PYLON: RESET, REFOCUSING AND RETUNING

"If you're gonna do something, do it! If you fall in the mud, maybe you'll come out a gorilla!" - Beanie Andrew, Mule Skinner Blues


It's been over a month since I posted on the Pylon. It's been almost six weeks since I zipped through my three-day Oscar weekend blurpost, catching up on all manner of Hollywood effluvia and star worship, racing to get my picks up in time for yet another semi-disappointing under-event. In the six weeks since then, I have only gotten to the movies twice, both with great success: V for Vendetta and Thank You For Smoking. I have only watched about five movies on DVD in that period, and one of them, The Aristocrats, I watched three times over a four-week period. Netflix must hate me for hanging onto films so long. I have three others sitting here in my apartment that I have had for over a week, and I have yet to work up the compulsion to watch them. That's the one problem with a program like N-Flix: you return one that you have watched, and a new one shows up a couple days later -- but what if you don't feel like watching a movie at that time? The movie sits there on your coffee table, nagging at you to watch it, day and night, and soon you just begin to resent its prescence in your home. So, you keep not watching it, and it sits there longer and longer -- until finally, you simply return the thing unseen. I, too, have done this in the last month.

So, what's up with the non-movie watching? Oh, I've been watching movies on TCM and Sci-Fi (no real way to watch any movie, this last one -- but, oh well...), and as said, I really zeroed in on The Aristocrats. No, it's not that I'm boycotting movies or anything of that ilk. I've just really only been attracted to really strange films lately; and by strange, I don't mean that they fall into the psychotronic range exclusively, which is the area where I normally prefer my films. No, by strange, I mean that I've only been checking out films lately that skew about 180 degrees from the place where my head is at that particular moment. It's my way of having cinematic adventures without keying into one genre. And this often means that I am incredibly selective about what I want to watch, though I am unable to plan ahead on what I watch.

But, I've been watching a lot of movies, actually -- it's just that they are short, little movies. Short, little animated movies. I've been concentrating on cartoons, people. And I've been writing about them -- a lot. I have been spending a large portion of my spare time working on posts for my other blogsite, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc. The thrust of the project is simply to engage myself in an exercise that keeps me writing each and every day, and thus far, I have been successful in that regard. Each day I post a review of a different cartoon: some famous, some not so, and I have tried to mix the varying studios so as to not get stuck in a rut with one character for too long. Sometimes, I have themes running, though: the last week plus has been a focus on the Max Fleischer Color Classics, and just before that, I posted several days of Bosko cartoons.

Which brings me to this blogsite. I am trying to rev up a few new regular columns within the Pylon, and one of them will be THERE'S A RIOT GOIN' ON, which will consist of a weekly recap of the previous week's Cel Bloc Reviews. Nothing much to it, but a transparent attempt to drive traffic to the other site.

Another new feature will be one called SLIPPED DISCS, where I will focus on a movie which has always been a particular favorite of mine, but which has fallen into the cracks in regards to my retaining a copy in my collection, either VHS or DVD. Sometimes, it will be a call for a favorite film to be released on DVD. But it will always shine a light on a movie near and dear to my heart, whether good or bad, whether neglected big studio picture or fringe obscurity.

Desert Island lists are always popular, but I can't choose just five films for such a list, no matter what I do. Yes, I have five films that I could name right off, but I would have an incredibly hard time stopping. Besides, my life now feels like I am on that desert island, so secluded from my friends and family, and once I departed with about 80% of my videotape collection, my DVD collection became my reservoir of cinematic happiness. Unlike the VHS collection, where I would tape just about anything that even mildly interested me, the DVD collection has been, for the most part, carefully selected most of the way, with only the films that I truly desire to rewatch and study making their way into my Hall of Fame. Perhaps "Hall of Fame" is a little too hyperbolic as a descriptive, because there are some pretty crappy films in the mix, too -- but, like anyone, I have bad movie favorites, too.

Thus, I am starting a non-chronological, non-alphabetical, non-ordered-in-any-way revisitation of the films in my DVD collection, and in honor of the Desert Island theory, I will call the feature, FIVE DISCS OF DEATH. Nothing grand; just quick-hit little paragraphs on each disc recounting exactly why and possibly how each disc found its way into the Canon. Of course, I said this same thing about the proposed brevity of the reviews on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, and we all know what happened there.

Oh, you don't? Well, then... click here.

See you tomorrow...