Missing the telltale scenes of Bound

I watched Bound on Friday night for the first time in nearly nine years, an uncommonly long drought for what I consider to be one of my very favorite "me movies" -- as in, movies other people tend to not know or not appreciate as much as I do. It's currently #30 on my Flickchart, and after this wonderful revisit, I'd say it's poised to jump back into my top 20. 

I also realized, as I was watching it, that it is the ultimate example of the possibility of me coming to embrace the film noir genre -- which I am struggling to do with this year's monthly Knowing Noir series. I never previously considered it, but this is a noir -- a "neo-noir crime thriller," if we want to go with its exact description in the first sentence of its Wikipedia entry.

It's also the 25th anniversary of the film's release. 

But none of those things are what I want to write about today.

Today, I want to again tell you about an instance of watching something without my wife wondering why I was watching it.

Now, it hadn't occurred to me that the hot lesbian sex in Bound -- and it is hot -- might be reason enough to save it for a night when she's not walking through the living room a half-dozen times. (My wife tends to do a lot of chores before relaxing for the evening with her TV, while I need to get started earlier for the longer running time of a movie.)

But it did occur to me once we watched the second episode of the new season of Never Have I Ever with our pizza dinner.

See, among other things this clever Netflix series does -- which include inexplicably and hilariously being narrated by John McEnroe -- is to have a lesbian subplot. One of the main character's two besties is Fabiola, a wallflower who hasn't yet started to have any physical relationships with other women. She's played by Lee Rodriguez, and she's only just gotten a girlfriend. I can't remember if they've kissed on screen before -- probably -- but in this particular episode, they definitely do, and she talks about how she's about to hook up in her best friend's bedroom.

Pretty tame stuff.

But hot enough to get me all worked up to watch two naked women going at it, in pretty risque graphic detail?

Such was my worry when it came to my wife's perspective on the subject of me watching Bound.

I had decided earlier in the day -- maybe the day before, I can't remember -- that I was going to watch Bound Friday night. I can't remember what triggered my interest to watch it on this particular night, but it actually happened to come up semi-organically on a Facebook chat during the day on Friday, after I'd already made my decision. That sealed it.

Now if I decided not to watch it based on what happened in this innocuous scene in Never Have I Ever, that would be admitting that my baseless paranoia on this topic was getting the better of me. Besides, I was primed and ready to watch it, and my reasons had nothing to do with lesbian titillation. (Let me tell you sometime about how this is one of the best and most clever scripts ever written.)

So I just decided to go for it, and hold my breath that my wife wouldn't walk through the room while Jennifer Tilly's finger was inserted inside Gina Gershon's vagina.

It worked out that way. Whew.

One time she came through during an overhead shot of the four mobsters beating Shelly in that bathroom immediately prior to starting to cut his fingers off. I didn't know if this qualified as a telltale scene from the movie, but she didn't say "Oh, you're watching Bound?" (She may have only seen it once.)

The next time was a scene with Joe Pantoliano and Tilly, with not much obvious happening. 

And that was it.

So I remain safe in the knowledge that my wife thinks I watch movies for altruistic and upstanding reasons only. (In this case, it's actually true.)

Now that I've written this, I'm thinking "Damn, it would have been awesome to talk about some new takeaways from this viewing of Bound, or at least things I was reminded of loving about it."

So let's finish with a little Bound speed round. Warning, spoilers. 

1) I love the character Mickey, played by John Ryan, the gangster with a heart of gold. In a world in which all women are disposable objects, Mickey treats Violet with respect. He's in love with her -- I think that's true of every character in the movie -- but his sense of what's right for her overrides all else. When she kisses him at their final parting and he gets this look of unbelievable longing in his eyes, overshadowed by the understanding that he can or will do nothing about it, his body makes a slight, almost imperceptible twitch toward her -- an amazingly subtle and perceptive choice by Ryan, the Wachowskis (have I not mentioned them yet??) or both. He'd like nothing more than to lean in and sweep her off her feet. But she has already politely declined his "offer," which presumably was for her to become his girlfriend. He doesn't want to trespass any further. So he forlornly gets into his car and drives away.

2) "Who's dead now, fuckface?" Spoken by Joey Pants while he holds the corpse of Christopher Meloni by the lapels. Still my favorite line of the movie, followed closely by Pants' "Fuckin' dark in here." (Joey Pants is like a walking quote factory in this movie.)

3) The ominous theme that plays twice when we see gangsters walking shoulder to shoulder to a fateful showdown is just gold. It's gold, Jerry.

4) One of my favorite details is that when Violet and Corky finally get alone, where Joey Pants ain't going to walk in on them ("Fuckin' dark in here"), their lovemaking is so intense that it pulls up one of the edges of the fitted sheet on Corky's bed. The next morning, when we get another overhead shot of them in bed, that corner of the sheet is still untucked. Great continuity.

5) A great callback is not the flawless repetition of a good line, but the little changes when a character inaccurately remembers it, as human beings are prone to doing. When Mickey starts cutting off Shelly's fingers, he says "I'm going to ask you ten times. Any time I don't get an answer, I'm going to cut off a finger." Obviously trying to imitate his mentor, Caesar repeats the same threat to Violet later on. But the Wachowskis aren't laboring under the misapprehension that a callback needs to be worded identically, because that's not realistic. When Caesar makes the threat, he says "I'm going to ask you ten questions," not "ten times." Some people don't notice these details. When it's a movie I love this much, I do.

I could go on. I won't. I'll just finish by repeating my standard recommendation about Bound: If you want to see a movie where all the characters are smarter than you are, but the clever decisions they make are all based in reality and as a believable outgrowth of their ability to improvise, then Bound is your movie. Also, if noirs have notably complicated plots that detract from the enjoyment for a certain type of viewer (such as myself), this is the absolute exception to that, as clear to follow as it is smartly conceived. 

The titillating lesbian sex ain't half bad either. 

Birthday rewatches

So birthday rewatches are officially a thing now.

It was my birthday on Monday, and I followed what I now recognize has become a new tradition: I re-watched a favorite movie.

Five of my past six birthdays have involved re-watching at least one movie I love -- I say "at least" because last year I re-watched a movie after midnight on the 19th, so it was really October 20th when I watched it, and then watched another during the regular evening viewing hours.

Probably the only reason I didn't watch a movie on October 20th of 2010 -- new or old -- was that my dad and his wife were in town to visit my then-newborn son, and we went over to a friend's house for dinner.

So I thought it was worth quickly recapping what I've chosen and why I thought my birthday was a good time to watch it.

2014

Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron)

Why now? It was meant to be Pulp Fiction, actually. I had wanted to join everybody else in reflecting on 20 years since the movie was released ... and probably nearly 15 since I had last seen it. The long running time (168 minutes) was daunting for a Monday night, but we would have pressed forward if the BluRay had worked. But Pulp Fiction became the second movie I brought from the U.S. that has not been able to play on our region-free DVD player. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was another option, but we opted for Children as the only movie under two hours. Which turned out to be key, because my wife had developed a sore throat, and was not expecting to last the length of even a 109-minute movie. That she did is a testament to just how good Children is.

Having seen Children of Men five times now, I consider it one of those movies where I start to get anxious if it's been too long since my last viewing. My previous viewing had been in early 2011, so it was definitely time.

Interestingly, this was the first time I actually watched my own DVD copy, which I have owned for at least six years now. My previous two viewings came at times when I already owned the DVD, but one was a random catch on cable where we started and couldn't stop watching, and the other was a friend's BluRay at his house on a big screen. So it was also the first time I sampled my DVD extras, specifically, the one that details what went into creating a digital baby that was so realistic-looking, I half-wondered if someone on set had actually birthed the child an hour before filming.

2013

The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) and Timecrimes (2009, Nacho Vigalondo)

Why then? The Social Network was an impulsive after-midnight watch on my computer on a night we had gone away for the weekend to celebrate my 40th. I was already half in the bag when I started watching, taking full advantage of knowing no children (only one at the time) were going to wake me up in the morning. I can't remember why I selected this over the 100+ other options in my Case Logic folder, as it was already my third time watching in barely three years since the movie had been released. I was just jonesing I guess.

As for Timecrimes, this was what we watched later that night when I got home. We had been wowed by Nacho Vigalondo's twisty little bit of low-budget time travel brilliance when we first watched it within a year or so of its release, and I'd been looking for another opportunity to see it. It was streaming on Netflix and I chose my birthday as the time to advance it forward for a second viewing.

2012

Beavis and Butt-head Do America (1996, Mike Judge)

Why then? A little different story on this one. Like Social Network, this was an after-midnight viewing on Friday night/Saturday morning, another in which my wife was obviously not involved. The viewing was less about it being my birthday than it being a Friday night and me still having some energy to summon from somewhere. But I've always thought this was an underappreciated gem, having watched it twice before the year 2000 but never since. It was also streaming on Netflix so I said "What the hey?" Perhaps unsurprisingly, I did not like it quite as much this time. Still good, though.

Note: For the evening of my actual birthday, we'd had a long day out in Ventura and my wife was happy for me to just take myself to a double feature. So I saw Argo and ... (ahem) Alex Cross.

2011

Unforgiven (1992, Clint Eastwood)

Why then? Unforgiven was one of a half-dozen BluRays my wife gave me the previous Christmas to celebrate having finally purchased a BluRay player a few months earlier. Most of them, however, were movies that were either long or heavy -- The Departed and The Proposition were two others -- meaning that they almost never seemed like movies you could casually slip in after a long day of dealing with a toddler. So I decided to specifically use my undisputed right to choose the movie on my birthday as a chance to get my first rewatch of my all-time favorite western (and one of my top 20 films on Flickhart) in at least 15 years. And yep, it was just as terrific as ever.

2009

Bound (1996, Larry & Andy Wachowski)

Why then? My wife was actually out of town for a work conference for my birthday in 2009, meaning that I got to live like a bachelor for a couple days. That meant having total control of the TV and which movies got watched. I rewatched about four movies while she was gone, but specifically saved Bound -- which I had rented from my Blockbuster through-the-mail account (that really dates it) -- for my birthday because I had built up its awesomeness to nearly mythic proportions, and had gone way too long without seeing it. I've since purchased the movie (I love it so much that I went to the trouble of ordering it from Amazon, something I almost never do) and have rewatched it again. It's my #20 on Flickchart.

There now, aren't you edified?

Would still like to get in that long-overdue Pulp Fiction viewing. Speaking of where I rank things on Flickchart, Fiction's all the way up at #4, behind only Raising Arizona, Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's streaming on Netflix, so I will have my chance -- we just didn't want to have to watch something on the computer for my birthday viewing. (Our cable that connects my wife's Mac to our TV is still on the fritz.)

And how do I feel about being 41?

That one's a bit more tricky. Let me get back to you. 

A week of judgment comes to a close

This past week I participated in a fun activity organized by Hannah Keefer on her blog Hannah and Her Movies. It was actually more organized on Facebook, with her blog playing a co-sponsorship role.

Hannah decided to do something really ambitious this year: She's watching one movie per day. That in itself is not the part that takes a lot of coordination. She's leaving 71% of the movies she watches (each of the weekday movies) up to her friends. Or in my case, acquaintances she met through the Flickchart discussion group. (You could call us friends, because we have quite a friendly interaction, but I have never met her in person.)

So she put the call out for interested parties to claim a week, and each person would then give her one title for each weeknight of that week. The initial response was overwhelming, so I didn't even have one of the 52 spots at first. However, someone dropped out, so this alternate became a full-fledged curator. I was assigned the week of February 10th to 14th, and had her a list of five within minutes.

(Do I sound like a guy who sits around, just waiting for the opportunity to recommend movies to people? Nah.)

Hannah's been calling this Hannah's Movie Challenge Adventure 2014, and she has a Facebook group set up to join together the people who are participating, and as kind of a home base for the project. That's where we have most of the discussion about the movies she's seeing, but she does also write about each on Hannah and Her Movies. And yes, I do consider it a shame that people seem to be more interested in having lively film discussions through Facebook groups than through the comments sections of blogs. :-)

Here are the movies I chose, and here were her responses to them:

Monday, February 10th: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tom Tykwer)

See what I've written about this movie here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Well, dang. This was a good start to Vance's week. A crazy, almost fantasy-esque serial killer movie with an incredible soundtrack and a great story. I loved it, though I had to think about it for a little while after it ended to decide whether I did or not."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4.5

My comment: I was riding high at this point. Perfume is one of my favorite movies to share with people. No one I've recommended it to hasn't liked it.

Tuesday, February 11th: Agora (2009, Alejandro Amenabar)

See what I've written about this movie here and here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Another movie I knew almost nothing about and ended up really enjoying. It had kind of unusual subject matter, like Perfume did yesterday -- I'm not sure I can think of another movie I've seen about a female philosopher. Nice pick."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4

My comment: Pretty pleased with that, especially since Agora has not been a hit with everyone to whom I recommended it. It does feel a bit more like my movie than Perfume, since it's significantly more obscure. 

Wednesday, February 12th: What Maisie Knew (2013, Scott McGehee & David Siegel)

See what I've written about this movie here and here. 

What Hannah said on Facebook: "The movies this week appear to be losing a half a rating every day... From 4.5 to 4 to 3.5. Hmm. But I still liked this one. The interactions in the movie felt very real, even if it was sometimes difficult to watch because of that."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 3.5

My comment: It didn't occur to me that yeah, not everyone wants to watch warring exes yell at each other about what they want to do -- or not do -- with their daughter. Glad Hannah liked it enough to give it a half-star higher than merely thumbs up.

Thursday, February 13th: Bound (1996, Larry & Andy Wachowski)

See what I've written about this movie here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Unfortunately, this one broke Vance's streak of movies I really enjoyed. It's tough for me to really care about crime movies, though I did enjoy the characters and watching them interact."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 2

My comment: That's a shame. Bound is another personal favorite to recommend, and no one's ever turned their nose up at it to this extent. However, if she doesn't like the genre, she doesn't like the genre. Not a lot a person can do about that.

Friday, February 14th: Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nick Stoller)

See what I've written about this movie here and here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "And my final movie of the week, which I found both funny and heartwarming. I'm glad Vance picked this one, as I'd been meaning to get around to it for a really long time. I had a bunch more written here, but then I realized it was pretty much just all the same thing I said in the review, so if you want to know more, you can read that."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4

My comment: I figured this would end the week on a winning note. For the record, I didn't intentionally pick this for Hannah and her husband to watch on Valentine's Day, but I'm glad it worked out that way.

                                    ************************

Note: You may notice that many of my picks are recent. In fact, four of the five came out in the last eight years. Well, Hannah is in her twenties, and I gambled on her liking new things better. That said, I also know she's a fan of musicals, and those had their heyday decades ago. 

It's funny that I ended up dwelling on her dislike of Bound, because really, four out of five is pretty darn good. The five movies had an average of 3.6 stars for her, which means I certainly didn't waste her time this week. And yet we tend to be so sure that the movies we love are great, that it can be an oddly personal kind of blow when someone doesn't like even one of them.

The competitor in me was a tad disappointed, too, since Hannah is keeping track of who has made the best picks for her by computing the average Flickchart position of the new movies she's ranked. One guy (another from the Flickchart Facebook discussion group) already has me beat with a slightly higher average, and it's only February. Oh well, I'll shoot for finishing in the top ten.

Overall, this was incredibly fun. I really looked forward to Hannah's daily posts (which would arrive in my inbox around 4:15 p.m. my time), with her latest assessment of a movie I'd suggested. I guess it felt kind of like when someone asks you to make them a mix. "What? You want me to show you what I think is awesome? Sure!"

And the truth is, Hannah thought most of the things I thought were awesome, were awesome, too.

Cool.

If Neo and Lola had a baby

Three directors.

Two men and one former man who now identifies as female.

Two siblings (once brothers) and one who isn't related to them.

Two Americans and one German.

The directors of two of the best films of 1999 (The Matrix and Run Lola Run).

Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski, as they are credited. Always in that order. (Ladies first I guess.)

However you slice it, Cloud Atlas is going to be interesting.

But will it be good?

Cloud Atlas looks like the classic example of a love-it-or-hate-it movie, and so far, the hate-its seem to be winning. You could say that its 52 Metascore means that those two opposing sentiments are averaging out almost perfectly, but if you were translating that score into a letter grade, it would be an F, not the C you would expect for a love-it-or-hate-it movie. (Then again, a straight translation doesn't work -- whereas a score of 59 or lower is an F in school, you're really probably looking at a Metascore of 25 or lower for the equivalent of an F. So I guess 52 probably really is a C, since it is described as "Mixed or Average Reviews.")

Yeah, I probably could have reconfigured that last paragraph to remove my faulty initial assumption altogether.

In any case, Cloud Atlas looks very much like the next installment in my series of movies that are "Too Shebulba," as described in this post. To refresh your memory, the term was inspired by Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, in which the characters appear in several different time periods and the futuristic version of Hugh Jackman is left whispering the word "Shebulba!" at a tree floating through outer space. One of my commenters corrected my spelling of the term, explaining that the character is referring to the Mayan underworld Xibalba. However, the term was born as "Shebulba," and that's how it will stay for my purposes.

In fact, if Cloud Atlas most closely resembles one single movie, I'd say The Fountain is it. Especially as it seems to focus on a man and a woman whose love affair stretches out over generations and in different incarnations of themselves -- here Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, there Jackman and Rachel Wiesz. And if it does really resemble The Fountain, that's bad news for me, since I found that movie to be an interesting failure at best.

But then I return to the directors themselves, and consider some of the boundary-pushing movies they've made over the years. I mentioned The Matrix and Run Lola Run, but each director or directing pair has a second movie that I absolutely love -- in the case of the Wachowskis, even more than The Matrix, and in the case of Tom Tykwer, slightly less than Run Lola Run. The Wachowskis' Bound is among my 30 favorite films of all time, and Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is probably among my top 50. Both movies mesmerize me, and both demonstrate that these directors or directing teams have the kind of range that could make them perfect choices for an ambitious opus like Cloud Atlas.

I will probably find out Sunday night. Until then, I will continue to marinate in a sense of wary anticipation about what kind of weird and potentially brilliant oddity lies ahead of me.

Finishing what I started

It's very rare for me to start a movie and not finish it.

A book, yes. I seem to be doing that all the time. Although I have a personal philosophy of finishing even the books I find to be quite a chore, it seems I don't actually live up to that personal philosophy as often as I'd like.

But movies? They are a much shorter commitment. There's not really a good excuse for leaving one unfinished. (Actually, there are a couple, which I'll get to later.)

This weekend, though, was a weekend that reminded me of the idea of not finishing movies -- because I didn't finish two of them this weekend alone, and heard discussion of a third I hadn't finished.

Let's get to the third first. It's Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie. It's a movie I'd wanted to see for quite some time, and it finally made its way into my DVD player sometime last year. Then made it out of the DVD player before I got a chance to finish it, because I started it too late on a Sunday night, and it was due back at the library the next day. Apparently, I wasn't enjoying it enough to pay the $1 late fee it would cost to keep it another day. Then again, the late fee really would have been more like $3, because I had two other movies that needed to be returned as well, and it seemed silly to make a trip to the library to return two of them, but not the third.

The Man Who Fell to Earth was discussed at length in a podcast I listened to this weekend. That's strange, considering that the movie came out in 1976. But this podcast, calling Filmspotting SVU (Streaming Video Unit), focuses on movies available on streaming, which takes new releases out of the equation in most cases. Each episode, the co-hosts submit one long-form review of a film that their listeners have selected out of three choices. When they listed the choices on the previous podcast, I was hoping and praying the audience would select Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, in part because I'd already seen it and would therefore get a lot more out of a discussion of it. (And would love to hear the hosts poke fun at that ambitious mess of a movie, which is intermittently successful.) Not only would The Man Who Fell to Earth be a movie I hadn't seen, thereby opening me up to having parts of the plot spoiled, but a review of it would remind me of my failure to finish watching it. Of course, that's what happened.

I listened to that podcast on Sunday morning, but only the night before, I started two different movies and finished watching neither of them. At least both were movies I had already seen. My wife had gone out to dinner with a friend, and I like to use occasions like this as a golden opportunity to watch whatever movie I might like. I started the Watchowski brothers' Bound, a movie I absolutely adore, and had finally broken down and bought within the past six months. But I paused at about the 35-minute mark, and never resumed. I decided there was a good chance I wouldn't finish it before my wife got home, and I suddenly got paranoid that she would think I had saved a crime thriller with some hot lesbian action for a time when she was out of the house. My more above-board reason for not resuming is that I actually thought it would be fun to watch this with her, since she's big on crime thrillers. (I think she's seen it, but it would have been years ago.) If I watched it through to the end now, I wouldn't want to watch it again for at least a year or two. And besides, as discussed, I probably wouldn't be able to watch it through to the end anyway.

At this point there was very little chance I'd finish a new movie, but I popped in Napoleon Dynamite anyway. I'd been in a bit of a funk all day (I won't get into why, but nothing having to do with my family), so I decided I should watch something light that might raise my spirits. (And something where there would be no suspicion of watching it for prurient reasons, when my wife inevitably returned home before I finished it.) My sister bought me Napoleon Dynamite for a birthday or Christmas, at least five years ago. I'd never taken the DVD out of its package, which is no commentary on the movie itself -- I'd already seen it twice, so obviously I like the movie a lot. A third opportunity to watch it just hasn't arisen. But I'd been up since 5:30 (when my son could no longer sleep anymore) and I got myself too comfortable on the couch, so I fell asleep about 20 minutes in, having the presence of mind to pause first. I awoke only when my wife came home, around 10:20 -- which actually would have given me enough time to finish either movie, if I'd stuck to the first or hadn't fallen asleep during the second.

In addition to those three movies, here are a couple others I started but never finished, and the reasons:

Sophie's Choice (1982, Alan J. Pakula)
Sophie's Choice fell victim to the same scenario as The Man Who Fell to Earth. I started it too close to the time it was due back at the library, but falling asleep was not the issue here -- I had to abandon it because I knew I'd be running up against some other social conflict in the evening, and some quick math told me I would not be able to get in its full 157 minutes. So I watched about 45 minutes of it, and made the Sophie's Choice of not finishing Sophie's Choice in favor of my social obligation.

Withnail and I (1987, Bruce Robinson)
With this one, there's no good excuse. Well, except that I wasn't really enjoying the movie. We were watching it on Netflix streaming at my wife's urging, but the movie's weird and unconventional rhythms just weren't working for me at that time of night, with the level of stamina I was bringing to the table that evening. You'd think we would have just finished it the next day, but it's been a good six months and it has not been resumed.

When I started this post, I imagined that I was guilty of this sin with more than three movies I've never seen before -- and I guess there could be a couple more titles out there I'm just not thinking of right now. And there are definitely some titles where I watched less than ten minutes before aborting, which I don't really count -- Akira Kurosawa's Dreams and Before the Devil Knows Your Dead are two that come to mind. But with those, I never stood a chance -- I put them on late at night and was literally asleep three minutes later. They don't count.

But with The Man Who Fell to Earth, Sophie's Choice and Withnail and I, I think I have a real duty to go back and finish those. They are like open, festering wounds. If they weren't, I doubt I would have devoted a whole post to them.

Now that I have, perhaps this will provide me the motivation to go back and finally finish what I started.

The Wachowski brothers' best movie

When The Matrix first came out, most people looked at the poster and said, "V.I. Warshawski is directing a movie about Keanu Reeves playing an android? What's this then?"

Me? I said, "Oh, it's the new movie from the guys who made Bound."

That's still how I see The Matrix -- Larry and Andy Wachowskis' sophomore and slightly inferior follow-up to their brilliant neo-noir thriller, Bound.

What's that you say? The Matrix? Inferior? Whaaa?

You read right. One of the most influential and exciting films of the last 20 years is not as good as this film. That's how good Bound is.

I watched Bound again last night for the first time in at least seven or eight years. In fact, during the day, I had a similar moment of inspirational clarity to the one I had on Monday, when I went to pick up The 13th Warrior. Except I knew this time, the film wouldn't let me down. It wouldn't be less good than I remembered. Bound is as solid as they come, through and through, and I knew it would be just the "special" viewing experience I was looking for on my birthday.

(Yesterday was my birthday. Let's all stop and make a big deal out of me turning 36. Then again, let's not. If it gives you some idea what I think of celebrating my birthday in some grandiose fashion, I was looking forward to a quiet night with a movie. Then again, if my wife were in town, I'm sure we would have at least gone out to eat.)

Any serious fan of The Matrix should have already gone back and watched Bound, even though it's a totally different kind of film. It's like going back and checking out the early works of a band you love -- sometimes you find out that the earlier stuff was even better.

But I think the reason more people haven't discovered Bound is that it's easy to dismiss it as some kind of Cinemax erotic thriller. The title itself suggests sadomasochism, and the poster does nothing to discourage that idea. Plus, discovering that the two leads are lesbians (Jennifer Tilly's character is actually bisexual) pushes a person even further toward the conclusion that the film exists primarily to titillate.

The truth of the matter is, there are actual physical binds (ropes) that exist in this movie, but they are not used sexually. Rather, Bound as a title has more to do with the trust that must exist in order to successfully execute a criminal plan -- as well as the fact that people become unwittingly bound to each other as the plan adapts to real-world changes, even though they may enter the plan as adversaries. The title is a one-word summation of the script's dozens of smart ideas about trust, deception, desperation, obligation, the criminal code, and ultimately, love. It could be honor-Bound or duty-Bound or love-Bound. Or simply Bound for trouble.

Oh, and if you are interested in being titillated, there are two hot lesbian sex scenes that are not very graphic, but are quite sexy indeed because of how the Wachowskis set up the camera, the dialogue they use, and the tension they create.

So what is Bound about, exactly? I won't tell you too much, because that would spoil the fun. But it's useful to know that Gina Gershon plays Corky, a lesbian ex-con just released from five years in prison for theft. She's been hired to do a big renovation job in the apartment next door to where Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and Caesar (Joe Pantoliano) live. Violet is the arm candy for Caesar's mafiaso money launderer, but she longs to get out, and sees a path to her freedom in the tatooed handywoman working next door. She knows when there will be $2 million in her apartment that will be ripe for stealing -- as long as they can hatch the perfect plan that will cast suspicion on someone else. But when the money gets drenched in blood from an impulsive whacking, the plan must adapt -- or else they'll be caught. And the mob doesn't look too kindly on those who try to screw them over.

What I love so much about Bound is how clean and tight it is. I won't say it's simple -- in fact, some of the chess moves that are Bound's essence rely on thinking three, four, five steps ahead, and truly illustrate the characters' intelligence. However, the twists and turns themselves are simple to follow, always believable, and organic to the action. In fact, so clean is Bound -- taking place almost entirely in the two apartments -- that I could easily see it staged as a play. The only thing you would lose is the Wachowskis' camera work and unobtrusive visual pizzazz, which would become their signature in the Matrix trilogy. Because accolades tend to flow when talking about a movie I love, I'll continue: The dialogue is also sharp and clever, but totally naturalistic. And I'd be remiss in this short capsule review if I didn't point out that this is by far the best work Joe Pantoliano -- a.k.a. Joey Pants -- has ever turned in. Gershon and Tilly are also great, but Pantoliano's Caesar is the far more ostentatious -- and at times, downright hilarious -- role.

One more credit to Bound: The fact that it was a cheap-o press on the DVD didn't affect my enjoyment one bit. The image appeared in the correct aspect ratio, but was boxed on all four sides by blackness, reducing its total size on the screen by a third. That might have been resolved with an adjustment on my DVD player, but let's just say no other DVDs I've popped in have required such an adjustment. I also needed to significantly brighten the image, as contrasts were getting lost in the darkness. ("Fuckin' dark in here!" to quote Caesar early on in the movie.) What's more -- and I found this the most astonishing -- the actual title screen on the DVD was generic. Not even the title of the movie appeared -- just the choices (chapters, setup, etc.) and a generic background used by the company that pressed the DVD.

Gives you some idea just how undiscovered Bound really is. If there's any justice, a Criterion Collection edition will be forthcoming at some point in the future. But just as extra frills can't make a bad movie good, Bound would be a good movie even if you watched it on a 10-inch black and white TV.

There's little doubt that Bound is better than The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions and Speed Racer. The film the Wachowskis wrote (Assassins) and the film they produced and wrote (V for Vendetta) also figure to be losers in this head-to-head duel. And I don't really know about this Ninja Assassin they're producing, which comes out later this fall, but it doesn't seem that original. Plus, it's got a crap title.

But is Bound better than The Matrix?

You know what I think. I challenge you to rent it for yourself and find out ...