A Gilded Planet

Lolita 1962. 152 minutes. USA. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Watchdate: 2/24/2011 By channeling the elemental creep, Peters Sellers causes convulsive combustion deep in my guts, cries of uncontrollable laughter seared permanently deep in the bastion of my physical memory. An engineer like Kubrick builds soulful demons and then forces them into covalent orbits. The reactions are priceless. My inner optimist shrieks with horror when contemplating his work, but he probes our darkest impulses with unflinching humanity.

I watched  232 movies in the 365 Days of 2010 . Here are  movies 219-215 that I watched: The Party  1968. 99 minutes. USA. Directed by Blake Edwards. Watchdate: 12/7/2010. Aside from a few opening scenes setting up the fairly simple fish-out-of-water premise, I am convinced that the movie was mostly unscripted and Blake Edwards just had a camera crew follow Peter Sellers around the titular party, throwing comic set pieces in Sellers' way as he thought of them. At least that's how I like to think of it. It's a simple but effective technique. My personal favorite sequence starts with Sellers finally finding a toilet after a long search and then proceeding to break, clog and flood the entire bathroom to such an extent that he is forced to escape through a window. What follows is the best fall in the history of slapstick comedy. The movie eventually devolves into pure nonsense, with a vandalized elephant and mysteriously metastasizing foam. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul   1...