Hey folks, Harry here - got a great day of films to dive into - will chat later, for now, here's Augustus...

Day 5 has come and gone with little to report. I saw one film for the second time, and the later timeslots were films I'd already seen or been warned to avoid. So, I'll try to go ahead and bore you with my impressions of Aachi and Ssipak and my delayed reaction to Southland Tales.

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Tyger (4 stripes)
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Tyger is a glorious 4-minute short by Guilherme Marcondes based on the poem by William Blake (a favorite of my school, whose mascot is the Tiger) "Tyger tyger burning bright in the forests of the night. Oh what fateful hand or eye could match thy fearful symmetrye." Live action, puppetry, and computer animation combine to bring to life an enormous tiger that stalks the city streets, magically turning everything into a forest.

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Aachi and Ssipak (4 blue popsicles)
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I've got 4 words for you: Two-legged mechanical rollerblading cow-ducks, oh, with leg-warmers. Guess that's more than 4 words, tough shit! I can't even begin to describe the moderately disgusting plot in this thing. It was at times pretty hard to follow what was going on, because there was just so MUCH on the screen. This one would really benefit from a dubbing, because trying to read the subtitles was too much a distraction from the gorgeous animation. I expected to hate the diaper gang, but they were really just too cute, like little blue lemmings. The title characters were not compelling, a stark contrast to everyone around them, from the wannabe film director with lips perpetually puckered to look like an anus to the porn starlet turned golden goose to the cyborg, who was definitely the most bad-ass guy in the film. Man, I could watch a movie just about that fucking cyborg! You'll want to freeze-frame this one just to look and see what each member of the diaper gang is doing at various points. Someone had mentioned to me there's an homage to Indiana Jones in there. They left out that it starts as an homage to The Empire Strikes Back. I think I caught a little Total Recall, too and probably missed 100 others. It was a mind trip.

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Southland Tales (7 seals)
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The long and short of it is I loved this fucking movie. It's ahead of its time, and people are not going to get it. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around parts of it, but they're fading as if I'd been given a glimpse of heaven in a dream that's too big to hold in a mortal head. Take a bunch of tv's, and set them up in front of you. On one, play A Clockwork Orange, on another, Donnie Darko, on another, Saturday Night Live, on another, MTV, and on another, the Nightly News. Throw in a couple more shows of your choice, and then take a really big hit of acid. What you'll see is something like this. People will want to deconstruct it, compare it to other things and bitch about how it doesn't measure up, but screw that! This needs to be taken for itself and enjoyed for the spectacle that it is. You can watch it over and over for the pop culture references, yes. It's like one of those paintings where an enormous landscape is made up of smaller scenes that each contain caricatures of scenes from pop culture. You can look at it for hours and never grasp a greater meaning. Or, you can look at the whole, choose a meaning that suits you, and ignore the fine-grained detail. Either way, you're missing something.

And, oh, there's a lot of fun things you don't want to miss. Christopher Lambert as a wimpy arms dealer getting his ass kicked by little Cheri Oteri. There's Jon Lovitz as a creepy murderous cop with Rutger Hauer hair. Sarah Michelle Gellar getting all the best one-liners as the ditzy porn-star newscaster Krysta Now. Many of the actors step out of type, but many others just do what they do best: Wallace Shawn channeling Vizzini, Miranda Richardson as the queen B, John Larroquette, Ling Bai, Curtis Armstrong, Holmes Osborne, and finally Tangina herself, Zelda Rubinstein, may she live forever. Is there anyone who isn't in here? It's a little like a scene where a Hollywood studio exec has two budgets in his hands; both have the same numbers, but in one hand, he's got a film with Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise and a Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise salary. In the other hand, there's this, where he's got every well-known but lower-paid face in town, and it's beautiful. There's elephants fucking, SUVs fucking, flying ice-cream trucks, and a mega-zeppelin like the relicle in Aeon Flux, in that order.

From a strict sci-fi/time-travel story viewpoint, it tends to break the rules a little bit in the same way as Donnie Darko. There's a little paradox involved, and things don't seem to work within a consitant framework. I'd elaborate, but I don't want to give away the story. Sufficient to say things happen to some characters that don't happen to other characters who undergo the same events.

Others are comparing this to an imitation of Philip Dick. I can't do that. I really couldn't compare it to his work as much as to Kubrick. I don't see the story as a Dick story, though I could make the argument it looks like an attempt to bring a story to the screen to look like a Dick film. Hell, parts of this felt more like the Big Lebowski than anything, especially the famed JT musical scene. Wow, that was beautiful and came out of nowhere like a baseball from outer space. The film is just chock-full of little hints that don't make sense until you reach the end where they fall into place. You'll think back and go "Oh yeah, I get it now". Or do you? Much like Donnie Darko. It will be a while until Southland Tales receives the appreciation it merits.

-Augustus Gloop