Saw My Architect last night with Gwen and a bunch of her co-workers. This is a documentary about the architect Louis Kahn by his son.

Kahn’s family life was complex, to put it gently. He was married and had two mistresses, and had one child by each of the ladies in his life–the filmmaker’s mother was the second of his mistresses, and to this day entertains the fantasy that he would have left his wife to live with her. Apparently all of the women knew of each other, but (unsurprisingly) had nothing to do with each other. Kahn’s cousin (who was interviewed in the film) disbelieved that the filmmaker could be Kahn’s son, since Kahn didn’t have a son, legitimately–apparently he wasn’t in on the whole story, though almost everyone else was.

The filmmaker didn’t know his father very well, since Kahn was rarely around–not only did he have a legit family, he apparently spent most of his time either at the office or travelling. So the movie is not just to document Kahn’s life: it’s a more personal project for the filmmaker to learn about his father, and inevitably, it winds up being a little self-regarding as a result.

Despite this, and despite the fact that it drags in spots, it’s a fascinating movie. Interviews with other leading architects of his generation (I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, etc) give us the sense that Kahn was “an architect’s architect” even though he had far fewer completed commissions than his peers. Kahn’s work is interesting to learn about: his schtick was monumental architecture. Some of his buildings are just plain ugly. Others, like the Salk Library, are beautiful but don’t seem to work well on a human scale–in that sense, they are monumental, but formalized, abstract, and not entirely functional.

At the end of the movie, however, we see Kahn’s last big project, which wasn’t completed until a decade after his death in 1974: the parliament and capital complex for Bangladesh. It is enormous, sprawling, and wonderful. A deliberative chamber is like a giant cylinder capped by a skylight, with a constellation of lights underneath. There is little to distract the eye, and it is easy to imagine being in that room removes you from petty everyday concerns and subconsciously reminds you of the importance of what happens there. The filmmaker interviews the Bangladeshi architect Shamsul Wares, who openly cries at what Kahn did for Bangladesh: by giving them this building, he says, Kahn gave them the institutions for democracy. Putting Kahn’s legacy in human terms as well as academic terms.

Saw The Cooler with Gwen yesterday. Good movie. William H. Macy has made a good career out of playing the nice-guy schnook, and he does so here in a role that has a little more meat than those roles usually do. Alec Baldwin is perfect as the tough-guy casino operator who is, in his own way, more pathetic than his schnook employee.

The story is a little disjointed–the interlude with the long-lost son is just sort of plunked down without really fitting in, and some of the backstory is never filled in–but it mixes the fantastic and hard-bitten reality in a way that I like, and kept me guessing how it would turn out until the end (which you might say is more because of my suspension of disbelief than anything else).

The movie is about gambling and luck: Macy’s character Bernie Lootz has such impossibly bad luck that any table in a casino he walks past instantly starts losing, making him an asset to the casino that employs him.

After the movie we threw some trout and veggies on the grill. I’ve never been much of a gambler in the customary sense, but I think barbecuing is where I give vent to my gambling urge: there’s always an element of chance with a grill, and every time a meal turns out well, I feel like I’ve beaten the odds.

Catching up on some belated blogging here, I saw Tokyo Godfathers with Jenny a few days ago. Enjoyable, good animation that mixed traditional flat drawing with rotoscoped backgrounds. Very schmaltzy story with an overload of astonishing coincidences (“….Dad??”) that (as Jenny points out) seems to be a sendup of coincidence-laden Japanese dramas.

Took in two oddball events at the Alamo this weekend.

On Saturday, we saw the “Show with No Name” show. This is actually a community access show (which I’ve never seen), but they saved their raunchiest, weirdest stuff for this screening, which included such lowlights as the Pamela/Tommy Lee sex tape, the Paris Hilton sex tape, and Chuck Barry pissing on his wife’s face. Plus lots of other scatalogical strangeness, capped off by a woman sending a profoundly bizarre come-on video to the object of her affection, Stevie Vai, featuring an astounding three-minute queef solo.

Saturday was a screening of Santo contra la invasión de los marcianos, presented in glorious Foleyvision [mpeg], that is, live voice-over and sound effects. The dialogue seemed to be a pretty straight translation of what (I’m guessing) the original Spanish must have been–they didn’t bother giving the movie the What’s Up, Tiger Lily? treatment, but it was funny enough on its own. After all–it’s a movie about a masked Mexican wrestler fending off a Martian invasion. What more could you want?

Saw Bubba Ho-Tep today. Best. Movie. Title. Ever. Stars Bruce Campbell, veteran of numerous horror movies, as the still-alive Elvis Presley, and Ossie Davis as the still-alive JFK. I think that’s justification enough to see it, but it’s also a damn entertaining film that is neither as camp nor frenetic as I expected, but really has a heart.

Apparently the producers have not been able to secure widespread release for this flick (go figure), so if you if you see it, consider yourself special.

Saw Kill Bill yesterday. Even for Quentin Tarantino, it was fantastically violent. More blood than all his previous movies put together, plus any Sam Peckinpah movie thrown in for good measure. There’s no getting around this. And the violence is not the arm’s-length variety practiced by Jerry Bruckheimer–it’s in your face, and in many cases intimate. Like a Peckinpah or John Woo movie, the violence is where the real art of the movie is concentrated, though.

Much of the movie is set in Japan, or a Japan extracted from QT’s wet dreams, where everyone carries a sword, where 60s-style girl groups perform on stages in traditional ryotei.

All that notwithstanding, I enjoyed the movie. The story of Kill Bill reminded me of a mirror-universe version of Charlie’s Angels–an elite team of hot babes (one of them portrayed by Lucy Liu), led by a mysterious and unseen older guy. Except in this case, they’re all assassins, not crime-fighters. It also bore obvious similarities to The Bride Wore Black To their credit, Lucy Liu and Uma Thurman both speak perfectly serviceable Japanese, much better than I’ve heard from most Hollywood stars.

The Alamo, with their usual panache, led off the movie with trailers for bad ninja-chick movies of the 70s, like Wonder Women–these alone were practically worth the price of admission.

Saw Mystic River last night with Gwen and her old friend Sonya. The movie is based on a book, but none of us had read it, so we really didn’t know what to expect.

Every one of the main characters–this is the classic ensemble cast, there really is no protagonist–is badly damaged in some way. And there are some apparent plot holes–or at least open question–at the end of the movie. But overall it works. It’s a very hard movie, a very grim story, but it is completely absorbing. I forgot that I was sitting in a movie theater in Austin though most of it–I was just wrapped up in the movie.

Just saw the latest by the Coen Brothers, Intolerable Cruelty. I’ll see any Coen Brothers movie on spec, and this one didn’t disappoint. Go see it. Love, betrayal, ass-impalings, car smashups, gunfire, and that’s just in the first five minutes–but sets the tone for the rest of the movie. As always, the brothers deliver whacky characters, snappy and occasionally erudite dialogue, funky camera angles, and a good yarn. Plus a lot of alliterative appelations. This movie, somewhat uncharacteristically for them, has an A-list cast, with certified Beautiful Persons George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Eta Beta Tomato Jones, but it is no less a movie for it.

Go see it.