Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

nosce te

Erling, Lynne, and I went to see Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma last Friday night, but when we go to the San Francisco Cinematheque in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a goodly 30 minutes before the showing, it was sold out. We sulked for about five minutes, waiting for scalpers to appear and offer us tickets, but luckless we trudged over to Restaurant Lulu instead for a bit of a nosh. We overdid the victuals and walking back to the car, noticed that The Matrix Revolutions was showing in Imax at the Sony Metreon. None of us having seen it yet, we decided to go in and recover from our dinner. It was fun looking at the thick makeup on Keanu’s mug and being able to see a spec of lint on the Merovingian the size of a Buick, but the movie overall was a disappointment. At the end, as we looked at the credits, Erling leaned over and informed me that Don Davis the composer of the score had come to Sub Pontio Pilato last April and enjoyed it. Also, three people who had sung in our opera had sung in the choir towards the end of the movie. Well, that was nice, but the movie was still bad. It was as though the brothers W. had taken all the iffy and boring parts of the first film and expanded them beyond all comprehension and endurance. Listening to Keanu parrot frosh existential philosophy while others stand around immobilized as if trapped in amber is not much fun. The special effects for the battle for Zion were fun in abstract way. And it was fun to see Phil Tippett reuse the feet off of his Enforcement Droid from RoboCop for the dockloader cloned fighter suits. All that was missing was Peter Weller or Sigourney Weaver. At one point, I found msyelf waxing nostalgiac for Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen discussing Krell graphemics in a director’s cut of Forbidden Planet. Of course, we could have gone to see Gibson’s snuff flick, but not on a full stomach.