RECENTLY RATED MOVIES #27

Too much time has passed, too many movies have piled up, and I'm too far behind to carry forward as I had planned originally. The Texas story, the subsequent depression, the illness and the injury will have to be put aside as I am longing to get back where I was; I fear that if I linger any longer than this paragraph and the next on such matters, then I will get stuck in that state interminably.

So, it is onward and upward. The depression has been met and declared a silly thing, the cough is still fighting my lungs and the leg is slowly, ever slowly healing (I hope - it does feel far better over the last few days than it had), and my back is around 95% at the moment. Being able to type for endless hours again -- and not just at my place of employment -- well, I never knew how much I would miss it.

"And now I'm back/to show you/I can really shake it down..."

In time for the greatest month in the history of months (that would October, you numbskulls), I am ready to hit the comeback trail. To do so, though, I must do a little clearance sale of the ratings for all the films that I have been watching while out of commission. So, I will start off with a handful of Recently Rated Movies entries to get the ball ricocheting. As a result, films that I saw a couple of months ago are just showing up on them, like the mildly disappointing but still fun Clerks II. It's not that the film was bad in any respect; it's just immensely hard to follow up a film that I have seen about fifty times (including an actual first release viewing in an "arthouse"-style theatre) and have generally memorized deep in the nooks and crannies of the cranium. A handful of terrific lines, as is the norm in a Kevin Smith film, and it actually is fun to hang out with Randal and Dante again (in order of preference), even if they are older and sadder, but not necessarily wiser.

Speaking of older and wiser, a delirious hangup on a Woody Guthrie/Billy Bragg tune from Mermaid Avenue (the first volume, that is) had me jumping at the chance to watch Ingrid Bergman wander about the island of Stromboli in the film of the same name. I will consider it a lesson learned. Heartfelt passion for a film idol can lead a man down some strange paths. Woody Guthrie dreamt up a lustful fantasy lyric; Billy whipped up a belated, singsongy-smart melody. I ended up watching one of the most boring films in existence. (Not uninteresting, but soul-wrenchingly boring.) At least Isabella Rossellini eventually crawled out of the smoke of that volcano, so it's not a total loss. I'm sure some huge auteurist suckoff will leap to Roberto's defense, throwing up the "island as character" smokescreen, and that's fine. Go live there if you're so sweet on it.

What? No takers?

The List:
Clerks II (2006) - 6; Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - 6; Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic (2005, DVD) - 6; Dog Soldiers (2002, DVD) - 7; 9 Songs (2004, DVD) - 5; Fall of the Roman Empire (1964, TCM) - 7; Attack of the Sabretooth (2005, Sci-Fi) - 2; Bamboozled (2000, DVD) - 7; Fearless Freaks (2005, IFC) - 8; Ercole sfida Sansone [Hercules, Samson and Ulysses] (1963, TCM) - 4; The Black Rose (1950, FOX) - 5; Stromboli (1948, TCM) - 5.