It’s 11:49 PM and I haven’t set foot outside the house all day.  In no small part, that’s because I’ve been ill all week (went to work every day though) and glad to have some time at home to rest.   I’ll tell ya, getting ill is the best diet I’ve found.  Last year when I was really really ill, I dropped close to 30 pounds in a month.  I’ve mostly managed to keep them off, but they’ve been creeping back recently.  So thanks to this bout of stomach flu or whatever I’ve got, I’ve managed to drop 3 pounds in 3 days.  If I can remain ill for 5 more days, I can go out and buy smaller jeans.

I had been thinking about a Shenzhen run today.  I was in the mood for a massage and the whole spa experience.  But not feeling well combined with it being so freaking hot outside, I stayed home.  This turned out to be a lucky choice.   This woman came over, a friend of my helper, and she gives massages in her free time.  And so of course I wanted one.  She was nervous to be left alone in a room with me (she knew about my reputation already?) so my gf sat on the bed, watching, and eventually pitching in, trying to learn to do it herself.  My helper came up to the room to see what was going on and the next thing I knew, there were three women giving me a massage.  Nope, no happy ending (you don’t get that in Shenzhen either) but I’m sure you can imagine, it was pretty damned nice all the same.

Tonight after dinner (home made chicken soup with pasta), movie time.  I settled on Repo Men.  Now I’m wondering if I can repossess the two hours of my life that I spent watching it.

When I first heard about this film, I thought it was a remake or sequel to cult classic Repo Man.   Turns out it has nothing to do with that film, and with a cast including Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schrieber and Alice Braga (Sonia’s niece), I thought it might be worth watching.

Here’s the idea.  20 or so years in the future, everyone drives Volkswagens and artificial organs are being sold for mega bucks by a mega corporation.  A pancreas costs $600k and you can buy it on the installment plan, 19% interest.  Miss 3 payments in a row and someone comes around to repossess it, forcibly and apparently legally.  As you might have guessed, this is an extremely violent film – even more so in the unrated home video edition.

It starts off well enough.  Its production design is an homage to Blade Runner and Jude Law gets me thinking of his performance in of AI.  Other parts steal from The Matrix, Brazil and many other far better films.  About halfway through, the film just goes completely off the rails, throwing logic to the wind in order to have a bunch of sequences that make little sense but look good on screen.   We stuck with it, even though about 10 minutes before the end there was a particularly gory sequence – I rarely flinch from on-screen gore and worship at the altar of Sam Peckinpah but this had me saying out loud, “Oh, this is just sadistic”  - and I didn’t mean what the characters were doing to each other, I meant what the film was doing to its audience.

It’s wretched films like this that send me running away from new films and taking refuge in older ones.  I’ve been meaning to write about Crumb since re-watching it earlier in the week but never got around to it.   I’m a lifelong fan of artist R. Crumb.  I saw Terry Zwigoff’s documentary when it first came out in 1994 and found it unsettling and disturbing.   I watched it again this week now that it’s available on Blu-Ray from Criterion.

Crumb is an intensely private man and he only opened up to Zwigoff because they’d been friends for years.  Shot over a period of several years, the film starts with a portrait of the artist and a retrospective of his “greatest hits” (Keep on Truckin’, Fritz the Cat, the Cheap Thrills album cover).   And you soon realize that someone who draws comix like this might be deeply disturbed and to some extent that is indeed the case – Crumb manages to completely unfetter himself and let everything from the deepest darkest recesses of his mind pour out onto the page.  Perhaps that’s how he is able to deal with life around him, by getting it out in this fashion.

And then, we meet Crumb’s two brothers, Charles and Maxon.   Compared to them, Robert is the normal one.  Crumb’s father was physically and verbally abusive and their mother was a drug addict.  Charles hasn’t held a job in 30 years, lives with his mother, never goes out of the house, subsists on a diet of prescription anti-depressants.   Maxon lives in a flophouse in downtown San Francisco, sits on a board of nails, swallows a ten foot long stretch of cloth to clean out his intestines every week and gets by by begging on the street for a few hours each day.  Crumb’s two sisters refused to be interviewed for the film and the film gives no indication of what they’re like.  (The film was originally supposed to focus equally on all 3 brothers.)

When I thought about the film after watching it for the second time, I was filled with admiration for how much information Zwigoff fit into two hours and how naturally it all flowed.  The film works for me on all levels.  I’ve picked up the Criterion DVD of Zwigoff’s first film, Louie Bluie and looking forward to watching it soon.

Here’s some links relevant to the film that you should check out:

Crumb: Minds Are Made to Be Blown – Crumb has been writing autobiographical bits that are getting published to his web site, this one about moving to San Francisco and how LSD influenced his art.

Crumb Reconsidered – a terrific essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum on Criterion’s web site.

And last but far from least, a fantastic interview with Terry Zwigoff at AV Club.  I find it rather depressing that most of the 206 comments on this interview are about Zwigoff’s mustache.  Those are the people who deserve to see Repo Men.