limit

The Limits of Control
$3.99
A number of years ago, I had my first ever experience with sedation dentistry. They hooked me up to an IV drip, and I just gazed out the window for the next two hours listening to their small talk with a sort of blas��� disconnectedness while they went about their necessary business.

This movie was kinda like that.

It's kinda like the director went around finding all the really cool architectural sites he could find, and then filmed them while a man walked through the frame from one side to the other. Sometimes from the left... sometimes from the right. Sometimes he's just standing there in the middle of the frame, gazing with a sort of blas��� disconnectedness while the director went about his necessary business.

Oh... and chicks look hot wearing nothing but thick black frame glasses. Ot so it seems. And cross-blur is a really cool effect, red is a neato colour.

I think that about covers it.

But it was nice to see a foreign country (Spain) covered in such mundane, everyday, detail. I did kinda like that.

Dragonball Z: Burst Limit
$29.99
The game is fun, has great graphics. Only negative is there is no tournament mode like Budakai 1 and 2.

Austin City Limits Music Festival 2005
$24.99
People always complain that their favorite artists aren't on the ACL Fest DVDs, but this set has a great selection of songs and artists. (Hey, if you want to see Coldplay you can turn on MTV). Disc 1 opens with a riveting Jet performance. Other good performances include The Bravery, The Decemberists, Bloc Party, and Rachael Yamagata. A bit heavy on the British artists, though.

My only complaint is that the DVDs don't capture the essence of ACL Fest other than a few time-captures and interviews on the second set. Perhaps the producers wanted to hide all evidence of the incredible heat this past year (108 in the shade) and the dust storm. But in a lot of ways I think this makes it cool -- the crowds hung with it despite the horrible conditions.

Bottom line - a great music DVD

Off Limits [VHS]
$12.98
Off Limits (Christopher Crowe, 1988)

You could put Willem Dafoe in a Jim Carrey movie and I'd watch it. (Okay, I'd consider it. Maybe. There are some things not even Willem Dafoe could fix.) Somehow, though, I'd managed to not cross paths with this one until now, over twenty years after its release. What a discovery it is; not necessarily because it's a great film, though it has its moments, but because Willem Dafoe, as is usually the case in his early films (have you ever seen To Live and Die in LA? Amazing!), heads up a cast that is beyond amazing.

Buck McGriff (Dafoe) and his pal Albaby Perkins (the late, great Gregory Hines) are police officers in Saigon in 1968. Not a plum assignment, to be sure. The two of them are navigating a fine line between their boss Dix (Tremors' Fred Ward), who tries to keep them out of trouble with the top brass, and the local constabulary, as represented by possibly-corrupt cop Lime Green (Brokedown Palace's Kay Tong Lim). The two of them stumble onto what seems to be a serial murderer of prostitutes, and helped by a long string of amusing, insane, and, in some cases, gorgeous interviewees, they come to the hypothesis that the killer may not only be American, but quite high up in the hierarchy...

Let me just say this: Amanda Pays. Richard Brooks. Scott Glenn. Keith David. Thuy an Lu. David Alan Grier. Is that a cast or what? Crowe, normally a screenwriter by trade (Last of the Mohicans, Fear, etc.), rarely got behind the camera himself; his only other feature film was 1992's Whispers in the Dark. I'm not sure why that is, because he did a pretty darned good job with this, a loose adaptation of Anatole Litvak's Night of the Generals. The script, also written by Crowe, is that kind of mystery script where plot twist follows plot twist in quick succession, but they're handled well, and the plot is easy to follow throughout. Dafoe and Hines play off one another well, and everyone else turns in a grade-A performance. It's pretty obvious why so many members of this cast went on to fame and fortune in the nineties.

A lot of fun. Check it out. *** ?