit is up here visiting friends and Friends, and she arranged for a movie night with holyoutlaw and myself. We went to Seattle's greatest movie palace, the Cinerama, and saw Crank: High Voltage. After that, it was off to Boom Noodle on Capitol Hill for dinner and yakkety-yak.As I told Kim in e-mail, she was exactly how I thought she would be from reading her journal and looking at her pictures and artwork. She must be pretty good at expressing herself. She is high voltage, high octane, high energy. Conversation was a blast. One of the things I've always enjoyed about her writing is that she brings a perspective of growing up working class and of a hard tumble life on the streets, but also an intense interest in both trash and avant garde art, as well as a hard-nosed experience as a working mother. Like Sharee and my niece's husband she reminds me that my own childhood was very protected, if not down-right coddled. Like them, she seizes the day. Always a good jolt to any tendency toward comfortable numbness.
Anyway, the movie was not something I would ever have seen if not for Kim. It's a sequel. It's trash. It's a frenetic action film starring Jason Statham, but it's also very avant garde in its own twisted way. Some people compare it to Looney Tunes cartoons, which seems appropriate. Others compare it to John Waters in its assault on good taste. Okay, yeah, I can see that. I imagine it also has roots in the gross-out comedies that I have so studiously avoided in the past decade. It *is* primarily a comedy, I think. It is almost physically assaulting, and there were several scenes that had me absolutely squirming in my seat. This movie is not for the faint of heart. If it hadn't been funny, I'm not sure I could have taken it. I don't know that I can really describe the effect of the movie. The plot is that Statham's stud character, Chev Chelios, has his heart removed and replaced by an artificial heart. He has a few hours to get his real heart back. He needs regular jolts of electricity to keep the artificial ticker going. (Cue diagram-heavy parody of pseudo-scientific info dump.) Did I mention how frenetic the pace of the movie is? As for avant garde, it plays around with text a lot -- including subtitles for various foreign languages done in homage to trash exploitation films of yesteryear and joking intertitles like "9 seconds later" during a chase scene or little bits of explanation of rhyming slang that aren't quite subtitles. There's a lot of sophisticated -- or at least slick -- graphics work layered onto the pictorial surface. On the other hand, the ethnic and sexual humor is rude, crude, and socially unacceptable, quite intentionally offensive. The characters use faggot as an insult, but the cavalry is played by a group of black leather dudes. Oh yeah, and there are lots of tits, and an outrageous sex scene, and lots of male genital torture. And a strike by porn stars. And Bai Ling playing an incoherent pidgin-spewing crack whore. And David Carradine in grotesque yellowface. Luke said it was One Damn Thing After Another. Relentlessly.
It was the perfect freaky trash tasteless balls-to-the-wall movie to see with Kim, in the perfect Seattle theater. A great time was had by all. Of course I was still so buzzed when I got home that it took me a couple of hours to unwind and get to sleep! Might have had a little to do with the green tea we had at Boom Noodle, I suppose.
