"Nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole"

I started the evening with an attempt at watching Lars Von Trier's "Dogville". That was still in my rental queue for some reason, even though I was pissed at him for that movie with Bjork and all, but still, I wanted to keep an open mind.

And I've got to admit, the concept was interesting. It takes place on a soundstage, with the streets and the floorplans of the few buildings of the tiny town all just painted on the floor, with very few props. But it's one of his mostly-improvised experiments, too. And I really really wasn't in the mood for it. So I gave up shortly after Nicole Kidman's character showed up. Maybe I'll give it another try someday, but right now, it just wasn't what I wanted to see.

After that, I scanned my DVD collection looking for something, anything that might do the trick. My big frustration right now is that I'm kind of tired of re-watching stuff. Especially anime, but also in general.

That said, I finally latched on to a recent purchase that, while I've seen it a few times before, I hadn't seen it in quite a while -- the recent DVD remaster of "Repo Man".

That provided the amusing escape I think I needed right about now, so it was definitely a bit of fun. Nostaligic fun. It pretty much encapsulates that whole late-80's psuedo-punk cult humor that was targeted directly at me and my age group at that time in college, and it proved to stick quite prominently in my head ever since. Even though it's a rather simple bit of fluff. But it is chock full of great one-liners, and the soundtrack is still a feature in my MP3 mix (most of the tracks which I actually manually converted from my vinyl LP some years ago).

As a DVD, the transfer is quite excellent, and looks much sharper and cleaner than all those years of laserdisc and VHS viewings I did (I missed out on seeing it in the theater). On the whole, though, I wonder if the film could ever possibly translate itself to current times... I mean, quite a few of the themes are universal, and/or repeated in the current era. But the details, and the tone; all of those are steeped in the whole coming-of-age-in-the-Reagan-presidency mood and environment. It's all a sort of time capsule. It's the sort of thing us old-farts like to quote or refer to in order to seem hip or relevant. But is it really just my generation's "Mother, Jugs & Speed"? Hard to say.