12 grand in checking

2010-05-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

New Blog!!!!! Again!!!!!

2009-04-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I get bored easily. I'm starting another blog. What can I say, I'm a wayward and inconstant doof. I like "12 grand in checking" a lot, but I feel like this blog is too aimless sometimes and therefore has no identity. I need an identity. That's why I cooked up my idea for a blog that's more focused, more purposeful; something that can incorporate my love for older pop culture and tie it more directly into my interest in current-day cultural politics.

The guiding philosophy of the new blog is what I'm calling a "retro manifesto," which argues that early and mid 20th century pop culture AS A WHOLE is superior to the pop culture of today. It's not to say that there's nothing good going on in the pop arts today (that's obviously not how I feel since I watch and read and listen to plenty of current stuff), but that, taken as a whole, our culture was simply better (in terms of popular media -- music, film, television, literature, comics, journalism, etc.) "back then" than it is today. Maybe you think that theory's all wet, but I don't care. I'm a true believer. I think it's important to spread the retro love around and maybe get some converts. Call it retro evangelization, if you will. I want to proclaim the gospel of retro and hopefully bring in the wayward prodigals who realize there's something a little soulless and empty in their day-to-day media consumption that a walk on the retro side might cure.

See, the thing about retro is: there's no corporate cross-promotion or blaring, inescapable wall of media to bludgeon you into paying attention to it. There's no incessant advertising campaign, no constant headlines, no subtle groupthink that informs pretty much everything "current" that we come across in the media maelstrom. Retro culture is an old toy in the attic, the one the world tells us is useless and gross and weird and old -- irrelevant -- but the retro lover is the one who can break out of media conformity and see beyond the groupthink haze, the one who looks at that dusty old toy and thinks, "Why not?" And then a new world opens up. Suddenly he begins to question the assumptions of his age and he's no longer a slave to what the current media world has to offer. Suddenly, he can know a time and a place and a people beyond the bubble of his twenty-something lifetime. It's about realizing that you don't have to be stuck with "beautiful" women like Paris Hilton for your image icons or the latest cookie-cutter rap star for your musical "geniuses" -- Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth and Carole Lombard are waiting for you; Frank Sinatra and George Gershwin and Cole Porter are waiting for you. That's what my retro revolution is all about.

The new blog uses salty, rough-edged language, so you've been warned. It's more provocative because I figure it takes a bit of blaring hyperbole to get read on the internet and I do want to be read (I mean, I write because I like to, but let's face it, we all want eyeballs looking at our page). It'll be a mindtrip through all the movies, TV, music, art, comics, literature, and nostalgic junk that I dig (and dig up) from the past. It'll be a little more political and little more strident. It won't be all old stuff all the time -- I'll find time to wax on about the greatness of things like NBC's action-comedy-drama CHUCK or the latest garage punk band I'm blissing out to at the moment -- but I'll try to always bring it back to The Retro if I can. I'm also considering a podcast and other "extras." I want the new blog to be big. It's my mad-scientist experiment in making retroheaded monsters, technicolor punks for a new millennium.

Enter DERELICTION ROW!

My Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #3. Almost Famous

2009-02-24T12:03:00.000-08:00

"It's all happening." If there's ever a sentence that describes New York City, it's that one. It's all happening in New York: business, theater, arts, sports, fashion, life. The city that never sleeps, the place where all the world seems gathered in Times Square at 2 a.m., it's the center of everything. In NYC, it's all happening because anything can happen.

"It's all happening" is one of the great lines from Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. It's the constant refrain of the rock 'n' roll characters because it expresses the very ethos of their lifestyle: limitless possibilities -- for drugs and sex and love and music, for anything that can be experienced. For the rock stars and their groupies (sorry, "Band Aids"), "It's all happening," is both a hopeful declaration and a desperate plea. It all has to happen -- right now, tonight, after the show -- because all these people have is "the moment," the brief window of The Now in order to feel something, anything that will give their lives meaning. Anything for that human connection and a chance to feel alive in this lonely world.

That's why I love the New York sequence in Almost Famous. It manages to capture both the limitless possibilities which are promised by the city as well as the desparate loneliness that lurks around its edges. It give us New York as a world for Cool and Hip and Rich. And then it give us New York for the Melancholy, for the world-weary coming down after the high of champagne and quaaludes. And perhaps best of all, it gives us New York in the 70s not as it was in reality, but as it was made to seem by the movies of that era. The Almost Famous New York sequence is like an amalgam of Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same concert film, Annie Hall, and a Neil Simon play.

And as if the images and writing weren't enough to evoke "1970s New York," Crowe throws in one of the best Elton John songs ever -- Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters -- to play over one of the movie's most climactic moments. If ever there was a song that breathed New York, it is Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters. This swirling, bittersweet ode to the city takes me to Manhattan every time I hear it. The song simply IS New York for me.

All those yellow cabs against the browns and greens and grays of 1970s Manhattan, that mandolin strum, Elton John's voice calling out to the weary streets, a kid recklessly, desperately, dashing out onto the sidewalk to find the girl he loves -- that's New York City.

Cool and slick and chic. New York has moved beyond the already-fading "grooviness" of the hippie culture.

New York is glam, baby.

New York is a suite at the Plaza, gaudy, decadent, and filled with booze and pills and room service, and it's all just expensive set dressing for an adolescent love story. It's an impossibly tragic and romantic moment, a little bit cynical maybe, but also fantasy, a moment that doesn't take itself too seriously even though the heart of the moment is utterly sincere. He's about to go where many, many men have gone before. And he doesn't care. Because he loves her. That's New York.

I can't think of a better description of the magic of New York than this image.

The scene where Penny Lane tells William all her secrets. In the original script, this beautiful moment is set in an airport terminal. Thank God, Cameron Crowe changed that. What better place to walk off a hang-over and open up your heart than in Central Park?

Penny: I guess what I'm trying to say is, that I've done twice the things I said I've done.
William: What about your mom?
Penny: She always said -- 'Marry Up.' Marry someone grand. That's why she named me Lady.
William: She named you Lady?
Penny: Lady Goodman.
William: Lady Goodman? That's... great. [and he means it too]
Penny: Now you know all my secrets.

It's all happening in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, one of my favorite New York movie moments.

Song of the Week

2009-02-23T20:22:00.000-08:00

In a Lonely Place by The Smithereens

A Savage Omission

2009-02-22T21:10:00.001-08:00

Maybe I missed her, what with the constantly moving camera, the pull-backs and wide shots and weird angles, and Queen Latifah taking up half the frame half the time, but I didn't see Ann Savage in the "In Memoriam" tribute at the Oscars. What gives? No love for "Vera"?

Not cool, Academy. Not cool. I was kinda hoping for a little Noir moment in the montage, a little Richard Widmark, followed by Evelyn Keyes, then Ann Savage, and then Jules Dassin to round it out. Instead, Ann was missing, and the other three were interspersed throughout instead of grouped together as they should have been.

I don't know why I keep expecting the people in Hollywood today to be geeky film lovers like me, but every year I keep tuning in to the Oscars to hear if the people in the audience will cheer wildly for old timers from the Golden Age -- like Nina Foch and James Whitmore this year -- and every year I'm disappointed.

Here's to Ann!

Shoulda Won the Oscar... It's the song of the week!

2009-02-15T21:54:00.000-08:00

I know a lot of people wanted "Blame Canada" to win (and really, how awesome would that have been if it had?!). But for pure emotional punch; for making me cry every dang time I watch it; for the sheer beauty of that golden sunlight as it streams through the autumn leaves of the trees. For all the heartache and longing and sadness and truth contained in these few minutes. Shoulda won the Oscar for Best Song in 1999:

"When She Loved Me" written by Randy Newman, performed by Sarah McLachlan

A Little Trouble in Big Hollywood

2009-02-12T18:18:00.000-08:00

I'm saying this as a friend. I'm sympathetic to Big Hollywood's mission and I especially admire editor-in-chief John Nolte, whom I've been following for years both on Libertas and his own website Dirty Harry's Place. I'm a cinephile and I'm a conservative.

But something just ain't right at Big H'wood. It's not that the website is terrible or unreadable or anything like that. I usually find something of interest there everyday. But it's not living up to its potential, and in fact, I think it might be hurting the conservative movement more than helping it.

For instance, a lot of the posts at Big Hollywood come off as whiny and negative. Many of the site's contributors spend all their Big H bandwidth pissing and moaning about all the stoopid liberal actors and liberal films that come out of Hollywood and it's not really all that fun to read, even when I happen to agree with what they're pissing and moaning about. It's like being in high school again and Big Hollywood is the band room where all the band geeks spend their lunch hour bitching and talking shit about how mean and evil the popular kids are. It may be kinda true, but it's a drag to listen to day after day. I love the TCM Pick O' the Day from John Nolte, and I think a lot of that has to do with the positive tone that comes with these posts. It's a celebration of film and there's a real love of cinema evident in Nolte's writing. Plus, he's trying to educate the masses about The Greats.

(Note: I think the model for Big Hollywood in this respect should be the conservative pop culture blog Yeah Right. This is a website that is upbeat, fun, pop culture-driven and not politics-driven, while still maintaining a conservative approach to pop culture and the arts.)

The other problem I've noticed is this: there doesn't seem to be much LOVE for cinema at Big Hollywood (other than the notable exception of Nolte's stuff and the posts from Robert Avrech). As the Self-Styled Siren has pointed out: "[Big Hollywood] is tilting toward being just a conservative site with the occasional movie review." I completely agree. Frankly, one Hot Air is enough, but it seems like Big H'wood is striving to be Hot Air West. It's mostly the same old political commentary that could be found at any number of big right wing websites and what's the use of that? It's just more white noise in the increasingly echo-chamber-like political blogosphere.

Many of the posts at BH are only tangentially related to movies, TV, or theater. Often, it's just a Hollywood conservative writing about what's cheesing him off that week -- no different that the site's liberal counterpart, the Huffington Post, and just as uninteresting.

My (probably unrealistic) ideal for Big Hollywood is of a place where conservatives can write about film and television from a place of love and passion -- as film lovers who happen to be conservative, not conservatives who happen to watch films.

This is most evident in the comments sections. A little story to illustrate my point:

I happened to be reading a fun article from Nolte about the top 5 films you know you're supposed to think are great but just can't dig, and I thought Nolte's choices were thought-provoking and a little surprising. It was a good article. Then I started to make my way through the comments and ever-so-slowly I began to feel a knot in my stomach. Were the people commenting here really my fellow conservative cinephiles? Were these philistines really representative of the conservative "movie lover"?! I was so shocked by the lack of taste and judgement of several of the people who commented -- people who share my political persuasion -- that I was ready to stamp an Obamessiah Hopeychangey bumper sticker on my car and just give up on the Reagan Revolution completely. It wasn't just that many of them missed the point of Nolte's article (Nolte's point, as I understand it, wasn't to say definitively that these five movies aren't great and popular opinion is wrong wrong wrong, but that he just doesn't "get" them for some reason and the fault is probably his own -- that's why he continues to watch them occasionally to see if he can change his mind).

What shocked me was the attitude so many of these people took towards these classic films. As if admitting you think The Maltese Falcon is garbage is some kind of great act of independent thinking and individualism. Like the people who wear it as a badge of honor that they think Shakespeare is boring. Guess what morons? Shakespeare is brilliant. The problem isn't that Shakespeare is boring but that you are dull and incurious.

Similarly, we can argue whether The Maltese Falcon is overrated or not -- and it certainly may not be everyone's favorite type of movie (if you have an aversion to a certain genre, it makes sense you won't like even the masterpieces of that genre). But the triumphant attitude, the smug superiority of the commentators who disparaged certain classics wasn't the same as the humility of Nolte, who recognized that his dislike of certain "classics" might be entirely his own problem and not a reflection on the objective goodness or badness of said films. People were confessing their cinematic "sins" with glee, as if disparaging these films was the same as sticking it to the stuffy liberal elitists in the political realm who said mean things about Sarah Palin. For instance, I don't "get" David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, but I don't go shouting it in comments sections like it's some badge of honor. Instead, I recognize that my inability to appreciate that film is a deficiency on my part and that my life as a movie buff is probably poorer for it. And it certainly doesn't mean anybody who does like the flick is some Commie Pinko Ivy League Elitist Film Snob Liberal Dhimmicrat.

And it wasn't just that everyone was picking on poor Maltese Falcon in that thread. Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Godfather (!), Gone with the Wind, and Bicycle Thieves were among the many films that got thrown under the bus. I remember reading through the thread and thinking: "These people want to be taken seriously in a conversation about cinema and art?!" I know I sound like a terrible elitist, but I couldn't help muttering under my breath: "Philistines."

I know the people who run Big Hollywood can't control what kind of people show up to comment on their threads, but if these are the conservative "film lovers" of America, and Big Hollywood is hoping to bring to life a conservative presence in the arts... with these blockheaded commentators as the disciples? Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.

Finally, I think the other problem facing Big Hollywood is the quality of its main articles. Are these the best writers conservative Hollywood has to offer? Some are excellent (the already mentioned Avrech and Nolte, as well as writers Burt Prelutsky and Andrew Klavan, though they post things far too infrequently); and others write interesting stuff on occasion (the anonymous theater guy, Stage Right, is a good example; and comics writer Bill Willingham has made some nice contributions in the past). But then there's everybody else, either writing generic conservative boilerplate stuff or flat-out bad and boring arts commentary and amateur movie reviews.

And this is where I think Big Hollywood gives conservatives a bad name. Stupid comments threads are the norm for big websites like this and they can't really be helped by the people who run the site, but the official contributors need to be held to a higher standard -- they're the public face of conservative entertainment commentary on the Internet, and they're not doing a good enough job of representing us to the wider world. Liberals involved with film and television will continue to dismiss conservatives as long as we settle for the kind of mundane drivel that often shows up on websites like Big Hollywood. Maybe the problem is that there are so few conservatives who can write convincingly and intelligently about the arts that we're forced to suffer through less-than-stellar work. But there are people out there who can help. I've seen Christian Toto show up on Big Hollywood a few times; why isn't he writing more for that site? Also, can anyone compel Terry Teachout or Victor Morton or Peter Suderman to join the show over at Big H?

Conservatives have to hold themselves to a higher standard because we're working against thirty-plus years of liberal domination in the arts and we can't just whine and cry about it, we have to be so thought-provoking and persuasive and witty and insightful that film lovers of whatever political stripe will be clamoring to read what we put out there -- because it's just that darn good. And we have to be writing about movies and TV and books and theater and whatever else as works of art, and not just as excuses to score flimsy -- and uninteresting -- political points. Conservatives should believe that there is more to life than just politics (it's one of the things that I think separates us from radical leftists). We should remember that truth and beauty are worth examining in and of themselves. If the writers at Big Hollywood can approach the arts from a place of love and fascination; if they can write as true film loving conservatives instead of "Conservative Commentators Who Watch Movies;" then maybe those on the left and the right can come together and realize that party affiliation doesn't have to separate us when it comes to engaging with the arts.

If we want to see Hollywood make things that appeal to conservative-minded people, we can't just say, "To Hell with 'em!" We have to show Hollywood that they have something to gain from engaging with conservative art lovers. That *together* we can make better art. Maybe that makes me a squish in some people's eyes, but I don't care. Politics isn't the be-all and end-all for me anyway. It's just something that keeps me distracted in between film screenings.

2009-02-08T19:48:00.000-08:00

drunk..... drunk?

2009-02-07T22:33:00.001-08:00

yes. I wish i was in my dream now. black and white and smokey. stream of consciousness marathon. i don't mean to be so empty, so fallow and self pitying. it's a fall back position, a default of that certain artistic temperment. i suffer from arrested development. i suffer from immature achievements. i suffer from melon swelling.

why do vodka gimlets taste like the bile of my stomach mixed with expectation? i wish i could taste such possibility, but it always washes away with the reality of my failure. is it possible to be successful at 29? that's my goal, though if I fail I'll always have 32.

It's a sad possibility that nobody realizes the genius of Gregory La Cava. and when I say "nobody" i really mean the fools and glassy-eyed loved ones who tolerate my dereliction. i live in an illusion, so why would I want to escape and face the lonely face of reality, where no one knows the color of ginger rogers's stockings? to sleep, perchance to zone out in television movie playground...

what am i saying?????? what am i doing? i've been writing the same shitty novella since november and i'm so ashamed of it i'm ready to credit the shitpile to one D.Q. McGillicutty, my drug-addled alter ego. Geo. Oeg. Goe. Eog. Spelling is for chumps and hores.

i showed double indemnity to a friend the other day, yesterday or tomorrow, i'm not sure, and it didn't take for her. like the revelation that you and only you is the only one who likes neil sedaka or Caddyshack II, the sad state of solitude, i can't believe i'm writing this for all the rest to see, how could someone NOT like that movie?! i guess i'm just outisde of normal time and felicity; i'm just cut from the mold of nostalgia, the pain from an old wound that i never felt but can feel just the same.

is this what it means to be outside, to be in solitude? i never realized I was so far gone. how much farther can a soul sink before it fans out in a whisper and empties itself into the ether?

i would give my arm for the next person to say they knew what sophisticated boom boom means. i need to listen to happier music.

i need a cigarette. i need a coke. i need a dvd recorder that works. i need a vfccccccccccccccccg xrshytgfmxxxxxxsytmzsjrtzgfnvdfsddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

whoops. i guess i need a pillow and not my keyboard.

the saddest sound in the world is a face in joy and no one to share it with.

Song of the Week

2009-02-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

The Big Knife

2009-01-27T11:02:00.000-08:00

part of the Great Movie Watching Challenge

From 1955, directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Ida Lupino, Jack Palance, Rod Steiger, Wendell Cory, Jean Hagen, and Shelley Winters. Whew!

The movie's based on the Broadway play by Clifford Odets, and the lead part of Charlie Castle was supposed to be played by John Garfield, who originated the part on the stage, but Garfield died before the play could be adapted to the screen.

Ida Lupino (who plays Charlie Castle's wife in the film) was pretty much miserable during filming because she was reminded too much of her good friend "Johnny" Garfield. But Jack Palance does a fine job in the role Garfield originated, and Ida's performance is filled with heartbreak and passion, so I would say they both did Garfield proud by their work in this film.

The story is about a big-time actor named Charlie Castle (formerly, Cass) who sold out his New York stage roots to find fame and fortune in Hollywood. Now the studio he's been working for wants to sign him to a fourteen year contract (basically, they're gonna own him till he's fifty) and he's got to decide whether he wants an easy living making schlocky pictures in Hollywood or a return to the legitimate theater and the life of a real artist back east.

Lupino is his estranged wife, and she wants her husband to reject the offer and be an artist again. Steiger is the maniacal studio boss who tries to bully Charlie into the contract; Cory is Steiger's sleazy right-hand man; Hagen is the wife of Charlie's friend, but she wouldn't mind a roll in those fabulous Hollywood silk sheets with old Charlie himself; and Winters is the slushy floozy who knows Charlie's secret.

Funny how a film can hit you hard when you're least expecting it.

I always thought I was one of those writers who wasn't so pretentious as to stick my nose up and look down on the "entertainment for the masses" (as the artistes so snootily call it) (and isn't it just like those snobby types to denigrate something that the average person likes! humph!). You know, those movies that come out of Hollywood (usually in the summer months) that are mostly easy, light bits of entertainment; fun and flashy but not particularly deep. I always thought I was on the side of the common man who prefers his superhero movies to those Oscar-bait snorefests the highbrows like to pump out around Christmastime. I always thought I wasn't the type to get preachy about "selling out," since selling out often means making something that a lot of people like, that brings ordinary folks a little bit of happiness and escapism and what's wrong with that? And "being true to your art" often means making some pretentious crap that only image-conscious hipster-types like. Guess what hipsters? I like comic books! I like Tolkien! I'm against the feces-flung desecration that passes for "art" in the Modern Art museums of the world!

But I'll tell you what, when I was in Hollywood, I did feel an icky sense that it was all about the money, and about the world of power and sex and fabulously rich possessions, and I feared what would happen to me if I stayed out there too long. Not that a person can't work in Hollywood and keep his integrity and morals -- there are brave souls, good, holy souls out there right now doing it for real, some of them are my friends and they can make it, they have the strength -- but I'm weak like Charlie Castle; I'm too easily tempted.

And I too longed to "get back east where they have four seasons" (a line from the film that hit me square in the gut).

So once again a movie confirms undeniable truth #17: New York is better than Los Angeles, always and forever. New York City is where the artists are. L.A. is for wealth, power, and soulless parties. The California sunshine just masks the empty ghostly figures by giving them a nice tan.

Or, at least, that's how this movie made me feel and maybe I've fallen prey to its illusion. Filmmaking, afterall, is about a certain perspective, i.e.: who's putting the camera down and where's he pointing it (and where isn't he pointing)?

This film is a New York playwright's indictment of Hollywood. Take that how you will. But it sure took me for an emotional ride and sorta made me glad I packed up and headed back east.

What's going on in my brain

2009-01-22T20:20:00.000-08:00

I wish I knew.

Spent the whole day sick on the couch watching a marathon of Ann Sothern films on TCM. It's the centennial of her birth today.

What a dream world TCM is! You sit there all day just watching movies nobody but a film geek's ever heard of and in between the features are shorts, trailers, interviews with people who lived the Golden Age, tributes to Richardo Montalban, a movie lover's paradise.

It's weird being part of an obscure fandom like the classic movie fandom. You rarely meet a fellow member face-to-face (grandmas don't count), so you seek them out on the Internet in various soggy corners. But even then, it's not exactly what you'd call a robust online fandom. A few bloggers and a couple of dull message boards isn't really enough to get your fix, if you follow me.

It's such a lonely hobby, which I guess makes sense since it's just you sitting on your couch alone watching images flicker in the dark. But I'm the type who doesn't care much for being alone. Watching and talking about a movie with someone else is always better.

Also, I'm one of those conservative freak-types who loves movies and television and entertainment, so how come I can't seem to warm to Big Hollywood. Actually, that's not fair: I do click on it everyday and read at least one or two posts. But something's missing over there; it's not quite living up to what I wanted it to be. I can't quite put my finger on it yet, so I'm gonna hold off on too much commentary until I can figure it out. Maybe it's just that there's not enough John Nolte?

Or maybe I'm just in the midst of Internet/blogosphere fatigue. It hits me every once in awhile, where I just look around cyberspace and yell, "Say something interesting already! Something original! Stop the same tired endless echo of talking points!"

I need a drink.

"We love you, Mr. President"

2009-01-20T11:51:00.000-08:00

Soddy Odds

2009-01-13T20:43:00.000-08:00

I once read somewhere that writers shouldn't do their writing in bed. It keeps you up at night, or something, 'cause your brain thinks bedtime = worktime. I'm writing this post in my bed, btw.
Recently rewatched We Are Marshall and cried like a little girl about 50 times. My brain knows it's not a very good movie, but it just can't seem to pinpoint exactly why it's bad. Instead, just as The Brain is on the cusp of finding that elusive badness, the music swells, Matthew Fox cries, and pretty soon I'm unleashing my sinuses all over the couch and the carpet and sniffling, "This is such a good movie!" McG, you magnificent bastard!
Trying to read more books. So far I've finished America: The Last Best Hope, Vol II by William J. Bennett, Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI), The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes, and I've got about 100 pages to go in Jane Austen's Emma. I'm also attempting to wade through A Theology of History by Hans Urs von Balthasar and yes, it's exactly what it sounds like: crazy hard philoso-theology that makes my brain hurt. Poor Brain has had quite a time lately, what with high-level theology books and sappy sports movies driving it into a tizzy. I'm also reading the Gospel according to St. John and a book about the Church Fathers. So, you know, light reading. (Seriously, do I sound like the stuffiest conservative pretentious twat ever with these books or what?! I mean, seriously, even my "light reading" novel -- Emma -- is by THE great conservative Women's writer, Jane Austen. I'm gonna have to go straight-up Jack Kerouac/Philip K Dick/Grant Morrison/Lester Bangs after this to strike the proper intellectual balance.)
I'm working on a horrible, horrible novella right now. It's really bad. It's warmed-over beat, stream-of-consciousness drivel, but for some reason I can't seem to quit it. It's like I have to finish it in order to finally say, yes, I can write long things that aren't movie scripts. For some reason it seems like when you give someone a hundred page "book" to read they're more impressed than when you give them 120 pages of screenplay. At least, that's how I think people will react when I give them the novella. Whenever I finish it, that is.
Watched Definitely, Maybe tonight. Read some mildly positive reviews so I thought I'd give it a chance. I'm susceptible to Romantic Comedies, though I always hate myself afterwards. Is that the same kind of self-loathing that follows bad sex? I wouldn't be surprised... Anyhoo, I have to say [SPOILERS ABOUND FROM NOW ON, including spoilers about The Umbrellas of Cherbourg], I always root for the married couple to stay (or get back) together. Being Catholic, what with that no-divorce thing, I've always considered divorce a tragedy. I just can't find a happy ending in stories where we're supposed to root for the hero/heroine to end up with someone other than his/her spouse. It's why, at the end of the day, I'm a Don/Betty 'shipper despite the fact that, yeah, Rachel Menken is just too cool with her cigarette holder and feathery pink hat. If Don and Betty don't end up together in a relatively happy marriage, then my heart will break a little, even if the show tries to make it seems like they're happier with other people. That's just how my brain works, and my heart too.
[SPOILER WARNING CONTINUES] So when Definitely, Maybe tries to be oh-so-modern and have Ryan Reynolds' character get a divorce from his wife and mother of his child only to have the girl he really loved the whole time just happen to be available and still totally into him it set both my "Yuck!" meter and my "Cop-out!" meter to red. It's obvious from their first scene together that Reynolds' and Isla Fisher's characters are in love with each other, but when it's (predictably) revealed that Reynolds has actually married his college sweetheart Elizabeth Banks (predictably, because his daughter makes a comment at the beginning that the college sweetheart simply can't be her mom, since the first girl in the story is never the girl the guy ends up with, which is such a total anvil that you just know Girl Number 1 is definitely, not maybe, coming back and she's going to be your mother, kiddo, what a tweest! -- and btw, if you want a for-reals synopsis, go here, I ain't got time for that blah blah --), the movie at this point has only two options: The modern-day, divorce is no-big-deal approach to "soul mates" and "happiness" and other such selfish garbage, or the Umbrellas of Cherbourg way. Of course, Definitely, Maybe takes the first option and why shouldn't it? Divorce is such a no-big in our culture nowadays, I'm the odd one out for wanting the married, though-maybe-not-as-happy-as-they-once-were couple to stay together.
[Side note: The other problem with D,M is that they never show why exactly Elizabeth Banks and Ryan Reynolds were ever together in the first place. They simply "were in love," but we never see them fall in love, so there's no emotional attachment to them as a couple for the audience member. The problem for a viewer like me is that I still think of marriage as a sacred bond, so if two people are married in a romantic comedy that means they must have once been in love and that that love is worth saving, even if the filmmakers couldn't be bothered with showing us how that love came about, and so the story is only a satisfying happy ending if the married couple stay or get back together. It's also a problem because we never see what drove them to divorce. So all the (old-fashioned) viewer like me gets is a married couple that (we presume) was once in love (yeah, it might not have been a big passion, but there was certainly tenderness and affection), who have a child, and who are now getting a divorce but are amicable enough to spend the day together with their daughter at the Central Park Zoo and share a few laughs and smiles and faces of longing and regret. Why are these two people getting divorced?! Their daughter wants them to get back together. I want them to get back together. And yet, at the end of the film we're supposed to gush and sigh when the man goes back to his "one true love" just so we can have a happy ending and make sure the two stars get their final romantic embrace?
[AGAIN, WITH THE SPOILING] The Umbrellas of Cherbourg way, instead, is the more realistic, and yet for my money, more emotionally satisfying way to end things in a movie like D,M. In Umbrellas, the young lovers try to make things work, but time and distance and circumstances all interfere and by the end of the film both have moved on with other lovers and other lives and even though they can still remember being in love with each other -- maybe they still harbor feelings of love, even after all these years -- they're both adults now, with children and spouses and adult responsibilities and the lives they have are actually pretty good and they're happy, as happy as people in this fallen, mixed-up world can be. It's a sad ending, to be sure, but it's also hopeful, because the movie is saying that we can still be happy even if we don't get the fairy tale ending.
D,M, on the other hand, wants to play like it's realistic (he's getting divorced! he's jaded and settled into a stifling career! he's got a lot of emotional problems and makes mistakes!), but it cops-out with the fairy tale ending just the same. Ryan Reynolds loves Isla Fisher and even though he has married someone else, he's gonna end up with Isla no matter what, and we're supposed to sigh and love it. A better movie would have made us see why Reynolds goes back to Banks's character and marries her (instead of stopping just on the brink of that moment). It would have shown us why they get divorced (obvious motive is on Reynolds' still carrying a torch for Fisher's character). And then finally it would have shown us that Fisher had moved on, that it was too late, and that Reynolds was throwing away a perfectly ordinary happiness to try to recapture something from his past. And then to satisfy me and my need for married people to stay together and be (pretty much) happy, he could have gone back to his ex-wife and realized that not all love stories have to be the grand passion, that sometimes we miss the ordinary realistic love while we're off searching for the Romantic Comedy-version of it.
I just rambled on incoherently about Definitely, Maybe for twelve paragraphs it seems, so take a much more succinct view from Victor Morton, who nails why this movie creeps me out in three awesome sentences: "But still, never have I seen in a conventional romantic-comedy, a child spend the movie’s last reel trying to get her father back together — not with her mother — but an old girlfriend whom the child had never met. And not because her mother is abusive or somehow “out of the picture.” Now, we consider divorce so routine (a reason for the one in this movie is never even hinted at, as if there’s no need) that we consider it an acceptable fantasy for a child of divorce to express, not the natural wish about her parents, but about a step-parent. If there’s been a conventional romantic-comedy with that rather self-rationalizing-for-adults premise (”it’s what the kids WANT”) — I’m unaware of it."
Finally, I'm sorry, but January Jones and Jon Hamm were robbed of Golden Globes the other night. The Globes are a joke award anyway, but still, it sucks to lose, no matter how stupid the award is. My sidebar has a quiz about the whole situation, since Sookie Stackhouse or whatever her name is is the worst character on True Blood and Betty Draper and January Jones's performance this past season of Mad Men was revelatory. And yeah, that word is overused when it comes to things like this, but it truly was a revelation to watch Jones in this role. I mean, she used to model for Abercrombie and Fitch for gosh sakes, and now she's rocking the socks off with her performance on TV's best drama!
Watched Beyond the Rocks on TCM (eh, wasn't too bad, but nothing special really; formerly lost films often seem to promise more than they deliver) and decided to read up on Gloria Swanson who I only really know from Sunset Blvd and that she used to be a big silent movie star. Turns out (according to imdb) that she made nearly $8 million between 1918 and 1929 and spent almost all of it. That's got to be at least, like, $80 million dollars in today's money, or something. Crazy.

No Time for Comedy

2009-01-05T13:57:00.000-08:00

part of the Great Movie Watching Challenge

From Warner Bros. in 1940, this picture starring Roz Russell and Jimmy Stewart and written by the Epstein Brothers of Casablanca fame, has the alternate title of "Guy with a Grin." I guess "No Time for Comedy" works better, though, since it's got more truth in advertising.

The picture starts off with a cast and a logline and a first act that seems to say, "Romantic Comedy," but pretty soon Comedy's left the highrise apartment and the romance is all one-sided on Russell's part as Jimmy goes off searching for his soul and his art and to have his ego stroked by a sycophantic New York socialite bee-yotch who wants to have an affair with him. No time for comedy, indeed. By the end of the thing, Jimmy's an asshole lush who wants to suffer and make "great art" and the delightfully superior Roz just stands by her ass of a man and makes him feel all "important" and "genius" and the whole story just ends in a big pile of mush. The tonal shifts in this thing were so big you could fit every pretentious artiste's sense of self-importance inside them.

The premise is that Stewart is a Minnesota small-town guy who has written a witty New York comedy of manners even though he's never even been to New York before. When he finally arrives in town to oversee rehearsals for the play, nobody can believe that he's the author and the producer wants to cancel the whole thing. But Roz falls for Stewart's "Jimmy Stewart Ways" almost immediately and she convinces everybody in the cast and crew to work on the play anyway because she believes it'll be a big hit. The play is a hit and Roz and Jimmy share a charming and romantic late night in Central Park where they decide to get married and that's about it for the comedy part. I should have known there would be trouble when the characters ended up getting married about 25 minutes into the picture. It's very hard to do a romantic comedy about marriage and so of course, comedy takes a back seat to marital troubles and "art." Was Preston Sturges thinking of this movie when he wrote Sullivan's Travels? A girl can only dream!

The second and third act are basically "Guy with a (bottle of) Gin" as Jimmy's character starts to drink in order to make it through the day as a "suffering" artist who has had a string of light comedy hits but wants to write something "serious" only he can't seem to make it work. The whole thing is like the anti-Bandwagon. Whereas The Bandwagon is a delightful send-up of pretentious Broadway windbags, full of fun and great songs and dance, No Time for Comedy takes itself far too seriously to be anything but a joke of a movie that thinks it has something serious to say. Note, The Bandwagon's theme was truer and better displayed than the mess that is No Time for Comedy. Point is awarded to the musical comedy. Heh.

Yeah, yeah, Stewart's character is convinced by the end that he should go back to comedy, but he decides to write a satire! So even in the end, the movie couldn't quite give up the notion that light comedy is sorta worthless for an artist and that egos still need to be stroked and awards still need to be won, so why not try satire, that always closes on Saturday nights! Blarg.

Russell is simply wonderful in the way she employs a devilish wink or a witty line and even though you can tell she's madly in love with Stewart through the whole picture (even when he's acting assy) she carries it all with an easy-going nature and never gets hysterical (meaning, she acts like a real human being and not an over-dramatic movie character who's being forced to act in an over-dramatic movie). Why she loves a prick like Stewart's character with such steadfastness is never fully explained though.

Stewart is so unlikeable in this movie I simply don't know how to explain it. His character here makes his character in After the Thin Man [beware, there's a spoiler coming] seem almost charming, and that guy was a murderer! [end spoiler]

In No Time for Comedy, Stewart is a cranky drunk who thinks he's a brilliant genius writer of "serious" plays, so he gives up his lucrative job as a light comedy writer to piddle away his time with a drippy woman (who is not his awesome wife, but somebody else's stupid wife) who flatters his every word. Meanwhile, Roz's character is his elegant, sparkling, sexy, and clever wife and she gets dumped on the whole time for having no "feelings," unlike her "feeling" husband, who "feels" so much he has to almost destroy his marriage in order to write a lame-o script about death or something equally predictable and banal. And then to top it all off, Roz apologizes to him in the end! It's like, the film assumes we'll love his jerky ways simply because he's Jimmy Stewart and Jimmy Stewart is just so darn likable why should it matter that we've written him as an insufferable egotistic jerkwad! Gah.

I'm really hating on this movie for some reason. Maybe with the cast and crew pedigree I just assumed it would be a little romantic comedy piece of froth, enjoyable but not particularly brilliant, just the kind of movie I like to lose myself in on a weekday afternoon folding laundry. Unfortunately, by the end I wanted Jimmy Stewart to kill himself or for Roz to leave him and become the toast of the Manhattan theater set again, charming everyone with her sophisticated wit and knowing smiles and down-to-earth elegance. I was disappointed, alas! Reader: they got back together and I had just wasted 105 minutes of my life.

Allyn Joslyn and Louise Beavers co-star and try to do what they can to salvage the "comedy," but it's to no avail. Even Roz -- who gives a delightful and poignant performance -- can't escape a script that's a turgid mess. Poor Jimmy Stewart, though, is the film's greatest victim, as he's made to act the part of a giant turd who gives up a good career and an even better wife so that he can stroke his ego and win awards for writing "serious" (read: pretentious) plays. Screenwriters, heal thyselves. A movie called "No Time for Comedy," starring Rosalind Russell and Jimmy Stewart and with a set-up about a rube who goes to New York to write plays and ends up being the toast of the town should have had plenty of time for comedy.

Oh well. It just goes to show: I don't like every old movie, you know.

Mr. Wu

2008-12-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

part of the Great Movie Watching Challenge

A 1927 silent feature from MGM starring Lon Chaney (in a duel roll!)

He's Grandfather Wu and (grown-up grandson) Mandarin Wu!

Based on a 1914 stage play by Henry Maurice Vernon and Harold Owen, the film centers around Mandarin Wu's daughter, a young Chinese girl who is betrothed to a young Chinese man but who instead falls in love with the handsome American guy she meets one day in her garden.

It's a pretty thin story for the first two-thirds, where we watch Wu's daughter moon over her American boyfriend, and we learn the American boy's father is a stoopid bigot and that they're moving back to America as soon as possible so say goodbye to romance. But the hitch, of course, is that the Chinese girl is pregnant by her American fella, so it's not as simple as saying, "I'll write to you! I'll always remember our interludes in the garden!" No, the daughter pleads with her lover to stay, and he loves her so much, he really wants to, blah blah romancecakes. The story picks up once Mr. Wu suspects his daughter's illicit affair and he begins spying on her.

When he finds out the truth, Wu has no choice but obey ancient Chinese law and kill his own daughter so that honor can be restored to the family. Mr. Wu also sets up a deliciously evil game of death involving the American boyfriend and his family. It's only in this last third of the film that there's any real tension or dramatic stakes. Funny how death and the threat of violence can suddenly make things so much better.

Best shot of the film is when Wu's daughter willingly kneels down in the great hall so that her father can kill her and we watch as Wu slowly draws his sword and raises it above her head, both father and daughter in total anguish over this "tradition" which demands the restoration of honor through death, and then the camera pulls back and a curtain is drawn over the scene before we can witness the actual beheading. Very effective.

Other than Wu's vengeance in the last part of the film, the only thing to recommend it is Chaney's performance and make-up. As the Grandfather Wu, Chaney is utterly unrecognizable. His ability to be so human and rascally underneath such extensive make-up is what makes Lon Chaney a genius, of course. And in his big emotional scenes as Mandarin Wu, Chaney is able to garner sympathy from the audience, even as he prepares to kill his own daughter or when he plays the twisted game of revenge against the Americans. Even in a story as thin as this, Chaney elevates the material by making his characters real. Grandfather Wu is a wisely mischevious old codger, a loving grandfather who wants to bring the teachings of the West to his grandson. As the adult grandson, Chaney plays Wu as a loving husband and father who is nevertheless bound to uphold his Chinese traditions. When he finally goes over the edge into murder and vengeance, it's hard to hate him. There are no hisses for the sadistic villain; instead, your heart breaks as you witness his descent into cruelty all because he is anguished over the loss of the people he loves.

One thing the film never fully addresses (at least not to my satisfaction) is the contradiction between young Wu's education by a Westerner -- something Grandfather Wu wanted for his grandson so that he might engage more fully with the world -- followed by father Wu's strict adherance to the harsh Chinese law of honor that requires he kill his own daughter. We see Mr. Wu entertaining Americans and respecting his teacher, Mr. Muir, but in the end it seems that none of that Westernization had any effect at all on Wu's thinking as he prepares to murder for the sake of the film's idea of Chinese "honor." It would have been nice if the film had addressed this issue a little more and shown how Wu came to finally reject his Westernized education and embrace the ancient Chinese ways. If they had made the story more about Wu's transformation from Westernized Chinese man to old school honor killing father it would have been far more interesting and challenging as a film. Instead, Wu's Westernized upbringing is little more than a plot device that allows the Wu family and the American family to be brought together in a few scenes. It's like the filmmakers recognized that East vs. West was a big motif lingering around the edges of the film but they were never able to actually capitalize on this motif and explore the issue in its fullest. Perhaps I'm just looking for the film to take what is subtextual and make it into actual text, but I think if they had made this angle more explicit it would have made for a more complicated and memorable film.

The bird in the little bird house in my soul failed to soar and I blame America, a.k.a I hate you all

2008-12-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

I have a feeling this is going to come spilling out of me in a gush of words like the way I always ramble on when I meet a new person at a social event and they're all like, "Pleasure to make your acquaintance," and instead of just saying, "Why the pleasure's all mine," I'm all like, "My grandmother's dog ate my favorite stuffed animal bunny named Bun-Bun and then ended up choking on the plastic eyeballs and had to be rushed to the pet hospital where Grammie ended up spending the whole evening cradling her poor pup Mojo on the cold, sterile, metallic examining table while the doctors performed emergency doggie Heimlich on the poor thing to save his life. And did I mention this happened on Christmas Eve?" So, yeah.

And if that style of dialogue sounds familiar, then I hereby name you friend. If it doesn't, then I hate you.

Oh well. If I am destined for word vomit, then I heartily accept my destiny. You guessed it: Pushing Daisies. Dead as Ned's mum, thanks to the suits at ABC and the American people's lack of appreciation for the beautiful.

First of all, why can't people be more like me? Why can't they snuggle up to a warm hot cup of comfort TV in a bright yellow screwball comedy Thin Man package? Is that too much to ask?

I get it. I get why it failed. It's weird. It's "quirky" (if I never hear that word again in connection with this show, I will be forever grateful).

[I hate quirky when applied to Pushing Daisies because it immediately reduces the show to a status of "we don't know how to describe this show so as to make you actually want to watch it, so we're just going to throw it into the catch-all category of "quirky" because we're too lazy to do our jobs as critics and journalists and actually confront something that is both refreshingly different and yet strangely familiar -- (it's the mash-up of genres and the throwback to the 1930s quality of the dialogue I'm talkin' about here) and attempt to discuss what the show is about and what it says, possibly, about our culture. I can't tell you how many articles I read about Mad Men when it was in its first season that analyzed the show like crazy, about how it glamorized bad behavior even as it seemed to be criticizing it, how it played into our desires to embrace our un-PC vices, how it was all-style-and-no-substance, or all-character-and-no-plot, or the-next-great-piece-of-American-television-the-heir-to-the-mantle-of-The-Sopranos. As a fan of Mad Men, I loved it. What did we get with Pushing Daisies? "Oh, it's so quirky! And whimsical! Wow, pretty colors! You should watch! (But it's probably too weird for you. Did I mention it's quirky?)" And then that's it. No exploration of the themes, or the rich cinematic heritage the show borrowed from, or what it says about our culture that a show with a certain counter-cultural (counter to the culture of the 1960s that we are still living with, I mean) approach to romance and the romantic comedy (basically, I mean the no-touching or sexual gratification between the male and female leads) actually made it onto the air and found favor with critics. Some might challenge me by saying that the show doesn't invite a critical appraisal because the show was light fluff, a cotton candy truffle that tasted good while eating but either left one in sugar overload afterward or else was immediately forgotten upon finishing. Some might challenge with that argument, but then some might be absolute dunderheads who think the only things in life to be taken seriously are things which take themselves far too seriously. Pushing Daisies is ripe for analysis; if approached in the right manner, it's as meaty as a plate of prime rib on Mad Men. But for some reason, all the critics saw was some damn good pie and then said, "Dessert was nice, but where's my main course?" I'm as guilty as anyone, I admit. Not that more than a handful of people glance at this blog, but I must mea culpa for not at least trying to draw attention to the significance of the show. But well, jeez o'pete, I'm doing it now!]

But what I don't get is why the show was never taken seriously by the critics. Yes, I know they championed it. Yes, I know it was nominated for awards and received tons of kudos. I know it got great reviews and made top ten lists. But when I say "taken seriously" I don't mean four star write-ups in the newspaper, I mean analysis. Would analysis have saved the show? Probably not, at the end of the day. But it would have given it a little bit more of a chance. Why, you ask? Because when critics analyze a show (I'm talking new media, here, like the interwebs and stuff), it generates buzz, and pretty soon there are write-ups in The New York Times and the New Yorker and a segment on NPR and then everybody gets involved, from the conservative journals to the CNN morning show, and pretty soon the show's not just getting nominated for emmys but it's winning 'em too. And then that gets you even more buzz.

Of course, at the end of the day, even a swarm of buzz probably wouldn't have been enough to save Pushing Daisies because it was this strange combination of being totally out of touch with the times and the culture, while at the same time having been produced in and by the very culture that rejected it (shut up! that sentence makes sense in my brain -- What I'm saying is that Pushing Daisies isn't some lost Howard Hawks movie that failed to connect with a modern audience because it was just too old and weird, it was a contemporary show, produced by contemporary people that was a throwback to an older style of storytelling, while at the same time being thoroughly post-modern, so it was something probably only our culture at this moment in time could make and yet it was rejected at this moment in time by the people of our culture).

So, even though critical analysis wouldn't have saved the show, it would've and should've been worth a try. At the very least critical analysis would have helped secure a few more episodes to close out the season and give the story a somewhat satisfying conclusion. (Did I mention that the very last episode ever made of Pushing Daisies is a freaking cliffhanger???!!!! I mean, even Arrested Development and Freaks and Geeks got to end their shows with some measure of completion.) Even more than getting us a few more episodes, though, critical analysis was worthy in and of itself for a show as fascinating and powerful as Pushing Daisies. Yeah, that's right. Powerful.

What? You don't think a screwball comedy can be powerful? Too bad for you. I can't say it's as weighty and "powerful" as The Sorrow and Pity, but Annie Hall is potent stuff. It's funny and sad and poignant and true and yeah, it's not a straight up screwball, but it owes some debt to the great witty romantic comedies of the 1930s. Same thing with When Harry Met Sally. Or, take a trip with me, how about The Philadelphia Story? My Man Godfrey is the silliest darn thing you'll ever meet, but I bet you a dime to a dollar that there's oodles of essays written and being written about that one. Same goes for It Happened One Night and His Girl Friday and The Awful Truth. These movies are powerful. Yes, their themes are different from Citizen Kane's or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but just because the theme might deal with love or romance or social mores doesn't make it less powerful. I guarantee that more people have been affected and moved by the end of Some Like It Hot than have by the end of There Will Be Blood. Maybe they're not crying there eyes out or contemplating the meaning of life, but they are delirious with the joys and comedies and paradoxes of life. And I guarantee you there's some movie critic blogger out there right now working out a rough draft for a Some Like It Hot essay.

So where are the Pushing Daisies essays? Maybe I've missed them. It's entirely possible; the Internet's a big place and even though I try to keep up on stuff like this, I can't read everything. And let me be clear again, I'm not talking about good reviews. I'm talking about analysis. Nerdy essays that agonize over what it means for there to be a romantic comedy on television in 2008 in which the boy can't touch the girl or else she'll die, literally, and what that implies about sexual relations as they've developed in the early 21st century. Essays with titles like: "Is the sexual revolution dead, Or did the Pie Maker touch chastity and bring her back to life?" Like I said, maybe there are essays out there and I missed them. Cool, whatevs. But usually the essays that are out there lead to more essays which lead to more essays which lead to cover stories in the NY Times. Again, think Mad Men.

Of course, essays don't lead to essays unless at least a few people out there are actually watching. And my gut tells me that not only weren't normal Americans watching, but most critics (even ones who praised the show) weren't really watching (or they weren't watching with a analytical eye) either. Could be that the show just wasn't very good, I guess. That I'm in the minority because I like not very good things that just happen to push my aesthetic buttons. I mean, don't I know that The Wire's the best show on TV? Stop messing about with cream pies and cartoonish art direction already. Sure Pushing Daisies is delightfully whimsical (say the stealth haters), but it's just a little "too much," dontcha think? It's clever (say the stealth haters), but it's easily forgotten fluff. I blame the fanboyish nature of nerdy criticism today.

Science fiction-y shows and/or "guys shows" like Sopranos and Entourage get a lot of play on the Internet because they appeal to guys. Girly shows like Grey's Anatomy survive and thrive on TV not because they're being written up by the dorks on their blogs but because they're mainstream chick shows about relationships and feelings, and they're familiar. Familiar shows usually succeed if they're well-written. Weird and envelope-pushing shows need the help of the nerdy analyzers and/or lots 'o buzz. The nerdy analyzers didn't feel like analyzing a sunny, funny, kooky romantic comedy/cartoonish murder mystery show so Pushing Daisies had to survive on the initial buzz of its first wave of newspaper reviews and advertising push. Unfortunately, that lasted for about 60 seconds of frenzied media culture time, and Pushing Daisies dropped dead with the touch of a million couch potatoes' fingers as they switched to something else.

So that's why I blame America. Even if the critics had analyzed the shit outta this show, it still wouldn't have made it. It's not really America's fault, of course, and I'm being kinda cold for hating on people who just want to relax and enjoy themselves after a hard day's work. I can't really relate to people who don't find Pushing Daisies relaxing and enjoyable, so I guess that solves the mystery as to why this show failed to find an audience: Not enough people are weird like me. But then I have to ask myself: Why aren't more people weird like me? I mean, a few million people are, 'cause Pushing Daisies managed to draw 4ish million viewers a week. But why not more? Why can't a show that draws on such classic (popular) fare as Dr. Seuss, The Thin Man movies, 1930s screwball comedy, Broadway musicals, Looney Toons, Charles Dickens, and Tim Burton be more popular? Why are so many people turned off by "cutesy," and "whimsy," and "sweet," and "sentimental"? Of better yet, why are so many people only seeing the cutesy, whimsy, sweet, and sentimental instead of also seeing the black humor and innuendo and morbidity and human pain? I mean, this is a show about a woman who was brought back from the dead by her childhood sweetheart who also, by the way, killed her dad when they were little because he decided to bring his own mom back from the dead and the universe must have balance so it balanced the scales by killing someone else (the dad) and also there's unrequited love, a cynical father who hasn't seen his daughter in years, and two aunts who are in misery because the niece they raised as their daughter was murdered (and she's in misery too, because she's been brought back from the dead but she can never let her aunts know that). (There's plenty more darkness besides, but this is the general idea. Did I mention there's hilariously gruesome murders every week?) And to top it all off, the guy and the gal who are totally in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together can never touch or else the gal will die, forever. That's heartbreaking stuff. That's powerful. But gosh darn it, those characters over there are wearing silly hats, so this show must be candy-colored goof-twaddle!

Gah!

Pushing Daisies is the closest thing to a great romantic comedy (in the classic sense) that we've had since When Harry Met Sally. The question on every female film critics' mind for the past few years -- Where have all the good Rom Coms gone? -- is answered in Pushing Daisies. They're gone to television. Certainly, Pushing Daisies is not a traditional Rom Com, since it's so utterly fantastical, but despite the mash-up of Comedy, Murder Mystery, and Fantasy, the will-they-or-won't-they (with a twist!) romance between Chuck and Ned, the good-natured pining of lovable Olive Snook, the delicious snark of Emerson Cod, and the general all-around madcapness and wit of the show all add up to the wonderful elements that made classic films by Capra, Hawks, Wilder and co. so enduring.

Or do they endure? I bet if you took the average American television viewer and had her watch Bringing Up Baby or Ball of Fire, she'd say "Corny" (and black and white, ugh!) and pass. But ask the average moviegoer in 1940 to watch 'em and watch out box office returns! Are we just a bunch of mush brained thickheads today? Have we devolved in terms of what entertains and satisfies us? The snob in me says "yes," and I really do try hard to strangle that snob whenever she appears. Truly. I hate snobs because snobs look down on things like The Sound of Music and J.R.R. Tolkien. The Sound of Music is beautiful in its own corny, sentimental way. Tolkien is one of the great writers of the 20th century. Snobs can stuff it.

But when I look at the sad case of Pushing Daisies, my inner snob surfaces. Why don't people love witty, rapid-fire dialogue anymore? Why don't people delight in a romantic comedy with real sexual tension, where the lovers don't actually jump into bed five minutes after they've met each other? Why don't people want to spend time with a happy (and yet sad), sunny (and yet dark), weird (and yet filled with relatable human emotion) television show every week? Why don't more people love Pushing Daisies? WHYYYYYYYY?!!!!!!

Deep down I know the answer. For all of its mainstream cultural borrowings (from Seuss to Lubitsch to Pee Wee Herman), when you put 'em all together it equals Weirdsville and most people just can't hop on that last train. Intellectually, I get it. I get why the show failed to find an audience.

But every week I watch the latest episode (and soon it will be the last), and I just can't seem to get over the fact that Pushing Daisies is a little masterpiece of a show and hardly anybody noticed outside of the critic's desk and us 4.6 million. And it makes me sad that most TV watching people in America weren't able to notice. Like I said, it's not their fault. Our culture isn't there anymore; the place where it would need to be to appreciate a clever and complicated romantic fantasy. Maybe it was never there, even back when Capra was king and zany comedies were filled with double entendres and daffy dames. Like I said, Pushing Daisies is a throwback, but it's also so thoroughly post-modern that it couldn't have been made in any other era. It draws from the past; it's outside of time; and yet it's the product of artists in 2008. Too bad the audience of 2008 didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

And if ABC would just let Bryan Fuller and the cast shoot ONE MORE EPISODE so they could wrap up the show in a somewhat rumply bow of resolution for the story and our characters, instead of leaving us fans with the anguish of a cliffhanger, I would hit the delete button on this post faster than you can say Darling Mermaid Darlings.

My Dad Is 100 Years Old

2008-12-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

part of the Great Movie Watching Challenge

Directed by Guy Maddin of Winnipeg, Manitoba (part of America's Hat, if you were wondering), but more importantly, written by and starring Isabella Rossellini, which means the centenarian "Dad" in this case is Roberto Rossellini, he of Italian Neo-Realism fame. It's a short film that explores Rossellini's "Neo-Realist" philosophy of cinema and compares/contrasts it to the philosophies of Hollywood's Art-for-Entertainment's-sake ethos, Fellini's dream-centered cinema, and even to the great master of silent film himself, the Angelic Tramp, Chaplin. But "My Dad Is 100 Years Old" is also a loving tribute to a father from his daughter. By the end it's hard not to feel one's throat catch in emotional response as daughter tells father just how much she loves and misses him.

Isabella Rossellini shares with her audience deeply personal memories and observations about her father and laments both his death and the seeming death of his ideas about film (i.e.: "Ignorance hasn't been defeated;" today Rossellini's films and philosophy are forgotten). Have Rossellini's ideas been abandoned? Is Isabella Rossellini's film a rebuke to all modern filmmakers, a challenge to return to a cinema that embodies the "need to know," the "quest for knowledge," a cinema of morality and reality that Roberto Rossellini believed in so powerfully?

We learn that Isabella loved her father's large, fat belly, rotund and bulging like a pregnant woman's. She tells how she and her siblings would lay on his large belly in perfect contentment and love, embracing their father as his stomach would rise and fall in the methodical and soothing motions of breathing. We learn that he loved to stay in bed all day and just think and write and work. Isabella compares him to a seahorse because male seahorses are the ones who give birth. She reveals that her father wished he, the man, could have been the one to nurse his children. Father Rossellini, in this case, is a demanding and powerful piece of masculinity, the artist-philosopher, but he's also the soft, spongy, warm and protective belly of happy motherhood. It's quite a contrast to Isabella's mother, who appears later in the film as a projection on the movie screen, an ethereal film goddess, imposing at fifty feet tall, otherworldy, out-of-time and beyond the mere mortal world of fat Italian men's bellies and cigarette ashes next to the typewriter and rumpled bed sheets.

Of course, it's not really Ingrid Bergman in the movie; it's Isabella playing her mother in all her Casablanca-esque glory. In fact, Isabella plays all the characters in the movie (she even does the voice of her father, though he's represented visually in the film by a giant talking fat belly, provided courtesy of Isaac Paz Sr.'s big ol' gut). Isabella is Ingrid Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, David O. Selznick, Fellini, and even Chaplin. In addition to writing a witty and wonderful script, she's also fabulous as each in this motley crew of cinema greats.

And Maddin's style is all delightful cinema tricks and enchantments. Shot in black and white, he gives us the great characters of cinema's past not as talking heads or members of a roundtable discussion. Instead he gives them to us as we remember, as creatures of the screen. We meet Hitchcock as a silhouette straight out of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents;" Chaplin is as silent as one of his films and speaks only in title cards; and Ingrid Bergman, mega-movie star that she is, appears only on a giant movie screen. For a film about the great Neo-Realist director, Roberto Rossellini, Guy Maddin seems to be copying the carnivalesque spirit of Fellini. It's a fascinating dichotomy.

"My dad was a genius. Maybe."

I wish I knew more about Rossellini's films and his filmmaking philosophy. I know the standard Intro to World Cinema stuff about Italian Neo-Realism, but I've only seen a few clips of "Rome, Open City" and I've never read anything about Rossellini's philosophy specifically. Watching "Dad" has made me want to find out more (luckily, in my collection of movies on DVD, there are a few Rossellinis mixed in, so I should be finding out more about the man and his films in short order).

"My Dad Is 100 Years Old" is fascinating not only because we witness the touching heartbreak of a daughter calling out to her father across time and celluloid. It's fascinating not only because of the paradox between subject matter and style, of Rossellini's realism versus Maddin's madcap fantasy. It's fascinating because Rossellini's belief in the power and responsibility of cinema is a challenge to the viewers as well as the filmmakers of the world. What do we expect from our cinema? What do we demand from our filmmakers? What do filmmakers believe in when they set their camera down and start shooting? Does the filmmaker have a moral responsibility to show life as it is, to educate his audience, to bring knowledge about humanity's struggles to the world? Does a cinema of dreams, or a cinema of fun, or a cinema of pleasure distract from the troubles of the world, from the lives of people struggling to be human, which is, afterall, the proper subject for an art that seeks to be moral? Is there a place in cinema for both entertainment and morality?

Hitchcock gets off the best line in the film: "Morality? Roberto, you should have been a priest."

In the end, we get a glimpse into the mind of both Rossellinis, father and daughter, and we learn that if nothing else, cinema can be an expression of love. The love Isabella Rossellini has for her father is what lingers after the credits have rolled, it's what stays and gives the film its ultimate power, and that is a cinematic philosophy I can believe in.

Self Titled Album

2008-11-25T13:22:00.000-08:00

Light and dark. Soul and flesh. Spirit and the world. "Elton John" is an album of dualities. It's part Elton John the soulful bluesman, part Reginald Dwight the English lad. Later, John and lyricist Bernie Taupin will be able to meld these two sides of the coin into a brassy bronze whole, but on this second album, they're still flipping the coin back and forth.

It makes "Elton John" a strange listening experience. Later albums like "Tumbleweed Connection," "Madman Across the Water," and especially "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy," are practically concept albums (and "Captain Fantastic" actually is), a sign to today's generation that Elton John was as much a rock artist as other 70s greats like Zeppelin and Bowie. But Elton's reputation among the young and hep has steadily declined since the early 80s, partly owing to the break up with Bernie Taupin (meaning the music's gotten less Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting and more Saturday night's the night for drinking wine and listening to soft rock radio) and partly owing to Elton's continued transformation into the world's slightly daffy and rotund but still fun at parties middle aged gay uncle. A listen to his early and mid 70s output, however, quietly dispells the myth that Elton John's music is fit only for the dentist's office or Princess Di funerals.

Even a messy masterpiece like the self-titled second album shows that Elton and Bernie were caught up in a swirl of rock and blues and sad English strings, teetering between being the soundtrack for a road trip across a sun-soaked and Southern-fried U.S. heartland or the soundtrack for a European art film. Both are compelling musical identities in and of themselves, but when combined together they would become the signature sound that would define the originality and brilliance of the 70s Elton John era.

What makes "Elton John" such a compelling record is that we, the listeners, get to hear the struggle within Elton as he seeks to find his musical identity. The duality of the album tugs at the duality in our own souls, between the soulful uplift of the blues-influenced tunes and the plaintive greyness of the English harpsichord ballads. We hold these identities within ourselves too: the sunshine promise of a new day, the yearning for the sun that comes from Elton's brand of sunny blues, and then it's opposite, the rain-swept overcast that clouds our hearts as we face the heartaches and regrets of life. Only in "Your Song" does Elton harmonize the two natures. "Your Song" is a slight smile and a small sorrow; it's yellow-blue sunlight peaking through the grey clouds; it's an English love song by way of a New York rooftop. A 1970s New York rooftop, naturally.

How to cure writer's paralysis

2008-11-20T22:06:00.000-08:00

First: Go to Trailers From Hell

Next: Listen to some oldies 50s rock 'n' roll, like this

Then: Read some Kerouac poetry:
Pull my daisy
Tip my cup
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts

Jack my Arden
Gate my shades
Silk my garden
Rose my days

Bone my shadow
Dove my dream
Milk my mind &
Make me cream

Hop my heart on
Harp my height
Hip my angel
Hype my light

...

Pope my parts
Pop my pet
Poke my pap
Pit my plum

And then finally: Rest assured that nothing you write could be worse than what you just read.

Tumblr blog updated

2008-11-20T20:49:00.000-08:00

Get back to the stuff that dreams are made of!

The Great Movie Watching Challenge!

2008-11-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

I have over 500 movies that I burned to DVD or that are recorded on my DVR and I haven't watched most of them. So I've decided to undertake the great task of spending the next year watching all of these movies and writing about them here on the blog. I don't really have any grand reason why I'm doing it, I just figured I should probably watch all these movies since I took the time to record and burn them in the first place. And it might be kinda fun to watch a bunch of random movies that I wouldn't otherwise get around to watching (why I recorded these randoms in the first place is anyone's guess). I also figure that by writing about them and making it a blog thing I won't be as tempted to give up or forget about it. So there 'tis: The Great Movie Watching Challenge to watch all the movies I recorded to DVD or DVR and then write about them on the blog. I'm giving myself 365 days.

Here are some titles in my collection as preview for what is in store:
The Mad Miss Manton
The Cat and the Canary
Mr. Arkadin
Harold and Maude
Escape from East Berlin
Sleeper
I Know Where I'm Going
Sherlock Jr.
Kiss Me Kate
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Spider Baby
La Jetee
Bluebeard's 8th Wife
The Kids Are Alright
Detour
Broken Blossoms
No Time for Comedy
The Crimson Kimono

and much, much more!

A little bit of meeping culture

2008-11-18T18:42:00.000-08:00

Those who get it will understand

2008-10-24T19:21:00.000-07:00

It's no wonder that Scarlett is my favorite film character:

It is from this I get my strength, the red leaves of Autumn...

And remember, you'll never get away from me:

You're gonna see, you're gonna not at all get away from me. IMing, text messaging. Email, baby.

And I'm still a writer.

Watch out for my rocks, though. I'm gonna need all the help I can get.

Drunk!d

2008-10-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

OH my, how flows the brain as it wastes an hour in past shadows! Rome atop a hill or seven, I wonder if there could ever be such an exotic and familiar villa. Roman blood in my veins? At least vulgar Italian blood, blood of pickpockets and Neapolitan thieves.

Better movie than The Godfather? Godfather Part II. I stand by it! "You can never lose your family." Is it a question? "You can never lose your family?" What if you do? Or is it a command: "You can NEVER lose your family" (or else)?

I take the cannoli and leave the gun! I keep my friends at arms length and my enemies in my back pocket! Hyman Roth was behind it all! Or was it Cicero and Brutus in the shrubbery on the Appian Way? I prefer John Milius's Antony to Shakespeare's. I prefer beer to wine. It is very unItalian of me. It is my British nature. My Potawatomi side wants whiskey. I'm not Russian but I like vodka martinis. I loathe rum when it is all alone, but still I dream of piracy. I have my pirate name and it is Mad Jenny Kidd! Arr!

(This was written on a used napkin):
That HBO show, Rome? Fucking awesome. And even better better when drunk. Like a time travel to brilliant. What does that even mean? I dunno. I'm wasted. Don't demand so much.

Paganicity.

I just made that up.

There's a giant stack of magazines on my television screen. And Frank Sinatra is next to them. I'm not lying! It's a really big stack. I don't know what it means, but it could either be ominous or exceptional. I vote exceptional. I'm an optimist like that. I hate to think the magazines are coming to destory our world, so I refuse to believe it. Sing me a song Frank! Don't let the world be a dreary place. The shower is for singing! Without a song, I would be buried under the gigantic stack of magazines!

What's your favorite song? That's like asking if I like steak instead of ice cream. I just stole that from The Chairman of the board. So sue me, sue me, what can you do me?

Brahms Piano Concerto no. 2 (Sarah)

Fingertips by They Might Be Giants (Kara?)

I'm not sure what my favorite song is. I'm not sure I have a favorite song. It's probably a Beatles song, if I could think coherently at this point. Lady Madonna. Rain. Total Eclipse of the Heart. No!

Mozart's Alleluia from Exsultate Jubilate (Me)

That's some highbrow shit right there. I'm feeling elite tonight.

Whatever happened to the backyard? (this is weak tea poetry)

2008-10-03T19:11:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to fireflies in my mustard? A picnic elegy.

Whatever happened to The White Album afterschool? A cloudy sundae.

Whatever happened to the Putt-Putt ticket sweepstakes? An orange ball hole-in-one.

Whatever happened to my wooden sword? An empty refrigerator box.

Whatever happened to a ghost-tag flashlight? Eaten by pixie stix.

Whatever happened to a dirt-rubbed ruler? Trapper Keeper.

Whatever happened to Arthur Pendragon's 20-sided dice? Rusted dragon teeth.

Whatever happened to banana slides? An October sunset.

Whatever happened to One-Eyed Willy's restaurant? Buried in my living room couch-fort.

Whatever happened to the candy bookstore? Not till after dinner.

Whatever happened to dog-eared Dragonlance paperbacks? Sitting in a moldy Elven knapsack.

Whatever happened to Mop Tops on cassette tapes? Mom's old station wagon.

Whatever happened to Englishmen in my Muppet forests? Finally on DVD.

Whatever happened to tracing paper airplanes? Eaten by evil cartoons.

Whatever happened to purple clouds in my yesterday? A two month haiku.

Whatever happened to the backyard? Rusted leaves fell. And came back to life.

I own this same zippered sweatshirt

2008-09-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

I got mine at the Salvation Army on Grand River.

I'm voting the BSG ticket this year

2008-09-02T23:28:00.000-07:00

Seriously. Is this frakking crazy or what??? Someone who has the time and the brilliance should do an "Election 2008 as Battlestar Galactica" thing. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking Hillary is Admiral Cain. Heh.

Best election ever.

"The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of" has been reborn!

2008-08-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

I really like the tumblr blog thing, so I'm restarting "Stuff..." as a tumblr blog. It's basically just youtube clips of old and foreign movies. That either sounds like paradise or a trip to the dentist, depending on your point of view. Anyway, it's here.

I really don't have an excuse

2008-08-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

for not posting more. Except, to borrow (and slightly alter), a quote from Family Guy: "Olympics must be street for crack."

Writers block means posting something somebody else wrote

2008-08-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

from Essentials of Spontaneous Prose:

"LAG IN PROCEDURE No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing."

courtesy of my teenage idol, Kerouac.

Heartache Plane Ride

2008-08-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

I wish I could write about it. But some things are too deep, too fearful, too sublime. If only life were surface, then we could just scrape the memories and the friendships off, we could peel back the tremblings of doubt and hope. How can I write when there are no words for such tremors and ecstasies? I wish I could write but some things are too deep to write. Some things are only meant for feeling.

Maybe we can't stay in L.A. forever...
(this next part was written on the plane)

I don’t know what this is, this plane traveling between two lives. I don’t know where I’m going even though I’m flying at 30,000 feet. Sure, sure Detroit is what it says on the ticket, sure I’m going back home, back to the warm bosom of family and familiar faded faces, places. But where am I really going? Where is my heart pulling me? The city of angels, the darkness drifts in as the sun sets and I can see it out my plane window, the plane going for darkness, the plane going for obscurity, for a small quiet life, nights spent slowly disappearing, in the dark of my Michigan living room, each day like the next just wasting away a little at a time until there’s nothing much left but an old Harrison football t-shirt, smelly and poked with holes, holes where my dreams slowly escaped, they flew, hitchhiked across the country and out to sunrises, but there’s me, flying on a plane back home and watching as the sun sets.

Below, the clouds linger, cottonball blankets, soft-edged mountains poofing their way near the wing, brushing past just to remind us all that Man can only fly if he keeps his head a little in his dreams. I wonder… I’m so giddy -- nervous or insane? -- irrationally charging off into who knows where, looking out into heaven and wondering if that was God speaking to me at mass this morning as the words of Jesus sounded across the stormy sea: “Oh man of little faith, you couldn’t even walk out on the water and come to me! Where is your Trust?” Am I St. Peter, testing the water with a big toe but untrusting, unwilling to take the step and let God lead me across the surface of the deep sea, sinking because of my fear? Won’t I just take that step, that stride, that leap into the deepness of a life on the edge, a life as an artists for God?

It’s too much sadness. It’s too much grey. The clouds are a murky sea now, and I’m waiting to hear the voice of God. Will He be an earthquake, 5.4, me rolling on the sixteenth floor of 5455 Wilshire Blvd? Will He be fire and flame, the light of a candle in the dark as we sit in a West Hollywood paradise? Yeah, sure, only my cousin’s back patio, but like a Buddhist temple, palms overhead and the sound of falling water, us eating pizza, talking about boys and life and fears and secrets, and the candlelight was all we could see, and it was enough, as I saw the faces of endlessly fascinating new friends (Will they stay with me, I wonder? Will we ever sit around the candlelight again?).

Can He really be a Longing, this almost-sickening tug of the heart, a string that’s tying me to that sun-drenched land, where madmen and poets and hucksters make up dreams out of key strokes and celluloid? Where is that call I yearn for? Is it a whisper, like Elijah on the mountain, that whisper I strain to hear but can actually feel like a brick in my stomach, that voice that calls me out to my dreams by somehow ordaining that today’s mass readings -- readings for the last mass I might ever hear in L.A. -- that they're readings about hearing the voice of God and trusting completely in the plan of Jesus, readings about Elijah and the whisper of God and Peter and the sinking into the sea? Is this how God speaks, in ordinary coinicidences and well-timed stories? Can it even be a question, that God would speak to a poor, confused storyteller like me through His holy stories?

The sun’s light is a sliver of pale yellow on the horizon. The land below is all black. I imagine slipping down into my seat, slipping so deep and so long that I slip down into that darkness, swallowed up by the unseen dark desert below. I’m not anxious about it. It seems like it might be peace, if I could just close my eyes and slip into that hole of the unknown and simply trust in the unseen One, me all blindness, God the divine Vision.

Maybe in a couple of weeks, I'll be driving through that desert on my way back to L.A.

The New York in the Movies Blog-a-thon (Updated! 2/24/09)

2008-07-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

See below for updates

Welcome to the "Grand Central Station" of the New York in the Movies Blog-a-thon. This is the post that will have links to all the other posts both here at 12 Grand in Checking, and elsewhere around the 'sphere. Things start on June 29th, and they'll continue all week. Look for my Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments, which will be a continuous series all week, and also my Favorite New Yorkers (a few of them, anyway!), who will be mentioned throughout the week as well. And also a variety of other pieces of interest, if I can -- I'm not quite sure why I decided to do a blog-a-thon the week before I leave for Los Angeles!

Anyhoo... If you have something you want to contribute to the blog-a-thon, drop me an email and I'll link it in the main body of this post, or just put the link in the comment box. And a big Thank You to those who got the word out and linked to this blog-a-thon; those who have written or are planning to write something; and those who have taken the time to stop by and read a few lines.

The New York in the Movies Blog-a-thon (updated 2/24/09):
Noel Vera takes a look at King Kong Old School and King Kong 3.0
Filmbrain says: "New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down"
Self-Styled Siren looks at the New York City of the Mind
My NY, a musing on New York as "the biggest collection of small towns, jammed close togther" and the movies that show us this New York, over at gee bobg
Hercules in New York(!) at Pluck You Too!
Radiator Heaven's look at the comedy Quick Change with Bill Murray, Geena Davis, and Randy Quaid
James Bond's New York City Movie at Ultimate James Bond Fan Blog
The Derelict's Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #1 and #2
The Derelict's Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #3
A few of My Favorite New Yorkers (updated 7/1)
New York Actualities
A Footlight Parade of Gold Diggers on 42nd Street (update coming)
No Time for Comedy (also part of the Great Movie Watching Challenge)

"In the end, the linkage [between New York and the movies] is fundamental. Like New York, film is big. Like New York, it is larger than life. And like New York, it embodies -- even defines -- qualities of romance, glamour, danger, adventure. What New York is, film by its very nature has tended to extend and heighten. If possible, film has transformed New York -- a city that looms so large by almost every measure -- to an even higher plane. It becomes an elemental force, transcending any earthly place: a super city, a mythic city, a dream city."

James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies

Do you know who the coolest people in L.A. are?

2008-07-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

The people at Act One, of course! I'm in the writing program this summer and I can't believe how utterly, amazingly, fascinatingly cool the people are. The instructors, the people who run things, my fellow students: all awesome. I'm wondering who let the bum (me) in here, frankly, because I don't deserve to be with such talented people. So if I'm not writing a lot for the next few weeks, it's because I'm hanging out with all these awesome Act One people and having the best time of my life.

Woody's New York

2008-07-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

"I selectively show my New York through my heart. I'm always known as a New York filmmaker who eschews Hollywood and in fact denigrates it. No one sees that the New York I show is the New York I know only from Hollywood films that I grew up on -- penthouses, white telephones, beautiful streets, waterfronts, going through Central Park on carriage rides. Locals say to me, 'Where is this New York?' Well, this New York exists in Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s. The New York that Hollywood showed the world, which never really existed, is the New York that I show the world because that's the New York I fell in love with. A friend said to me after seeing me walk out of my house in Hannah and Her Sisters -- showing beautiful black-and-white doors over on East Seventy-second Street -- 'Where are these places? I saw New York in your movies with foreigners and fans in Belgium and France and Italy. When I came to New York I wanted to seee the New York I grew up loving in your films. It's more beautiful in them than it is in reality.'

"The fact is, when I first chose to portray New York as a character in a movie in a significant way, in Manhattan, I made the film in black and white because most of those movies I grew up on were in black and white. In those films you would see nightclubs and the kind of streets we'vev been talking about; actors would be walking on Riverside Drive or on Park Avenue, or coming out of their houses with furs on and getting into cabs. And, you know, where Jimmy Stewart goes through the park in that movie [Born to Dance, 1936] singing "Easy to Love" -- the Cole Porter song -- is exactly where I placed the scene with Mariel Hemingway and myself in the horse-drawn cab in Manhattan, because that's where I got it from. I feel I owe nothing to reality in my movies in that sense. That's my vision of the city and I'm creating a work of fiction, and that's what I want to create."

from Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax (p. 266)

Coming into Los Angeles...

2008-07-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

So, I didn't really finish everything I had planned for the blog-a-thon. Yeah, I failed. FAIL!

But, I'll be getting around to it eventually. The problem, you see, is that I'm in L.A. right now. And I'll be here for a month. So last week I was preparing for my trip and the whole watching movies and writing inane comments about them thing just wasn't always possible amidst the packing and the whatnot. But now that I'm here and settled in, I'll be able to get back to the blogging.

Even though I'm in Hollywood for the time being, it's still gonna be a New York state-of-mind around here.

My Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #1. Big and #2. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

2008-06-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #1. Big and #2. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

My idea for the Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments was to pick certain scenes and/or sequences from various movies that were my favorite movie “moments” of New York (or “New York” as the case may be with some of the older ones). These movies aren’t necessarily my favorite New York movies (though a couple of them are); some of these movies aren’t even particularly good (though I think most of them are). But in each, there’s a particular scene, a particular shot, a certain moment that has infiltrated my imagination and added a piece to that mythic image of New York City that swims around my brain.

So it’s kind of awkward then, that I start my list not with two movie “moments” as I described above, but with two actual, whole movies. The cinema we watch as children has a powerful effect, because it’s often these early films that form and shape not only how we approach the movies, but how we approach the world. The New York of my imagination was created in large part thanks to these formative movies of my youth. I watched Big when I was eight years old; Home Alone 2 when I was eleven. Together, they formed a version of New York City that was part playground, part slum. Playground if you had tons of money in your pocket; scary slum if you had none. Together they showed me that New York was the place where you went when you wanted to be on your own, to be independent and free. You went to New York to grow up; but with a lot of money, the city wasn’t a world of responsibilities and work (I had conveniently forgotten how Josh turns responsible and “grown up,” or how Kevin has to thwart the bumbling crooks again); it was a world of toy stores and junk food and pop machines in your living room and room service in the Plaza. New York in these two movies was only a scary place of hookers and bums when you had no cash.

"It's pretty scary in here too, kid."

With money in New York, even you could have your very own loft apartment filled with toys and a giant trampoline. With credit cards in New York, even you could stay at the Plaza and eat ice cream in bed while watching old black and white movies on tv.

Big is probably the single biggest reason why I’ve been in love with New York since as long as I can remember. I watched it when I was fairly young, and together with the creepiness of the Zoltar machine and the fact that the movie opens with Josh playing a computer game about wizards and dwarfs (I‘m a fantasy nerd), it was pretty much inevitable that I would be caught under the movie’s spell. But once Josh turned big and entered the city, he lived a life that was my dream come true. When you’re eight, the thought of playing with toys all day and getting paid for it, and living in that amazing loft, and being able to eat at fun Italian restaurants, and just basically doing whatever you want -- it’s the perfect life.

Sure, in the end he goes back to Jersey and becomes a kid again; but for me, it was the playground world of New York that was the lasting image. My secret wish is still to go to New York, get a job with MacMillan toys, and spend all my time playing with toys and getting paid. And to have a loft apartment with a pop machine in it.

Home Alone 2 came along later, and so it didn’t create such a lasting, complete image of “fun New York" as Big had done, but it still contributed. The two biggest impressions left by Home Alone 2 were of Central Park and The Plaza Hotel.

In Big, the city was about fun, fun, fun; whereas in Home Alone 2, the city is about luxury, strangeness (but in a good way), living the high life (though Big had its share of the high life, with the limo ride and hanging out the sun roof):

"Your limousine and ice cream, sir."

Home Alone 2 also had the magic of Christmas. It confirmed my own long-held bias that Christmas should be celebrated in a cold climate, preferably with snow, and with big, wonderful Christmas trees everywhere. Along with Miracle on 34th Street, Scrooged, Elf, and countless other films, Home Alone 2 stands in the great tradition of movies that say: New York is the Christmas town. And since Christmas has always been my favorite holiday, this association between holiday and city has only increased my love for New York. When you’re forming an opinion about the world at age eleven, and you see Christmas and New York so inexorably intertwined, you can’t help but fall in love with the city.

Home Alone 2 also helped create in my mind the mystique of Central Park.

I’ve always been fascinated with Central Park. There it is, this gigantic stretch of wilderness right smack dab in the middle of this huge city. The Central Park of Home Alone 2 was at once beautiful and strange; a bit of a fairy land amidst the steel and reality. Having recently been to New York for the first time (right after Christmas!), I can’t tell you how much I longed to see standing before me the surreal image of the pigeon lady. Alas, she is only a part of movie New York. But in those images swimming around my brain, imprinted there by these movies of my childhood, the pigeon lady of Central Park exists. Drifting along the edges of the real park, I catch a glimpse of her even as I stand in the cold, bright sun of a real December day.

A few of my favorite New Yorkers...

2008-06-29T00:05:00.000-07:00
Claire Trevor, born March 8, 1910, in Brooklyn, New York. The "Queen of Film Noir." Born Claire Wemlinger, both of her parents were immigrants. Her father was from Paris and worked as a tailor in his business on 5th Avenue; her mother was from Belfast. She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then began a stage career. Her career in films started right in her own backyard at the Warner Bros.-owned Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn.

By the early thirties she was in Hollywood, and it didn't take long for Warner Bros. to start her in the roles she would make a career of: the floozie, the hooker with a heart of gold, the gangster's moll, the femme fatale. She earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as a young girl who turns to prostitutuion in 1937's Dead End (dir. William Wyler). She was nominated again in 1949 for John Huston's Key Largo and won. It's still a chilling performance. The scene where Edward G. Robinson's ganster forces her to sing for a drink is almost too painful to watch. Huston knew Trevor wasn't much of a singer and that she was nervous about doing the scene. If I remember the anecdote correctly, she had wanted someone to dub her voice and Huston had at first agreed. But then on the day of shooting he told her no, she'd be singing herself and they wouldn't dub her voice, and this caused Trevor to be so nervous and tense that her performance in the scene was less actual acting and more real terror. But I don't care. Acting or for real, her ability to be so honest and raw in that scene (and really, thoughout the movie) gave us one of the greatest supporting performances ever put to celluloid.

This was her gift. The bad girls, the low-lifes, the women who just couldn't get anywhere in life: no one could give them the humanity and the depth that Claire Trevor could. Even at her most fatale, she could still make you see the good girl underneath, even if that good girl was only a faded imprint on an image of all black.

She was nominated by the Academy again in 1954 for The High and the Mighty. She was also nominated twice for an Emmy, and won the award in 1954 for her role in the television production of Dodsworth.

Her Oscar and Emmy statues now reside at the University of California, Irvine (Go 'Eaters!), Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Having an arts school named after Dallas from Stagecoach? Pretty darn cool. And that's what Claire Trevor, the Queen of Film Noir was: Pretty darn cool.

Barbara Stanwyck, born July 16, 1907, in New York City. Little Ruby Stevens had a pretty tough life growing up in Brooklyn. Only two years old when her mother died, and not much older than that when her father abandoned the family, little Ruby was raised in foster homes and by her older sister. By fifteen she was a Ziegfeld Girl.

Stanwyck wasn't always one of my favorites. In my early days of classic film watching, the only thing I'd seen her in was Sorry, Wrong Number, and while I enjoyed the movie, and her performance, I wasn't exactly compelled to seek her out in anything else. In those early days I was much more into Vivien Leigh and Jean Arthur and Bette Davis. Stanwyck was good, sure, but I couldn't get a read on her film persona; I wasn't quite sure what to expect from her. In those early days, Stanwyck didn't fit into any of my classic film preconceived notions -- she wasn't the unstoppable acting force of a Bette Davis; or the ravishing, wicked beauty of a Vivien Leigh; or a screwball comedian like Jean Arthur; or a singing-dancing-comedian like Ginger Rogers -- so I put her out of my mind. Stanwyck was great, that's what I'd always heard, but I just wasn't interested.

I'm sure it was Gary Cooper who enticed me to watch Ball of Fire a few years ago for the first time, but by the end of it, it was Barbara Stanwyck who had bowled me over. Her Sugarpuss O'Shea, spitting out snappy slang and doing a drum boogie, was clever and funny and sexy and vulnerable and tough, and finally I was interested. It seems cliche to say that Stanwyck combines toughness with vulnerability (isn't that the way we describe all those "strong women" we're supposed to be admiring all the time?), but I can't think of any other way to put it. In her performances she really does seem tough and real, as if she always had to fight for the things in her life (even when she was playing a matriarch or an heiress), and yet there's always a bit of softness, a sadness or a bit of insecurity, that opens up your sympathy for her characters (even Phyllis Dietrichson). And she's smart. Her intelligence and working-class wit are always a delight. She doesn't crack wise with brass like early Ginger Rogers; instead she's a bit subtler and more flirtatious, smart alecking and cutting you down to size, but with a smile that says, "Yeah, you'll do."

I'm still discovering her films, jumping from noir like The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers to early stuff like Gambling Lady, but with each flickering scene I'm finding myself more and more entranced by Barbara Stanwyck. She's one of my favorite New Yorkers.

New York Actualities

2008-06-29T00:01:00.000-07:00
Back in the day, New York -- not L.A. -- was America's movie production capital. Way, way back in the day. Like, one hundred years ago back in the day. The boys who worked for Edison and Biograph grabbed their cameras, plunked them down on some interesting street corner, and started filming all the comings and goings of New York City and her people. This mostly had to do with the fact that Thomas Edison worked out of New Jersey and New York, so naturally he took his new movie cameras to the city; it was simply a matter of practical convenience. But New York was also the ideal location because it provided these early filmmakers with dozens of possible subjects to shoot, all available during the sun-filled daylight hours. Because film stock was so slow in these early days, large amounts of light were needed to get a good exposure, and the sun was about the only thing around that could guarantee a good exposure. Not only that, but the streets of New York were brimming with life and wonderment, with crowds and construction projects, with skyscrapers and street urchins, and it was just the kind of stuff the new movie audiences of America wanted to see. These early films were often the first exposure many Americans had to New York City; they were often the only exposure many of these citizens would ever have to America's greatest city. Even today, everyone thinks they know New York, even if they've never been there, simply because they've seen the city in the movies.

These earliest of films -- called actualities -- were two-minute mini-documentaries, cinema verite-style, that simply recorded the city as it was, as things happened. The earliest actualities involved a stationary camera recording such things as Skating on Lake, Central Park; New York City in a Blizzard; Electrocuting an Elephant (at Coney Island) -- the titles explaining exactly what you were about to see, no artistry or narrative or filmic style, just point and shoot and get it all done during daylight hours. As camera technology developed and the camera could be moved, new actualities featured a sweeping, rolling camera that panned and tilted its way over and through the city's great buildings and streets. Finally, when film stocks improved so that high amounts of direct sunlight were not needed to shoot anymore, the actualities could suddenly get down into the depths of the new subway system, or they could travel to Coney Island at Night for Edwin S. Porter's famous film of "Dreamland."

Eventually these actualities gave way to narrative filmmaking, and eventually the movie industry would move across the continent to California, to the studio system and its Hollywood stars; but for the first few years of motion picture production in America, it was New York City and her everyday people who were the stars of the cinema.

At the Foot of the Flatiron:

Twenty-three-Skiddoo!

Sky Scrapers of New York City, from the North River:

Lower Broadway:

Interior, N.Y. Subway, 14th St to 42nd St:

Coney Island at Night (I wish I could find a clip to embed here, but there doesn't seem to be any available. The best I can do is link to a clip from Getty Images)

Movies recently watched

2008-06-24T07:30:00.000-07:00
I still haven't figured out how I want to do these. First there was this crazy ramble where I sound like a freak, then other attempts followed, but I'm still not satisfied. I want a regular thing where I do little capsule reviews, but I want to keep it fresh and un-movie-review-like, if that makes sense. So, once more I reinvent this thing. . .

The Spiral Staircase
Sadly, there aren't any bitchy old women like Ethel Barrymore anymore. This movie is more fun as a comedy than as a thriller, what with Elsa Lancaster hamming it up and Sara Allgood's Nurse playing Felix to Barrymore's Oscar. But those eyes! Those eyes! It's one of my secret phobias, but now everyone will know: I'm terrified of "intense" and/or buggy eyes. Fear:

Johnny O'Clock
Dick Powell: sex on a stick in this one. Oh, why do I love his flat delivery so? It's like he thinks that by delivering his lines in a disinterested monotone the audience will be fooled into thinking he's all tough and shit, and yet, I love it and totally buy him as tough guy! He plays the kind of asshole who gets the chicks because some chicks secretly love an asshole who lives up to the hype. And Powell lives up to the hype with his snappy noirish dialogue (Bad Guy: "You get in my way and I'll kill you;" Johnny O'Clock: "You took the words right out of my mouth"), gun battles and bullet wounds, and the sad, soulful eyes he turns on the hat check girl's sister. And yeah, they totally did it, and it wasn't just the cigarette that told you: She was wearing a completely different outfit when they faded back in after the clinch! Evelyn Keyes, you tramp. Still trying to out-do your sister, Scarlett, eh? Also, could Ellen Drew be any trampier and awesome? No. Someone needed to make a movie all about her character.

The Facts of Life
You take the good, you take the bad, you take it all and there you have a fairly intelligent adult comedy about adultery that did the impossible for me: Made me like the adulterating couple. And it didn't turn the other spouses into jerks in order to do it. And it also didn't make the two cheaters getting together seem like the height of romantic fulfillment. But yet, you still liked seeing these two people being happy together. And then you liked seeing them go back to their respective spouses at the end (spoiler alert!). I'm not sure how the filmmakers did it, but I am sure, in our developmentally arrested times, we'll never see the likes of this movie again. Artistic regression, thy name is Now.

101 Dalmatians
I have seen this one before, so don't think I grew up deprived or anything. But man, seeing it again now as an adult who's obsessed (among other things) with the cool hepness of the 50s and early 60s, this one's out of sight! I could stare at the backgrounds all day long:

Her Highness and the Bellboy
June Allyson has to go. She ruined a perfectly good piece of 1940s cotton candy and turned it into a downer with a stupid fantasy musical number that reminded me of Shirley Temple's fantasy sequence from A Little Princess only bad. Replace cute little Shirley with adult June and yes, it really is that annoying. I'm still not sure what her good qualities were besides being cripple. I know Hedy is in love with that random newspaper guy who shows up for five minutes in the middle of the movie and then disappears until the credits, but who can blame Robert Walker for wanting to trade Allyson's two-packs-a-day smoker's voice for Lamarr's fun little German accent. A more accurate title for this one might be, "Her Annoyingness and the Bellboy and also their Is-he-mentally-challenged? friend who chews a lot of scenery, and oh yeah, also some princess or something, we're not really sure why she's here except as eye candy."

Quote of the Day

2008-06-21T10:16:00.000-07:00
(yeah, I'm still here, just had some computer problems. basically, my whole computer died and I had to get everything reinstalled. fun.)

"In memory, at least life in New York seemed sublime -- the energizing flow of cars and streetcars and people, the chance sidewalk encounters with friends and acquaintances -- especially when compared to the street life of Los Angeles's sunstruck boulevards, where, as one writer put it, it was 'as if everyone had gone indoors and pulled down the shades.' The writers might fondly recall the rush of 42nd Street's pedestrians, or just ordinary stoop life on a typical sidestreet, in the context of the strange, often isolated existence that now engulfed them, their bedroom windows filled with nothing but empty blue sky and a few palm fronds, their days measured by the dozens of miles between appointments and the familiar face of the gas station attendant."

James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies (chapter two, "Dreaming the City: New Yorkers in Hollywood")

I'm going to L.A. in two weeks. I wish it were New York instead.

World's Greatest

2008-06-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

Back home again in Hockey Town

2008-06-04T21:46:00.001-07:00

Swedish Seven! In your face, Don Cherry! Though he does pick the Wings to win again next year, so he's back on my good side again, I guess.

Zata wins Conn Smythe!

Today was a five movie day

2008-06-03T21:07:00.000-07:00
I didn't have to go to work today and I was sick, alright? I'm not totally pathetic. I'd say I'm operating at about 63% patheticness.

The movies?

The Very Thought of You, Delmer Daves 1944 (more on this later, if I'm feeling it)

Turnabout, Hal Roach 1940 (my advise: Don't be fooled by the promise of campy fun. Almost too bizarre, and yet boringly executed, to be either campy or funny. The lame writing doesn't help.)

The Housekeeper's Daughter, Hal Roach 1939 (My new candidate for "mediocre movie that should be remade", only they need to revamp everything but the basic premise of a young woman who flees her life with the mob and comes to live with her housekeeper-to-a-rich-family mother. All thoughts of remaking the Adolphe Menjou/William Gargan barely-funny-comedy-routine should be banished forthwith. Make the movie a romantic drama with some noir elements and you've got a winner.)

The Woman in the Window, Fritz Lang 1944

The Clock, Vincente Minnelli 1945

(Both of these last two are 4 star movies. Window I'd seen before, but it improved so much on second viewing I'm calling it a masterpiece. The Clock was a revelation. I can't explain yet why or how, but it seemed more "modern" -- like a "modern movie" in other words -- than any other 1940s picture I've seen yet.)

I like New York in June. . . (A New York in the movies blog-a-thon, starting June 29th)

2008-06-02T17:05:00.000-07:00
UPDATE! THE BLOG-A-THON HAS BEGUN! GO HERE

How about you?

I'm going to have 12 Grand in Checking's first-ever blog-a-thon later this month, all about my favorite city in the world, New York, and my favorite art form, film. Anyone who reads this blog and wants to contribute is encouraged and very welcome, and even if you don't read this blog, contribute anyway! I'll take anybody. Actually, I'm kinda hoping this thing will boost my traffic, and I'm not ashamed to say so. In fact, I feel very New York-ish for having self-interested motives.

The rules are simple: write about New York and the movies. It can be anything, basically. Films actually shot in New York; films that take place in New York; famous New York filmmakers; famous New York locations; how cinema has affected our perceptions about New York; writers who came from New York to work in Hollywood; movies set in New York but shot in Toronto; actors/producers/composers/etc. who are from New York; other cities vs. New York; the state of things today when it comes to New York and the movies; the state of things in years past when it comes to New York and the movies; movies in or about the different neighborhoods and Burroughs; your most favorite/least favorite New York movie or scene; your impressions of the actual city vs. the Hollywood version of the city; etc. etc. These are just a few topics off the top of my head; I'm sure there's way more out there that could be said and explored. I'm not being picky, so basically anything with even the most tentative relationship to New York and the movies is cool. I'll be writing about my favorite New York moments in the movies; "New York" as a creation of Hollywood; my favorite New Yorkers; Edison's New York; New York musicals; and much more.

The starting date for the blog-a-thon will be Sunday, June 29th, and I'll continue posting stuff until the end of the week, wrapping it all up on Thursday, July 3rd. For anyone who has something to contribute, just send me an email linking to your blog post, or put a link in the comments box on June 29th.

And frankly, since there's only four weeks to get this thing together, I might just take contributions from whenever, even if it's after July 3rd. Heck, I'll probably still be posting my stuff well after the 3rd! So, yeah, New York in the movies blog-a-thon, starts June 29th, goes till whenever.

It's a helluva town, and I hope this'll be a blog-a-thon to match.

On this date in Beatles recording history...

2008-06-02T17:00:00.000-07:00
Tuesday 2 June, 1964*

The Beatles continue work on A Hard Day's Night, recording "Any Time at All," "Things We Said Today," and "When I Get Home."

The boys started the day recording "Any Time at All." They ran into a little problem, though, seeing as John hadn't actually finished writing the song. Seven takes later and they still didn't have a song, so it was decided they'd better take a little tea break and let John write the middle eight, which he did, and they finished it all up before the evening was through. Paul's "Things We Said Today" is a moody bit of minor key work, and "When I Get Home" is pure pop; all three songs showing that the Beatles could churn out infectious pop records with ease back in the summer of 1964.

The second engineer during the session was just a 17-year-old kid named Ken Scott (who would later go on to produce stuff from David Bowie and Supertramp). Poor thing was pretty nervous about working with the Beatles and couldn't help making a mistake. The Beatles wanted to hear a playback of the day's recordings for some friends who had come by, but the four-track machines in those days were actually in a hallway outside the control room (because they were too big to fit in the control room itself) and you could only get communication with the control room through a speaker. So when Ken Scott heard George Martin say "home" through the speaker, he thought that meant things were a wrap, so he switched off the power, put his coat on, and headed for the door. A moment later he ran into Martin who had to explain to him that "home" didn't mean quitting time but "Put When I Get Home on the machine." Scott, utterly embarrassed, booked it back to the machine and put the tape on, all the while, in typical seventeen-year-old-trying-to-act-cool style, pretending like the whole thing was no big deal even as he was having an internal freak out.

*My source for all this is a wonderfully wonkish book called "The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes, 1962-1970" by Mark Lewisohn

Most boring leading man ever?

2008-06-02T16:23:00.000-07:00
I just discovered Self-Styled Siren also thinks Peter Lawford is boring.

Question:

2008-06-02T16:17:00.000-07:00
Is it "film noirs" or "films noir"?

Quote of the Day

2008-05-27T20:43:00.000-07:00
"For a lot of younger audiences -- and I've asked my daughters and their friends about this -- black and white represents an unsettling lack, and not just of color. Compared to the pounding sugar shock induced by media aimed at children, old movies can seem disturbingly empty. The pace is unhurried, the action irregular, the dramatic payoff uncertain or, worse, corny and predictable. Kids thrive on knowing the rules and feeling superior to them, and entertainment corporations are slavish about catering to those interests if only to close the sale. One false move and you've lost them, literally so in the home video environment, which is the only place most kids watch old movies and from which their entire shiny lives beckon them to come away if they're bored for a nanosecond."

Ty Burr, The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together

I'm an easy mark, I guess, to be so grateful for centaur star-gazing and Dr. Cornelius, and let's not forget the bear who sucked his paws

2008-05-18T19:42:00.000-07:00
Prince Caspian is a summer book, a library book meant to be read in the back seat of your mom's station wagon, windows down, wearing shorts, on your way to the pool, or a forest where you'll splash crawfish in the creek and fight knights with wooden swords, homemade. It's a book that's in a pile next to your bed with Song of Roland and The Egypt Game and a picture book of Greek myths. Prince Caspian is another trip to Narnia, this time all sun and sand and full green forests and warriors in armor and broadsword fights. It's another chance to stay in Narnia forever, even if it only lasts a few hundred pages, that forever of sun-gleamed shields and a golden-maned Aslan, and trees -- trees in a glade, trees that dance and arch their branches into a wild forest cathedral, trees that catch the sunlight and the starlight and make that world into a holy place.

It's my summer book, my summer holiday book, just as the Pevensies get set to return to school, they, and I, we all get pinched and pulled away to a war and a wilderness and woods where Aslan waits for us to finally believe and see him. When I read Prince Caspian, I find I never want to leave Narnia. When I read any of the Chronicles, in fact, I find I never want to leave Narnia. Perhaps that's why we're lucky to have seven books, and why Lewis promised that even the end of his books was only the beginning of the story. That is the one great function of fairy stories, to show us the world of Faerie and stir in us a desire to dwell in that place forever. It's the desire for heaven, enchanted with the trappings of fauns and dwarves and broadswords.

For all the wailing of infidelity and smug denunciations that have come out against the Prince Caspian movie, I myself cannot shake the unmistakably familiar feeling I get whenever I watch either of these two latest adaptations: I find I never want to leave Narnia. Whatever its faults as an adaptation of Lewis's work, whatever its thematic poverty (according to the nitpickers, at least), the Narnia movies affect in me that same longing, that same desire I get from reading the books: I want to stay in Narnia forever.

Patronizing as I'm sure it will sound, I actually feel bad for those who reacted to Prince Caspian with disgust. They are so attached to "the word" of Lewis that they end up missing the beauty and power of the images. It was Lewis himself who said he conceived of the Narnia stories as images in his head which he then fashioned stories around. And what are movies if not images come to life, animated with movement and music, and the flesh and breathe and voice of real people inhabiting our favorite characters.

Yes, the movie leaves things out, it even dares to change things. We don't get to see the part where Dr. Cornelius tells Caspian all the tales of Old Narnia -- but what we do get is the round, twinkling face of the old tutor that betrays the perfect hint of his dwarvish mother. What we do get is the thrill and magic of the moment when Caspian stands before the Old Narnians on the Dancing Lawn and pledges to restore Narnia to them.

We don't get the scene where each of the children finally comes to see Aslan as they each in turn come to believe he is there. But instead we get a beautiful scene of a contemplative Peter, sitting at the foot of the broken Stone Table and silently praying before the image of Aslan, a moment of Adoration almost, in which we know from his sad, meditative face that he has finally realized the sin of his unbelief and is begging for Aslan's forgiveness and help. We get the simple profundity of the moment when Edmund, Peter, Caspian, and Susan finally come face to face with the great lion and they fall to their knees in homage and repentance.

I've read criticism from Christians who say Aslan is just a "magic lion" in these movies, that he's really no different than any of the other animals, only kinda, sorta "more powerful." I can't understand such impressions, not when I've seen the golden mane of Aslan in the forest, the trees parting in the glade to reveal him in all his majesty to Lucy as she seeks him with her simple faith. "Just a dream"? To paraphrase Albus Dumbledore, just because it's happening in her head doesn't mean it's not real. I can't understand the idea that Aslan is just a cuddly creature who roars occassionally, not when his roar is so terrifying, so utterly wild and fierce and dangerous, that I wonder for a moment how he might ever speak in Liam Neeson's dulcet tones again.

The Narnia movie nitpickers have, sadly, missed the forest for the dryads in their criticisms of Prince Caspian. Could more of Lewis's themes have remained intact? Certainly. But very, very few adaptations maintain all of a book's themes when going from page to screen, so why scold Caspian so relentlessly? I left the movie wanting to be a better Christian. The film reminded me of a favorite homily topic of one of my favorite priests: In our lives, whose will are we really following, God's or our own? Caspian reawakened in me the awareness that it must always be God's will that I follow, that thinking I can do it alone leads to nothing.

But yes, let's savage the film because the themes weren't subtle enough, because the breadth of Lewis's theological thinking wasn't explored with enough depth. Nevermind that the film stirred my heart (and I'm sure others') toward virtue, or that it filled me with the same longing and joy that I get from reading the books. Nevermind the beautiful and profound images: the catacomb of the Stone Table; Trumpkin kneeling before the roar of Aslan; the four kings and queens standing amongst the ruins of Cair Paravel; the werewolf and the hag tempting Caspian into evil; Aslan breathing on the Telemarines before they go through the door in the air; Peter and Susan walking with Aslan as he tells them they cannot return to Narnia -- that private conversation we never hear, yet we know from their faces the seriousness, the sadness of that conversation, and the spiritual maturity the eldest siblings have achieved to be able to have had such a talk with the lion. Nevermind all that, I guess, since the filmmakers didn't hammer the anti-Enlightenment theme hard enough for the critics. I guess Miraz calling the Narnians a superstition and Cornelius saying he was "forbade to mention the old tales" wasn't enough for them, nor was Trumpkin's calling Aslan "someone who doesn't exist." I find it funny and ironic, as well, that so many critics are decrying the violence in the film, because the exact same criticisms were (and continue to be) lobbed at the books. Many argued that the books glorified violence and were far too violent to be "Christian," and yet Lewis responded that he was no pacifist, and that the books are violent because life is violent and full of evils that need to be fought and we should not shield children from this fact.

For my part, though, the nitpickers can keep picking their nits in resentment while I bask in the grace of the golden CGI lion and pledge my sword to Ben Barnes's Caspian.

Now the weather gets warmer, the trees fill with green, and soon it's summer. The summer story -- Prince Caspian -- waits at the side of my bed to be opened and enjoyed again, to be read underneath a tree or on a playground swing. And now it's also waiting for me in the darkened theater, the film's summer sun pierces light through those shadows and takes me to a place I never want to leave, to Narnia and to Aslan.

Some brief thoughts on Luis Bunuel's "Viridiana," from a Catholic perspective

2008-05-13T00:57:00.000-07:00

It's not the miracles, or the Resurrection, or the Virgin Birth, or "Love thy neighbor" that makes Christianity so hard. It's the forgiveness. Seven times Seventy-Seven means pretty much infinity in Bible-terms, and let's not forget John Paul II forgave the dude who shot him. Jesus offered himself up to die on a cross so that all of our sins could be forgiven, and all he's asking in return is that we always forgive. It's considered by many to be the hardest of Jesus's teachings. It strikes at the deadliest of the sins -- Pride -- because when we forgive someone who has wronged us, we have to let go of our self-righteous pride to do it.

"Viridiana" is not some kind of super-stealthy jujitsu Christian movie masquerading as an anti-Catholic comedy. It's ant-Catholic. Bunuel's film, in fact, might be better described as anti-Christian, due to its scathing attack on some of the basic tenants of Christianity, including a very un-PC critique of the poor. It's funny, and disturbing, and brilliant, and I loved it, but it holds a pretty unflattering mirror up to Christianity and says, "This is a religion of hypocrites. And these people over here, these 'poor', they're not worth your time. And in the end, you get nothing out of your religion except disappointment." I'm not sure how I can defend my love for a movie that so successfully and intelligently attacks and refutes my religion (not to mention the fact that Catholicism in particular is made to look especially ridiculous).

But I knew I loved this movie the moment Viridiana refused to forgive her uncle. All the debauchery, the faux-piety, the perversion, and the sin that acts against, overwhelms, and ultimately destroys Viridiana's faith can, in a way, be traced back to her own sin. By committing such a sin and refusing to forgive her uncle, Viridiana lays the tracks for her own spiritual train wreck. Here is a film that has no qualms about ridiculing one of the most socially acceptable of Christianity's teachings -- love for the poor -- but yet at the same time, gives a theologically perfect example of how refusing to forgive can damn your soul. Something changes in Viridiana the moment she refuses that apology. All the perversion and sexual licentiousness swirling around her in her uncle's house had no effect on her faith, but the moment she's called upon to live out the hardest of Christ's teachings, she fails, and with her failure her heart hardens just a little.

The rest of the film is Viridiana's attempt to make amends, but her heart continues to be hard toward her uncle. In the end her good works for the poor couldn't save her, nor could her seeming piety. "Judge not lest ye be judged" isn't a command not to judge, but a warning to remember that you'll get what you give out, so it's better for your soul to forgive. In Viridiana's case, she gave no comfort, no mercy to her uncle, and in the end, no mercy was given to her. She becomes the thing she hates, and God seems to have left her in despair just as she left her sad, dejected uncle. It's Bunuel irony at its finest.

Irony is considered by some to be the highest form of humor. I've read essays by philosophers who argue that God himself enjoys irony above all other forms. Bunuel's use of irony brilliantly attacks God and the Christian religion, but the film cannot escape one further ironic turn: In its attempts to reject and refute Christianity, the film shows just where a rejection of Christianity leads. Viridiana herself rejects Christianity (when she does not forgive) and it leads to her "doom." She ends the film a cynical, world-wearied woman, resigned to a life of empty pleasures. The bitter irony of her ultimate fate doesn't erase all of Bunuel's other pointed and intelligent (and funny) attacks against Christianity. They still stand and they still disturb the believing Christian even as she laughs heartily. But the strange irony of Viridiana's unchristian behavior being the cause of her eventual despair, is one of the things (among many) that enriches and complicates this film, and makes it a masterpiece.

In Matthew's gospel, Peter asks Jesus: "Lord, how many times must I forgive?" And just as Jesus answered, so Bunuel tells Viridiana: "Seven times seventy-seven." She doesn't have a problem giving away all her possessions like the rich young man from Matthew's gospel, but she goes away sad nevertheless. Forgiveness? That is a hard teaching. And "Viridiana" is a great film.

"I wanna watch Betty Boop!"

2008-05-06T22:18:00.001-07:00
That's the new thing these days for my two-and-a-half year old niece. Ever since I used my ipod to distract her one day while my mom changed her clothes she's been hooked on the Betty Boop video I got from Vintage Toon Cast. The toon in question is "Betty Boop and the Old Man in the Mountain." I can't decide which makes me happier, the fact that she's totally into a black and white cartoon from the 30s, that she's totally into the Cab Calloway jazz number on the soundtrack, or that she's started dancing along (in hilarious fashion) with the Old Man when he does his best Cab impression. I think the adorable way she says "Betty Boop" is my favorite. Nothing warms my heart faster than to hear those words: "I wanna watch Betty Boop!" Coming right up!

It's quarter to three. . .

2008-05-05T21:15:00.001-07:00
I've had "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" stuck in my head all day. So what do I do when I want to post something but don't feel like writing something? YOUTUBE! I typed in the song on youtube just for fits and giggles to see what would come up, and amidst the usual Frank Sinatras and Billie Holidays I found someone I never expected: Ida Lupino.

And yeah, this is Ida actually singing. I did not know she could sing, and if IMDB is to be trusted, she plays the piano too. Crazy, man. But as cool as this clip is, it bums me out because it's a movie I've never seen, and never knew I wanted to see until I first found this clip and found out the movie existed. Noir in a road house with Richard Widmark and Celeste Holm and Cornel Wilde, and Ida as the torch singer? Where have you been all my life Road House (1948) directed by Jean Negulesco!

Clip (with Spanish subtitles! Son las 02:45. . .)

AFI meme, for procrastinators (which I am and always will be)

2008-04-27T00:15:00.000-07:00
via Some Have Hats

The meme requires going to the AFI List of 100 greatest movies which is here, and then answering the following questions.

Your favorite 5 movies that are on the list:
Aw man! Do I have to pick five? Seriously, I love a lot of these movies. Does that make me terribly mainstream? Tough shit, I am terribly mainstream and proud of it. These are "The 5 I have to pick because the meme said pick 5":

Gone With the Wind
The Godfather
Casablanca
It's a Wonderful Life
Bringing Up Baby

(but it could have just as easily been Network, The Wizard of Oz, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Rear Window, and The Maltese Falcon) (or it could have been Star Wars, Some Like It Hot, The Godfather part II, Fantasia, and Fargo) (or it could have been. . . okay, I'll stop)

5 movies on the list that you didn't like at all:

E.T. the extra-terrestrial
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

(I've seen most of the movies on the list, and other than the five I have no desire in seeing, and these two, I've liked pretty much all of the ones I've seen, in varying degrees, of course. The list, despite it's so-called "safe"-ness, consists of a good set of movies, for the most part, and includes a number of true, enduring classics. If nothing else, my satisfaction with most of the movies on the list should be evidence enough of my middle-brow tastes -- tastes I happily and unashamedly hold. But yeah, I never liked E.T., even when I was a kid.)

5 movies on the list you haven't seen but want to:

Amadeus
The Apartment
The Manchurian Candidate
King Kong
Duck Soup

5 movies on the list you haven't seen and have no interest in seeing:
It's not even that these movies look bad or anything. In fact, if I watched them, I'd probably think they were at least pretty good. But for whatever reason, these movies look boring. Don't ask me why, even in the case of 2001 and M*A*S*H where I like the genres and the directors, but I'm just not that interested. It's a weird phenomenon that I suffer from, where certain movies, despite seeming to be very much in my wheelhouse, hold absolutely no appeal for me. For instance: In general, I like Kevin Smith's movies. But Clerks? Never seen it. And I don't really want to. Don't ask me to explain. I'm just not that interested. Anyhoo:

The Deer Hunter
Platoon
Midnight Cowboy
2001: A Space Odyssey
M*A*S*H

Your favorite 5 movies that aren't on the list:

In a Lonely Place
The Strawberry Blonde
Notorious
The Thin Man
Ball of Fire

The best case ever made to go back to chant and polyphony

2008-04-24T22:47:00.000-07:00

Say no to liturgical dancers!

Two of my favorite things. . .

2008-04-19T22:26:00.001-07:00

. . . Pope Benedict XVI and New York City!

Arriving at St. Patrick's Cathedral. The Pope, NYC, St. Patrick's Cathedral. . . sigh. Awesome.

One of my favorite moments in New York was going to mass at St. Patrick's (on the feast of St. John, for extra awesomeness value). It wasn't planned. We didn't know the mass times, we were just there sightseeing, and then all of a sudden, I heard the announcement for the start of mass and I pushed my way back through the crowds like a madwoman to the guy at the rope letting people in for mass. He was all Mr. Stern-faced, sick of tourists: "You can only go in if you're staying for mass," and I was like, "Dude! I'm totally staying for mass, this is amazing! Squeeeee!!!1 I can't believe I'm here doing this! asldkfjadkdjs;lfdjafldssjfa!" Mass was reverent and beautiful, but it was totally weird that while we were there celebrating the Eucharist all these people were going around the side altars of the church sightseeing and flashing pictures. It was beautiful and bizarre at the same time.

Speaking of beauty. . .

The Pope saying mass at St. Patrick's.

My Pope and my country! Woo hoo!

The spires of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral are dwarfed by the skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline, yet in the heart of this busy metropolis, they are a vivid reminder of the constant yearning of the human spirit to rise to God.
(from The Pope's homily at the St. Patrick's Cathedral mass, April 19, 2008)

Similarities between Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and television's Pushing Daisies

2008-04-16T22:50:00.000-07:00
Both feature main characters named Charlotte who go by boy-name nicknames (Charlotte "Charlie" Newton in SoaD, and Charlotte "Chuck" Charles in PD).

Both deal with death and murder as subject matters.

And Macdonald Carey looks more than just a little bit like Lee Pace, only with bigger ears. Of course, if I work up the effort to do a screen grab and it turns out nobody else thinks he looks anything like Lee Pace, my whole theory is shot to hell.

Danged youtube for having a clip of the movie so I can't claim laziness as an excuse!

Well, here's a picture. Remember, I said "more than just a little," not "exactly totally without a doubt!" and I did say bigger ears:

Come on, just a little, right? Come on! Okay, whatever.

Your Artie, the Strongest Man in the World! Picture of the Day

2008-04-14T20:44:00.000-07:00
He's up there in the right hand corner, frozen in superhero-sleep-position because his Krebstar 2000 radio (which was keeping him awake, 'natch) ran out of batteries. Poor Artie!

Drunk

2008-04-12T21:24:00.000-07:00
This blog has become entirely too respectable. Time for a drunken ramble. Which is good, since I'm drunk, thanks to a wedding, and feeling all rambly, and now I'm drunk and will write and regret it in the morning. There are worse things to regret on a Sunday morning, I guess.

About 10:43 tonight I had the strongest desire to watch either a Whit Stillman film, a screwball comedy set in New York City, or listen to Vampire Weekend. None of these things came true. How I wish they could! My ipod died on the car ride home and it made me sad. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just entirely too strange and nerdy to ever find someone who can appreciate the thought of Central Park in the rain, a Thursday afternoon on Broadway and 79th, an evening watching French New Wave double-featured with Will Ferrell movies. I'm planning to move to Los Angeles, for a change, for a new career, for the weather, for God knows what, and of course, being from working class detroit, no one seems to understand why, "you're a writer? Oh. so what do you really do?" -- i'm dreaming that in l.a. they don't respond so practically, that in l.a. they'll ask you what you're working on and not judge in that harsh midwestern way, i'm hoping, i'm dreaming, but it's hard to move when you have no cash.

I wish I could muster the intellect to write about the old movies I've watched recently. I saw Raw Deal the other day. Claire Trevor, so flousy-tragic, voice-over noir, how could I resist. It's a chiaroscuro girl-fight between her and Gloria Grahame for the title of Favorite Noir Moll. Dennis O'Keefe is what Dennis Morgan would be if he'd been knifed in the face and sent up to San Quentin for a misunderstanding and a stolen 12 Gs. In a bit of What-the-hell! Dennis O'Keefe was in an episode of Petticoat Junction. Petticoat. Junction.

I would write more if I were motivated. But that's the problem: I'm not. I've watched some perfectly good writable movies -- Raw Deal, Mr. Lucky -- and shows -- PBS's Sense and Sensibility, Mad Men (which I've been rewatching in reruns and I'm not sure if it reinforces Baby Boomer narcissism or rejects it), John Adams, The Tudors (God help me, I'm only watching till St. Thomas More is martyred, I swear!) -- but nothing comes of it. Is anyone else worried that the film blogosphere is dying?

I guess I'm just tired of cyber-conversations. I want to discuss my random interests with a flesh and blood, is there no one else out there in my sad small town who can argue which is better: Pre-Code Babs Stanwyck or Ms. Bette Davis, Hays Code-style, or is Faye-Dunaway-fucking-William-Holden-in-Network better than them all? Can I have an intelligent conversation about Montgomery Clift already? Is there anybody out there who knows what these words mean: Gaius Baltar, Jeremiah Wright, Moqtardo Sadr, Madeline Kahn, Ron Stoppable??? I despair.

In my room, I have an entire wall covered in pictures of the Beatles. It is my Beatles Wall. At this moment, greatest Beatles song ever? Mr. Moonlight.

No. I kid. That's the worst fucking Beatles song in history.

True answer, right this moment? Hey Jude. Anthology 3, track 17 (maybe). I don't care if it's obvious or cliche or too popular, it's a great effin' song and sounds great at 1 am saturday drunk-like. No. Now I'm changing my vote to Rocky Raccoon. Try writing a masterpiece like that Mick and Keith!

I heard the best wedding toast tonight. My cousin -- the best man at his brother's wedding -- three lines (if that), ending with "To health and happiness." Perfect. We were rolling, everyone at my table. It followed fifteen minutes of bad poetry and crying and barely funny "funny" stories, which however heartfelt they may seem to those who are saying them had me wishing for a double gin martini to go with my Jack and Coke and put me to bed momma.

Then! A message sent down from heaven, the best man's (my cousin's) speech was an antidote, the equivalent of those old Oscar speeches where Clark Gable simply says, "Thank you very much" and then sits down. Succinct, gracious, maybe ten seconds in length. Rub-a-dub-dub time for some grub. It was the Gettysburg Address of wedding toasts.

Now: I'm sminking of gin. Only about 0.02% might ever get that reference, but for those of you who do, you're welcome. See: Rocky Raccoon, above (Anthology 3)

This isn't nearly as funny as it should be, i'm frickin' drunk yo! Oh well. Regret: The best motivation to do better next time.

Movies recently watched

2008-04-07T09:51:00.000-07:00
Pretty Good, but suffers from cloying, unnecessary-pulling-of-heartstrings flashback syndrome and would have been much creepier if we never knew what happened to his family, call it the Val Lewton principle, What We Can Imagine Happened to His Family Is Always Scarier Than What You Show Us:
I Am Legend

I love Will Ferrell, okay? Lay off:
Semi-Pro

The MASTERPIECE that most people will think is too long and boring, but I could easily watch twelve more hours of Deakins's pictures and Casey Affleck's cold, cold eyes and never get bored:
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford

A little too stagy, and feels so slight for a Hollywood "classic", but Hepburn is wonderful in the party scene doing Shakespeare:
Morning Glory

Thinks it's a Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell/Ralph Bellamy screwball, when it should really be a Jean Arthur (or Barbara Stanwyck)/Gary Cooper/Walter Brennan (or Thomas Mitchell) screwball, and John Krasinski is Gary Cooper (so, guess who that makes Clooney?):
Leatherheads. To be fair, I thought the first half was good, and I loved the old Universal logo at the beginning -- perfect mood setter! -- but it got way too serious in the second half, and watching the third act revealed just how badly the first act did of setting it up (we should have seen those trick plays in the first act, just so we could actually know what we were missing in the third act once the rules came in -- the "no rules" vs "rules" thing seemed tacked on), and Zellweger's character became totally unlikable once she decided to not feel bad about tricking John K's character.

If this is 1936 and Capra's directing, reporter gal Jean Arthur feels bad about tricking the nice guy for a story, and she ends up falling for him in the end and they fight the real corrupt liars (like the sports agent and the commissioner who knows there's too much money involved to let a scandal happen). But it's 2008, so apparently using someone's affections and trust and then betraying those affections and trust is a perfectly acceptable move, as long as you get the story and expose the "lie." And of course you have to fall in love with The Clooney, since his name is above the marquee, since he's the "Last Movie Star", even though you have no chemistry with him and actual sparks with Jim from the Office, but whatevs -- this movie is just another in an ever-growing long line that prove that the traditional screwball comedy is the only major movie genre that couldn't survive into a post-1960 world. Which totally bums me out, because I really wanted to love this movie, and if someone who better understood the genre traditions of screwball had script-doctored this thing, it could have been a minor classic.

The Old School Nick You Probably Don't Remember

2008-04-03T22:41:00.000-07:00
For all the Old School Nick fans out there who consider Alex Mack "old school" (in my opinion, Alex Mack and Shelby Woo and Keenan and Kel were the beginning of the end for good Nickelodeon live-action shows), here's a true oldie: Out of Control. I had forgotten about this show for years until an old college roommate and I were reminiscing about old Nick shows and we both had vague memories of this weird show that featured a poor man's Cyndi Lauper, Uncle Joey from Full House, a robot that did something. . . we couldn't remember what, and had an aesthetic that I can best describe as investigative reporting meets the Goonies meets Monty Python meets the Yellow Submarine. Later my roommate found out the name of the show while searching on the Internet: Out of Control. Yes! How could I have forgotten it?! How could this show have gone missing and forgotten for all these years?! Without Out of Control all the great Nick shows that came after would not have existed. No Clarrisa Explains It All; no Salute Your Shorts; no Adventures of Pete and Pete.

This is the only episode I could find on youtube, so savor it:

Your Artie, the Strongest Man in the World! Picture of the Day

2008-04-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

Opening Day!

2008-03-31T12:53:00.001-07:00

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is all.

On this date in Beatles recording history...

2008-03-29T13:28:00.000-07:00
Wednesday 29 March, 1967*

The group recorded the animals sounds on "Good Morning Good Morning" on March 28, but they were spun into the four-track tape of the song on this date, the 29th. The order of the sounds, according to a story from Geoff Emerick, was decided because John Lennon wanted "to have the sound of animals escaping" and that each animal should be a capable of eating or frightening the animal that came before it. So the sounds, in order, are: A cock crowing, a cat meowing, dogs barking, horses neighing , sheep bleating (though, it's unclear to me how sheep can frighten horses), lions roaring, elephants making elephant noises, a fox being chased by hounds, horses galloping, a cow mooing, and then a hen clucking, to bring it back full-circle, I guess.

Sound effects were added to the tape track of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" today, as was the organ music, with was played by producer George Martin.

Up until this point, poor Ringo hadn't recorded a song as lead vocalist, so John and Paul wrote a song just for him: "With a Little Help From My Friends." Of course, at this point, the song was titled "Bad Finger Boogie," for what reason I have no idea. George Martin played organ on the song, Paul played piano, George on lead guitar, Ringo on drums and lead vocals, and John on cowbell. None of my Beatles books, however, mention whether or non George Martin ever made any calls for "more cowbell."

*My source for all this is a wonderfully wonkish book called "The Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes, 1962-1970" by Mark Lewisohn

Everyone who griped about this year's Oscars had it wrong

2008-03-25T12:37:00.000-07:00
This is such an old topic for a rant that I almost just said "forget it, move on," but providence, the universe, my nagging rant-muscle, they have all compelled me to comment. Remember when it was all the rage to pile on the Oscar noms for being downers and depressing and out of touch with the American public? Well, it was, even if I can't be bothered to find those old articles from a few months ago. Just go google "Oscar hates America" or something. But it was a punditry trend back in January and February, that much is for sure.

I should have written about it those many months ago when the story was hot, because for once I kinda disagreed with the opinion that the Oscars were out of touch. Well, no, they are still out of touch to a certain degree, but I couldn't jump on the bandwagon against the Best Picture noms, because this year was the first time since 2003 where I had actually seen a majority of the Picture nominations and had actually really liked them (No Country, Atonement, and Juno). I can't help it that more people didn't go see No Country for Old Men, because it's actually an awesome suspense thriller, but whatever. Of all the years to gripe, I just couldn't feel the hate this time around. Last year? Sure. The year before? Definitely. The year Million Dollar Baby won? I just gagged a little thinking about it. But this year's Best Pictures were awesome and I just couldn't get my bristle up about them.

Of course, that doesn't mean I didn't complain. I did. And, of course, I was totally right. Who got an undeserved Best Actress nom? And who didn't get a much deserved nom? Excuse my smugness for a minute, but, *G.O.B.-style*Come On!*G.O.B.-style* The Best Pictures for 2007 were great and not worth picking on. But the acting noms? Yowza. Out-O-Touch. The Oscars were out of touch with regular people on many of these and the way to get in touch is to start considering nominating actors and actresses in movies that people have actually seen. And this doesn't mean nominating sub-par work. This isn't the false choice between No Country for Old Men and Transformers for Best Picture. That's why all those articles earlier this year were so pointless. Sure, more Americans saw Alvin and the Chipmunks than they did There Will Be Blood, but that doesn't mean we should nominate something that doesn't deserve it just to cater to general tastes.

But guess which movie also made a ton of money AND had an Oscar-worthy performance? Yeah, okay, I already mentioned that. But how about some love for "McLovin"? Was that kid not hilarious? Was his movie not popular and critically acclaimed?

And this whole rant got restarted in my brain because last week and over the weekend I was overwhelmed with the comments from family members about the wonderfulness of Enchanted and especially the wonderfulness of Amy Adams's performance. Now, I loved Enchanted when I first saw it back in November, and I loved Adams's performance. But I kinda tossed my "Amy should totally be nominated for Best Actress" zeal up as being a result of my girl-crush. Sure, I might think she's cute as a button and want to be her BFF, but that just calls my objective judgment on the Oscars situation into question. But when other people -- people I had not broached the subject with, or even knew had any interest in the movie or the actress -- started approaching me and saying how totally awesome they thought the movie was and who-was-that-girl-who-played-the-main-girl-she-was-so-amazing, well, my previous, strongly-held opinions resurfaced. If you want to bring the Oscars back into relevancy, it's not about making sure National Treasure II gets a Best Picture nod. It's about saluting quality work that also happens to be popular. It's the choice between a Cate Blanchett role no one cared about and a star-making, lovable, iconic turn by an actress everyone in my familial and social circles is raving about. It's not about sacrificing quality for popularity; it's just a substituting of one type of quality for another. Can you imagine the wonderful publicity, the buzz and excitement, the throngs of viewers who would tune in to the broadcast if this McLovin kid had been nominated, or if Amy Adams had, or if Seth Rogen had. And I don't think it would be a "lowering" of Oscar standards to have nominated any of these three. Or Imelda Staunton for Harry Potter (yeah, I'm just not gonna let that one go).

Anyway, I don't really have a pithy wrap-up that makes a blistering, well-written final point of brilliance, so I'll just say: Oscar, start recognizing comedies and family films and the performances in them. You've ghetto-ized animation, but at least they still get some recognition. Comedy (and to an even lesser extent, family/kids movies) don't even get that. Okay, maybe the occasional screenplay award, but only if the comedy is "indie." That's not a very good way to keep The Public smiling, happy, and invested in what you do. I feel like I should end with the "Comedy's hard. . ." maxim, but I won't. Instead I'll just say, it shouldn't be this hard to get a little Oscar love.

People are really creative

2008-03-20T14:07:00.000-07:00
In looking for the hilarious Shining-as-heartwarming-comedy fake trailer on youtube, my cousin found this gem:

I realize this is probably old news to pretty much all the cool people out there on the interwebs, but it's new to me, so I post it. And it's amazing. I continue to be astounded by the creativity of ordinary people. Watching all these fake trailers is just as much fun as watching the original movies. When I consider the massive success of a cookie cutter retread show like Grey's Anatomy, my faith in humanity is lost. But when I witness the ingenuity and creativity it took to create a murderous Mary Poppins that scares the shit outta people, my faith is restored.

My big Shining day, Part II

2008-03-18T21:09:00.000-07:00
This is how cheap I am. I'm so cheap that I go up to Ann Arbor on Monday nights and sneak into the screenings for a film class that my cousin is taking. She tells me the film for that week, I determine whether I want to see it or not, and if I do, the day arrives, I pop a bag of popcorn and grab a bottle of Diet Pepsi, and she and I go to her class's screening. So far, I've seen The Grand Illusion and Bonnie and Clyde, two films I had only seen previously on my TV screen. It's awesome. A big screen, an audience, free. And since I'm not actually taking the class, no homework or lectures. With this scheme, I've taken the act of living vicariously through others to its perfect apex. My cousin tells me all the fun stuff from her lectures with the boring parts left out; I get to criticize and nitpick her GSI's ability to run a discussion without actually having to deal with said GSI; and I go to the film screenings with her but don't have to write papers on them. It's like I'm in college again, only better.

Yesterday was a day I'd been anticipating for a long time. Yesterday was The Shining Day. Probably in my top six favorite horror movies. Effin' creepy. Blood coming out of elevators, rotting old lady flesh, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," attempted ax murder, the 1920s. That's some creepy shit. It was weird watching it with an audience too. They laughed in spots, which was jarring, but the laughs made sense, seeing as Jack Torrance goes so crazy at some points you're not sure whether to laugh at him or cower in fear. I loved the atmosphere as we watched: This is one messed up movie, and we could all feel it, and we fed on each other's fear and revulsion. I loved how people around me were covering their eyes and creeping down in their seats (just like me!) when Jack first walks slowly through room 237. It's why we go to the theater, to share experiences like this.

I recently got into an argument with a friend who hates going to the movie theater. He claims there's no reason to, since the theater is expensive, the seats are uncomfortable, the people in the audience are annoying and eat their popcorn too loudly, and you can't pause the movie if you have to go to the bathroom. My arguments, that the big frakking screen is unbeatable and that you go for the atmosphere, and yes, that includes the munches of the audience, because there's nothing so awesome as sharing that collective emotional experience, whether it be surprise or dread or laughter or sadness or excitement or joy -- you can feel it when you and the audience are both experiencing the same emotions and it's thrilling. Like the shared gasp when Frodo gets stabbed by Shelob. I knew he wouldn't die, having read the book, but I couldn't help being caught up in the very palpable feeling in the air that the shit has just gone down and we, the audience, all just got mindfucked. That's why you go to the theater: Big frakking screen and shared collective experience.

So, that's why I've been going to the "theater" in Angell Hall, even though these are all movies I've seen before. It's a unique experience getting to see a movie on a big screen, with an audience; a movie that you've only seen previously on your couch, alone, at home.

Immediately after viewing it, I became obsessed with the central question (in my mind anyway) of the film: Why the 1920s? Why did Kubrick choose to have Jack's soul be trapped in a picture from July 4, 1921? Why all the 1920s ghosts and the 1920s party in the Gold Room?

I have a confession (which I also touched on, in a way, in this former post): The 1920s kinda freak me out. As do silent films and black and white films from the 30s (especially the early 30s). I explained in the post linked above that I think it has to do with the oldness of the images and the black and white that kinda makes everything look ghostly. But after watching The Shining again for the first time in many, many months, the old question has arisen again. Why do I find the 1920s so creepy? It's a sort of chicken/egg question: Was I always creeped-out by the 1920s (are they just inherently creepy?), or did The Shining create the creepiness? I'm pretty sure I first saw The Shining when I was in middle school (I'm thinking it was about age 13), and the ghosts/visions in that film are all from the 20s, so it could have been early enough in my life that the movie was able to shock my psyche and screw up the 20s for me. Just like those gloriously weird ghosts in the film, this question has haunted me.

After the movie last night, I went back to my cousin's dorm room and proceed to google various combinations of "1920s the shining/the shining 1920s why/the shining 1920s explanation/reason 1920s party the shining" to get some answers. I was obsessed with knowing why Kubrick would show visions of a party at the Overlook from the 20s and have Jack eventually be seen in a photo from a party in 1921. Did Kubrick think the 20s were as creepy as I do? Did he hit on some unconscious understanding we all subconsciously share that the 1920s were one effed-up decade and therefore perfect subject fodder for a horror film? Or was there no explanation at all; was it just one of the many random things Kubrick threw into the film to keep the audience disoriented and off-balance? Probably needless to say, my google search didn't provide me with a succinct, clarifying, all-questions-answered answer. I read a lot of really awesome theories and analyses, though, all about mythology and fairy tales and psychology and Colorado and the Red Room and White America's injustice against the oppressed Peoples of Color. It made for some fun, strange reading. So that was good.

In the end, though, I was able to find out that Stephen King actually wrote quite a bit about the history of the hotel in his original novel, so it wasn't like only the 1920s were particularly evil -- there was evil stuff happening throughout the decades in the Overlook. And through process of elimination, my cousin, her roommate, and I decided that if you're going to have spirits from the past haunt your movie and you've got between the years 1907 and 1980 to choose from, there's really no other decade you can choose that's going to be scary as hell and appropriate for a big ball room party scene except the 1920s.

Think about it. The 70s were too recent for the present-day events of the film (sure, the 70s are scary, but how scary could they be for people in 1980 -- it's practically still the 70s!). The 60s had scary hippies, but they wouldn't work for a high class hotel like the Overlook. The 50s might scare ignorant left-wing hipsters, but no, Donna Reed and men in suits and skinny black ties are just not scary. The 40s had guys in cute sailor outfits and riveting Rosies, no scares there. The 30s can definitely be scary (dig these ghosts!) (Pre-Code talkies -- ahhhh!!! The grainy film, the black and white, men wearing stage lipstick and eye liner, the high falsetto-voiced male singers, the Busby Berkley numbers. Scary. Though I have to admit, in a good way.) But the 30s also had the Depression, and who can afford to stay at some high class joint when half the country ain't got no job!

The 1920s -- they've got all the creepy factor of the early 30s, plus the feathered, beaded, fringed Flappers, gin-soaked parties of lavish wealth and privilege, crazy hedonistic sex orgies (possibly), and a general wantonness that would fit with a ritzy hotel that makes people go psycho killer. You can possibly imagine a bunch of drunk, high class 1920s blue bloods resorting to cannibalism if they got bored enough at a soirée. The 1910s were too occupied with The Great War. Sure the Titanic can certainly conjure up some good ghost images, but there's just not enough hedonism in the 10s to be truly as depraved as the 20s. And then we're getting into the years when the hotel was built and those won't really do.

So, in the end, it has to be the 1920s. Kubrick knew what he was doing. Only the 1920s would do for a horror story about a richie rich hotel. The 1920s, inherently creepy and messed up, or only made so because of Stanley Kubrick's film? I think the answer is, a little bit of both.

My big Shining day, Part I

2008-03-18T11:36:00.000-07:00
Before I commit to any thoughts, I first have to post a link to this awesome video: The Shining in 30 seconds with bunnies

This is probably old news to Internet peoples, but I just saw it for the first time yesterday and it delighted me. Favorite shot? (it's right after BunnyJack at the typewriter) A shot of BunnyJack with crazy face and there's a farty-sounding percussion instrument noise on the soundtrack. Totally random. And it captures Kubrick's style from the film perfectly.

Poetry Slam!

2008-03-16T13:36:00.000-07:00
The Donkey by G.K. Chesterton

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

Old School Nick Toons for what ails ya

2008-03-12T20:15:00.001-07:00
I've been annoyingly sick these past couple of days, just watching tv and communicating through hand signals and raspy whispers (me=sore throat), and between the Jane Austen miniseries and Red Wings games it's been either Boomerang or the Nick Toons channel. Old school Nick toons, in fact, first Rocko's Modern Life, then Ren and Stimpy. I'm not sure how a show so irredeemably disgusting can be so entertaining. I think back on what I used to watch when I was a kid and I sometimes can't believe the weirdness I was into. It's like the pop culture universe was like, "How can we make that weird girl in Michigan even weirder?" and then they sent me stuff like Big Top Pee-Wee, the episode of Duck Tales where they went to the Bermuda Triangle, and Ren and Stimpy.

Hoekvision presents, I Like Pink:

Why watch old movies?

2008-03-10T14:07:00.000-07:00
It'll make this Lord of the Rings parody much funnier.

I love how the credits say: "Gowns by Marie." That's such an old movie thing! I also think the casting of Smeagol was the most brilliant decision Howard Hawks has ever made.

You Never Give Me Your Money

2008-03-08T14:25:00.000-08:00

by the Beatles.

I could listen to this song forever. Of course, it's famous for being the beginning of that delicious pop medley from Abbey Road, the one that introduces the melodic sounds which will come to comprise the second half of the album. But even in isolation, it feels like it's own mini rock-pop epic, every bit as good as Stairway to Heaven or Bohemian Rhapsody or Free Bird. Am I overreaching? Yeah, okay, it's not as grandiose and ambitious as Stairway, and it doesn't have the operatic bigness of Rhapsody. And it certainly doesn't have the full-frontal sonic assault of ROCK that Free Bird's got going for it with it's barrage of dueling guitar licks and rock star lifestyle lyrics. But. You Never Give Me Your Money is the pop music answer to the rock music stadium anthem. It can be performed live, I think (and didn't Paul do it during one of his latest U.S. tours?). But on the album, its album-ness is so completely overwhelming and perfect that the London studio can't help feeling like its natural habitat.

And that's pop music: it's music meant to sound produced, to sound engineered, to be recorded and then pressed into vinyl and sold in shops. It's not the rawness of rock; it's the perfection of pop. You Never Give Me Your Money is on the album titled after the studio it was recorded in, and nothing could feel more appropriate. It's got all the sound of the Abbey Road studios, all the changing melodies and instrumentation that sum up the essence of what made the Beatles' studio recordings so ingenious and groundbreaking.

It's also a lot of nonsense. Supposedly it's about the group's business disputes, but that meaning gets lost after the first few lines, and the rest of the lyrics are so all-over-the-place that the overall effect is one of mood more so than meaning. And that mood is melancholy. The opening piano melody just drips with longing, with a resigned sadness that nevertheless grasps for warm contentment. "You never give me your money,/ you only give me your funny paper." Sure, the business table talk is there, but it seems more like a metaphor, something that can mean anything to anyone who yearns for one thing and ends up with something else. It's also a bit of a silly pun -- for what else is money but "funny paper" -- that gives an illusion of profundity even as it winks at us in jest.

When it switches to the second section, the sound of yearning gives way to a saloon hall riff on the piano and talk of "yellow lorries" and "outta college money spent," and it's all a bit happier, a bit jauntier, though we're not sure why. The speaker in the song is suddenly younger, he's on his way out into the world, there's money to be made, but then suddenly the yellow lorry has "nowhere to go," and meaning escapes us again, even as we can't escape the feeling that we're grasping at something and just missing it, longing for a thing that's never going to come. The lyrics don't "mean" anything in a direct sense, but the overall effect -- the sound of the nonsense words together with the melodies -- imparts a feeling, an emotional state, something beyond pure rationality, and it is that something which draws the human heart to music in the first place. The song has an illusion of substance, and at the same time the sugary emptiness of candy. It's seems powerful but remains pop-y without incongruity.

I'm reminded of my first response to the poetry of Gerard Manely Hopkins: I didn't necessarily understand all the meanings in "Pied Beauty" the first time around, but I understood its sound, its rhythms and sonic qualities, and I immediately loved it. Just to speak those words, those lines, aloud was enough to know the poem's beauty. There's a bit of that going on in the nonsense lyrics of You Never Give Me Your Money, as well. Just the sound of those words as they roll off the tongue and suddenly the mood is conjured. As the song fades out to the repetition of a nursery rhyme ("One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,/ All good children go to heaven"), the nonsense almost lifts up into a prayer, the melody and the words pulling us higher and higher into the clouds until all that's left to do is to fade out and up into who knows where.

The song is endlessly listenable because it's got those five different melodic sections that all flow seamlessly into one another so that when the song ends in a completely different place from where it started, it feels totally organic. It's the beginning of the Abbey Road medley, but the song itself is a medley, and yet it never feels pieced together or random. There's a sense that this is the overture to some Broadway musical, with all the melodies integrated into a complete and satisfying story, preparing its audience for what's to come. That one can listen to the song a hundred times and still feel surprised as each new melody is introduced, is a testament to the magic of the thing. "Oh that magic feeling,/ Nowhere to go." The song is a sonic journey; it uses some kind of magic to weave its nonsense into the listener, and while we're still listening, we're not sure where it has left to go. And then by the end, we're not sure where we've been. Once the song finishes, we realize that what we mistook for meaning has evaporated, and only melodies and a mood remain. But somehow, that is enough.

Movies recently watched

2008-03-05T18:31:00.000-08:00
The Ones I Liked (I think I've decided I'm done with grades and ratings, since I'm not a professional critic, and don't much care to be one. Just like to analyze and discuss and act all cinema-crazy, no need for elaborate grades and such. Plus, I'm too soft-hearted and easy-to-please to give out grades that would mean anything to anyone anyway.):

Again, The Ones I Liked:
Juno
Ride the High Country
Foreign Correspondent
Semi-Pro
Miss Austen Regrets (PBS, 2008)
Northanger Abbey (PBS, 2008)
Raisin in the Sun (ABC, 2008)
The Goodbye Girl
Miller's Crossing
Vacancy

The Ones I Didn't Much Care For:
Persuasion (PBS, 2008)
Mansfield Park (PBS, 2008)

Is it needless to say that these are all first-time viewings for me? Well, consider it said. These are first-time viewings. (And that goes for any future "Movies recently watched" as well, which, of course, might not ever get written, as it is my way these days to be reckless and absentminded and totally random about the blog, but just in case, this here is my explanation). And if I ever do mention a movie on one of these posts that I have seen before, I will specify and possibly explain my multiple-viewing reaction in *slight* detail. Such as: "This was my reaction the first time I saw it. This is my reaction now." Etc. etc.

And now I'm laughing because this post, which was intended to be a short and sweet little list of movies to fill some blog space and make it seem like I had something to say about film, has turned into something bigger, and in fact, is less concerned about the actual topic (you know, "Movies recently watched") and more concerned with explanations and minutiae and unfocused ramblings as to the hows and whys and whats of the thing. The previous sentence is a perfect example of what I mean: unrelated to the main intent of the post (the movie list) except in that it makes mention of it by way of complaint. I gotta work on ordering my thoughts a little better. I should re-title this post: "Explanations on grading, aversions to said grading, and the uselessness thereof as it relates to the author, and first-time viewing assumptions that should be made by readers, including a self-referential complaint about content, with a list of movies liked and disliked mentioned briefly but unspectacularly, which can be avoided if wished, you wouldn't be missing anything."

I want to remedy this. So:

I was pleasantly surprised by Ride the High Country and Vacancy. I've always told myself I wasn't a Westerns girl, and yet every Western I've watched recently has been highly enjoyable. I think I might actually like Westerns, and it'll be getting close to love territory if this keeps up. All those horses and American mythmaking and strong, tough, good men. Vacancy was tense and scary and surprisingly touching. Not sure it would work on a second go 'round because the plot is mostly "Will they make it?!" and once you know how it ends, there's nothing to go back for. Except for maybe that surprising tenderness I mentioned, so maybe it would be okay on second viewing. Stay tuned. . .

I can't give a good justification for Semi-Pro to those who consider themselves discerning movie watchers. It's stupid, poorly written, minor league movie making. But Will Ferrell makes me laugh, a lot, in everything he does really, and this movie made me laugh, and when I'm watching a comedy, if it makes me laugh, then I'm gonna like it. That's my formula (see above: my not being equipped to review movies in any intelligent way). I laughed at Semi-Pro. Helluva lot, actually. But I would probably laugh at Will Ferrell reading a blank piece of paper, so that's where my taste level and sense of humor are.

I feel a little better about this post. Got a few limp scraps of meat and rubbery pieces of fat hanging off it now. And with that delightful image, I finish.

Seasons Readings (this post needed a title so it wouldn't get swallowed up by the other post above it)

2008-03-05T08:02:00.000-08:00
The snow has kinda put it out of my mind at the moment, but whenever March rolls around, and brings the faint whiff of Spring with it, I have the sudden urge to read The Lord of the Rings. What's funny is that whenever December rolls around, and with it the stark clearness of Winter, I'm instantly taken with the idea of watching the Lord of the Rings movies. Same story, two different seasons.

The Hobbit is an Autumn book. Prince Caspian is a Midsummer book. Which makes the movie's coming out in May interesting. I wonder when the Hobbit movies will come out?

Why watch old movies?

2008-03-04T11:32:00.000-08:00
Reason: That unusual, unsettling, rumbling, sinister twinkling of Sydney Greenstreet's voice.

This Weekend's Double Feature!

2008-03-03T09:59:00.000-08:00
Across 110th Street

and Planet Terror

I was down all weekend with a sinus infection and what does every sane person do when sick? I watched a shitload of TV. Had Across 110th Street on the tivo; Starz has Grindhouse On Demand. I tried to stay up to watch Death Proof and make it a triple feature, but I fell asleep. I don't think it was the movie's fault, me being sick and all, but the beginning was a little talky and missing a lot of the crazy exploitation-stuff I was expecting from a film like this. I conked-out right after Stunt Man Bill (?) bought Julia and Butterfly (??) a couple of beers. Loved those trailers, though. DON'T! heh

Youtube does the blogging so I don't have to

2008-02-29T12:53:00.000-08:00
Nevermind the little commercial at the end; I'm not trying to sell anything even though Extras is a great show and would be a worthy purchase, but I'm using this clip because it's just the scene I wanted, short and awesome and good quality. Do not cross Dame Diana Rigg; she will drink your milkshake.

Drainage!

2008-02-25T17:43:00.000-08:00
I would totally watch this show.

Mystery!

2008-02-18T22:04:00.000-08:00

2008-02-15T21:44:00.000-08:00
Yesterday was a triumph. I got my two-year-old niece to watch The Wizard of Oz. She didn't sit the whole time, since she is, after all, my TWO-year-old niece, but she sat for most of it and would occasionally give an "oh no" when the music turned foreboding (she "oh no"-ed, in fact, when the witch melted, and I had to remind her, "No hon, that's good that she's dead. We hate her, that wicked ol' witch" and then I proceeded to do my awesome melting-Wicked-Witch-of-the-West impression: "Oh, what a world, what a world! Who ever thought a little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?" Which my niece proceeded to completely ignore). She was also fascinated by the Scarecrow and the Lion and mentioned them constantly throughout the day, but all she had to say for the Tin Man was, "He can't talk," which isn't a bad observation for a toddler (which she made pre-oil can, of course), but considering the Tin Man's my favorite, I was hoping for a little more, like maybe a mention of the awesome rusted-legs-side-to-side-swaying thing he does in his dance. Love that.

She called the bubble that Glinda travels in "The Moon," and that cracked my shit up, and she was very concerned when the twister was coming and Dorothy hadn't gotten in the basement yet. I cherished every minute of it because it was my first attempt to expose her to the "old movies," those gems of the 30s and 40s and 50s for which I have an undying love. I'm taking Ty Burr's advice and trying to get her while she's young. But I can't help shake the feeling that I'm acting like the annoying Boomers who have continually forced the pop culture of their youth onto a younger generation with a solemnity that should probably be reserved for family traditions and religion. The Sixties changed the world, dontcha you know, what with the hippies exposing the hypocrisy and soul-deadening ways of middle America and rock music ending the war and destroying Nixon and everything. We must all stand in awe at the glories of Woodstock and The Graduate and Abby Hoffman. Blech.

But am I guilty of partaking in that same silly reverence for the pop culture of the past with my pass-on-the-old-movies obsession? I guess I can take comfort in the fact that the things from the past that I love -- basically, the pop culture of my grandparents' generation -- is infinitely cooler and more interesting than the Boomers' tired, played-out culture of the 60s, and I'm not being as narcissistic as the Boomers since the 30s and 40s weren't my childhood eras, so at least I'm not pushing them on people as a way to relive and validate my own glorious youth.

I can't wait till she's old enough to appreciate Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock. Right now I think my next move is Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, or an MGM musical from the late 40s.

Time for more shitty writing!

2008-02-13T13:13:00.000-08:00
I was cleaning my room today and found two poems I wrote as examples for my Creative Writing students this past Fall. We were studying metaphysical poetry, and my cooperating teacher believed that we the teachers should give the students as many examples of our own work as possible as a way to show that yes, these things we teach you are relevant 'cause we use them in our own writing too. The first poem is incomprehensible, but I kinda like the way it sounds. The second is my attempt at a copy-change of sorts using Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God."

In my continuing efforts to try and post something nearly everyday, no badly written piece of tripe goes unblogged!

POEMS!

Unless like small and dreaming children we become,
And fashion paper angels in a fit of mirth,
And hope for second birth,
And string these forms from door to porch,
Knocking, laughing, playing
Paper games that seem like life silhouetted
(And yet in these outlinings the clearer form is seen),
We risk a fall into self-sufficiency and singleness,
And trade our happy curfew for an unending fete,
Becoming creatures, no longer flesh, whose
Only self is reflected in the pixeled images,
Cartoon icons on a screen. The true Icon brings us closer
To that welcomed imprisonment, in old closets
With other lost and battered toys, and we see
The face of One discarded, another childhood indulgence
We rediscover, reloved.

(a copy-change of Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God")
Shock my soul, Spirit of Hope; right now
You only whistle, spittle, flick and tickle;
So I can float, and laugh, electrocute me, and send
A shockwave, to jolt, choke, stand-hair-on-end and revive me, anew.
I, like a can of celluloid, cut and discarded,
Long for your hand on the flatbed,
To resplice me, but the film falls apart;
Unspool your white leader for me, label me;
I am misnumbered, scratched, and out-of-sync.
Now I long for you truly, and want you in me again,
But am stuck doing Jaeger with Despair:
Throw me into the bathroom, hold me
Over the sink, so I, my face on cold tile,
Can know Heaven on the gum-drenched floor,
Say a prayer, and smile.

I guess I'll have to start watching it now

2008-02-12T11:27:00.000-08:00

Who is Your Ideal TV Boyfriend?

Created by BuddyTV

Ideal TV Boyfriend

My Weekend Obsession

2008-02-11T13:35:00.000-08:00

Never mind the Bill of Rights -- There's too much clutter!

2008-02-06T20:59:00.000-08:00
I was in Ann Arbor the other day and I grabbed an issue of The Michigan Review, the student journal of conservative and libertarian thought (and my favorite choice for bus ride reading material when I was at school there). Apparently, there's a bit of a free speech controversy going on at the University of Michigan and student publications on campus are (rightly) up in arms.

According to the LSA college (the college of literature, science and arts) there's too much "clutter" in the buildings on campus from all of the publications that are distributed there. Basically, students pick up free issues of The Daily, or the Review, or whatever, that are in bins and stacks around the hallways of the buildings, read them while waiting for lecture to start, and then throw them away, or else just leave them on a desk or on the floor. It can be pretty gross when there's a bunch of old Dailies strewn about the floor of your classroom, but honestly, it was never that much, and I usually would pick one up to read, since it would be left there so conveniently, and then throw it away later, so there's at least one piece of litter out of the way. But I guess for the precious Felix Unger's of the college of LSA, the sight of some papers on the floor is too much to bear.

Old newspapers on the floor isn't the only "clutter" the college is concerned about, though. They also contend that there are too many bins and stacks of papers in the hallways and that these are disrupting the flow of the hallways and cluttering things up and I guess they're a safety hazard or something. Seeing as I was just on campus, walking around the hallways of Angell Hall, this is patently ridiculous. It's true, I graduated more years ago than I would care to admit (*cough*2003*cough*), but it was as "bad" then as it supposedly is now, and that's: Not very. Seriously, it's nothing. It's stacks of newspapers and leaflets along the walls. Plenty of room in between. Maybe there are other more immaculate, more spacious college hallways elsewhere in the country, but as far as I'm concerned, the LSA buildings look like a normal school.

Anyway, as I understand it, the college wants to start restricting publications from distributing on campus, basically making the determine of which publications make the cut and which don't, as well as putting restrictions on when and where the approved publications can put out their issues. I think it's pretty clear that once a college or university starts making determinations over which student publications can and cannot be distributed on campus, it's a serious threat to the future of free speech at that school. It's assumed that The Daily, the main student-run paper of the school (i.e.: the liberal rag) will make the cut, but even they will be limited as to where they can put their paper, and when they can put issues out (I guess there's something in the proposal that would prohibit publications from being displayed between April 14 and September 15, which would mean that the Daily can forget their summer issue). Other publications, especially smaller, less established ones, would no doubt be left out in the cold once the LSA and MSA (Michigan Student Assembly) and whoever else gets to decide make the decision over who can distribute and who's just annoying, useless "clutter." Paranoid right-winger that I am, I have a sneaking suspicion that a paper like the Review might just be one for the "clutter" bin. And even if they're not, it's still a stupid, useless move by the college that will limit the speech rights of the students.

It's all ridiculous and phoney baloney. But that's my alma mater! I think our motto is Artes, Scientia, Ineptia. Take a look at the Review's coverage for more.

Happy Lent!

2008-02-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

Forty days and forty nights
Thou wast fasting in the wild;
Forty days and forty nights
Tempted, and yet undefiled.

Shall not we thy sorrow share
And from earthly joys abstain,
Fasting with unceasing prayer,
Glad with thee to suffer pain?

And, if Satan, vexing sore,
Flesh or spirit should assail,
Thou, his Vanquisher before,
Grant we may not faint nor fail!

Keep, O keep us, Savior dear,
Ever constant by thy side;
That with thee we may appear
At the eternal Eastertide.

Thoughts on Blues in Technicolor

2008-02-03T19:19:00.000-08:00
I can't decide if Janis Joplin's singing is pathetic and clownish or if we still haven't yet appreciated the heights of her unique virtuosity.

I think her real problem was lack of great material. Robert Plant might have been unbearably annoying if he didn't have the benefit of the genius of Jimmy Page, and if the sound of Led Zeppelin hadn't been such a perfect-fit playground for Plant's Witch-King-of-Angmar meets Welsh triple harp voice.

Joplin had, perhaps, "Me and Bobby McGee" and "Ball and Chain" (maybe "Turtle Blues"), but that's it. Imagine her in the 1920s and 30s when the blues were rawer and wilder. Why she didn't cut more traditional, old-timey blues records instead of the weak sap, early '70s idea of "blues" she did record can probably be chalked up to everybody doing too many drugs back then.

It's so easy to blame hippies.

February Made Me Shiver. . .

2008-02-03T16:24:00.000-08:00
I'm driving in my car today, and I put the ipod on shuffle. A few songs go by: The Beatles' "I'm So Tired," Jim Croce's "I've Got a Name," Julie Andrews doing the "Do Re Mi" song. And then suddenly, Don McLean's sweet voice comes on with "American Pie." I freaked out a little. Why? Today's the anniversary of the day the music died. I've got more than 5,000 songs on the old 'pod, and it picks "American Pie." That's pretty weird, right?

Easter Parade (dir. Charles Walters -- but it's Arthur Freed who matters -- 1948)

2008-01-31T21:05:00.000-08:00
Watched this for the first time last week. Kind of a minor musical, when you get right down to it. I always expected every Arthur Freed musical to be some kind of masterpiece, but this one had a sorta warmed-over quality to it that just never really grabbed me. Actually, it grabbed me big time and held on like a vice grip when Fred opened the film with that insane drumming/dancing number and immediately after that I was expecting a real firecrack of a film, but alas, I went into movie-watching auto-pilot until Ann Miller showed up in sassy yellow and saved the night, if only for that brief canary-colored moment. I just kept thinking: I'd much rather be watching The Bandwagon.

Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, and Miller were all awesome, as usual, and the film was pleasant, so I came away liking all three stars more than I did before, so that's something. And it was nice to hear a song I could relate to: "I was born in Michigan, and I wish and wish again, that I was back in the town where I was born" (Of course, I'm only about two miles from the town in which I was born, and I never lived on a farm, though my mom used to live at The Farm, which is the name my family gave to the house on 11 mile where they had a pony and some ducks and that was surrounded by fields and forests, but which they eventually sold to some dudes who wanted to put up office buildings, and so I guess the song isn't that relatable, but I like to hear my home state immortalized in song).

I really expected more from the "Steppin' Out" number and greeted it with a ho hum. And what exactly was Peter Lawford's character all about? Was he a law student or something? Why was he friends with all these vaudevillians? He seemed pointless, except as the "Freddy Eynsford-Hill" of the thing, and the movie did have a distinct flavor of a second-rate My Fair Lady, so I guess that's how he fits. I just find him so dang boring!

Since I'm asking all these questions to myself, I'll ask another: What is an "Easter Parade"? Was this something unique to New York city, or did other towns and cities have Easter Parades? Shouldn't these people be at church?

Seriously, though, what was the point of Peter Lawford? I guess I'm betraying my biases, but what is ever the point of Peter Lawford?

Wash out the boring with a little Ann:

For Maxine

2008-01-29T10:38:00.001-08:00
The Classic

Drive Through

It's hard to believe, but teenagers have no idea how to finish the sentence: "Pardon me. . ."

It's also hard to watch The Wizard of Oz and not expect this promo to pop up

2008-01-26T23:00:00.001-08:00
I'm sitting here reading The Habit of Being and I'm distressed to find out Flannery O'Connor loved Catcher. I'm annoyed by intellectuals at the moment. I'm bothered and simply bored with the learnedness and endless allusions; it's all too much thinking and not nearly enough ridiculous hyperbole. I suppose I should want to be more careful in this Internet where our words spread out across the world, and I should want others to be more careful too, in the spirit of charity, and I know the tide is turning against me out there in cyberland where everyone's sick of internet blowhards and snark, but I still want to make wild and unsustainable claims. I still want to embrace the brashness and permission-to-make-idiotic-statements that is the blog's birthright. Have I entered the party too late? I still want to celebrate the lower common denominator (though not the lowest -- we all have our standards and these are mine). I want to say, "Why yes, I just watched the first National Treasure movie and it was pleasantly entertaining, goofy and stupid of course, but endearing with its sleeve all covered in hearts for America, and I hope that doesn't make me some unwashed red state rube -- No! What am I saying?! I gladly accept!" Sheesh, lighten up filmy people, it's not like movies are literature or anything, and if I could say these things to Jeffrey Wells's face, I wish I would...

Our culture is pretty gross right now, I won't deny it, and I'm sure tomorrow I'll be carping over the fact that kids these days can't appreciate a good Frank Capra film anymore -- but sometimes trying to live up to the standards of the smart set is too much of a weight; it bears down on you until you forget why you wanted to read/watch/etc. all this "art" in the first place. And is Capra in or out this decade? I can never find out until the film brains have switched back again and I'm stuck with my nose on the outside glass and singing the praises of You Can't Take It with You...

Would it be too depressing to say that all the old joys now leave me cold? Basically, I'm just not digging the snow as much this year. It's been tons of snow off and on all winter and I've been sledding once so far, hurt my back on the first run down, and was poked in the eye by a tree. I promptly went inside afterward. Normally, the thought of going sledding again would be thrilling; it once was in times of yore, like, say, last year. A chance to regain some glimpse of lost days and grasp at evanescent desires, but dang, it feels like such a chore. Am I disappointing some reassuring image of myself?....

I just realized tonight that my parents rarely listen to music. Sure, just like everybody they listen to music when it's attached to pictures on a screen, but I'm constantly listening to music. The soundtrack of my life, she's always a' spinning. If I'm in the car: radio. Walking to and from buildings: the ipod. On a trip, in my room, while reading, while writing, doing chores, trying to relax: Always music. My parents are another thing entirely. They'll put the car stereo on occasionally; sometimes fire up the Everly Bros. or Beethoven when doing house work, but it's rare. I know they like music. My Dad's an Elvis guy to the point where he sings just like him. My Mom eternally blessed me by passing on a love of the Beatles. Where did I come from? How did I create this need to constantly surround myself in sonic, melodic stimuli? It's not genetic. Is it a generational thing? Am I just another disconnected youth, shielding myself from human contact with quarter and half notes? By the way, as I write this: The Killers, "This River is Wild." I can't help myself; I need the music. And I'm just now realizing that I might be a total freak in this regard and should probably stop airing my obsessions out for all to see.

Movies I'm looking forward to:
The Young Victoria
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Prince Caspian
Indiana Jones and the Crystal something or other

View from the Rickshaw of Doom!

2008-01-25T18:18:00.001-08:00
This is from the New York trip. Basically, we had four full grown people and dozens of shopping bags sandwiched into the flimsiest rickshaw ever, and our driver was this adorable little elf of a man, named Brian, who is my New York hero, and he drove us all the way from the Golden Theater to the Empire State Building, in the rain, uphill a lot of the ways, and through the death trap known as Times Square. Seriously, I was freaking out that a car was going to just paste us while we were going through that chaos. Plus, I was in the back so I couldn't see anything but the back of my cousin's head. She's the one who took the picture. It was totally ridiculous and possibly the most fun I had while in New York. All I remember, besides fearing for my life, was laughing hysterically. We were like circus clowns in those little cars, and just when you think another clown can't possibly come out of the car, three more get out. I'm sure the people on the street who saw us pile out of that thing were thinking circus clowns in tiny cars. It was awesome.

"Think It'll Work?

2008-01-19T09:33:00.000-08:00
. . . It would take a miracle!"

Okay, so I kinda think he won't win the nomination because the McCainiac is looking pretty unstoppable at the moment (and I don't really mind that, even though I have some problems with McCain), but I'll admit it: I'm a Mitten! I just really like his optimism and his emphasis on innovation and American ingenuity (as a Michigander, I think announcing your presidential bid at the Henry Ford Museum is a cool way to kick things off). This video, though, is pretty funny whether you're for The Mitt or agin' him (via someone in the comments section at Hot Air):

Romney's only mostly dead. . .

I gotta straighten my face

2008-01-17T18:38:00.000-08:00
Shit-on-a-stick, people! Fifty thousand (57) of you descend on this place thanks to the very cool word from Michael Blowhard and I feel like a nerd-o-rama with my youtube links to kids shows and sophomoric attempts at beat poetry -- I'm really an adult, I swear! Is it too totally creepy to lie about your age? What if you're only doing it to avoid being thought an intellectually lightweight woman-child with the maturity of a twelve year old, instead of for some silly vain superficial physical appearance reason that compels most women to do the age-lying thingy? Should I say I'm seventeen? If I'm only some seventeen year old artistic teenager type, then my writing and theses will have the appearance of wise-beyond-my-yearsness instead of being these pathetic empty noises bleating in the much smarter and more interesting world of my blogging peers. And... that was a badly written sentence. Yeeaugh! I'm just digging the hole deeper, aren't I? Look! Totally rad pictures will distract you!

Bowie!

This blog has no substance whatsoever

2008-01-15T15:17:00.000-08:00

Hem hem!

2008-01-13T20:05:00.000-08:00
Excuse me, but I'd just like to point out my favorite supporting part of the last year and ask why in the heck she's not on anybody's radar (even though I know perfectly well what the answer is, and it has to do with The Major Movie Awards bias towards certain types of films and certain types of parts, and it's the reason why Cate Blanchett could potentially, if the Golden Globes are any indication, get a lead actress nom at the Oscars for a movie everybody (all 24 who saw the thing) thought was pretty shitty while Amy Adams, who created one of the most memorable performances of the year, is relegated to "undeserved long shot" status and derided as not being "Oscar-worthy" since she's in a Disney family film; Julie Andrews' Mary Poppins would've had a hard time in our gloomy, mopey, "adult" times).

I must not tell lies, people, and the truth is this woman is brilliant. For your consideration:

Best Supporting Actress.

2008-01-13T00:22:00.000-08:00
I'm falling out of love with the one-subject blog post -- it's too much damn writing. What, am I in college again?! I'm not doing 'em anymore. Enough already, all you egghead showoff bloggers with your big, long paragraphs of smartness and insight and awesome analysis -- I don't have to play your intellectual games, blogosphere!

I can write short, meaningless, unoriginal little tidbits from my head, filled with canned snark I borrowed from TWoP, and I'm just as valid and cool as you! So keep your really, really brilliant writing and engaging combox discussions, 'cause I got tons of links to youtube and a couple of pretty good Bette Davis quotes from coolquotes.com, and I'm perfectly, totally, really, really fine with that, okay? Stop judging.

Seriously, though, just gimme some short, punchy little blurbs and some links to embarrassing celebrity pictures and that's all I really need from you, blogosphere; links and attitude. It's what the interwebs was made for, and I'm satisfied with that...

Now go watch this!

Old School Nick YouTube Links!

2008-01-11T10:16:00.000-08:00

Farewell, My Little Viking (part I)

An awesome fan video (though, unfortunately, unfinished)

Inside Out Boy!!!

"We've all been Hoovered!"

Weinerville used to come on Sunday afternoons and run for like two hours. I don't remember much about the show except the human heads with little puppet bodies and that they used to show cartoons, and that two people from the audience at the end of the show would be "weinerized" (turned into human-headed little puppets). Old school Nick was weird, basically.

Why I've always remembered this scene from Ren and Stimpy so vividly, I just don't know. But I do.

Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society... The Tale of the Final Wish! (starring Bobcat Goldthwait!)

Even the commercial bumpers were better back then!

Hi-De-Hi-De-Hi-De-Ho!

2008-01-09T20:28:00.000-08:00

New York Journals, part II

2008-01-07T15:51:00.001-08:00
These are my New York journals, my Kerouac-lite prose-poems, in my default shitty style that I revert to when I'm being lazy or just want to write fast, but I'm posting them anyway (as I stated below) 'cause it was my first-ever trip to NYC and I was in love with an image before but now I'm in love with the City and these are my puppy dog love letters and also I'm a narcissistic exhibitionist twit, so nothing goes unposted. I'm hoping my earnestness is enough.

NYC, NY 12/28/07
I never knew there were rocks like these in Central Park, big monsters of granite (?) pushing their way through the grass, attacking the landscape, prehistoric skeletons of the city, like the elemental cousins of the skyscrapers --
Everything in New York is famous,
Everything you do is iconic,
Everything you see on a clear warm December sunny day is a little piece of the miracle of human ingenuity,
and the Dakota is where rich people live and a famous man died and life goes on, NYC is bigger than a moment or a death, it is its own life --
So many people, I can't feel fear, the woman passing by the knock-off stand is my favorite New Yorker yet, she speaks to me so familiar:
"It's kinda cheesy right? But whaddaya want for 20 bucks!"
and she laughs like we didn't just meet 20 seconds ago (and then she's off to do whatever New York thing she's got to do) --
I think I love these people, familiar and open, yet strangers, tough but honest, you couldn't invent them though we try, so different, variety upon variety...
Avenue Q and puppet sex and Trekkie Monster! (and "We're all a little racist")
And the Empire State Building:
Where's the Ape and my Ginger-Rogers-feather-dress and Warren William? Up at the 102 floor we look out and see the world, what else is there than this? A Limo ride through the Lincoln Tunnel.

NYC, NY 12/29/07
I have seen a real New York street, a dingy thing covered with fire escapes, creeping their way up to clearer air -- but who wants that!
I want the crowded streets, the vendors, the smell and salt and t-shirts that hint of gasoline, a fish stand, cheap watches and a thousand hat-and-purse shops, all the same, it's Chinatown swallowing Little Italy --
A small church lit-up with Christmas lights and a Nativity scene, I feel like I just entered The Godfather, part II, and we eat at Angelo's, est. 1902 (or was it 1905? As if it matters, a hundred year old restaurant in Little Italy, NY, NY and I quibble with a few years), and suddenly it's Godfather the first one, waiting for Michael Corleone to come out of the bathroom with a gun, I eat Veal Parmesan and I'm completely content.

On the plane ride back, Simon and Garfunkle trill in my ear, whispering the siren call and nostalgia of the city, and I cry because I don't want to leave, I miss it so much and I haven't even left New Jersey, how can I get back, how can I make that my life?

Suburbtown, MI 10:15 p.m.
Watching the Giants try to spoil New England's perfection, I'm utterly depressed seeing the blue and red and the "NY" and the screaming fans and to know that only a few hours ago I was there, and then they show a shot of the Statue of Liberty and I'm a wreck -- It's all I can do to keep a stream of tears from bursting, I'm already bored with my life and being home, I love my family, I really do, but this place is a drain, it's an exile, (almost), now that I've seen the center of everything, now that I've been to New York. A little melodramatic? I don't care. You didn't just leave the cold, fast City to come home to extended family lumped all over the house, the smell of ham and gingerbread mixed with bad perfume, and the dim yellow lights of lamps reflecting off of chintzy Christmas gold and every TV on. I'm allowed some melodrama.

New York Journals, part I

2008-01-05T15:41:00.000-08:00
These are my New York journals, my Kerouac-lite prose-poems, in my default shitty style that I revert to when I'm being lazy or just want to write fast, but I'm posting them anyway (as I stated below) 'cause it was my first-ever trip to NYC and I was in love with an image before but now I'm in love with the City and these are my puppy dog love letters and also I'm a narcissistic exhibitionist twit, so nothing goes unposted. I'm hoping my earnestness is enough.

New York, NY 12/26/07
Like an outsider, and yet I belonged -- or I wished, at least, or I dreamed, deluded but delirious and HAPPY! stupid grin but who cares! -- it was a crowd at night, and lights, and lights, and lights, all up and alive and I was too, I had finally met the city and mood to match my own where the day starts at Midnight and all is movement, all is tough and mystique, all is lights across the Hudson a vision that's in the frame of every famous movie ever made that skyline, that star-filled-lights-on-black-sticks-that-stick-into-the-air, blacker than the sky, they rise and rise, and me all Midwestern wide-eyed awshucks I've never seen such blackness and buildings and lights -- it's a cliche, I know, but it's like a dream and I can't believe the view from my window in Jersey City. How can I be so at home and yet have it all feel so new? How can I see the Coliseum and Lenin's Tomb and the Bridge of Sighs and yet stand in the tacky, radiant, rushing, brilliant flash of Times Square and cry, a little, out of the corner of my eye, and get a chill? -- How can it be that New York is the greatest city in the world and I'm here?

A dream?
A dream.
Fulfilled.

New York, NY 12/27/07
Subway
Ground Zero
A church yard, cemetery a thousand years old, it seems
A boy, four years old, a headstone
1709
Dead and yet God's Will the faith of our fathers, so seemingly solid but I wonder what doubts entered a weary mother's mind...
St Paul's stands amidst the rubble of the attacks -- the asshats, the jack-offs who did this and for what? -- I love my country so much at this moment and I rejoice in our strength, our humility, and don't laugh, it's true, America is still a shy child in a world of bitter men...
The subway again, and we ride it with apprehensive confidence
Darling I love you!
Park Avenue!
Lexington Avenue!
Fifth Avenue!
The world is contained in this city and I am here and this is all...
The Met is too big to embrace, like a Madison Avenue concoction, like a darling young man, it's the entire sum of perfection, it's the compilation of genius, it's. so. fun. So much stuff!
And Rockefeller Center,
it's the reality of unreality, it's there and it's a picture, it's within reach and it's fake but then I realize it's not, it's there and I'm there and I go to mass in St. Patrick's and I am partaking in the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ and I am here and life, His life, the life of the city and all life all living all reality all truth is here and now I know why writers come to New York City...

12 grand in checking

New Blog!!!!! Again!!!!!

My Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #3. Almost Famous

Song of the Week

A Savage Omission

Shoulda Won the Oscar... It's the song of the week!

A Little Trouble in Big Hollywood

drunk..... drunk?

Song of the Week

The Big Knife

What's going on in my brain

"We love you, Mr. President"

Soddy Odds

No Time for Comedy

Mr. Wu

The bird in the little bird house in my soul failed to soar and I blame America, a.k.a I hate you all

My Dad Is 100 Years Old

Self Titled Album

How to cure writer's paralysis

Tumblr blog updated

The Great Movie Watching Challenge!

A little bit of *meeping* culture

Those who get it will understand

Drunk!d

Whatever happened to the backyard? (this is weak tea poetry)

I own this same zippered sweatshirt

I'm voting the BSG ticket this year

"The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of" has been reborn!

I really don't have an excuse

Writers block means posting something somebody else wrote

Heartache Plane Ride

The New York in the Movies Blog-a-thon (Updated! 2/24/09)

Do you know who the coolest people in L.A. are?

Woody's New York

Coming into Los Angeles...

My Highly Personal Top New York Movie Moments: #1. Big and #2. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

A few of my favorite New Yorkers...

New York Actualities

Movies recently watched

Quote of the Day

World's Greatest

Back home again in Hockey Town

Today was a five movie day

I like New York in June. . . (A New York in the movies blog-a-thon, starting June 29th)

On this date in Beatles recording history...

Most boring leading man ever?

Question:

Quote of the Day

I'm an easy mark, I guess, to be so grateful for centaur star-gazing and Dr. Cornelius, and let's not forget the bear who sucked his paws

Some brief thoughts on Luis Bunuel's "Viridiana," from a Catholic perspective

"I wanna watch Betty Boop!"

It's quarter to three. . .

AFI meme, for procrastinators (which I am and always will be)

The best case ever made to go back to chant and polyphony

Two of my favorite things. . .

Similarities between Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and television's Pushing Daisies

Your Artie, the Strongest Man in the World! Picture of the Day

Drunk

Movies recently watched

The Old School Nick You Probably Don't Remember

Your Artie, the Strongest Man in the World! Picture of the Day

Opening Day!

On this date in Beatles recording history...

Everyone who griped about this year's Oscars had it wrong

People are really creative

My big Shining day, Part II

My big Shining day, Part I

Poetry Slam!

Old School Nick Toons for what ails ya

Why watch old movies?

You Never Give Me Your Money

Movies recently watched

Seasons Readings (this post needed a title so it wouldn't get swallowed up by the other post above it)

Why watch old movies?

This Weekend's Double Feature!

Youtube does the blogging so I don't have to

Drainage!

Mystery!

Time for more shitty writing!

I guess I'll have to start watching it now

A little bit of meeping culture