Haven't seen Kill Bill yet, but this cartoonish samurai film by Takeshi Kitano was suitably twisted (in a good way), ultraviolent and loveable.

It retells the old kurosawa-via-spaghettiwestern vengeance tale of a lone samurai entering a remote village to defend lowly peasants against sadistic and grinning local kingpins. The predictable showdown is preceded by numerous superheroic deeds: both good samurai and evil samurai hastily dispatch scores of anonymous henchmen, ninjas, assassins and neer-do-wells. The attention paid to severed hands, blood splats and human sheesh-kebabs approaches high art. Several details make the film really fun: the swordmaster is a blind masseur, he is helped by a bitchy transvestite geisha, and the film ends with a bollywoodesque tapdancing extravaganza. And why not?

LOL Belgo, great impression... so where can you go see it?

It's on the cultural centre distribution list, so is doing the rounds of filmclubs.

Otherwise:
<a href="http://www.agenda.be/cin/fr/detailfilm.asp?Code_film=11395" Target="_BLANK">http://www.agenda.be/cin/fr/detailfilm.asp...lm=11395</a>

<a href="http://www.agenda.be/cin/nl/detailfilm.asp?Code_film=11395" Target="_BLANK">http://www.agenda.be/cin/nl/detailfilm.asp...lm=11395</a>

If I could ever actually make it out to the Cinema, then the top 3 films I'd like to see right now would be:

1) The one about the dwarf train-spotter.
2) Either this one - Zatoichi or the Twilight Samurai
3) Troy (bit of a 'bird' choice I know.)

Things I'd like to know: i) Do we really need another film about John Holmes? ii) What's with the Vampire craze? iii) Is Kill Bill 2 really as dull as reviews are suggesting?

I picked up "Secretary" at the DVD rental shop the other day, an odd film about S&M in an office situation. James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal play the boss and the secretary. It's worth a rental if you're not easily offended and can handle disturbing topics like mental health and sexual deviation.

brewer - I'm looking forward to Troy too -- Peter O'Toole should camp it up as King Priam, and Saffron Burrows can only look ravishing in a toga. Mrs belgo hates big-budget blockbusters but I love 'em: she never quite understood my apprecation of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (brainlessness) and 'Logan's Run' (a curiously gladiatorial approach to elderly healthcare).

The film I'm looking forward to now is 'Steve + Sky', a Belgian film about a relationship between a short-ass jailbird and a tart-with-a-heart, set amid the brothel-and-baanwinkel sprawl outside Ghent.

-- john holmes? dunno, are they funded by those penis enlargement spammers? or are just celebrating seventies kitsch (Starsky and Hutch and all that)?
-- hadn't heard about that dwarf film - it's been slated in Kamera magazine, but they're mudslingers; it's won lots of prizes so it's either genuinely good or just sentimental.
-- vampires? Either a goth revival thing or just a staple moneyspinner (there's a legendary 1970s Belgian vampire film set in Ostend, but I've never heard of it outside of the TimeOut Film Guide).

db - The 'Assume the Position' poster looked so sexist that I thought it'd be a reworking of Porkies. But 'Secretary' has been recommended to me as a kind of pervy contemporary update of 'Quills', with James Spader relishing his obscene lines in a similar way to Geoffrey Rush playing the Marquis de Sade.