How can a site titled Lazy Bastard not understand the desire to find the fresh material without looking at all that old stuff over and over again? Don't let the daily fool you. We'll get around to new stuff when we feel like it.
08/29/04: An attempt to get groovy blogger technology one step closer to my front door: The Unclear Eye.
08/23/04: Nothing new yet, but notice is hereby served that I have changed servers and expect to change some things around here shortly.
09/08/02: Egad. I'm very bad at updating, aren't I? In fact, the reason why I'm updating this here is that I'm bashful and posting this in a place where maybe people wouldn't look for it. See I did want you to know that I put, finally, another page of the World So Far up, as well as a new section in The Transitory called Slice, which are excerpts from what I've been writing this past year. Why I'm being all sneaky and putting it here, I can't rightly say, but I thought I'd mention it here rather than on my kinda-blog The Hereafter. In fact, I'm thinking of setting up a blog through Blogger because--well, again, I'm not quite sure. I have a blog going all the time in my head, but I'm bashful about putting it up on this site. I'm weird.
Oh, and in case, you think I haven't done anything on the site between Jan. 16 and now, rest assured that I have, in dribs and drabs. There's the reviews of the movies Orange County and Black Hawk Down, book reviews of Don DeLillo's Libra and Chuck Palahniuk's Choke, and a lot of blogging for a month or two, on The Hereafter. I'm thinking of getting back to the reviewing. Maybe. I'm currently writing reviews of new comics once or twice a month on the Comix Experience website.
But there you have it--more new juicy free content.
01/16/01: Finally, I have a good justification for having all these different email addresses--I was able to get my review of Ghost World through, and now it's up.
01/13/01: I'm pissed at my webmail--I've got the first three paragraphs of my review of Ghost World stuck in there somewhere and I can't get to it to finish it. But I did do a review of Body Heat, which I just finished watching this morning.
01/11/01: The first draft of my NaNovel, Still Life With Monkeypants, is up. Try it and lemme know what you think.
01/10/01: I can't imagine I can continue this trend but I have seen three movies in 2002, The Royal Tenenbaums, Brotherhood of the Wolf, and Mulholland Dr. and I've written reviews for each. A new leaf? Or just creative procrastination? We shall see.
12/27/01: The good news? Roughly 35 pages (by publishing standards) of new material. The bad news? It's a stream of consciousness travel diary, pally, with pictures of my trip to Europe. It's in the new section, toward Prague.
09/02/01: It's my fault. See, I decided to stop listing when I added anything new here because, well, I don't know why. I think a lot of it was that I felt uncomfortable saying, "I wrote a beautfiul poem about flowers that I have hidden away on the site somewhere." And I kind of got tired of the arc of reader reaction which often ran from "wow, you have so much stuff on your site! It's really inspiring" (when they first started reading it) to "you lazy bastard, update your site!" (when they caught up). I felt that people wouldn't mind trolling around the site to find new stuff, or else they would know where to generally find links to anything new (Hint: The Bio page for reviews, the Hereafter site for my pop-obsessed meanderings). But I think there's a lot here that people may have missed by not knowing what was going on, in part because I promised to explain it here.
Anyway, let me update those of you still checking this page and going "Nope, nothing new." And I promise that if I do stop updating this page again, I'll let you know and remind you of some general hubs to check out.
So, today, in a flurry of activity, I wrote reviews of Lagaan, the new Planet of the Apes, Way of the Gun, Godzilla 2000 and the book Sniper.
I started reviewing books when I got tired of all the negative reviews on Amazon of Peter Straub's Mr. X, and then got pissed off when the web browser collapsed on me and erased the review. So I saved it here, and followed it with reviews of Marine Sniper, and the graphic novels Benkei in New York and The Complete Box Office Poison. Looking back, the review of Mr. X may be a bit more laudatory than it should be--the book is good but not great--but I felt that not only were most of the reviewers on Amazon numbnuts, Straub's prose is still head and shoulders above the current crop of horror writers.
As for movies, I haven't reviewed a lot of them this year, in part because I haven't seen many movies, and in part because the IMDB seems to have stopped accepting my reviews for their external review links (presumably because of the five or six weeks where our server was down back in February or so). Nonetheless, I have reviews of Shrek, Kiss of the Dragon, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and Time and Tide up. The review of Shrek bites, but the others are okay (I think). And after my review of Requiem for A Murder in August of 2000, I went on to review Reindeer Games, Your Friends and Neighbors, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, and the remake of Get Carter.
Meanwhile, I've really let my Hereafter page slide, but there are surprisingly complete entries for the months of May and June of this year to be found.
And finally there's some stuff on the Transitory page, including several poems which are just awful and one that is pretty good. Both modesty and shame prevents me from saying more.
8/2/00: Why anyone ever bothered to make Requiem For A Murder, I can barely guess. But why I reviewed it, I can honestly say I have no idea.
7/23/00: I hope this isn't a trend, having more to write about movies that I didn't like and remaining surprisingly mum about movies that I do. In any event, I review Jackie Chan's Gorgeous and Sonny Chiba's Golgo 13: Assignment Kowloon. This brings my total of individual movie reviews to 75 (a little over 100 when you include the 26 unique mini-reviews in my top ten lists for 1998 and 1999).
7/13/00: Have I abandoned this site? Well, no. Just this particular page, as I've added a few pieces to The Transitory which aren't exactly new (I'm also rather doubtful as to whether they're any good which also makes me reluctant to hype them here). Finally, though, I cranked out some new movie reviews; Shot Through the Heart and Cutthroat Island.
5/19/00: After a million years, I've finally written another movie review. It's for Girl, Interrupted, and concludes with what hopefully will be my only Gene Shalitesque tagline. Now back to my current webpage obsession, which is trying to find some decent pix from Twin Peaks. Rather than dressing up all of my old essays, I think I'm only going to take the my favorite seven or so and then maybe figure out a way to compress all the tiny bits I like of the other pieces and compress them. Stay tuned.
5/15/00: Time flies like an arrow...and fruit flies like a banana. I finally, finally, finally dressed up one of my old essays from the Daily Screed days and linked to it. Voila. I keep meaning to do a movie review of a couple of different flicks, but just can't seem to get my heart into it.
4/16/00: Added a few more pictures to The World So Far, and another small piece in The Transitory.
3/12/00: A review of Scream 3, which so far is the only movie I've seen in 2000 that was released in 2000, if you follow me. Doesn't bode well when it's almost a quarter of the way through the year and I've only seen one movie from it.
3/09/00: Installment Three of The Friday Report. A bit behind schedule, but finished at last.
2/22/00: Added a few more pictures to The World So Far.
2/16/00: The next hijinks filled installment of The Friday Report and its text companion, is here.
2/3/00: Finally. The Lazy Bastard List of my Top Ten Movies of 1999. A bushel of movie reviews all in one convenient slow-to-load location. Whew.
1/30/00: Those of you who wonder what I do with my ridiculously abundant spare time are hereby pointed to The Friday Report and its text companion here.
1/28/00: Whee, yay, happy new year, whee! [Sound of comically late noisemaker being blown] I've been working on things, honest, just nothing that's quite at the put it up point yet. But I have (God and Thumbs Plus willing) added a new page of me diddling about with this digital camera. If you want, check out The World So Far.
12/05/99: November was basically a wash. Although I don't like listing them here (for whatever reason), I added entries to both Hereafter and the Transitory. There are definitely some movies worth writing about, and a lot of movies I want to see before the end of the year. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me that this was one of the best years for American film in a long, long time.
11/09/99: My soul cried for release, I begged for release, but there was no release...from Astroesque.
11/03/99: Your soul cries for release, you beg for release, but there is no release...from The Funhouse.
10/31/99: A review of Halloween on Halloween. How appropos. What are you for Halloween? I'm 33.
10/24/99: Despite a stellar headache just last night, I've been busy at work since early this morning. Anyway, I wrote a review of Rounders, which makes a new Lazy Bastard record for me, since it makes five movies that I've seen and reviewed in a row.
10/22/99: Well, Tim hated Perfect Blue, so maybe there's more wrong with it than I can see. I still liked it a second time, though.
I also liked The Big Hit when I saw it for a second time recently. But I liked it in a three or four paragraph kind of way, which is interesting because I basically didn't like In the Mouth of Madness in an eight or nine paragraph kind of way. So I guess it was better for me to to see In the Mouth of Madness even though I liked it less. Why it pans out that way, I have no idea.
10/17/99: I don't know, maybe I'm just getting critically flabby, but it seems like there's a lot of really good movies out. I saw Perfect Blue and really dug it. The only thing that grates? The title, which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the movie.
10/08/99: Of course, I didn't catch the movie list, and the internal links for movie review to movie review, which really blows and I'm now in the process of playing catch-up. Part of the problem was pulling from an older back-up and not a more recent one. Oh, well. It's straightened out now. I also put in a review of American Beauty.
10/08/99: What a dink.
I needed some images to do my review of Lethal Weapon
4 and my image file was only half-loaded from when I rebooted the computer.
So I transferred the stuff I saved on CD. But I reloaded the wrong
stuff, and overwrote all my dailyscreed files and not the screedimage files.
Oy. I'm just glad I caught it before I uploaded the files, otherwise
I would have lost all of this, back to March.
10/03/99: Yay! I'm back up. My thanx to superroomies Dave and Julian for setting up everything so that I can again start transferring to this site. There's a lot of stuff over at Hereafter but I recommend reading it in bits and pieces (as it was written). I bet it all kinda runs together, as quasi-diary type things tend to do.
8/11/99: Well, I bought Driver and it's really pretty cool (although the controls are hard). In penance, I wrote a review of Eyes Wide Shut. Did you know that's my 60th movie review? I'd be proud if that wasn't over a two+ year period. Oh, well, I'll take what I can get.
8/11/99: Movie reviews for American Pie and Austin Powers 2 and stuff, and, once again, it took forever. I'm on the losing end of a fight to buy Driver. It seems like every 28 days I get this urge to play video games and shirk all other responsibilities. I wish I was like my pal Larry, who doesn't like 'em at all. I'd get a lot more done.
8/08/99: Movie reviews for Belly and The Haunting, and I can't believe it took me three hours to write two movie reviews. Also moved my movies and book lists of 1997 and 1998 to separate subpages to the Bio page.
4/08/99: Hmmm, good thing this site is called what it is. Otherwise, I might feel a tad guilty about not doing anything new for so long.
Actually, I've been busy in the last few hours, perhaps too much so. I finally linked to pal Larry Young's groovy Astronauts in Trouble site, which I apologize for not doing a month ago when he first gave me the URL. In other news, either my critical facilities have turned to mush, or I've been very lucky over the last month, seeing a lot of really good movies. I wish I could kind of get my act together and write something decent about The Funhouse, this low budget horror movie from the early '80s that I was really, really impressed with. Anyway, I have reviews of Tango, Kurt & Courtney, Who Am I?, The Matrix, The Flirtation of Girls, and Dahab. That looks pretty impressive, but the reviews of a few of those are really just typed pleas for people to not miss the movies. And there's at least three more good movies besides the Funhouse that I should be writing about! It's turning out to be a very good spring for me. Now, if I could just get my essays and Fanboy Rampage columns up, I'll be happy.
3/07/99: A mouthy review of U-Turn. There's some slight irony in writing a review putting down Stone for being a sadistic, loveless bastard today, since it was just announced that Stanley Kubrick is dead.
Kubrick is going to be getting a lot of press, I'm sure, and most of it will be off the mark. It will be talking about how deeply he'll be missed, what a great man he was, etc., etc., Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have already released a statement along the lines of "We'll miss him. Stanley was like family."
Family? Maybe, but only if you have an eccentric, perfectionist, cheapskate uncle in the house. From all accounts that I've read, Kubrick was all of these things: a gruelling taskmaster, a guy who made people fly out to visit him at his London estate because he himself refused to fly, a filmmaker who insisted on control right down to the types of pen used to circle the approved advertising tag lines. He also would ask to have the newest filmstocks sent to him, the latest materials, the most modern computers and filmmaking equipment and then neither return nor pay for it. 37 takes of Jack Nicholson crossing the street in The Shining until they got it right (and without Kubrick bothering to say what was wrong, either). I'm not sure how much Stanley Kubrick really will be missed.
But
his talent... I remember my poor Dad taking me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey
when I was really young (must have been during one of its rereleases in
the early '70s). I still haven't apologized to my Dad for being such
a restless bratty kid about about the whole experience. I was bored
out of my mind because I knew the story of the Odyssey and this wasn't
it. I was expecting a space Cyclops, intergalactic black lotus eaters,
the planet of Circe where men are turned into cosmo-swine. I liked
Hal, though. Everyone likes Hal.
And that's Kubrick the filmmaker for you, unwilling to make you root for anyone but the machine. Kubrick pretty much had one theme; which is that mankind is a bunch of bastards, whether we're in the Overlook, outerspace, Viet Nam or the court rooms of World War II, and to try and stamp out that brutality (as in A Clockwork Orange) is really only an act of brutality itself. His genius was not only in the way he stuck to that vision of the world, but in the way that he captured that world. When the primitive ape in 2001 throws a bone, the first tool, spinning up into the air and the camera cuts to the slow-spinning space station, you have not only probably the most audacious edit in cinematic history (covering millions of years with no explanation) but also a manifesto brilliantly put forth in less than six seconds (the first tool has just been used for the first murder, and civilization has grown, basically, from man's desire to kill). Even a movie like The Shining, arguably a failure, contains more haunting images and more innovation than probably any other movie released that year. I've seen 2001 a few more times since that first time, and it's one of those rare movies that gets better, deeper and more powerful each time I see it.
So here's to you, Kubrick. I never knew you, I probably wouldn't have liked you if I did, but I'll miss the magnitude and power of your talent. Millions of filmmakers and probably billions of film viewers owe you a debt that we can now never repay.
2/21/99: Added my review of Rushmore. You know, I saw Payback and A Simple Plan on the same day. Why did I write about Rushmore first? I'm trying to figure it out.
2/20/99: Welcome to the new site! It's just reams and reams of graphic overkill. Hope y'all have the phat pipes! As for new content, there's an introduction about my movie reviewing style here. And I broke the movies I've reviewed into categories here. There's also a lot of new links on the links page. My picks for best films of 1998 ended up here. And there should be more stuff forthcoming. All I have left is the icky part; picking and reformatting my essays from the old Screed pages, coming up with new material, etc. Oh, and Weeb's friend wrote me back! I'm very pleased, and trying to be much less psycho in my reply.
2/13/99: Gosh, it hasn't really been that long, has it? And, in fact, it hasn't. I wrote a big butt list of my picks for the top ten movies of the year. And, gee, I got this email from this friend of Weeb's who said she liked my site, and asked why I didn't mention the rerelease of Touch of Evil as one of the best of the year. I was really happy to hear from someone about the site, particularly, and I'll be honest here, a woman who's really into films. So I write back this long reply in which essentially, I dis the rerelease of Touch of Evil. Like mightily. And at the end of it, I'm like, "well, heh-heh, that's just my opinion, of course, what's yours?"
Response: zip. I should go to email charm school or something. Anyway, I also wrote a review of Playing By Heart. Whatever.
12/11/98: The company Christmas party tonight. I kind of don't want to go, mainly because it means that I have about six hours to get my act together. I know I'll have a good time when I get there, but after four days away from work, I'm still pretty asocial. Anyway, maybe this is why I bothered with a review of a Steven Seagal movie, The Glimmer Man. The best piece I ever read on him was an amazing analysis of the man and his icky ways in the late, great Spy magazine. If that didn't kill his career, this won't. I wrote it anyway, though. Then I went and watched Killing Time, and wrote a review of it, too. Don't feel that much better about the company Christmas party thing, though. I'll get over it, I'm sure.
12/09/98: I didn't mention that I also watched A Life Less Ordinary on the day of the great S.F. blackout. I turned out a review bright and early this morning.
12/08/98: Where were you during the great S.F. blackout of '98? I called in sick, so I spent a lot of time napping and wishing that I could mess around with the Playstation or write a review or something. By the time the lights came back on, I was inspired to bitch a little bit about Men In Black. Although really I should complain about the local TV news coverage of the blackout. I swear to God TV news gets stupider every year. Of course, there I am, like a chump, watching the news for more details about something I lived through. The power went out. It was inconvenient. Duh.
12/06/98: I believe the term is overtime whore. Well, that and lazy bum. So, now that I'm sick, congested so that I have that wonderful diving-bell, head ringing thing, I decided to share my misery with the world, and put my thoughts on I Know What You Did Last Summer on paper. Well, cyber-paper. Whatever. And Gummo, too.
11/06/98: More of the same. I added lots of pics to most of my movie reviews, even added additional links to some movies who had really rad secondary sites (although I'm kicking myself for not bookmarking this amazing Peckinpah site that I now can't find), and did lots of stuff so that the pages wouldn't be a pain in the ass to load as a result, i.e., broke each review into its own page, added previous movie/next movie links so browsing wouldn't then become a pain in the ass. I've been doing it for three hours now, and I'm a bit cranky. By the way, it's not new, but I forgot to mention my review of Knock Off from a few days back.
11/04/98: My first real three day workweek. Consequently, I whip myself into a frenzy and add pictures to the website. Little bit of a worry, since there are those who think that I need a bit more eyecandy (including me) and those who like the purity of just quick-loading words (like me). There's also the whole attribution problem, too. In any event, it was great fun culling the web for images, and many ideas spring to mind about improving the site. Go look for 'em!
10/09/98: Thirty-two approaches like a steamroller, or perphaps I approach it, like one of those heroes tied to a log and thrown on the conveyor belt at the saw mill. Nonetheless, I ain't doing much. Updated movies seen and books read, but maybe I should get around to throwing some actual recent reviews in there. I did update all my links so that they're relative now. Should make things easier if/when I move the site.
9/26/98: More time spent doing nothing. More or less. Julie and I broke up in mid-June (fuelling, I'm sure, my sudden but brief increase in productivity). Since then, I've gone to Burning Man, had minor surgery, found myself in the unenviable category of "glaucoma suspect" (more on this as I find out more) and the even more unenviable category of someone who recognized himself in Jeff Bridges' character "The Dude" in The Big Lebowski. Let's not even mention some of the family stuff. Anyway, I've updated my bio page, and am currently figuring out how to revamp these pages. Sometimes I like the idea of little photos and captions and things on my movie review pages, but am unsure if this is a good idea or not. Particularly since, running now on a DSL line, I have absolutely no idea how long it takes to load a page in the real world (hell, why not just compress the whole movie and put it on the page.) I'm also thinking about putting content up here that I don't necessarily want feedback on; currently, friends and family appear to be the only people checking out the page. It doesn't quite seem appropriate to write pained Nietzschesque prose condemning the few people who make an effort to check in. Quandry, quandries. Oh, and I updated my list of movies seen and books read. Whee.
7/4/98: Took some time off. Trying to figure out what to write a new column on. Added an insubstantial review of Gattaca.
6/26/98: Grunt! Grunt! Added reviews for Godzilla (1998) and X-Files: The Movie. I'm working, I'm working!
6//25/98: Fixed some links. Put a graphic (gasp!) on my movie index page. Added reviews for G.I. Samurai and Replacement Killers
6/98: I can't even believe that I added this page a year ago. Aghhhh. I need to bury you with content, smother everyone with content. Content, content, content!
6/98: Added a mini-essay on horror fiction in my bio. Pam found it kinda boring, but I liked it.
Somewhere in those three months I added a review of Mr. Nice Guy. Not a bad review, and I think it's interesting that the way ol' Lamont Pond used to write reviews for our zine has been very influential on me.
3/23/98: Added reviews over the last week for Burn, Witch, Burn, Gonin and Fireworks (Hana-Bi).Do you know I have 33 of them now? I think that's cool.
3/10/98: Added a few links, some more stuff to my bio.
3/5/98: Revised and subdivided My movie page .
6/7/97: Added this page.
Added reviews for Zandalee and for Chasing Amy.
Added some minor stuff to my my bio.
6/3/97: Added web counter. It's pretty cool, and keeps track of my visits by hour, day, etc. Enjoy so much I kind of feel only slightly icky for selling out.
Added some minor stuff to my my bio.
All material on these pages is © 1997-1999 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.