I was reading in the Tool FAQ that Tool videos are (or some, I guess, have been) influenced by the work of the Brothers Quay, animators who were themselves influenced by some seriously bizarre Eastern European masters. A good two hours of their work is collected in a DVD, including the minute-long piece that appeared on MTV during commercial breaks, where a magnet flips around collecting metal shavings, and creepy looking porcelain doll observes the whole thing while spoons grow out of the wall. Unsettling is an excellent way to describe it.

There’s a guy at work who likes to say "I’d buy that for a dollar!" and then identifies it as being from Running Man.  It’s not.  It’s from RoboCop.  Running Man has the same kind of media criticism in it, but it’s more an indictment of society’s thirst for justice and violence than an attack on shallow journalism, entertainment, and commercialism.

So anyway, the first time he tried to pass it off as Running Man, I said "hey.  That’s RoboCop.  Trust me."  That was a few months ago, but yesterday it happened in front of Lloyd, who said "yeah, man… that’s Dan’s favorite movie, RoboCop."  The guy said "RoboCop is your favorite movie?  How messed up were you at 14?"

Which about sums it up.

I watched Monster last night.  Excellent movie, great performances… and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone, and I’d certainly never watch it again.  It’s great, though.

I sort of knew it was going to be one of the most intense movies I’ve ever seen, so it took me a while to find myself in the right mood to watch it.  I got it from Netflix on December 31st, 2004… easily the longest turnaround for any film they’ve ever sent me.  (I didn’t even join until July 2002.)

I am also totally already in line for the next Charlize Theron film, Aeon Flux, even though it’s going to be, how to put this… awful.  I can tell already.  The original shorts are pretty much my favorite piece of fantasy science fiction.  The series on MTV altered the tone by a few degrees, and basically ruined it.  And now you’ve got Charlize Theron doing interviews where she’s trying to justify how the skimpy outfits weren’t really necessary to the story.  Okay, sure, but the minimalism, sudden death, quickly shifting moral landscape, and absurdist tone of the story really are necessary… and I imagine they’ve all been sacrificed long ago.

But that’s all got nothing to do with Charlize Theron, who is both beautiful and clever.