I rented a batch of four movies that I hadn’t seen so far; Apocalypto, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Full Metal Jacket and Die Hard.

Cuckoo was clearly the best, but I was very surprised at the incredible quality of Apocalypto. For a movie that was supposedly awful, it was far better than Die Hard and I personally found it better than Full Metal Jacket.  It is absolutely a terrifying end if you know any history – they had already destroyed themselves, and now someone was coming to wipe them off the face of the Earth. Really, the scene with the Europeans arriving was incredible; it is possible to derive so much meaning from it.  Even if one was to ignore history, Apocalypto was the perfect chase movie. The scene where the chase turned into guerrilla warfare (after he challenged them near the waterfall) still resonates in my head today.  Apocalypto is a more human “Predator”, with better acting and better story telling.  Highly recommended.

Full Metal Jacket has a lot of quotable lines, but it doesn’t really feel that important to me. This is probably because I watched it 2 weeks after I saw “The Deer Hunter” (which is by far its superior).

Die Hard is crippled by having Reginald VelJohnson. Everytime I saw him, I couldn’t help but think of Family Matters. (In particular, I always have this one scene in my head where he is infodumping about how the police don’t have “ticket quotas”, a complete falsehood). His performance was bad; sadly, it wasn’t bad enough to be enjoyed.

Cuckoo was great because you know it is a dark movie going in, but you still fall hard for how McMurphy is trying to help the people around him. Seeing Billy at the end getting past his stuttering, only to be destroyed by the head nurse is excellent cinema.

The other day I was taking a look at the music rack at Hard-off, a “Recycle Shop” (think: used goods store). I can’t imagine a worse purchase than new Japanese CDs.

Singles cost something like 800-1200 yen. It is even worse when you look at older ones from the 90s. Full albums can cost 4000 yen with ease. Yet, there I was looking at 10 CDs from sugar pop queen supergroup “Morning Musume” and it was valued at a mere 320 yen ($4). Someone probably shelled out about 200$ for those CDs brand new; a value retention of about 2%.

I’m probably going to start reviewing the albums from the 100 yen rack, just to see what’s so bad about them. Maybe what I heard from the old Gaijin types is true; maybe it is just that there is very little timeless pop music in this country.

I don’t know where this came from, but I’ve been thinking of that game non-stop for a week now. I’m even thinking about buying a TV and PS2 just to play it.

I specifically LOVE this part.