What I've been watching lately

I've been watching a ton of movies both on netflix streaming and dvd, so many that I'm gonna forget some. But I'll try and list them and maybe tommorrow get a short writeup about at least some of them.

Sweet and Lowdown

Everyone Says I Love you- Had already seen this, but I enjoy it anyway.

Criminal

Jarhead

Somewhere in the City

Brick

Antz

Edmond

Siberia

Naked - A Mike Leigh film

A Hole In My Heart (Ett hål i mitt hjärta ) directed by Lukas Moodysson

Also as another note all the Hal Hartley films that I uploaded to youtube have been taken down at his request.

Guest Blog

I wrote a guest blog on this site http://www.bombit-themovie.com/ the site of a great documentary about graffiti worldwide. It talks about my friend BUKET and how I'd like to make a documentary myself on the subject. It can be read here http://bombit-themovie.com/blog/. As it turns out my real name isn't J.L. Hartley.

Top ten working American filmmakers (work in progress)

So far I have this list:
tarantino
coens
fincher
wes anderson
gus van sant
woody allen
spike lee
spike jonze
pt anderson
scorcese
soderbergh
hal hartley
jim jarmusch
david lynch
gondry
baumbach
linklater
abel ferrara
paul schrader
cronenberg
mamet
aronofsky
wachowski brothers
f.f. coppola
sofia coppola
james cameron
ridley scott
tony scott
robert zemekis
oliver stone
clint eastwood
spieldberg
robert deniro
brian de palma
mel gibson
mel brooks
kevin smith
judd apatow
sean penn
michael mann
tim burton
michael moore


I'm surely forgetting a number of people, any suggestions before I begin narrowing it down to ten?

I've also watched an extensive amount of movies in the last week hopefully I'll get some writeups up tonight or tomorrow.

Graffiti Artist BUKET sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison

Please support my friend by visiting his website and reading his story. It can be found here BUKET'S Story

Hal Hartley Heads Up

Most of his early stuff is relatively hard to find but Netflix currently has 5 of his films available to watch instantly. Henry Fool and its sequel along with earlier stuff such as Simple Men and my favorite, Trust.

As far as upcoming projects IMDB lists him as working on a film Moving the Arts, a collaboration with Atom Egoyan and others.

I'm tired of stars

With regards to rating movies. There's just not enough room with stars. Some people use a 4 Star system some people use a 5 star system but they're both bullshit because you clearly need more than 5 reference points to judge the merits of a movie. Netflix has a 5 star system which is what spurred this little diatribe 5 stars? What a load of shit so if I rate it 5 stars its a perfect film. I don't know that I've seen a perfect film and only a small few would I even consider anything close to a perfect film, so I'm introducing the 0-100 rating system. If it makes you feel better you can call them stars but there will be a lot of shitty films with 40 Stars. I'm going to list a few reference points and give my ratings but I reserve the right to change my rating at anytime if I feel I have misjudged the system or not adjusted properly for certain things etc. Going out to smoke now, be back with a list.

For fucks sake eh?

The only writing of mine that I was able to find was written during a time with a girl that ended quite poorly, it depresses me to re read it now and unfortunately it was the only thing I could find.
It started as a cute little scene when she was in a bad mood, I thought it would cheer gher up, and it did, so I kept writing them, it turned into a bit of a serial and I'd send her sections every few days as I wrote about the adventres we were going to have together. Now looking back on it makes me feel depressed because I failed at all those things I wanted to do. We didn't really do any of them and the woman is no longer involved in my life, which of course of itself is sad and depressing.
So basically now I don't know what to write about.

When it happened, I'm not sure

But at some point I stopped writing fiction. I use to spend a lot of time writing short stories and now probably haven't written anything other than this blog in five, maybe more years. Worst part is that two desktops and two laptops later means I no longer even have the stories I wrote in the past. I may be able to track one or two down in old emails but I would be very lucky to do so. Anyway, I think I'll take a shot at writing another starting tonight so hopefully I'll have some more original material to put on this blog.

While I don't necessarily condone vandalism...

I do appreciate art in all of it's forms, here is a quick slideshow I put together featuring the work of street artist BUKET and original music by my good friend Pedi Talai.

Leave it to Hal Hartley...

To create a dialogue driven science fiction film, The Girl From Monday stars Hartley regular Bill Sage and Sabrina LLoyd!! I fuckin love Sabrina LLoyd as she was a key character in my favorite TV series of all time Sports Night. Hartley personally scored the film as he often does but then doesn't score with the film that should have been another 30 minute short film which he does so well. It's worth watching but I didn't think it was anywhere near on par with Hartley's other stuff.