If you count my computers, TV, DVDs and CDs, I have several thousand dollars worth of electronic entertainment at my disposal. But none of it seems to offer the transcendent bliss that I've been getting from a single $12 Christmas present I received this week.

Mattel's Classic Football 2 is a re-release of this, which was, when I was nine, the best game one could hope to find under the tree. Little flashing red LCDs indicate who's got the ball (bright red), who's on defense (slightly-less bright red) and who's an eligible receiver (flashing red). The big advance with Classic Football 2 was that players could move backward as well as forward. (I'm certain Moore's Law accounts for this somehow.)

Anyway, I can't put the damn thing down.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure I'm not being nostalgic for my youth. I hated my youth, and I much prefer being an adult. I just think this game kicks ass.

like flakes of snow
the entries fall
off the
front
pa
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If Satan were an art school student, this would be the project that would get him expelled from film class, and would probably earn him a hefty folder in AG Ashcroft's file cabinet. Begotten is a film that's passed in and out of my radar for years, but only now--since I've joined Netflix--have I been able to check it out. It's not the kind of film you'll find at your local Blockbuster Video.

It begins with a hooded figure--a god, actually--seated in a cabin in the woods, slowly disemboweling himself with a straight razor. From there it gets gruesome and bizarre.

It's a 75-minute series of the most nightmarish, horrifying images I've ever seen, told without dialogue and depicted in the grainiest, most hyper-exposed black and white you can imagine. The content of the images aside, it is--from a visual standpoint--an astonishing film. It's often impossible to tell exactly what's being depicted--and when we can tell what we're seeing, we usually wish we couldn't. Things are constantly being (usually symbolically) born and (usually very realistically and gruesomely) killed. When it was released in 1991, Premiere called it a "metaphysical splatter film". That's about right. Rape. Dismemberment. Necrophiliac fellatio. Oh yeah, it's got that.

Obviously not for the squeamish and really only for the most open-minded filmgoer. I loved it...I think.

"...it would be the coke-addled niece of some mega-millionaire that complained when their eggs didn’t have the right consistency and sent them back to the waiter without ever making eye contact (aka an asshole that you really want to beat the shit out of)."
--David Cross
via misc., etc.