Wednesday

Classic of the week this week was Rabid, one of David Cronenberg's early films. I'd seen it before about ten years ago, so it was interesting to return to it now. The movie stars 70s porn star Marilyn Chambers as a woman who undergoes experimental surgery and afterwards develops a taste for blood. It is a zombie/vampire/disease crossover B-movie, and I have to say that it's perfectly executed. It's not a great film, but I think it achieves everything it sets out to achieve. It is never really frightening, but is disturbingly sexy and sinister at the same time, something Cronenberg will go on to perfect in his later movies. Indeed, there is much here that Cronenberg fans will love. The cyst in her armpit, in fact, looks remarkably similar to the 'ports' in eXistenZ - a nice connection to that film. The world of the movie is conjured up simply and successfully, and the characters, whilst rudimentary, are believable and their dilemmas compelling. Yes, this is still firmly a B-movie, but as long as you acknowledge that before you start watching, I'm sure you'll enjoy it a lot.

Tuesday

I worry about the character of Joey in Friends. Yes, this is a sitcom, and he is a comedy character, but there is something troubling about him. He is a baby, an overgrown child, yet (highly) sexually active and aggressive. He is constantly hitting on his closest friends, and this is accepted. It is to be laughed at. He is also extremely possessive, to the extent that he will take things away from babies, and be suspicious of anyone new entering his closed group, and he is fixated with being young. A particularly disturbing episode is 'The One Where Joey Doesn't Share Food'. On a date he is annoyed by a woman who wants to eat some of his food. However, when she orders a nicer desert than him, he eats it all whilst she is taking a phone call. When she returns he says 'I'm not even sorry'. Indeed, he is obsessed with food, and is aggressively stupid. He is a worrying figure when you start to consider these issues seriously. And what character did they choose to have their own series? Joey. Although we should remember that the really successful 'Joey' series is actually Two and a Half Men. The hard thing for you is to figure out if I'm joking or not.

Sunday

Some may have already noticed, or I might have even said in my previous review of the film, that Borat is essentially a documentary. I don't mean this literally, or that the fictional documentary style of the movie is to be taken seriously. Rather, the project of the film is to expose what people think, and whilst the methods it uses to achieve this are different to a conventional documentary, it has to be said that they are not unrelated. The presenter pretends that he is innocent and naive to their customs in order to let them open up and reveal their true feelings (this is essentially the style of Louis Theroux). Borat holds himself up as a mirror for Americans to express their feelings on foreigners and on themselves. One might say that the film is a perfect document of the United States under the Bush administration - its insular, self-involved isolationism. Is the country really any different now under Obama? This is perhaps the object of Bruno, which I haven't yet seen, but it makes a neat parallel. Bush is represented by Borat, the misogynistic, sex-obsessed patriot; and Obama is represented by Bruno, the gay, artistic idealist. Stop me when I go too far.