My birthday's coming up (January 24th, if we're going to be technical) and while I'd love to see all of you at the lil get-together I'm having that evening at The Ginger Man (6:30pm; be there), I realize that that's not going to happen for some of my new out-of-state chums. So I figured let's celebrate the way the lovely and amazing Marya Murphy did this past year--with a live-tweet!

So. January 22nd. 11:30pm EST. Richard Kelly's much-maligned Southland Tales.

I chose this film because it deserves a lot better than it's gotten. I'm sorry but people who see a crude mess in it are just plain wrong. I've written extensively on the film in the past and now am cashing in my birthday chips to get people to see what the fuss is about. @Patrick_Pogo and I will do our best to show you why underneath its aggressively loud exterior is an amazing film about "The Information Age," about the destruction of history and of identity and about how we're so stoopid and desperate that we'd use holy fire for a renewable energy resource. It's all there and then some, I swear and it only gets better when you know what to look for. This is Kelly's ballsiest film, the one with all of its ideas running pell-mell, helter-skelter for the simple reason that he doesn't expect you to keep up.

It's the end of the world in Southland Tales because there's too much distracting data and too many false prophets claiming they understand it all for anyone to get it all. Underneath its breakneck, broad frathouse humor is a dark and smirking celebration of a society that's become so unglued that the only people to realize what's going on are three schizophrenic soldiers and even they only understand that the world is ending, never really why. This is a film about the disintegration of language, of the use of everything from religion to Karl Marx to explain what's going on and why we'll never understand the brutally unkind way Kelly's God destroys us without so much as an explanation--not with a whimper but with a last gasp view of America as the butt of a divine, cosmic joke.

Join us. It'll be fun. And heady. And silly. And long. And exciting. And obnoxious. But mostly fun.

Hashtag is #rkstales

Well, not quite. In the absence of organized/institutionalized live-tweet events, Michal Oleszczyk and I have been staging guerilla live-tweets on Saturdays at 3pm EST. Because we can, grunt grunt.

But it's come to our attention, thanks to Tom Russell's due diligence, that there hasn't been an update on the site in a bit.

So the next live-tweet event is this upcoming Saturday, 12/12 3pm EST.

The film? Mike Myers' vehicle The Love Guru.

No, my friends, I am not kidding. This is not strictly to rag on MM, though there will be some of...hell, a lot of that. I can only speak for myself when I say that the live-tweet is an excuse for me to see whatever happened to MM, a comedian I used to like as a teen and now dread looking at head-on for fear that his mugging has gotten as bad as it looks.

The illustrious Ali Arikan will be co-hosting the event with myself and all are welcome. You can follow us respectively at twitter.com/aliarikan and twitter.com/simonsaybrams. Hashtag will be #lguru. I believe Tom and/or Mary Russell will join us as well so you can follow them at twitter.com/tomandmary. We're good people. We won't steer you wrong....much.

So to be clear:

Stuart Gordon's From Beyond.

Saturday October 24

3pm EST

At Your Place

It will be fun.

Re-tweet this announcement, please, and be sure to follow simonsaybrams, my Twitter account, to let me know you'll be joining in (my account is security protected; it keeps the spammers at bay but it means I have to okay anybody that wants to follow me). So there.