who wants to see "Time Regained" next week?

-- books finished this week: Jacques Lacan Seminar I: Freud's Papers on Technique, Sir A.C. Doyle A Study in Scarlet, Bruno Schulz Crocodile Street.
-- Dicks and Carbonas were great on Thursday night. Dicks shed a member since I saw them in Austin, so they were a four-piece (as in "the day"), and miraculously had not at all improved on their instruments since 1980. Their ineptitude, however, was somewhat mesmerizing, since it re-created the sound of their records perfectly, and since their not-quite-fast-enough, stomping beat has always been somewhat hypnotizing. Carbonas were too cool by half, but also sounded just like their records, but somehow blew the middle of their set by playing a string of uncatchy numbers and some KBD cover (which was alright but what are you gonna do it's 2006).
-- last night watched The Specialist, which made me realize I need to read Eichmann in Jerusalem really badly, but a few comments: 1) "the banality of evil" is pretty dead-on, but not quite in the way that I thought before I saw the movie; like, "banal" is not really equivalent to "bland" or "mundane" and is the only word that captures Eichmann's obnoxious, insipid, pathetic vibe. 2) also, dude is pissed off for most of the movie, since this is in some ways not a "real" trial and while normally I would sympathize with that sort of self-important indignation, y'know... you can't really, here. 3) best shot in the movie is when Eichmann is doing a typical oh I wasn't in charge of that or well we didn't *call* it 'burying people alive in mass graves', we called it 'deportation,' and the prosecuting attorneys play this tape of something similar he had said previously, and all you see in the camera shot is the bailiff rewinding the tape and on his arm the Camp tattoos. Heady stuff, people.
-- Talya was complaining about "post-Wes Anderson" films as being worse than the genre I was complaining about (the shitty independent films that Landmark and Angelika are always playing). Discussed: Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, You and Me and Everyone We Know, etc. I really liked Squid and the Whale, though, which is definitely "post Wes Anderson". The phenomenon that I was talking about was movies like "Happy Endings" with Tom Arnold, "The Good Girl", "Closer", "the World's Fastest Indian" and any movie where Paul Giamatti is the main character (I'm sure "Cinderella Man" sucked, but it isn't really the same phenomenon). Basically, movies that think they are more steamy/thoughtful than "average Hollywood fare," and are self-absorbed enough to try and make the Festival rounds but need someone to tell them "you aren't arty; you are just boring." This is almost exclusively what they play at the one or two independent theaters in Austin. SUCKS