1) Check out James Kunstler's intriguing little piece on Jacko and the recession. No -- trust me -- it works. @ Clusterfuck Nation (via Marginal Utility and Generation Bubble).

2) I'm now in the process* of re-watching Edgar Reitz's Heimat, and it seems more strange to me than ever that this film is absent from most discussions of the best and most influential movies of all time. How can it be that Americans and Brits have taken so long to discover this movie? For me, Heimat is the kind of project that makes being an artist seem like a worthwhile way to spend a life. More later.

* A "process" because Heimat is so long.

In defense of Bad.

Most of the Michael Jackson appraisals I've been reading seem to be saying that his only truly iconic albums were Off the Wall and Thriller.

But Bad doesn't deserve to be lumped in with his mediocre later work. As anyone my age remembers, that record was inescapable -- it felt, to an elementary school kid, as ubiquitous as Thriller had been, years before. It produced some of his best hits; in fact, both of my favorite Michael Jackson tracks, "The Way You Make Me Feel" and "Smooth Criminal," are from Bad. (It also included the treacly "Man in the Mirror," which foreshadowed his very worst stuff, like "Heal the World" and "Childhood.")

And the Bad period was when Michael Jackson released his awesome video compilation Moonwalker, which I probably watched five dozen times. Surely y'all haven't forgotten Martin Scorsese's fun West-Side-Story-inspired video for Bad's title track! (Any truly nerdy fellow will also remember the two Moonwalker video games -- the excellent arcade beat-em-up and the fun Genesis platformer.)

His skin was getting white, but it wasn't all-the-way white. His nose was shrinking but it wasn't all-the-way gone. He was weird, but he was still fun-weird (vs. tragic-weird). His pet monkey was still on the scene. And the music was still great.

So: don't shortchange Bad.

Man -- this new Transformers movie really does sound fucking incredible.

Go immediately to NPR.org and listen to this gorgeous collaboration between Sparklehorse, Danger Mouse and David Lynch.

1) My alma mater: could they possibly have picked a more depressing photo for the front page of the web site?

Imagine a thought bubble over each of these faces: "Fuck. I'm going to Evergreen."

2) Unwatchable: Gran Torino. It's rare that I bail a movie fifteen minutes before the end -- at that point, you might as well complete the miserable experience -- but in this case, I just couldn't take any more.

All of those people who praised the performances . . . um, were they kidding? "Wooden" doesn't capture it; these actors seem anaesthetized. This is a nonprofessional cast, right? I don't care enough about this movie even to open the Wikipedia page to find out.

I could rant about Gran Torino's racism, but: meh. You can probably imagine how offensive it is. The main thing I want you to know is not to rent it under any circumstances.

3) Bad movie that I loved: Alain Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After.

Good movie that I loved: Robbe-Grillet collaborator Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

Worst Louisiana accents yet recorded on film: HBO's True Blood.

Only so-so, as far as Pixar goes: Up.

Sam Raimi's best movie since Evil Dead II: Drag Me to Hell.

Even better than expected: Edgar Ulmer's Detour.

Funniest review I've read in a while: poor old Roger Ebert on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. See Slant, too.

1) I'm over porn chic. Porn itself, I can take or leave -- although I'm growing more receptive to the argument (made well here, less well here) that the ubiquity of porn is taking a serious toll on Gen Y. But porn chic: enough. I do not care that Sasha Grey thinks Stroszek (!) is a totally awesome movie. I'm tired of looking at American Apparel ads -- and equally tired of looking at the ugly store itself on the UT Drag on my way to work (can't the Church of Scientology buy up that retail space?). At this point, I'm tired, even, of reading Andy Rooney-esque complaints about porn chic like the one I'm writing here.

Nevertheless: Andrew Altschul has managed to come up with an entertaining, thought-provoking, non-Andy-Rooney-esque review of Steven Soderburgh's Girlfriend Experience. Read it, and skip the movie.

2) Lindy West's brief review of Tyson gets it best; I have nothing to add. It's not a very good movie -- just a deeply fascinating one.

3) Last night, I watched Battles Without Honor and Humanity, the first of the five parts of Kinji Fukasaku's legendary 8-hour crime epic The Yakuza Papers. I liked it, and plan to watch the rest, though I'll admit the pace was a little fast for me. I spent most of the movie just trying to remember who was who, why this guy hated that guy, and whether that other guy was betraying the one guy, betraying the other guy, or betraying neither or both of them. There are so many characters -- and there's so much plot -- that the (excellent) DVD actually comes packaged with a fold-out map and chart to help viewers keep it straight. Interestingly, this seems to be a film without a true protagonist; characters come and go throughout. Every time a new character appears, Fukasaku freezes the frame and gives you text introducing the character and listing the character's affiliation and rank. And you see that character's name in freeze frame again when he dies -- sometimes less than half an hour after he was introduced. So the movie really is about the yakuza.

"There's never been a collector like Michael Jackson."

More here and here.

UPDATE: Oh, what the hell, here's another one: