There Goes the Bloggerhood

My good friend Jason, who once kept a blog called Bad Movie Club, is back from a long online sabbatical with a new site called Violently Arousing. His first post for it takes up an annual tradition. Every January, Jason lists and grades all the movies he saw for the first time the previous year (in the theater, on DVD, on cable). In 2007, he saw 339 movies for the first time. That's not a typo. Jason has two children. He spent several months traveling in the Middle East for his job. And he saw 339 movies. Jason, as you may have guessed by now, is an insomniac.

He's also a stern grader, only doling out one A+ and four A's to last year's class (all very well deserved, in my opinion). Conversely, there are 22 F's and one F-. This is partly due to the fact that he sees every mainstream movie -- Failure to Launch, Lions for Lambs, etc. But he also subjects himself to things like Death Tunnel, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, and Glass House: The Good Mother (tagline: She makes Mommie Dearest look like an angel).

The new blog is decorated with vintage art from women-in-prison flicks, but the title is less salacious than you might think -- it comes from this classic exchange in Kicking and Screaming, when Chet and Otis discuss All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. It's supposed to be a two-man book group, but only Chet has come prepared:

Chet: You know what I noticed, near the end of the book, when Grady goes to the prison, that the violence, which has up to then had a ferocious energy about it, departed from the emotional violence and became terrifyingly brutal and real. And particularly after he left the prison and he went to find that horse, I found the descriptions of the horse to be, frankly, astonishingly beautiful and yet disturbingly arousing. What are your thoughts?

Otis: Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. You are, you're right on, I think. You really, you've pinned down the, uh...what it is about the book. Definitely with the prison, when, um, when Grady is does he's...there's violence, there's a lot of violence, and it's like night and day. And when Grady...he saw those, those horses, I think you were saying, and it was arousing. It was...violently arousing.