O Whackjob, Whackjob! Wherefore art thou Whackjob?

In case you've been John C. Wrighted too much lately, http://cucumberseed.livejournal.com/616086.html & http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2009/08/open-letter-to-john-c-wright.html offer a little leavening.

When in the course of human events...

A man must take his sense and go,
Why do they insist on writing about it?

Ponyo (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

Sosuke and Ponyo in the 2008 film "Ponyo," directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
August 14, 2009
Forces of Nature, Including Children
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: August 14, 2009

To watch the image of a young girl burbling with laughter as she runs atop cresting waves in “Ponyo” is to be reminded of how infrequently the movies seem to express joy now, how rarely they sweep us up in ecstatic reverie. It’s a giddy, touchingly resonant image of freedom — the animated girl is as liberated from shoes as from the laws of nature — one that the director Hayao Miyazaki lingers on only as long as it takes your eyes and mind to hold it close, love it deeply and immediately regret its impermanence. More

Taxidermia (2005) NYT Critics' Pick -- Holy Flaming Phalluses!

Marc Bischoff, as a sallow, cadaverous taxidermist in the Communist era, in a film by the Hungarian director Gyorgy Palfi.
August 14, 2009
A Speed-Eating Course on the Bestial Appetites of Humanity
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: August 14, 2009

Among the grotesque images paraded through Gyorgy Palfi’s film “Taxidermia,” the most indelible are neither the graphic depiction of an obsessive voyeur masturbating with fire nor the shearing of a pig’s tail attached to a newborn baby. They are found in its extended scenes of sport-eating competitions by a Hungarian team of gourmands during the Communist era...

In Part 1 Vendel Morosgovanyi (Csaba Czene), a servile military orderly and peeping Tom in a remote wintry outpost, obsessively spies on the wife and daughters of his sadistic commanding officer, who treats him like a slave. Vendel finds comfort in secret lust. He tortures himself with a candle flame, drinks fire and in a spectacular special effect turns his erect penis into a flaming rocket.

After he copulates with the lieutenant’s slovenly wife in a scene in which squeals and grunts are accompanied by his fantasies of her daughters and a slaughtered pig, she becomes pregnant. More

Gaylaxicon 2009 Programming Thread

Lawrence Schimel's thread for Gaylaxicon 2009 programming. Link