TXB DVD Roundup

I been renting movies like a guy who has utterly lost his faith in T.V.--well, okay, not like that guy...I am that guy. I thought I would always maintain my faith in T.V. even if I gave up on Christianity, the progressive movement, and Pizza Hut. What's next...porn? God damn it...if I lose my faith in porn, I want one of you gibblers just to execute my dumb ass. Anyway, with the loss of faith in T.V., my faith in independent films, particularly in the DVD market, hath grown big time. So here's a few films I can recommend as long as yer not renting movies solely from redbox...and as long as you take your humor black: The Good Night is a sort of a tragicomedy about a guy who dreams nightly of Penelope Cruz and--following a completely logical line of thought--decides that he'd rather live in that dream world than in the shitty real world where he has a lame job and is living with ugly ol' Gwyneth Paltrow (uh, waitaminute...the logic chain broke down somewhere in the last part of the sentence). It's not a laugh riot throughout, but it has two of the funniest scenes I've seen in a film lately--both featuring that dude from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. In the not-as-funny-but-still-amusing comedy vein we have Wristcutters, which is about a dude who offs himself only to find out that suicides all go to a world that is very much like ours...only a little worse (and they all say "offed" instead of "committed suicide" for some reason). Also, no one can smile in that world, so it's sorta like living in Hollywood without the coke and the whores, I guess. Patrick "Tempus" Fugit does an adequate job of being our Everyman in hell, and Shannon Sossamon is hot and pale as always. The best part of the movie is some weird-ass song by a band named Gogol Bordello. It's called "Through the Roof 'n' Underground," and you can dial it up on the Tubes of You, yo. In the tragic and not at all comic arena, we have Starting Out in the Evening, which is one of those movies that--well, you know how critics always say that you can't predict where such and such movie is going...but you always totally can predict it?--anyway, this is a movie where it's actually true: you can't predict where things are all gonna end up. But it's a good ride with smart people who are involved in completely foreign cinematic subject areas like reading books, writing criticism of books, going to interpretive dance shows, reading in bed...y'know, completely off the wall shit like that. Cultural shit. Stuff that only elitist presidential candidates like Barack Obama would engage in while Hillary is knocking back shots of Crown Royal and McCain is sitting in a pile of his own feces, muttering something about Iran. And finally, speaking of smart people with culture, let's swing back to tragicomedy (yay, tragicomedy! you're so hot right now!) with The Savages, which depicts siblings played by Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman illustrating the necessity of putting your batshit elderly dad in a nursing home before he does something crazy (like run for president). I'm sure I'm prolly the only one who found this to be the funniest line of the movie, but PSH cracked me up when he had to explain to his sister the reality of all nursing homes: "Right now, inside that beautiful building, it's a fucking horror show!" Oh, and if you must rent only from redbox, you could do worse than watching my boys Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck tear it up in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (actually, for all I know, you might be able to get every one of those movies from redbox--y'see, I'm one of the eight dumbasses in America who still rent movies at Blockbuster...) "Sure, tragicomedy is hot right now, but when's the last time it gave you a wet dream?"