Quote of the Day

After a long weekend on the west coast I picked up Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, edited by David L. Ulin. Los Angeles is a funny "city" (if you can even call it that); disjointed, surreal, and not particularly attractive (save for the beaches), I find myself liking it nonetheless.

I’ve pulled the below passage from Stewart Edward White’s (1873-1946) The Rules of the Game (included in the anthology). It conveys, spot on, my reaction to Los Angeles - the fact that it was written a hundred years ago and remains relevant, speaks more I think to the enduring character of metropolitan areas than to anything else.

““Well, what do you think of our fair young city?” he grinned.
“It’s got me going,” admitted Bob.
“Took me some time to find out where to get off at,” said Baker.
“When I found it out, I didn’t dare tell anybody. They mob you here and string you up by your pigtail, if you try to hint that this isn’t the one best bet on terrestrial habitations. They like their little place and they believe it in a whole lot, and they’re dead right about it! They’d stand right up on their hind legs and paw the atmosphere if anybody were to tell them what they really are, but it’s a fact. Same joyous slambang, same line of sharps hanging on the outskirts, same row, racket, and joy in life, same struggle: yes, and by golly! the same big hopes and same big enterprises and big optimism and big energies! Wouldn’t you like to be helping them do it?”
“What’s the answer?” asked Bob, amused.
“Well, for all its big buildings and its electric lights, and trolleys, and police and size, it’s nothing more nor less than a frontier town.”
“A frontier town!” echoed Bob.
“You think it over,” said Baker.”

Finally, a summer show actually worth watching

Summer, known for its long weekends, mindless blockbusters, and lazy strolls in the park, has always been viewed as something completely different for network television executives: a fertile dumping ground for shows that didn’t (NBC’s Kings and ABC’s Eli Stone are good examples), or wouldn’t (I’m a Faux Celebrity, Shoot Me in the Head with a Nail Gun springs to mind) make it during the other nine months of year. This three month period of television purgatory, akin to your fridge the day after Thanksgiving, is of the take it or leave it variety; you’re either eating leftovers, or you’re going hungry.

But as the major networks lick their collective wounds, trying to figure out a way to staunch their slow audience bleed, cable has quietly moved in on their territory. TNT and USA have thrown the harmless Burn Notice, HawthoRNe (“she’s a RN, who’s the SOUL of the ER”), and Royal Pains into the ring, and they’re uniformly forgettable. Maybe summer just wasn’t made for watching TV. But three weeks ago, HBO, in all its infinite wisdom, premiered the second season of its wonderfully addictive True Blood. The show, run by Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, shares absolutely none of its predecessor’s pathos, which for a show about transsexuals, shape shifters, and vampires, is a good thing. Based on the ‘Southern Vampire Mysteries’, a series of novels by Charlaine Harris, Blood follows Sookie Stackhouse (played by Anna Paquin), a mind-reading, Bon Temps (a fictional Louisiana town) waitress, who falls in love with a two-hundred year old vampire. True Blood is steeped with allegory, and Ball (who is out), clearly wasn’t playing for subtlety. When a synthetic blood is discovered, successfully mimicking human blood types, vampires finally “come out of their coffins” (a line pulled directly from the show) and during the opening credits, “God Hates Fangs” is posted prominantly on a church billboard (pretty much summing up Bon Temp's opinion of vampires).

One would imagine that Blood was originally envisioned as HBO’s response to the mega-popular Twilight, but Blood shares none of the tween staple’s forced seriousness. Instead, True Blood flourishes in its own brand of absurdity. Sookie’s brother Jason (played by Ryan Kwaten), is a dumb as dumb gets, and by Season 2 Kwaten has nailed the furrowed brow of idiocy. As Jason’s roped into a retreat for the vampire-hating Church of the Sun, you’re just waiting for him to sleep with the minister’s wife - and promptly get caught (cue said furrowed brow of idiocy).

The beauty of Blood is that it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. While there are a few season-long mysteries, and horror scenes that aren’t actually scary (they’re usually just gag inducing), Ball’s smartly kept the show light and airy, with fleshed-out characters, high production values, and some much needed nudity. If True Blood were a junk food, it would be one of those chips with a big ‘No Trans Fats’ plastered on the front of the bag: you know it’s bad for you, but at least it could be worse.

True Blood airs Sunday at 9PM on HBO.

A few of my favorites clips:





The opening credits:

Quotes of the Day

I found today's quotes buried in a wicked Salon.com article (http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2009/06/18/impact/ ) for the new ABC summer mini-series Impact, starring James Cromwell, and airing this Sunday at 9. The two-parter was originally set for broadcast on the Sci Fi Channel (should give you a good gauge of quality right there), and was produced by a German production company (ok, now you should be running).

A few of the gems are below.

"We have no other choice, sir. You can't hide from gravity!"

"Look, I can't even answer the questions on 'Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader,' but even I know the moon is not capable of manipulating gravity at this level." (This zinger is straight from the Chief of Staff)

and finally:

"Science has very much come under question these last few days. But, it's all I have."

Now lets pause for a moment and remember that someone was actually paid to write this. The lucky sap is Michael Vickerman, and yes, he went to film school. Some of the other writing credits under his belt include The Haunting of Sorority Row (winner of four Acadamy Awards) and Superfire - Inferno in Oregon (a paltry two Acadamy Awards). Sadly, I now feel I owe it to myself to watch his latest masterpiece.

"We are a part of something here that's going to be written about in the same context as Newton and Einstein. I know you don't want to miss out on that!" utters Natasha Henstridge towards the climax of the mini-series.

You're damn right I don't.

re-mixed movie trailers, YouTube style

I recently stumbled upon an entire sub-genre of YouTube clips where people take a considerable amount of time and effort to re-cut movies into trailers, completely changing the tone of the films. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are pretty amazing.

I've linked a few of my favorites below.


Shining

The Shining as a family rom-com, appropriately re-named Shining.

"Meet Jack Torrance. He's a writer looking for inspiration." Classic. Love the use of Solsbury Hill.




David Lynch's A Goofy Movie

Had this actually been made, God save the children. [there's also a great David Lynch's Dirty Dancing clip, if you've got the time]




Glen & Gary & Glen & Ross

And finally, my personal favorite, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross as a film dealing with tourettes syndrome (not much of a stretch there).

finally that Pixies/Godard mash-up everyone was clamoring for

Ok, so maybe there wasn't much demand for a Godard/Pixies mash-up, but there sure as hell should be now. I'm pretty sure the UK Surf remix is off of the B-sides album if anyone's interested (personally, I like it better than the original).

Quote of the Day

From reclusive British author James Hamilton-Paterson's Seven Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds (Europa Editions, 2009), a melancholy meditation on the ocean and man's destructive and transformative power:

"And then what pleasure to set up a hut, a fish drier; to pare things back to water and light, to knives and spearpoints, to order and silence! All men have an island, Donne should have said, for a suspended wheel rim being beaten in a cement block chapel on the distant mainland ought to tell us no more than the fish curling and flapping between our hands, bleeding rusty threads into the sea. That steely toiling from across the water brings no news, nothing we do not already know as later we climb the headland to watch soft dusk well up over the world's rim and efface the ocean below. It is not interesting to tot up the sunsets seen and perhaps to come. Those deaths, our deaths, are not plangent affairs but matters of geology. We are all at best marginalia in another era's fossil record. Go down to the hut instead through a drift of fireflies. Light the lamp, cook rice. There is nobody else on this island; there never was and never could be. Outside, the waves wring green flashes from plankton. The great mineral machine turns its fluid gears. The firefly in the thatch tugs us into its gravitational field."

monkey prostitution is all the rage

[ and yes, this monkey can paint better than you ]

I was recently re-reading a few of my favorite chapters from the 2005 New York Times Bestseller 'Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything' (basically a mishmash of pop culture and econ 101), when I remembered a great little article from several years ago (by the same authors) detailing an experiment looking to teach the value of currency to primates (or specifically, capuchins). According to the Times piece the capuchin "is pretty much focused on food and sex" (sounds pretty intelligent to me), making them perfect for this sort of behavioral study.

The most illuminating passage appears towards the very end, and makes it crystal clear that the capuchins did indeed learn the value of currency as they decide to partake in man’s oldest profession:

“Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens [the currency], flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them -- a combination jailbreak and bank heist -- which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just
food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)"

If these little buggers got away with all this in a lab, in the span of minutes, just imagine what'd they do in Vegas.

Read the article in its entirety here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html

Finally, an Iraq War movie actually about the war

Movie-going audiences haven’t seen much from director Kathryn Bigelow since 2003’s box office flop K9: The Widowmaker, when Harrison Ford unhappily took home the statue for “worst accent in the history of film” (previously held by Keanu Reeves for his “British” accent in Dracula). The Hurt Locker, set to be released next month in New York and Los Angeles, should change all that.

Over the past few years studios have shied away from greenlighting any film that even touches on the Iraq War and for good reason - they’ve all been financial disasters. Curiously, they’ve also not actually been about the war. Case in point: Grace is Gone, starring John Cusack as a father struggling to tell his daughter about the death of her mother in Iraq. Picked up at Sundance in 2007 by the Weinstein Co. for four million dollars, it failed to break the million dollar mark worldwide. Home of the Brave, another Iraq-vet flick this time starring Jessica Biel (how realistic!) and Samuel L. Jackson only brought in half of that. In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis’ much ballyhoed follow-up to Crash (my pick for the least-deserving Best Picture Winner in Academy history) failed to recoup even one-third of its costs. A pattern starts to emerge. Nothing quite spells ‘immediate cash black hole’ to studios these days than an Iraq War Movie. But these films failed because they were inherently political. They either argued against stop-loss, George Bush, or the war itself. Americans get enough of that at home. They wake up to that. When people go to the movies they’re not looking for a rant from Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann (or at least I hope not).

The Hurt Locker, which recieved a ten minute standing ovation in Venice, follows a three person Explosive Ordnance disposal unit (EOD for short), and brings along no political baggage. This is a film about soldiers who have one of the worst jobs on earth – they diffuse IEDs. Filmed in Jordan, often just miles from the Iraqi border, The Hurt Locker is grab-the-person-next-you intense. There are scenes so nail-bitingly taut and immersive that you’re almost compelled to turn and run out of the theater (kind of like the guy stumbling on screen in full body armor, screaming at everyone to move out of the blast radius). Bigelow employs a shaky, docu-drama approach to directing (Hollywood’s latest crutch to mask small budgets and poor acting) which fits here perfectly. You end up feeling akin to an embedded journalist. Bigelow intelligently chooses relative unknowns for the main characters (though Ray Fiennes and Guy Pearce make quick appearances) and they’re uniformly excellent. Jeremy Renner, who plays James, an aplomb, replacement staff sergeant, is the standout of the film. As a bomb technician, he works an impossible job, and unfortunately he’s very good at what he does (in one particularly harrowing scene he’s forced pull an IED out of the gut of a dead child). In a notable sequence, as James is set to defuse a roadside bomb, a car rolls up on his position. He puts down his gear and pulls his side arm, shouting at the driver while motioning for him to turn around. The man doesn’t understand English, and James doesn’t understand Farsi (a common thread throughout the film), so James shoots out the front window (after having stuck the gun to the driver’s temple). The car backs up and US troops pull him from his car. James laughs, saying something along the lines of “Well, if he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure is now.” It’s a sad, hopeless scene, and Renner pulls it off brilliantly.

The Hurt Locker is the best war film I’ve seen in years and easily outshines the handful of Iraq movies Hollywood's put out. The film is both helpless and heroic; a testament to the immersive and visceral power of film.

Sir Michael Caine puts you in your place and makes you stay there

[That's 'cutlery' to you, damn Yankee]

Currently Michael Caine is known for both elevating any film which he deems worthy of his innumerable and immense talents, and as that old british guy your mom would happily bang. Lately, "any film worthy of his talents" translates to "anything Chris Nolan is directing" (trust me, I used an online translation program - it's science). But Sir Caine wasn't always so lucky. Sir Caine, back in the day, used to be like any run-of-the-mill, out of work, non-SAG actor (except British), and he took whatever job would pay his bills (including the interest on that hundred grand Tisch student loan). But don't take my word for it, take some of his. And then have a good weekend.

"I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
-on taking a role in Jaws: The Revenge

"I am in so many movies that are on TV at 2:00 a.m. that people think I am dead."

"The best research [for playing a drunk] is being a British actor for 20 years."

"First of all, I choose the great [roles], and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent."

What a cool old dude. They should make a movie starring Patrick Stewart, Michael Caine, and Sir Ian McKellen, and call it "Sweet Old British Dudes Bro-ing Out". Then just film the three of them getting high together by the craft-services trailer and that could be the entire movie. Genius! Green-lit bitches!

I do believe something fishy's going on here...

J.J. Abram's Fringe, like most of the things to which the maestro attaches his name, has quickly risen through the ranks to become one of my guiltiest pleasures. It's not a particularly great television show, and the pseudo-science is often utter drivel (most of the time they don't even try, i.e. deja vu is actually you experiencing an alternate universe...uh, ok, sure), but sadly it's better than most of what's currently on the tube. At the very least it's an attempt at serialization in a sea of murder-of-the-week shows.

The intro theme (composed by Mr. J.J. himself) is all kinds of great. The strange thing is – I knew I’d heard it somewhere else. So I did some serious YouTube digging and finally found this:





That’s the intro theme to the short-lived 2005 ABC series, Night Stalker, which starred that dude who’s banging Charlize Theron (and then forced her star in the eye-meltingly awful The Battle for Seattle), and the lovely Gabrielle Union. A remake of the cult classic, and run by X-Files alum Frank Spotnitz, it aired just six episodes.

Now here’s the intro to Fringe:





See any similarities? Something’s not right here people. Or maybe I'm just taking crazy pills.

The Criterion Collection strikes again

The Criterion Collection is known for plucking classic films from obscurity (films often lost or available only with terrible transfers) and transforming them into beautifully packaged (and colossally expensive) DVDs. The extras aren't just added studio advertisements but enlightening documentaries containing interviews with film historians and the films’ creators, often edited with direct input from the filmmakers. There are 3-disc editions of The Battle of Algiers and Bicycle Thieves, and FOUR disc sets for some of my personal favorites, Brazil and Seven Samurai that would take an entire day to process. They’re often stuffed with beautiful booklets, and the Criterion edition for Robert Altman’s Short Cuts includes all nine Carver short stories which inspired the film. I was looking over new Criterion releases this morning when I stumbled upon this gem –


-John Huston’s Wise Blood, which stars the super-creepy Brad Dourif. I’ve never seen the film (a well reviewed late-seventies piece, based off Flannery O’Connor’s first novel), but it’s the box art that really excited me. The artist is Josh Cochran, whose portfolio is just superb (you can find more his work, along with a post on the genesis of his Blood work at his personal site: www.johncochran.net). I love the composition and contrast for the cover, and obviously a lot people feel exactly as I do since most of the items for sale on his personal website are completely sold out.

Because no one demanded it, more Paul Auster

From the memoir 'The Invention of Solitude', Auster's highly personal reflection on his shell of a father, and ghost of man:


"From a bag of loose pictures: a trick photograph taken in an Atlantic City studio sometime during the Forties. There are several of him sitting around a table, each image shot from a different angle, so that at first you think it must be a group of several men. Because of the gloom that surrounds them, because of the utter stillness of their poses, it looks as if they have gathered there to conduct a seance. And then, as you study the picture, you begin to realize that all these men are the same man. The seance becomes a real seance, and it is as if he has come there only to invoke himself, to bring himself back from the dead, as if by multiplying himself, he had inadvertently made himself disappear. There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but seeing nothing, never able to anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man."

- Reprinted in the Picador edition of Auster's Collected Prose (2003)

The memoir is disjointed, as is Auster's memory of his elusive father. He paints the portrait of solitary, distant man, which often reads as a sort of train of thought narrative - as if Auster is figuring out his relationship with his father as he shuffles through His shuttered mansion, one dusty room, and one paragraph at a time.

Patrick Stewart is awesome

Patrick Stewart is awesome. Along with headlining two mega-million dollar franchises and rocking the shit out of any Shakespeare part he plays, he also makes pretty amazing cameos (not to mention his recurring character on Fox's 'American Dad!').

If you haven't seen Extras (which is good, but not close to the The Office (British) good) you owe it to yourself to watch this. Unless you're a middle-aged, single dude, and haven't watch Star Trek. Then don't watch this.



If I were interviewing candidates for World's Sweetest Grandpa, Patrick Stewart would win hands down.

Stewart's badass Sesame Street/ Shakespeare combo:



What a pimp.

Stewart, as Stewart, on Family Guy:



Patrick Stewart rocks your face. FACT.

David O'Russell vs. Christian Bale = epic flip-out

According to Variety, the wheels are in motion for principal photography to begin on Fighter, a long-gestating project that now adds Christian Bale to a cast that already includes Mark Wahlberg (Brad Pitt was previously attached). The film follows Irish Rocky Mickey Ward and his half-brother, Dicky Eklund, a fellow boxer who kicked a drug habit and served jail time before backing Mickey to world lightweight championship.

David O’Russell (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees) is set to direct, which I find particularly amusing, since this is the same David O’Russell famous for choking-out George Clooney on the set of Three Kings, reportedly saying “Why don't you just worry about your fucked-up acting?! You're being a dick. You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me.” Clooney describes the experience as “the worst…of my life.” Then, on the set of his existential-tragi-comedy “I Heart Huckabees”, someone actually filmed his flip-out on poor Lilly Tomlin, which I've embedded below (note Dustin Hoffman cowering in the corner - way to man up Dusty). According to the New York Time’s Sharon Waxman, who chronicled O’Russell in the excellent ‘Rebels on the Backlot’ (2006), “Mr. Russell ends his tirade by sweeping his arm across a nearby table cluttered with production paraphernalia. He storms off the set and back on again, continually shouting. Then he locks himself in his office, refusing to return.”



So now I hear that Christian “Am I going to walk around and rip your fucking lights down, in the middle of a scene?!?” Bale is going to be taking direction from David “a shower of bitches” (a phrase he used when accusing Chris Nolan of stealing Jude Law from Huckabees) O’Russell and I’m just waiting for the next YouTube clip to surface. There’s just so much potential. David O'Russell v. Christian Bale. Date TBA. Mark your imaginary calendars.

Tweenbots to take over the world with cuteness

Tweenbots, the brainchild of ITP graduate student Kacie Kinzer, is probably the cutest thesis project I've ever seen. Or maybe the only cute thesis project I've ever seen. The lil' cardboard robots are completely human-dependant, can only mosey in one direction at a constant (and hilariously slow) speed, and have a final goal in mind (printed on a white flag sticking out of the robots square butt). Kacie let one of them loose in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park and over the course of forty minutes close to thirty different people intervened, lending a helping hand whenever he got lost, stuck under a bench, or just plain loopy. I particularly love the quote from some guy talking directly to our interpid little Tweenbot: "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.” He then proceeded to turn the little guy back the way he had come. Oh, the amazing ability of humans to anthropomorphize any tiny thing with a big smile and googly eyes.

If the video doesn't make you smile (while showing how great a lot of New Yorkers are) then you yourself might be some sort of robot - though probably not half as cute as a Tweenbot.



Check out the entire site below:

www.tweenbots.com

listen to this

On March 3rd, Brooklyn-based The Antlers released Hospice, a full two years after their previous full-length album. Self-produced, it’s as good as anything I’ve heard all year (yes, better than Animal Collective), and well worth the wait. I’ve been playing it frequently and fully, as it should be listened. The record is completely realized over ten tracks, which unspool to tell the story of a home-care professional who falls in love with a troubled patient. A meditation on death, attempted suicide, hospital machinery, and ghosts (along with other uppers), these types of downtrodden topics could have easily fallen into an emo-shovelled trench with no hope of getting out. But they don't. Silberman, 22, The Antlers’ frontman, has a vocals style that ranges wildly. He can pull the falsettos of Jeff Buckley, with the sincerity of Wayne Coyne. This, along with the ambient background underlying his lyrics, help make the album play more like fleshed-out novel. The lyrics are haunting, and poetically so (the liner notes are particularly insightful - www.antlersmusic.com/linernotes.pdf). “Bear” and “Two” are probably the standout tracks for me, and I think it’s because they’re a bit more uplifting, at least in their arrangement (even though their subject is so foreboding): “You had a new dream/ And it was just like nightmare/ You were just a little kid/ And they cut your hair/Then they stuck you machines/ You came so close to dying/ They should have listened/ They thought that you were lying/ Daddy was an asshole/ he fucked you up/ Built the gears in your head/ Now he greases them up/ And no one paid attention when you just stopped eating/ 87 pounds! and this all bears repeating.”

It’s powerful, moving stuff, and well worth your time.

The album, in its entirety, is streaming below:

How to Scar a Poor Kid for Life (number 5)

[the Uruk-hai's the least of your problems, kiddo]

5. The Black Hole (1979)

This little masterpiece came out before I was born, but still managed to spread its dark, dark, tentacles throughout my nubile mind. To this day I haven’t been able to gather the strength necessary to re-watch the damn thing. As a SPACE.com article asked, twenty-five years after its original released date: “Does Disney’s ‘The Black Hole’ Still Suck?” I can’t imagine how not.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this Disney crap-fest except that it might be the oddest movie in the studio’s entire, monumental library. From what I can remember (and it’s not much – I must have been five at the time), it’s something of a hybrid between Star Wars and Time Bandits…if both were on a shit-ton of acid. Someone involved (or maybe everyone involved) must have had a raging hard-on for robots because I recall unnecessary reveal after unnecessary reveal where humans are robots, robots are humans, and all these robots chase after everyone else like a pack of dogs in heat. The real monster, sans the robots, is Maximilian Schell, who plays Dr. Reinhart, effectively making Darth Vader look like your grandma. He’s terrifying. I don’t really remember his master plans, but he lives alone on some massive ship orbiting a black hole (hence that creative title), obsessed with reaching the other side in some sort of misguided attempt at attaining immortality. Not really sure who gets paid to write this. Extremely dark, and as I remember it, confusing, the movie was bleak, in that whole “oh-shit-we’re-leaving-the-70’s-and starting-the-depressing-80’s” way. The tagline, “A Journey That Begins Where Everything Ends”, doesn’t even make any fucking sense.

In a lot of ways this movie falls into the same category as Time Bandits (number 8 on my list), which is that it was marketed towards kids, but really shouldn’t have been. It’s just one major pile of unmitigated and unintelligible creepiness. Between this and Terminator 2, the eighties only really convinced me of one thing: stay the fuck away from robots. And consider becoming a neo-luddite.

Quote of the Day

From Roberto Bollaño's posthumous, five-part masterpiece, the lyrical and haunting 2666:

"Then Boris Yeltsin looked at Amalfitano with curiousity, as if it were Amalfitano who had invaded his dream, not the other way around. And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the world. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater of the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And the he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said:
"I think it's time for a little drink.""

(2008, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

David Costabile, stop stalking me

Or maybe I'm stalking you. Whichever it is, I feel like I've seen you everywhere lately. I first met you (or so I was led to believe) on Flight of the Conchords where you play Doug, Mel's silent, push-over of a husband. You were quiet— Mel’s constant shadow – and I barely noticed you. But as you huddled under the basement stairs of your Queens brownstown (at Mel’s request), beneath that solitary light bulb, you became something more: a character I noticed.

Then came Season 2 of Damages, and in walked Detective Rick Meeser (originally introduced in Season 1 as the illustrious 'Bearded Man'), the psychotic ring-leader of a gun-for-hire service. You were the creepiest thing on the show for a few episodes, until Darrel Hammond came in and really icked it up a notch (who would've thought that the guy who impersonates John McCain could also be one of the creepiest, ChapStick using weirdoes to hit the small screen in a long, long time?)

[holy shit Darrell Hammond]



You're cold-blooded here Dave, I gotta’ say, and I don't think I like it. Ordering Tim Olyphant to murder Rose Byrne (attorney Ellen Parsons)? Have you ever seen Rose Byrne? Do you know how cute she is? Why would you want to kill her, Dave? Lemme show you a picture...here's one...


And she’s Australian! Yeah, I’m glad you reconsidered too.

So with that behind us, lets discuss your T-Mobile commercial, which, if I may say Dave, is also a pretty creepy (I’m hoping you don’t get typecast as 'hey I need a creepy guy actor' like my man Zeljko Ivanek – mad respect by the way Zeljko). I keep getting distracted seeing you play a little girl’s dad when I’ve just watched you as a methodical, double-crossing scum-bag on Damages. So this is just the gist of the commercial mind you, but I’m pretty sure that your daughter is trying to set you up with her friend’s grandma. It’s all a little strange, but I guess the idea is that you would put the old lady in your FabFive and meet her for a martini at her nursing home. Pretty sweet. I fugured at this point in your career commercial work would be below you Dave, but then I saw the thing 1,000 fucking times in a week and realized the kind of coin you must be raking in on residual checks. So I’m not judging.

Then I looked you up on IMDB, because really, I had no idea what the hell your name was. And you BLEW MY MIND Dave. The newspaper guy from The Wire! You just skyrocketed in my book. Literally flew off the page. Now, whenever I see that terrible, terrible T-Mobile commercial, I’ll shout out: “That’s David Costabile! Doug from Flight of the Conchords, the newspaper guy from The Wire, and ‘Bearded Man’ from Damages, and he is my hero.” And I’ll let it out with pride.

Welcome back Spike Jonze, it's been too long.

From the visuals and the animatronics, to the David Eggars screenplay, all the way down to the Arcade Fire song, this trailer is pretty much pitch-perfect.



Jonze's last movie was the great Adaptation, way back in 2002 (!). There have been some rumblings that the studio was unhappy with the tone of film and made Jonze re-cut and re-shoot much of this 80 million + film, which is always a bad sign. Lets hope they didn't tinker too much.

Quote of the Day

From Steve Baer, prominent American inventor and solar designer:

"You don't need to know that much
you just need to go ahead
and try and it out.
But then you have to do
other things."

How to scar a poor kid for life (Numbers 7 and 6)

[ I feel your pain little buddy ]

7. The X-Files (death by dude coming out of a toilet episode)


My older brother has seven years on me. I guess then that my childhood subjection to adult-themed television can be seen as somewhat natural. I do, however, think that watching The X-Files as a nine-year old was probably, in retrospect, a bad call. The X-Files was one of the first shows to perfect the monster-of-the-week (MOW) plot device, and to this day it still manages to get a rise out of people (aka me). And yes, I’m looking at you episode with the house full of inbred, genetically mutated hicks, who have sex with their mother (who, fyi, lives on trolley underneath a bed) and gruesomely murder unsuspecting passer-bys. In this case, the episode of special note is Squeeze (sorry murdering inbreeds, you come in a close second). The premise is simple. Tooms (our illustrious MOW) is somehow able to stretch and contort his body. He resides in cave, where he hibernates between killings (surrounded by his own bile), and every once and a while he’ll go out, do some creepy stretching, and murder people. For good measure he also steals their livers and eats them (who doesn't love some good human foie gras every once in a while?). Pretty terrifying. Especially mortifying is a scene where the motherfucker (in this case, Tooms) comes up out of a toilet with his stretchy-hand and long, gangly fingers, and kills a dude. THROUGH A TOILET. WHEN THE GUY WAS TRYING TO TAKE A DUMP. I was nine. I already didn’t like toilets all that much. Fuck you X-Files.


6. Terminator 2: Terminating Little Kids Ability to Sleep Peacefully


Dear Dad,

Thanks for ignoring Mom when she said it was probably a bad idea to take an eight-year old to an R-rated movie. I really appreciate it. You know what else I really appreciated? The scene where the TX-1000 poses as John Connor’s foster mom and proceeds to stab John’s foster dad (with a liquid-metal sword-hand no less!) through a carton of milk, piercing the dude’s throat, and popping out the top of his bald head. Totally cool.

“Your foster parents are dead” - Arnold Schwarzenegger, Captain Obvious

Why the fuck do you think I never drank straight from the carton? I’ll give you one hint, and it has nothing to do with anything my parents ever told me.

Zac and Miri Make a Porno wasn't all that funny, but...

...Justin Long managed to steal the entire movie with four minutes of screen time. Crazy how that works sometimes.

Watch the entire scene here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lL2F6mw9pk

Good job Apple Guy! One more step on the path of redemption for Herbie: Fully Loaded (which, incidentally, sounds like a porno).

Quote of the Day

Alan Moore (author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta), on creativity:

"To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself. That's the reward. That's better than money."

Patrick Hamilton: A Role Model for the Children

That is, if you’re looking for your children to be cripplingly depressed, fall in love with a prostitute, and die, early, from cirrhosis of the liver. Hamilton (1904-1962), probably best known as the playwright of Rope and Gaslight (which spawned the classic Hitchcock and Bergman movies), is slowly gaining recognition for his brand of fiction. His most celebrated novels, Hangover Square and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, capture a particular societal niche in pre-World War II London. His characters, much like Hamilton, are alcoholics, depressed, odd, and social outcasts. Often, his narrators are unreliable, which adds a dreary, yet amusing vein of black humor throughout.

“The kiss of a wicked woman – the kiss of Sin… The sweet, brief, virginal kiss of Sin….It remained on his mouth like a touch of violets. There had never been such a kiss in the history of the world.”

His characters are heroically contradictory, in their thoughts and in their actions, and it is here where his novels become so heart wrenchingly honest. You realize, eventually, that the character is trying, at least mentally, to convince themselves of one thing but instinctually they'll do the exact opposite.

And they always lose.

The passage above, taken from The Midnight Bell (the first story in Twenty Thousand Streets), focuses on Bob, a pathetic barkeep with a peculiar world view. He falls in love with Jenny, a manipulative prostitute, who plays the dumb, forlorn fool for his entire savings.

““Well – I’m married.”
“Oh God,” said Bob.
There was a long silence. She put her hand out consolingly on to his. He was appalled by its white sweetness and beauty. He hoped people wouldn’t see. It didn’t look well – being tenderly consoled by a prostitute in a public place.””

A master of the paradoxical sentence, in this short passage, conflicting narratives come into play several times. Hamilton, whose father was bullying alcoholic, eventually succumbed to the disease as well (after a crippling car accident). Like Bob, he too fell in love with a prostitute, and like George, the dim-witted, split-personality protagonist from Hangover Square, he died at an early age, from cirrhosis of the liver. Hamilton’s prose is always touchingly sympathetic for his characters, the lowliest of the low. They are the perpetual drunks, the drug dealers, the street walkers and the homeless. They were his people, and he treated them as such. As Doris Lessing wrote for the Times in 1968, "Hamilton was a marvelous novelist who's grossly neglected." It’s hard to think of writer who treats the neglected with such welcoming, honest, and tender prose.

Denise Richards relinquishes "least believable scientist in the history of film" title to Megan Fox

Variety is reporting today that Megan "Transformers Hooker" Fox has signed to play Aspen Matthews in Michael Turner's Aspen, a comic that debuted in 1998, at the height of the 'big boobs and impossibly small waist' wave. Turner, who passed away last year after a long and arduous battle with cancer, will remain as executive producer. The comic centers around Aspen Matthews, an Olympic swimmer and marine biologist (?!?) invited to study at a top-secret
underwater science facility known as the DMD, built around the discovery of unknown undersea craft. Aspen soon finds that she's connected to the ship's owners, a race of malicious undersea dwellers. How the script plans on explaining the bright orange sheen to Ms. Fox's skin after months in a sea-floor laboratory, remains one of the films lingering mysteries. James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment had previously been attached.

I'm impressed by two things; one, that Megan Fox has decided she can't act (good job, she can't), and has succumb to good, old-fashioned, boob and popcorn movies; and two, someone made the executive decision that Fox needs to be around water for an entire movie (preferably naked, or in a swimsuit) running around shooting things.

Finally, to Denise Richards, my congratulations. Christmas Jones, your ludicrous character from The World Is Not Enough, no longer retains the title of "Least Believable Scientist in the History of Film." Perhaps congratulations also are in order for Ms. Fox, the quasi-hooker cum tattoo parlor employee, who now possesses the illustrious crown.

Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest leaked three months early

The sad news today that Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest, the follow up to their widely acclaimed Yellow House (2006), has been leaked. It's a poor quality, transcode leak, which makes this all the more unfortunate. According to lead singer Ed Droste on his Twitter: "I'm trying to be zen about the album leaking because I'm "ok with it, but I'm bummer. And apparently it's a low quality rip. So now everyone will be judging it off a crappy rip. Sigh...Was hoping to make it to at least april. I'm cool with it just...so early!" So, so, early. The album was due to be released May 26th. Having just seen them perform with the Brooklyn Philharmonic on Friday, it's extremely disheartening to see this happen to such a talented quartet of guys.

Below I've linked a few songs from the Friday night show in Park Slope.

[encore, not with the philharmonic]

Quote of the Day

From Brooklyn-based Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy, one of my favorite novels of all time (though this quote is pulled out of his newest novel, Man in the Dark):

"At that point, Noriko finally breaks down and begins to cry, sobing into her hands as the floodgates open - this young woman who has suffered in silence for so long, this good woman who refuses to believe she's good, for only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves."

- Man in the Dark (2008), Henry Holt Publishing

When an opening, sadly, trumps the film

On rare occasion I’ve found that opening sequences (be it title credits, a montage, or simply a set-up scene) can trump an entire film. Some argue that the same can be said about critically acclaimed films; the storming of Normandy in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan; the single-camera, no-break tracking shot at the start of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights; or the wide-angle POV scene which begins Antonioni’s Blow Up. But these are universally loved films, respected as much for their palate prepping openings, as for what’s to come. In certain, less well-regarded films, a superbly executed opening sequence can have the sobering effect of raising hopes, only to have them knocked down as the film progresses.

Take, for example, Richard Kelly’s follow up to his cult classic Donnie Darko, Southland Tales. The film was universally panned at Cannes in late 2006, where Kelly claims he sent a three hour, unrefined cut, at behest of the studio. No matter how you had cut this movie, it would have been a failure. It probably could’ve been trimmed to a tighter, more intelligible film. As it stands, it’s an interesting disaster. The movie is a hodgepodge of ideas, clumsily thrown together, that fails to satisfy, and only mystifies. Nowhere is this more evident than in the casting (i.e. Sarah Michelle Gellar, The Rock, Mandy Moore, Christopher Lambert, and Jon Lovitz. Really?). The film is riddled with interesting ideas (a near-future dystopia, mega-corporations, an over-reaching Homeland Security), and had they been synthesized more concisely, or had Kelly edited himself more precisely (see The Assassination of Jesse James for another film that could’ve been great, but was sadly undermined by its Director’s arrogance), the film might have succeeded in some respects. Overall, Southland Tales was a disappointment. The below opening scene, which terrifyingly depicts a nuclear blast in suburban Texas, emphasises Kelly’s talent, and grandstands the entire misfire of a film.

In Zack Snyder’s (300, Watchmen) remake Dawn of the Dead, it’s a bit of different story. Here’s a movie that’s not trying to be great – it just wants to be a serviceable horror movie. It succeeds admirably, and in some respects, even manages to surpass Romero’s classic. The intro embedded below, cut by the same genius who gave us the title sequence to Fincher’s Se7en, uses Cash’s 'When the Man Comes Around' to terrific effect. It turns out to be a high point in a pretty damn good zombie flick.

The Battlefield Earth Drinking Game (or How to Kill Yourself Quickly)

Battlefield Earth, John Trovolta's 2004, quasi-Scientology misstep, is good for very few things. One reviewer claimed that it was only recently surpassed (by The Spririt) as the worst film of all time. It's good for laughing. It's good for crying, from laughing. And it's good for death by alcohol poisoning (if you're under the age of ten, I'd recommend Time Bandits, per my previous post, for the same desired effect).

The Battlefield Earth Drinking Game

Drink Every Time . . .

1. Someone is referred to as a "rat-brain" or "man-animal"
2. Someone talks about "leverage"
3. The Denver library is talked about or shown
4. Fort Knox is shown or talked about
5. "Piece O' Cake!"
6. Anyone fires a laser gun
7. Someone uses an accessory to breathe

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand ten minutes into the movie you're already dead. Congrats!

http://www.lazydork.com/movies/battlefieldearth.htm

Sneaky Frenchman Michel Gondry directs an episode of Flight of the Conchords

On Tuesday night I finally decided to polish off a two-day-old episode of Flight of Conchords, HBO's off-beat musical/comedy show. To my suprise, who do I see listed as director but Michel Gondry. Gondry lensed what I consider to be one of the best love stories ever put to celluloid, Eternal Sunshine Spotless Mind, having previously collaborated on music videos with Daft Punk, Bjork, the White Stripes and Radiohead. Like Fincher and Jonze, he paved the way for other, crapier, music video directors to break into features (I'm looking at you dude who directed Torque). I give dual credit for Spotless to Gondry and Kaufman, but Gondry's recent work, where he personally tends to the script, has been spotty at best (i.e. Be Kind, Rewind).

I assume, as was the case with J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon directing episodes of The Office, that Gondry was a fan of the show, and asked if he could guest direct (I doubt a show like Conchords could meet his quote). The episode, 'Unnatural Love', was my favorite of the season, and definitely up there in the top three for the entire run. Gondry managed to incorporate his trademark surrealist imagery perfectly, with Bret and Jermaine using video controllers as their instruments. One of the music videos from the episode is embeded below.

How to scar a poor kid for life (Numbers 10-8)

This list started to bounce around my brain right after exiting a 3-D showing of Coraline, which I thought was excellent. It should not, however, been rated PG. This movie creeped me out. If I was a kid, and I saw this movie, I probably would've pissed my pants and then had one of those seizures like in The Ring. My face probably would've inverted. So I've attempted to point fingers. Starting at ten, and counting down, I'm going to name the top 10 movies or tv shows that messed me up as kid, either in atmosphere, general plot, or maybe just because of a certain scene. The order here is mostly arbitrary, but number one is there for a reason (and will be included in a subsequent post). I firmly believe most of these deserve to rot in hell. The rest just freaked me the fuck out, and in a lot of cases, still do. Most I only remember in bits and pieces (and occasionally, incorrectly), and when they come to me at all, it's in a haze - a jumble of faces and inappropriate situations that shouldn't have been shown to anyone in the age range of 3-10. Even now, the thought of a few of these make me shudder.

10. Millennium (1989)

I don't think I saw this movie in theaters. At least I hope not (I was four). Probably on HBO. I remember it had something to do with abducting people off airplanes and taking them to the future. There were weird hairstyles. Everyone looked like David Bowie. People smoked those weird cigarettes like something out of Watchmen. It was like Blade Runner, except it sucked. Kris Kristofferson, a Mulder-wannabe FAA agent, looked like a homeless person (does he ever not?). It succeeded in turning me off airplanes for a bit, since I thought they were being used to ferry me to a shitty future where there were robots with annoying accents, and everyone was about to die from timequakes (pretty sure this one didn't pick up an Academy Award for screenwriting).

9. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

This one is included just because I remember loving cartoons (who didn't) around the time of its release. I also remember loving crossover live-action with cartoons. When Space Jams came out, it made my year. So who, exactly, decided that it would be a good idea to have cute little cartoons being killed off via a poisonous green liquid by the absolutely terrifying Christopher Lloyd (Judge Doom)? I mean, I found this guy freaky in Back to the Future, so having him hold some poor, hand-drawn bunny rabbit over his bubbling concoction of death played more like the end of Terminator 2 than an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Also, Bob Hoskins should never play the likable guy. Bob Hoskins scares the shit out of me almost as much as Christopher Lloyd.

8. Time Bandits (1981)


Dear Terry Gilliam,

If anyone ever asks you to direct a kids movie again, please, please, jump out the nearest window. I can understand if you're looking to cause an increase in suicides for the 8-12 emo-kid demographic, but you literally only know how to make movies that depress, in brutal efficiency. You're currently batting a thousand at getting people to cut themselves after downing a handle of Jim Beam with a mixture of horse tranquilizers. So when you decided to go out and make the 'kids' movie Time Bandits, whose brilliant idea was it to have the parents of the kids die during the last five minutes after touching a devil toaster!?! Do you have any idea how fucked up this was for me? Here we have a group of kids going through a ton of terrible shit with midgets, and hanging cages, and weird looking sailing boats, and demonic figures, and when they finally get home, you BLOW THEIR PARENTS UP INTO A PIECE OF MOLTEN METAL. Maybe that's how they teach lessons to kids over on your side of the pond, but over here, we like our kids to use toasters for Pop Tarts and breakfast burritos, not as a weapon to blow their parents to shit.

Thanks.

[7-5 to follow]

The National, predictably, have an awesome celebrity playlist

It's well over a year old (I just found it), but includes some less known, yet nonetheless fantastic tracks from Beirut, New Order, Yo La Tengo, M. Ward, Broken Social Scene and others. The playlist really gives some good perspective on The National's musical influences (though I'm suprised not to see and Tom Waits or Nick Cave, but maybe that's just too obvious).

I would also highly recommend Dark Was the Night, a double cd compilation, featuring brand-new tracks or reissues, that came out yesterday benefitting AIDS relief. It includes many of the same bands (but throws in Bon Iver, Arcade Fire, and Andrew Bird to boot) and was produced by brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner (of The National).

http://www.rhapsody.com/playlistcentral/playlistdetail?playlistId=ply.16460218


[Updated: Some wonderful soul just posted the new National song off of DWTK]

Governor Paterson can do no wrong

Well obviously he can, considering two days into office he admitted to a previous long-term cocaine addiction and several instances of infidelity (Huh? Really? Him?). But after reading The Economist this week, he actually had an amazingly prescient quote, and the Big P (I'm hoping that catches on, but I doubt it) has never really been one for words.

"Everyone with a shovel says they're shovel-ready."

[in response to President Obama's plan to put shovel-ready projects into action with the new $789.5 billion dollar stimulus package, $100 billion of which is dedicated solely to infrastructure projects]

[

Disclaimer: Fred Armisen's brutal impersonation on SNL might have impacted my newfound man-love for Mr. Paterson.]

Quote (and obsession) of the Day

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a black and white, annual series, written by Canadian native Bryan Lee O’Mally and published by Oni Press, has gotten quite a bit of publicity of late. It’s for good reason. Edgar Wright, who brought Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead to the silver screen is attached to direct a script based off the graphic novels, and the cast seems to be lining up nicely (I think they’ve already begun principle). The books are a veritable kaleidoscope of genres. O’Mally has created a hybrid comedy/fantasy/alt-lit/rock graphic novel, that never quite manages to pigeon-hole itself. I’m currently on volume three, of the five released (I assume it should wrap up around seven, two years from now), but it’s still hard to describe the plot, let alone the overall feel. Might as well give it a try.

Scott Pilgrim, our titular hero, (who, (yay!) will be played by Mr. George Michael himself, Michael Cera) is a twenty three year-old wannabe rocker, who squats in an Ontario one-room apartment with his gay roommate. They also share one mattress. The plot oscillates from realistic, twenty-something dialogue, to epic, street-fighter-esq battles for the love of Ramona V. Flowers (Pilgrim’s current crush). Scott needs to battle all seven of her evil ex-boyfriends (who dated our fair Ramona from middle-school to present) to win her heart. In the second book, Pilgrim goes mano-a-mano with Lucas Lee (played by Chris Evans), who, as a famous movie star, is a lot like, um, Chris Evans. Yeah.

The books seem to jump all over the place, never taking themselves too seriously, but always managing to get a good chuckle, or at the very least, a smile. Given the times, I guess that’s all anyone can ask.

Below is a quote from the second book, which comes up on a video store monitor, when Scott, attempting to see what he’s up against, tries to rent all of Lucas Lee’s movies:

"Member: Scott W. Pilgrim
Blocked
Current Fines: $508.28
Notes: Returned “The Land Before Time IV” 36 weeks late. He claims that mice hid the video somewhere in his apartment. Also claims he rented it as a joke. Do not let him rent anything. He is scum. "

This movie’s going to be so epic.