Weekend!

Matt and David came to Oxford for a short while. I, unfortunately, had rehearsals while they were here, so I went off and made theater while they stayed at my flat and drank Strongbow for hours. They didn't see very much of Oxford, and a few things they chose to see on their own were, apparently, very lame (like Oxford Story, which is kind of like a bad Epcot ride about Oxford). A good time was still had, however. We went to Pizza Hut, which was surprisingly good, and extremely cheap, even by American standards. Not exactly English, of course, but we all needed a short wallet-reprieve, I think.

I might be moving into another house soon. I've become good friends with the kids on Binsey lane, which down the road a few hundred yards from my house. They have a spare room, so I think I might move in with them. Nothing's definite right now, though, and since this is a blog that anyone in the world can read, I don't really want to go into the specifics. Just figured I'd give that little update for anyone who's interested.

This has nothing to do with England, but: I read recently about the next Quentin Tarantino/ Robert Rodriguez movie Grindhouse. For those of you that don't know, these two made a movie together previously, one that Tarantino wrote and Rodriguez directed called From Dusk Till Dawn. It can be described in three beautiful words: Mexican...Stripper...Vampires. George Clooney (when he was just a bright shining TV star trying to break into film) and Tarantino himself play two bandits who've kidnapped a family of three (Harvey Keitel plays the father) and bring them to a Mexican strip-club. Selma Hayek, before she was moderately famous, plays a stripper named, according to imdb, Satanico Pandemonium. If memory serves, she has snake wrapped around her at all times, and at one point during her little sex-dance dance she pours whiskey down her leg while Tarantino sucks it from her toes. Then the vampires come. And now it becomes this ultra-violent vampire movie. And I mean really fucking violent. People getting ripped the fuck in half. That kind of thing.

So now they're making this other movie called grindhouse. It's supposed to be this simulation of going to a grind-house feature in the sixties and seventies. This means a double-feature, trailers, and even the accompanying techincal issues (apparently the sound crackles and pops, and the film skips whole sections, with just a title card saying "reel missing"). I watched the trailer, and there's one segment with a stripper with a gun for a leg. The whole thing is apparently going to be three hours long.

Here's the thing: I want to see this movie really badly, not because I think I'll enjoy it, but because I want to see how much a train wreck it'll be. These two seem to bring out the worst in each other with regards to their filmmaking, and making a three-hour exploitation flick seems to straddle a weird line, where you're making something that panders to an audience, but doing it in a very esoteric way. I'm sure it will be the most self-indulgent thing possible, like mildly talented internet fan-boy being given millions of dollars to make his fan-fiction into something presentable. But I'll be god-dammed if I'm not gonna be there watching it.