*silence*

Maybe I'm just hallucinating or something, but I seem to remember reading something about how this was Miike's version of a New Year's movie, which was some Japanese genre film (released at the New Year) that was usually a musical about a family coming together against some challenge. It sounds reasonable enough, but…

Do you live a nightmarish life of pain and fear?

FLAGGED!  Innapropriate use of medeival Catholicism!

Yeah, who needs comedy?

Murray, I would be more than willing to replace all of Chevy's lines with the ringing of a bell.  Plus, wheelchair-related pratfalls?  Priceless.

I'm hoping that each show begins with 15 minutes of Huell sitting in the lobby, gazing blankly into the middle distance.

The Saul Goodman Goodtime Fun Factory co-starring Huell!

If this guy wins his case, I might actually get a few bucks, so this is the greatest crime ever perpetrated on humanity.

Off the top of my head: Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delany, John Crowley, Ursula le Guin, Thomas Disch, Harlan Ellison on his good days. Not to mention the mainstream writers who have written occasional bits of science fiction: Calvino, Nabokov, Pynchon, Wallace, Lethem, etc.

It never ceases to amaze me what kind of intellectual contortions writers will go through to avoid being tarred with the brush of science fiction.  This just seems like another example of that.

It's a pretty common complaint in the SF world that mainstream authors will steal SF ideas without knowing the genre.  And Margaret Atwood has been notoriously dismissive of science fiction, and refuses to accept that these novels would qualify as science fiction.

Counterpoint:

Mine did too, but I'm way more embarassed about all of the Spyro Gyra records my dad had.

Woo! SIWC!

To be fair, Sonny Rollins or Bo Diddley could play a one note solo and make it sound as bluesy and soulful as all get out.

Because there was at least one bald guy involved in both things?

Kirk, if you eat, shit, fuck, and work in the same basement, chained to the same radiator, all bets are off.

Billy Nayer Show are great.  I remember when they used to play pretty regularly in San Francisco.  They always put on a great spectacle, and this movie is like a filmic version of their live sets, and about as narratively coherent.

And Trevanian is really Robert Ludlum!