16. Cube (1997)

Cube is in my top ten favorite sci-fi movies. The premise is amazing :: 7 very different people wake up in an infinite universe made entirely of identical-looking cube-shaped rooms, each with entrances on every side (you could hit it from the back, top, side, etc... just watch out that your johnson [penis] ain't flappin in the breeze or it may get beheaded by a LASER... [if you have a vagina, make sure your labia, flip-flaps, etc., are all properly stowed.]) No one has any memory of how they got there, or any idea why they are there, or any idea how to escape. (You can also hit it "doggy-style," which is where you act like west-coast gangsta-rapper Snoop Dogg while you do it; try saying things like "my shizzle is off the hizzle forizzle, bizzle," which translates in english to "girl, my dick is the shit" in ancient ghetto, and "I do believe my wanker is quite splendid today" in British.)

Cube gets super fun when the you come to know that, although every room looks identical, many are booby-trapped with lethal killing devices of all sorts :: lasers, noxious gases, smelly rotting corpses of those who never escaped, ugly women, hot women with teeth in their vaginas*, Carlos Mencia on big screen TVs 24/7...

*Aside :: Teeth is a great movie. It's about a girl with teeth in her vagina. Fuck condoms -- just watch Teeth once a week and you'll be abstinent for years. Unless you are a girl, then you may wish you too had teeth in your vagina.

"OH YEAH? WELL MAYBE MY COCK HAS TEETH TOO"

lemme check.

nope, how sad. now I can't literally "fuck a bitch to death."

"OH YEAH? WELL MAYBE MY COCK HAS TEETH IN ITS VAGINA"

...

Cube. On the door into each cube-room are a collection of numbers. A way to beat the system? I won't tell you! I can't! No... don't tickle me! Okay fine i'll tell give you a hint :: the autistic kid is good at mathematics! See :: Rainman -- a classic film in which Tom Cruise is actually quite tolerable, although still very short in the height-sense.

Do not see the sequels to Cube. There were never meant to be sequels according to the original director. There is only one true Cube.

Aside :: "I will take the ring, though I do not know the way." - Frodo

...

Characters include an autistic boy (excellently played by the way,) a computer designer nerd-type and an angry black control freak, who I think is a cop (go figure...)

This movie is a metaphor a for a godless world. No one is there for seemingly any reason, no one seems to be in control, no one seems to be watching. The cube is just there. There is no creator, there is no answer, there is no God. No one is listening to you complain, either. The 7 chosen rats in the maze have only themselves to bicker to. And as is the tendency of humans, they are not always very helpful to eachother. The world of cubes is only a simplified version of the world we all live in -- we are all just here. We didnt ask for it, we dont always want to be here, we don't kill ourselves (mostly because we dont have enough guns or drugs,) we can't run away, we are not able to fly. We have only eachother. It's sad, it's beautiful, we all die. Crazy.

The whole movie was shot in a single cube-shaped room, even though in the movie there are seemingly never-ending cube-shaped rooms in every direction, each with its own hidden death-a-ma-jigs and killtraps (some without... the tension!)

This is the type of movie that could have been horribly executed (as many sci-fi films tend to be) because the progression of the movie is reliant on characters alone. There are no props, no setting changes, only the never-ending system of cubes, and 7 unlucky people. What's great is the acting is damn decent. You care for the characters, and better yet, they arent movie-stars -- so you are dropped into the cube not knowing anyone, just the characters as they are.

It's so simple! It's too brutal! It's a shape! It's a one-syllable word! It's a box without a lid! It's a square in 3-d (sort of)! It's a mystery! It's fun! It's sexy! It's atheistic! Diabolic! Anti-septic! Good fun for the whole family! On sale! Buy it now, take it home, wash it off, put it back on! Let bygones be bygones and be gone! Fuck the shire! This is Cube, motherfucker! Fuck Dildo Baggins and Carlos Mencia (especially Carlos Mencia!)! Up with Dave Chappelle and big skies and CUBE!

I first saw Cube when I was in a phase of seeing movies with one word titles that don't include "the" at the beginning ::

Pi

Cube

Sphere

...

It's math without class! It's violent! Did I mention it's sexy?! Lo-fat! HIGH FIBER... so you can poop real good, all one piece, send the snake deep into the lake, wake 'n' bake, toys R us, we IS you.

Don't be a boob... go see Cube!

And now a brief poem ::

my brain is a lake

in which fish don't have gills,

but lungs...

swimming faster

i look for some lunch

but tis nothing to eat

for the fish have all died

cause they couldnt fucking breathe

underwater

lub,

alec g

15. Natural Born Killers (1994)

To say that you must watch this movie on mushrooms or entirely stoned is probably too much... the movie is a trip in itself :: a big circus with its weirdo angles and color filters... i won't even dare to use the term "special effects" because they are basic, crude, and poorly done. nonetheless, they're wonderful.

But [being fucked up] does make it a lot better --
You can feel ( and of course, envy) their demented killing spree and you don't even feel bad about loving it... if you're stoned.

Played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are Mickey and Mallory Knox :: infamous, rebellious, sick, sexy, disgusting. heartless, but with a dangerously passionate love for one another -- and that is all that matters.

If, in real life, anyone fucked the police as hard as Mickey and Mallory Knox I'd be a total fan, no matter how many innocent bystanders they massacred.

Both of them are very potent characters, strong headed and totally insane. Mallory not so much in the beginning but that's part of her charm. it's... the classic idea of the boyfriend lover sweeping the young girl off of her feet and away from the domestic imprisonment of her fathers home. but way more hardcore. we get to tap into the seemingly endless acceleration that is the thrill of being on the run, in love, and fucked up. where is the end to this ride? route 666 stops somewhere...right?

After falling in love with their destruction you forget about every moral and value you might have clung to at any point in your life and all you want is for these lost yet determined souls to overcome every force which attempts to keep their freedom and love away from them. it's a beautifully demented story. a twisted journey. and most of all, a good time.

Btw :: included for only $3/mo. are Rodney Dangerfield, Edie McClurg, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones... if that doesn't get you I don't know what will.

14. Stranger Than Paradise (1984)

Stranger Than Paradise is in black and white.

black and white movies as an artistic choice are a tricky thing. i sort of hate "film noir", especially if it's put out recently. (for clarity: stranger than paradise is NOT AT ALL film noir). it seems like the actors are acting like the actors from past... in other worse... worse, sort of. newer film nourish stuff just seems too cheeky (a british word meaning "resembling ass cheeks") or something. picture george clooney, if her were british, wearing a suit, staring in the mirror laughing at how good-looking he is, in black and white, with really hot women who really know how to dress well (covering up is sexy, instead of bikini's or titties swinging loose) but are horribly annoying and slutty, or at least they kiss a lot of dudes and then the scene cuts and it's implied they did it doggie, without a rubber.

maybe film noir is just fun for the actors.

stranger than paradise is great in black and white.

Stranger Than Paradise is a minimalist film.

in other words, there ain't a whole lot of shit going to happen, ain't a whole lotta fluff (or maybe it's all fluff.)

i find minimalist films, whenever i recognize them to be so, are the closest films come to portraying "real life" (a thing i imagine, and am told about, although am not sure if i have ever seen myself, especially since the epic film dan in real life). real life is minimalist. you drive the car, it's quiet in the car. in minimalist film, the big things become small. small movements of objects in a room, or a mumbled three words after minutes of silence, become bigger, more... "meaningful". watching, you become sensitive to small changes, so the small changes become just as big as the big changes in a big movie, where big things happen (bank heists, orgies, bombings of small towns, etc.)

look at it this way: I'm listening to recording artist the books right now and they use an audio sample of a woman singing "you get used to hangin' if you hang long enough." if you watch silence for long enough, it becomes the norm, your brain gets into a rhythm with it, you start to breathe its pace. this might be why it took me a few minutes of "trying" to watch, before Stranger Than Paradise stopped feeling a tad... slow. then you slow down with it. it goes at the pace you normally go at, just ya know, living. you get in the groove. (too be watched in company of wine, not cocaine)

sidenote: i wish people went to the bathroom on camera more often, and almost "randomly", in movies. like in a serious movie when someone's got some heavy pondering to do... maybe an early thirties woman choosing between two men, one to become her romantic, fuck-everyday, eventually do her-in-the-butt, get married, get kids, stop fuckin', renew their vows in hopes of jump-starting their sex-life, failing, cheering V for Viagra, and then dying holding someone's hand instead of... not. the one not chosen by our indecisive woman gets their dick chopped off at the hand of a weak midget with a dull knife in a dungeon, and right before he dies, he's told that the matrix is real and that they are in it.

anyway, why not cut to the perplexed woman taking a shit? what if she "DROPS THE KIDS OFF AT THE POOL" and then "REALIZES WHICH DICK WENT DEEPER"?

Stranger Than Paradise has three main characters, 2 guys and a girl.

i find this amount of people, in this gender ratio, to be one of the most interesting small groups in both real life and movies. 3 is the smallest "group". one can die and ya still got two, enough for them to not have to masturbate or commit necrophilia, but to simply do it out of the kindness of their hearts, wide-eyed spewing the beauty if simply-being-alive out of all orifices (a juicey substance resembling the popular beverage "kool-aid" if it came in a flavor called "soul of the poet").

The female character in the film comes from Hungary to new york and carries around an audio-cassette-tape-player that always has the same tape in it: screamin jay hawkins.

"it's screaming jay hawkins, he is a wild man."

minimalist movies become about the details, about the tiny strange things that make real, real. normal movies have a box of cheerios, minimalist movies have screamin jay hawkins on tape from Hungary. and i would argue, this is why it can feel so real. for instance, my buddy conor has a "screamin jay hawkins" t-shirt (which is, if i remember correctly, black and white). he's had it forever, i know it well, and it is really the only relationship i have with the name "screamin jay hawkins". specifics are easier to personally pocket and organize than... having to imagine being part of an oil-drilling team which gets chosen by NASA to land a space ship on an ASTEROID and blow it up with NUKES. (see armageddon, on TNT nightly.)

and when stranger than paradise is all over, you care about the characters as if you saw horrible things happen to them, as if they saved little timmy from being killed by a bus (launched by an asteroid), as if they were bruce willis in die hard, barefoot, bloody, mp5 automatic machine gun in (one) hand, right after he's saved an entire building of hostages from some foreign terrorists with bad morals, bad hair, bad fashion. i like to think you simply like these three characters cause they are people. people you could meet. (nevermind about caring for them as much as bruce willis in die hard, he went through that whole movie with no shoes...)

i dont actually know much "fact" about minimalism... anyone know more? off the dome?

but be sure to catch stranger than paradise. it is moving without moving too much, twisting my nipples without too many plot twists, jerking me off without jerking me around (or causing undue chafing)... you get the picture.

love,

Alec

do watch the preview. it's "epic".