The International Submarine Blog

Watching, reading, listening ... November 18

2011-11-19T06:59:00.001-08:00

Movie - "Martha Marcy May Marlene" (2011)

Movie - "Sleeping Beauty" (2011)

Completely by accident yesterday I saw two movies that are intimate examinations of young women who, despite (or perhaps because of) their independence and their cold intelligence, are sucked into all-consuming institutions. In "Martha" it's a Catskills Mountain cult and in "Sleeping Beauty" it's a high-end prostitution service.

And I didn't love either one of them, but they both stuck with me in a weird way, particularly "Martha." You really don't fully realize the stakes involved until the end.

---

Went off to the beach last September and completely lost my blogging momentum.

Watching, reading, listening ... September 18-24

2011-09-18T22:01:00.000-07:00

Sept. 18, 2011

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 10 - "Salud" - Wow. This season, which has been my least favorite of the four, is certainly turning around.

Watching, reading, listening ... September 11-17

2011-09-11T08:14:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Sept. 17

Movie - "Magic Trip" (2011)

Movie - "Red State" (2011)

Friday, Sept. 16

Movie - "Drive" (2011) - The European aesthetic of Michael Mann's 1981 debut, "Thief" gets filtered whole-hog through the lens of a bona fide European, Nicolas Winding Refn, the tooth-grinding auteur behind "Bronson" and "Valhalla Rising." It's a whack-job movie, with a pulsing 80s-centric synth soundtrack, some truly syrupy drama, a Melville-ian procedural approach to the underworld and a jaw-dropping collection of violence. Are we supposed to laugh when Ryan Gosling's cheesy satin jacket gets blood-spattered and he continues to wear it? Or when he literally stomps the head off a minor thug? Or when Albert Brooks' homicidal mogul mobster returns a murder weapon to its burnished box full of knives?

I see through the movie's pretense, I anticipated its inspirations, I seriously questioned the logic of the denouement ... and yet I have to say I'll probably pay to see "Drive" again on the big screen within the next week.

Thursday, Sept. 15

TV - "Archer" - Season 3, Episode 1 - "Heart of Archness, Part 1" - Hilariousness.

TV - "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" - Season 7, Episode 1 - "Frank's Pretty Woman" - More hilariousness.

TV - "102 Minutes That Changed America" - Awkward, sensationalistic title aside, this is an absolutely amazing documentary about Sept. 11. Way more nuanced and subtle than standard "History Channel" fare (although that's where it appeared).

The film consists entirely of amateur video shot on 9/11, in New York, from 8:48 to about 10:30 a.m., synched chronologically by timecoding. There's no narration, no interviews, no talking heads and minimal captioning -- you know what happened, anyway.

Even so, the film is harrowing, repulsive, mesmerizing and at times beautiful in a terrible, fiery way.

The tension that grows between the two plane crashes is almost unbearable (all the spectators are aghast ... but you always know that there is so much more awfulness to come). And yet the footage is so captivating and so carefully edited that I actually was surprised when the second attack hit. Then again, we are seeing people fall to their death when that happens....

Wednesday, Sept. 14

Movie - "Meek's Cutoff" (2010)

Tuesday, Sept. 13

Movie - "Our Idiot Brother" (2011)

Monday, Sept. 12

Movie - "Valhalla Rising" (2009) - Second viewing. It was slightly more coherent this time -- not sure if that comes from seeing it again or from watching it at a reasonable hour on a school night.

Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011

An unintentional triple-feature of films that have just one thing at all in common -- they're about extremely angry dudes.

Movie - "Super" (2010) - Wants to stick our noses right up in the mess, the better for us to appreciate the extreme reality of the carnage, but it also wants to say, "Hey, where's your sense of humor?" This is a deeply confused movie, both in its tone and its ideas.

Movie - "Comedian" (2002) - A decent documentary, but eight years after my first viewing the center strikes me as smug rather than breezy. It alternates between super-successful grizzled vet Seinfeld (who talks constantly about how crazy it is that he's back working as a road comic rather than relaxing on the beach) and up-and-coming comic Orny Adams who is never once shown having any kind of fun at all. He would've eventually killed his own career, but this movie did him the favor. Watching somebody with this many self-esteem issues get this kind of hatchet job is like watching someone who's petrified of firearms get shot in the face with a cannon. The resulting movie would be unbearable if Adams wasn't already thoroughly hate-able.

Movie - "Valhalla Rising" (2009) - Apocalypse Now meets ... Medieval Times! Which is not to say it isn't kind of beautiful.

***

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 9 - "Bug"

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 10 - "Larry vs. Michael J. Fox"

Watching, reading, listening ... September 4-10

2011-09-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Sept. 10

Movie - "Contagion" (2011) - "Marion Cotillard is Katy Perry as Lucy Van Pelt...."

Thursday, Sept. 8

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 14 - "New Jersey/Airport" - Steven Wright, F. Murray Abraham, Chris Rock. Rock is extremely good in his short scene, but Abraham gave me some of the biggest laughs of the show, not the least of which was when I realized he was who he was. Also: "That's a bit of none of your business!"

Monday, Sept. 5

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 9 - "Mister Softee" - For me, any episode that features extended Leon Black = instant hilarity.

Movie - "Stake Land" (2010) - I wonder if "Stake Land" was always called "Stake Land" or if the title was changed after production to court comparisons to "Zombieland." The latter had America overrun by zombies and the former has the country teeming with ... vampires who basically act like zombies. Both tell the story of two guys wandering a monster-plagued post-apoc wasteland, with one being a naive kid, and the other a larger-than-life cowboy with a manga-ish flair for violence, fueled by hatred. Both also have scenes in which a body wrapped in a tarp is unceremoniously dropped off a second story balcony. But -- since "Zombieland" was a smart, funny blast and "Stake Land" is a grim, laborious slog -- the comparisons end there.

Maybe if the two main characters were charting the Mason-Dixon line, or surveying the Louisianna Purchase, it would earn the bleak, gruelling world-weariness its characters suffer under during the second half of the film. But they're fleeing cheaply made-up ghouls and a gang of radical Christian cult members who shave their heads and dress in monk robes. So, please.

The movie loses additional points for a voice-over narration that underlines everything you're seeing onscreen, but "Stake Land" actually gains points for having its theatrical release on the very same day as the completely different (though similarly titled) "Skateland," which is hilarious.

Sunday, Sept. 4

TV - "The X-Files" - Season 3, Episode 4 - "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" - Speaking of an episode that is "one of the greats, one of the best of the series, one for the canon," there's this. Which is my favorite X-File.

Closer in spirit to a "Zone," with Peter Boyle as Bruckman, a sad-sack insurance salesman and possessor of a psychic gift with a limited range -- he can only foresee how someone will die. His days of playing the lottery in vain are interrupted when he becomes involved in a serial killer case investigated by Mulder, Scully. The script neatly hurtles its many contrivances by wrapping them around Bruckman's fascination with fate and destiny, chance and coincidence.

The real Clyde Bruckman, it's worth noting, was a successful comedy writer and director (he wrote Buster Keaton's "The General," co-wrote "Sherlock, Jr." and "The Cameraman, worked with The Three Stooges, et many al) but his career was hobbled by alcoholism and shaky reliability, until its notorious end.

From wiki: With nowhere else to turn, the desolate Bruckman borrowed a .45-caliber pistol from Buster Keaton, claiming to need it for a hunting trip. On the afternoon of January 4, 1955, Bruckman parked his car outside a local restaurant, ate a meal he couldn't afford, entered a restroom, and shot himself in the head.

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 8 - "Hermanos" - Honestly, I haven't been crazy about Season 4. So far, it's my least favorite season of the bunch. By far. I've found it slow and needlessly frustrating -- an opinion not borne out by the TV critics I follow each week. But this episode is one of the greats, one of the best of the series, one for the canon.

Ironically, it's the first of the season The A.V. Club has rated below an A-. They gave it a B+. They're completely, utterly wrong.

Watching, reading, listening ... August 28 - September 3

2011-08-28T22:11:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Sept. 3

Movie - "All the Real Girls" (2003)

Friday, Sept. 2

TV - "Childrens Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 14 - "Newsreaders"

Thursday, Sept. 1

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 12 - "Niece" - I thought the season had ended with the hour-long "Duckling," so it was a surprise to flip onto a new episode late Thursday night. I thought the "it's called empathy" exchange with Godfrey was a little heavy-handed and on-the-nose, but other than that ....

TV - "Childrens Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 13 - "Party Down" - Sweet ending.

Tuesday, Aug. 30

Movie - "Jackboots on Whitehall" - Imagine Parker and Stone's "Team America" crossed with "Inglourious Basterds" -- World War II fought by marionettes -- but both previous films set too high a bar for "Jackboots" to clear. The concept is strong, the design is absolutely beautiful ... but the models' faces hardly move (usually just their mouths quiver a little bit) and that completely compromises the movie, gives it a slipshod quality that almost kills it. Admittedly, however, Josef Goebbels, whose face is perpetually frozen in a screech of rage, regardless of the situation, is one of the best jokes of the picture.

Monday, Aug. 29

TV - "Parks and Recreation" - Season 2, Episode 4 and 8 - "Practice Date" and "Ron and Tammy"

Sunday, Aug. 28

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 7 - "Problem Dog"

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 8 - "Car Periscope"

Watching, reading, listening ... August 21-27

2011-08-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Aug. 27

Movie - "Another Earth" (2011)

Thursday, Aug. 25

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 11 - "Duckling"

Wednesday, Aug. 24

TV - "The Larry Sanders Show" - Season 3, Episode 13 - "Doubt of the Benefit"

Tuesday, Aug. 23

TV - "Childrens Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 12 - "The Chet Episode"

Monday, Aug. 22

TV - "True Blood" - Season 4, Episode 9 - "Let's Get Out of Here"

Sunday, Aug. 21

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 6 - "Cornered"

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 7 - "The Bi-Sexual"

Podcast - "The Smartest Man in the World" - McDonalds

Watching, reading, listening ... August 14-20

2011-08-14T09:36:00.001-07:00

Saturday, Aug 20

TV - "True Blood" - Season 4, Episode 7 & 8 - "Cold Grey Light of Dawn" and "Spellbound"

Friday, Aug. 19

TV - "True Blood" - Season 4, Episode 6 - "I Wish I Was the Moon"

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Jimmy Shubert

Thursday, Aug. 18

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 10 - "Halloween/Ellie"

TV - "True Blood" - Season 4, Episode 4 & 5 - "I'm Alive and On Fire" and "Me and the Devil"

Wednesday, Aug. 17

Movie - "Sucker Punch" (2011) - I, admittedly, only watched half of this two-hour movie. And I really don't like to weigh in on something I haven't seen start-to-finish. But I find it unlikely that the second sixty minutes could do anything to reverse the pretty crappy effect of the first sixty. It's just one long wank by a guy with great visual sense, precious little intelligence and apparently no idea how revealing his aesthetic is of the overall weirdness of his brain.

Zack Snyder also isn't aware how transparent his manipulations are -- not since Mary Pickford led a gang of orphans through an alligator-infested swamp in 1926's "Sparrows" has a such a small waif suffered so much in exchange for our empathy. But Snyder queers the deal by taking his downtrodden heroine and fetishizing the holy shit out of her. Not for nothing is she named "Baby Doll" and for every fat, sweaty, eats-with-his-mouth-open would-be rapist she encounters (and it's a lot) there's an equal number of shots of her full, quivering, heavily-glossed lips; her false eyelashes; and her neon cream skin. She's a damsel not just in distress, but also in pigtails, a sailor skirt, stockings and heels.

Also, the fantasy-within-a-fantasy-within-a-fantasy narrative is really just an excuse to play by no storytelling rules at all. Follow me if you can -- she's an orphan who dreams she lives in a brothel and her hooker persona dreams she's a fantasy warrior, but the fact that the movie opens on a theater stage (an admittedly cool effect) means there's a good chance none of any of it is supposed to be for real.

Tuesday, Aug. 16

Music - The artist's name is Gas (actually Wolfgang Voight) and the album is "Nah und fern" and it is my musical obsession of the past week. When you want music to write to and you don't want things like melody or lyrics getting the way of your think-stuff, this is the road to take. Like an Eno soundscape with a lot more texture.

Monday, Aug. 15

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 5 - "Shotgun" - As we approach the halfway point of (what we know now is) the penultimate chapter, this is by far my least favorite season of the series' run. I really wasn't as wowed by the critics were by the season premiere, and each subsequent episode has felt sluggish and anti-climactic. I'm hoping they're just building momentum for the second half.

Also, Gustavo Fring -- fried chicken magnate, methamphetamine kingpin, Volvo owner -- was so much more compelling and enigmatic when we knew so much less about him. Further, I seriously doubt he would've taken the risks that could've come from violently pitting employees against each other in public for such a vague reward.

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 6 - "The Hero"

TV - "Childrens Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 11 - "The Night Shift" - A prime example of one of the most unexpectedly hilarious shows on TV. The standard 11-minute running time doesn't hurt, either.

Sunday, Aug. 14

Movie - "Run Man Run" (1968) - Early morning matinee. Had great potential -- I was particularly charmed when our hero, Cuchino, steals a 20 peso coin, uses it to win a beat, then -- just as it appears he's about to steal more -- secretly repays the stolen money from his winnings.

The basic plot is, essentially, what if Tuco from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" found out about the location of the hidden gold and went to go get it himself. But the story meanders in and out of the lines, the cast becomes too crowded, motivations become questionable and it's soon difficult to understand who's fighting for what.

Podcast - "Tom Rhodes Radio" - Doug Stanhope

Podcast - "The Indoor Kids" - Episode 4 - Todd Levin

Watching, reading, listening ... August 7-13

2011-08-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Aug. 13

Movie - "Cold Weather" (2010) - Well-shot. Charmingly-cast. But glacially-paced ... seemingly edited without any prioritizing at all over what the audience needs to see and doesn't need to see. It's a mystery movie that doesn't even hint that a mystery will enter the story until very nearly the 40 minute mark. Even so, hard to dislike.

TV - "True Blood" - Season 4, Episode 3 - "If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'?"

Podcast - "The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith" - The Art of Adapting Comics to the Screen 2011

Podcast - "Who Charted?" - Paul Scheer - Scheer deftly dissects the essential problem with "The Change-Up" -- When the principals in a body-swap movie are identical except for their marital status, what's the point?

Podcast - "Making It with Riki Lindhome" - Garret Dillahunt

Podcast - "The Nerdist" - Casa de Queso

Friday, Aug. 12

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 9 - "Eddie" - Thursday's other ep, "Come On, God," felt a little gimmicky, so this bleak joint gave the show a good balance for the week. I'm really intrigued by the series' weird skews and lapses of continuity. Louie's mother is depicted in radically different ways, depending on the context. In one ep, his only sibling is a brother, and in other eps he's got sisters. The actor who plays his accountant is clearly a young man in his teens (and was really good, by the way). And in this chapter, the actors who play Louie and Eddie in flashbacks to their 20s really don't look like them; even their heights are reversed.

Doug Stanhope, who played Eddie, was pretty amazing, especially for a performer whom I don't believe has done any dramatic acting (IMDb lists three minor credits).

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - "James Gunn and Steve Agee"

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - "Live in Baltimore - Amy Schumer, Anthony Jeselnik and Graham Elwood" - Everybody onstage except Elwood gets completely hammered, but it's odd -- there's no slurring or overt rowdiness, the principals just lose any and all ability to be particularly funny. Their efforts are largely rewarded with confused silence or ill-advised laughter. Doug prefaces the podcast with an apology-in-advance (a flight layover caused a delay and left the stars and the audience with too much time for pre-show drinks) but after so many good shows, I found this epically bad episode fascinating, just in that it provided a negative against some positives.

Podcast - "The Nerdist" - Mike Birbiglia

Thursday, Aug. 11

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 8 - "Come On, God"

TV - "True Blood" - Season 4, Episode 2 - "You Smell Like Dinner"

Interview - "The Paris Review" - Joseph Heller (1974)

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - "200th Episode - Marc Maron - As Told to Mike Birbiglia"

Wednesday, Aug. 10

TV - "The Larry Sanders Show" - Season 3, Episode 12 - "Larry Loses a Friend"

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Aubrey Plaza

Tuesday, Aug. 9

Movie - "Happiness" (1998) - First viewing since it was at The Grandin on its original release. Still a blunt instrument upside the head, but funnier than I remembered. If you don't mind a comedy that makes you feel like you're draped in wet, prickly wool for two hours.

Podcast - "How Did This Get Made?" - "The Smurfs (2011)"

Monday, Aug. 8

TV - "White Collar" - Pilot

Podcast - "Extra Hot Great" - Episode 48 - "You'll Never Make a Monkey Out of Me"

Podcast - "Nerdist Writers Panel" - Episode 1

Sunday, Aug. 7

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 4 - "Bullet Points"

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 5 - "Vow of Silence"

Movie - "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" (2011) - The first (and only necessary) sign that a holding zoo for primates is going to be The Worst Holding Zoo for Primates in the history of cinema -- It's run by Brian Cox, who tells the owners of a penalized chimpanzee, "Visit anytime. Just call first."

Rare is the big studio blockbuster that, through its story and characterizations, encourages humans to root against their own species. Touches like Cox's hellish zoo, and lead James Franco's constant d-baggery, make this that kind of big studio blockbuster. John Lithgow, Frieda Pinto and the guy who plays the learning disabled zookeeping assistant are pretty much the only characters you don't ache to see trampled and pulled on by apes. The movie satisfies some of those desires with a fair amount of relish.

I honestly had no desire to see this until the reviews came out and reflected surprised admiration from most critics. I might've liked it more had I not been primed to expect something above average ... but then again, I wouldn't have gone otherwise. So there you go.

Watching, reading, listening ... July 31 to August 6

2011-07-31T20:35:00.000-07:00

Saturday, Aug. 6

TV - "Melrose Place" - Season 3, Episode 31 - "The Big Bang Theory"

TV - "The Larry Sanders Show" - Season 3, Episode 9 - "Head Writer Phil"

Podcast - "The Smartest Man in the World" - "Bumps"

Podcast - "The Nerdist" - "The Dork Backward"

Friday, Aug. 5

TV - "Childrens Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 10 - "Munch By Proxy"

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - Aziz Ansari, Ruben Fleischer, Rob Huebel, Paul Scheer.

Thursday, Aug. 4

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 7 - "Oh, Louie/Tickets" - Louis C.K. and Dane Cook share a segment together -- and subject is Cook's real-life alleged theft of Louis' material. It's as if Mia Farrow did a walk-on in a recent Woody Allen movie and they lampooned the Soon-Yi situation. Which is to say: Whose idea was that and why did the other agree to be involved? Especially considering the issue is never fully resolved. I can't tell -- maybe this is more for comedy nerds than regular viewers, but I am, among other things, a comedy nerd and I found the concept, the execution and just the fact that it came about fascinating.

TV - "The Larry Sanders Show" - Season 3, Episode 6 - "Hank's Night in the Sun"

TV - "Wilfred" - Season 1, Episode 4 - "Acceptance" - The series is consistently clever, and frequently touching, but I can't shake the feeling it seems to be going in a circle every week.

Podcast - "Jordan, Jesse GO!" - Episode 186 - "Who Broke My Window?"

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - "San Antonia with Lucas Molandes"

Wednesday, Aug. 3

Movie - "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One" (1968)

TV - "Wilfred" - Season 1, Episode 3 - "Fear"

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - "Andrew Dice Clay/Max Silverstein"

Podcast - "Smoviola" - "The Rocketeer"

Article - "Getting bin Laden" - The New Yorker - Aug. 8, 2011

Tuesday, Aug. 2

TV - "The Larry Sanders Show" - Season 3, Episode 7 & 8 - "Office Romance" and "Mr. Sharon Stone"

Monday, Aug. 1

Concert - Steely Dan

Sunday, July 31

TV - "Childrens Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 9 - "Children's Hospital: A Play in Three Acts"

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 3 - "Open House"

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 4 - "The Smiley Face"

Podcast - "The Smartest Man in the World" - "Beavers"

Watching, reading, listening ... July 24-30

2011-07-24T21:16:00.001-07:00

Saturday, July 30

Movie - "Captain America: The First Avenger" (2011) - Not as blatantly, ridiculously dumb as "Thor," but -- from start-to-finish -- completely synthetic and artificial.

As a fan of "The Rocketeer" I was excited that "Cap" would have the same director, but Joe Johnson brings along absolutely none of the spontaneity, breakneck fun or lurking danger of the former film. "Cap" is "The Rocketeer" completely drained of its essence.

The structure is uncertain, the pacing sloppy, the adventures dull, the logic constantly questionable. This is a movie just going through the motions, but at the same time it feels like a four-hour film trimmed down to two.

Motivations are unclear, questions go unanswered, introductions are set up and then never made. For example: Why have The Howling Commandos appear at all if you're not going to identify them as a unit?

Probably the biggest missed opportunity is the handling of Steve Rogers, who -- thanks to a super-serum and some "Vita-Ray" exposure -- goes from 96 pound F-4 weakling to a strapping, totally cut uber-soldier. His "before" version is whiny, passive aggressive and seems a bit of a masochist (taking brutal beatings from bullies, diving onto runaway grenades); his "after" version never really seems the least bit disoriented, conflicted or even very excited by his transformation. And most importantly we never learn exactly why Rogers was so gung ho to fight in the first place, even though there are countless opportunities for a quick monologue that might explain his passion.

In an effort to seem important, "Captain America" clutters itself with World War II-era iconography, but its "chase-fight-chase-fight-repeat" train of thought comes from a cut-rate videogame.

TV - "Mad Men" - Season 2, Episode 6 - "Maidenform"

TV - "True Blood" - Season 4, Episode 1 - "She's Not There"

Friday, July 29

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - Pat Francis, Gary Lucy and Matt Belknap

Thursday, July 28

TV - "Mad Men" - Season 2, Episode 5 - "The New Girl"

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 6 - "Subway/Pamela" - After last week's intentionally claustrophobic episode, the show comes back with two of the series' better shorts.

TV - "Mad Men" - Season 2, Episode 4 - "Three Sundays"

Podcast - "Who Charted?" - Bob Odenkirk

Wednesday, July 27

TV - "The Larry Sanders Show" - Season 3, Episodes 2 & 3 - "You're Having My Baby" and "Would You Do Me A Favor?"

Podcast - "How Did This Get Made?" - "The Back-Up Plan" - Standard comment: "In that water birth scene, too, while it was funny, I was disturbed by the fact that that woman at one point leaned over, as if to position her ass like a cannon, and shoot the baby out ... it looked like she was pooping out that baby."

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - "Rob Riggle" - The over-enthusiastic cop from "The Hangover"/junior executive from "Step Brothers" was in the Marines and helped clean up Ground Zero for a month after 9/11. Who knew?

Tuesday, July 26

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - "Demetri Martin"

Podcast - "The Smartest Man in the World" - "Domes"

Monday, July 25

Movie - "Step Up 3" (2010) - Seriously. Part old school musical (the chummy heroes are literally dancing to save their home) and part martial arts feud (the villains demand dance satisfaction). Also part lethally bad and part hysterically unintentionally funny. The dance segments, however, are eye-boggling and worth watching on their own. They really make me wish I'd covered my face and snuck off to see this on the big screen, in 3D. Seriously.

It's like the girl twin of "Drumline."

Sunday, July 24

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 2 - "Thirty-Eight Snub"

Movie - "The Harmony Game" (2010)

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 3 - "Palestinian Chicken" - The first two were middling, but this episode -- in terms of hilarity -- is on the level of prime "Arrested Development."

My most anticipated movie of the summer?

2011-07-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

Maybe so ....

Watching, reading, listening ... July 17-23

2011-07-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 23

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - "Tournament of Championships - Paul F. Thompkins, Scott Aukerman, Samm Levine (w/fake Edgar Wright)

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - "T.J. Miller, Pete Holmes, Brandon Walsh"

Podcast - "Breaking Bad Insider" - Episode 4.1

TV - "The Larry Sanders Show" - Season 3, Episode 1 - "Montana"

Friday, July 22

Movie - "Take Me Home Tonight" (2011)

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 5 - "Country Drive"

Thursday, July 21

TV - "The Larry Sanders Show" - Season 3, Episodes 4 and 5 - "The Gift"/"Peoples Choice" - "Peoples Choice" is pretty much hilarious. So is Netflix's scrambling of the order of the episodes.

Wednesday, July 20

Movie - "The Man Who Wasn't There" (2001) - First viewing since it ran in theaters -- I'd forgotten almost all of it. Like most Coen Brothers films, it improves on subsequent viewings. It's better than I remember. Seems less cruel and also less of a gimmick than when I saw it expecting the brothers' usual controlled bursts of activity.

It's also a total Gregg Toland love fest, which is very much a good thing.

Tuesday, July 19

Movie - "The Tall Target" (1951) - In one year, 1950, director Anthony Mann made four films: The crisp Farley Granger noir adventure "Side Street" plus three Westerns, including "Devil's Doorway," the rousing classic "Winchester '73" and the epic, mind-boggling desert Gothic "The Furies."

In 1952, he'd reunite with "Winchester" star James Stewart and proceed into the years of their Technicolor Western partnership with "Bend of the River," "The Naked Spur" (my favorite of the bunch), "The Far Country" and "The Man from Laramie."

But in 1951 he had two projects -- uncredited work on "Quo Vadis," and this little ticking clock thriller. Compared to his best stuff, it feels like a journeyman effort, but that's not to say it doesn't swing like a well-made B movie. Besides, after his output the previous year, he'd earned a little rest.

But while "Target" lacks the momentum of "Side Street," it has a good sense of the politics of the time (in which Tea Partiers might feel right at home) and it borrows one of Hitchcock's most frequent motifs -- a story in which one lone guy, stuck in a crowded public place, tries to stop something terrible from happening while the masses around him not only won't help but often hinder his efforts.

It's set 90 years earlier, on the eve of the Civil War, and for 78 brisk minutes it follows a New York police sergeant who's racing to foil the assassination of not-yet-inaugurated President Abraham Lincoln. And, really, what can you say about a movie from the early fifties in which the name of the guy trying to stop a presidential sniper is ... John Kennedy?

Podcast - "The Indoor Kids" - Episode 1 - Steve Agee

Podcast - "This American Life" - "#339 - Breakup" - At first, I thought the high point of this episode (which focuses on split relationships) was the conversation between Phil Collins and a heartbroken young woman asking advice on writing a torch song.

Then I got to the segment that includes a 1987 interview with a deadly serious (yet also hilarious) 8-year-old girl from Manhattan who wrote a letter to then-mayor Ed Koch to tell him about her parents' divorce. The response she got from Koch's office was both thoughtful and non-obligating, which makes the child's dissatisfaction with it even funnier and more bittersweet. The segment includes a 2007 reunion between Adams and the girl, "now" a 29-year-old elementary school teacher. I was very curious to hear what she sounded like "now" but her voice has filled into the template of a stern adult and it reminded me of the conclusion of the "True Grit" remake when we realize that precocious Mattie's seriousness has only intensified with age and, having ascended past childhood, she doesn't appear to have found much happiness or fulfillment.

Monday, July 18

Movie - "El Topo" (1970)

Movie - "Rango" (2011)

I honestly wasn't trying to line up two extremely odd Westerns in my Netflix DVD queue, but that's the way it worked out. And yet I could -- and later may -- write paragraph after paragraph about the contrasts and parallels between these two films, both of which I found uniquely disturbing on their own. "El Topo" is without a doubt one of the strangest films I've ever seen -- it's in a "what the fuck?" class with "Putney Swope" and "Eraserhead." And speaking of David Lynch, I wonder how many times he's seen "El Topo." Certainly more than once, I would think.

Sunday, July 17

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 4, Episode 1 - "Box Cutter"

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 2 - "The Safe House"

Watching, reading, listening ... July 10-16

2011-07-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 16

Movie - "Red, White & Blue" (2010) - Endlessly humid, hungover and pretty much awful. This Texas psychological thriller offers 70s exploitation aesthetics to spare, but gradually devolves into a deeply ugly and pointless game of leapfrog as three characters trump each other with their capacity to be totally fucked in the head. This is one of those movies in which you see extras in the background and think: They never, ever could've guessed what kind of film they were signing on for when they signed on for it. Who the hell is this movie for, anyway? Other than people who thought "Bug" was just a little too sunny and slapstick.

Movie - "Thick as Thieves" (1999) - Straight-to-cable comic-crime thriller that could easily be mistaken for one of countless too-clever entries in the post-Tarantino glut. But it's actually riffing off Elmore Leonard. Uneven in tone and consisting of scenes that are essentially a series of mismatched parts. Not as clever as it wants to be, and muddled in its geography -- as it bounces around from Miami to Chicago to Detroit ... I often got lost trying to figure out where one of its many characters was in relation to another. Even so ... it's made somewhat worthwhile by its consistently dry humor and a great, eclectic ensemble -- Bruce Greenwood, Andre Braugher, Michael Jai White, Richard Edson, Khandi Alexander, Alec Baldwin in one of his final leading man roles and especially Robert Miano as a quietly practical mobster.

A note: I remember catching this on HBO when it first aired and having the same reaction on my initial viewing, but seeing it again made me curious what else the director had made. I was completely surprised to discover the only other movie he's made he co-wrote with White -- the incredibly awesome "Black Dynamite."

Also: It's a shame the production couldn't afford real music. Baldwin's master thief is supposed to be a connoisseur of vinyl jazz ... but the music he listens to is canned lounge and the album covers he lovingly peruses are obviously cheap mock-ups of Blue Note sides.

Podcast - "The Nerdist" - Episode 106 - "Neil Gaiman"

Friday, July 15

Movie - "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955)

Movie - "Alex Cox on Kiss Me Deadly" - Bluray supplement.

Podcast - "Professor Blastoff" - Episode 11 - "Altered States"

Podcast - "The Sound of Young America" - "Simon Pegg"

Podcast - "How Did This Get Made?" - "Green Lantern" - This is one of the most consistently hilarious podcasts I've listened to. And they seem to me to be equally funny, whether you've actually seen the movie they're talking about or not.

Thursday, July 14

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 4 - "Joan"

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - Tig Notaro, Kyle Dunnigan, David Huntsberger - I tend to like the studio episodes better than the live joints because they sound better and they're more laid back ... but this one ... kind of a snooze.

TV - "Sherlock" - Season 1, Episode 3 - "The Great Game" - Easily the best of the batch, even if the puzzles that comprise most of the story are waaay too complicated to be taken seriously as any kind of reality. You simply can't Encyclopedia Brown the problems Holmes is forced to solve, but that's OK. At least he's not kick-boxing.

Even on a second viewing, the final scene of the finale remains fantastic. A Holmes staple that is finally given a face somehow walks the perfect line between ridiculous and fairly chilling. Bodes extremely well for next season, even if that only turns out to be the resolution of a perfectly good cliffhanger.

Wednesday, July 13

TV - "Parks and Recreation" - Season 2, Episode 2 - "Stakeout"

14 hours in court. Burnt.

Tuesday, July 12

Podcast - "This American Life" - "No. 218 - Act V"

Monday, July 11

Movie - "Just Go With It" (2011) - I am not a knee-jerk Sandler-hater. But this is pretty shitty. So shrill and crass and obsessively madcap that, admittedly, I could not finish it.

Sunday, July 10

Movie - "Beginners" (2010)

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 8, Episode 1 - "The Divorce"

Watching, reading, listening ... July 3-9

2011-07-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 9

Movie - "Horrible Bosses"

TV - "The Benson Interruptions" - Episodes 2, 4 and 6

TV - "Parks and Recreation" - Season 2, Episode 1 - "Pawnee Zoo"

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - "Edgar Wright, Samm Levine, Jordan Brady"

Friday, July 8

TV - "The Sopranos" - Season 2, Episodes 4-6 - "Big Girls Don't Cry," "The Happy Wanderer," "D-Girl."

Thursday, July 7

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Todd Hanson - I feel like Maron's still in sleazebag mode, either before or after his ambush on Nick Thune (or maybe it's just me), but his interview with The Onion head writer Hanson is, nevertheless, a fairly devastating chat about depression and the places it can take you, particularly in the second half. I regret I didn't know Hanson's name prior to this podcast, but his story is one of the more genuinely affecting things I've heard this year.

TV - "Children's Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 5 - "That 70's Episode"

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 3 - "Moving" - "So you have less than 10 times less than one mortgage payment on this house." "But ... what about Obama?"

Wednesday, July 6

Movie - "American: The Bill Hicks Story" (2010)

Podcast - "NPR: All Songs Considered" - "Summer Music Memories"

Tuesday, July 5

Movie - "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" (1970) - Whack.

TV - "The Twilight Zone" - Season 1, Episode 2 - "One for the Angels"

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Nick Thune - This is the first episode in which I actually felt like Maron's picking on someone. Didn't feel that way about the Mencia interview. Definitely didn't feel that way about the Gallagher or Dane Cook interviews. But with this one ... Maron brings up Thune's beliefs and background as a Christian, and proceeds to grill him about it for the better part of an hour. You can practically hear his hands going over the surface, picking for cracks. Thune -- whose name I knew, but whom I've never heard do comedy -- is polite and open, but it's clear he isn't expecting the subject to be discussed at such length and he's obviously intimidated. I understand Maron's curiosity and his obligation to give meaty interviews ... and I'm not particularly religious ... but it felt like a bait-and-switch. He's effectively outing him in front of an aggressively secular audience, forcing him to make good on his faith in a way that's essentially public performance. Only Thune's honest transparency prevents this from being kind of disgusting.

Monday, July 4

Too busy for fun.

Sunday, July 3

Movie - "The Aviator" (2004) - Seven years and multiple viewings later, I still don't really know how I feel about this film. As a Hughes buff, I'm happy to see the story depicted on such a grand, epic scale ... but at the same time I don't feel it's successful overall. It's heavy-handed, relentless, gorgeous, as extravagant as its subject and frequently amazing (particularly with its strange color schemes and blue golf courses, and that spectacular Beverly Hills plane flight/crash).

Despite all that, though, it's my go-to movie when I'm holed-up at home on a Sunday afternoon and feel like subjecting myself to a lavish torture chamber.

Movie - "The Last International Playboy" (2008) - Beautifully shot and exceptionally well-cast, particularly in terms of beautiful women, but dumber than a post. Also the DVD has compressed the aspect ratio and distorted the image somewhat.

Watching, reading, listening ... June 26 to July 2

2011-06-26T10:58:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 2

TV - "Wilfred" - Season 1, Episode 2 - "Trust"

Movie - "The Thing From Another World" (1951)

Podcast - "KCRW's The Treatment" - Kevin Smith

Movie - "Tales from the Future" (The Making of Back to the Future) - According to the documentary, Universal Studios president Sid Sheinberg loved everything about "Back to the Future" ... except the title. He just didn't understand the contrast of forward and reverse, and his one request was that the producers should change the name. His suggestion: "Spaceman from Pluto." It actually has a loose connection to the story -- it's a way-too-obscure reference to the comic book held by the Lone Pine farmer's son when Marty crashes through the barn -- but it also sucked balls.

Friday, July 1

TV - "Children's Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 5 - "Nip/Tug"

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - Thomas Lennon, Robert Ben Garant and Samm Levine

Podcast - "Filmspotting" - Episode #353

Podcast - "Sound Opinions" - Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Christopher Titus

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Larry Miller

Podcast - Multiple back episodes of "Film Threat Podcast"

Re-watched this week's "Louie."

Thursday, June 30

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 2 - "Bummer/Blueberries"

Wednesday, June 29

Movie - "Catfish" (2010)

Tuesday, June 28

Sad day.

TV - "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - Season 7, Episode 1 - "Funkhouser's Crazy Sister"

Monday, June 27

TV - "Twin Peaks" - Season 1, Episode 3

Sunday, June 26

Movie - "The Tree of Life" (2011)

TV - "Children's Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 4 - "Home is Where the Hospital Is"

Movie - "The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark"

TV - "Children's Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 3 - "The Black Doctor"

Watching, reading, listening ... June 19-25

2011-06-19T09:11:00.001-07:00

Saturday, June 25

Movie - "The Trip" (2010)

TV - "Wilfred" (Australian version) - Episode 1 - "There is a Dog"

Friday, June 24

TV - "Louie" - Season 2, Episode 1 - "Pregnant" - Kind of beautiful.

TV - "Wilfred" - Pilot - Beautiful.

Thursday, June 23

Movie - "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980)

Tuesday, June 21

Read - "Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!" by Robert Ben Garant & Tom Lennon

Monday, June 20

TV - "Game of Thrones" - Season 1, Episode 10 - "Fire & Blood" - A fantastic finale. At first I thought it was falling prey to the typical HBO curse (blow your wad in the penultimate episode, then use the final ep to set the table for the next season). But between the hatchlings, the prospect of Tyrion verbally sparring with Littlefinger when he reaches Kings Landing, and the rousing start to the mission beyond the wall ... it's a fairly opulent table that's being set. I'm completely down for next season.

Sunday, June 19

Movie - "The Man Who Would Be King" (1975) - I've always found John Huston's movies have a formality in their storytelling and in their presentation that drains them of their potential for any kind of fun at all. From "The Maltese Falcon" to "Prizzi's Honor," each of his scenes bear a stiff stateliness. You can hear Huston dutifully checking off each measured narrative requirement. "...King" is no exception to that rule, and while I enjoyed the easy rapport between Sean Connery and Michael Caine, for the first hour I felt the movie had been largely overrated by its fans. But the yarn takes a nice turn when Connery's character -- mistaken for a God, and promptly crowned king by the people of a small Middle Eastern country -- starts to believe his hype, and comes to value power and position over the quick fortune he and his partner initially sought. The ending is unexpectedly chilling.

Podcast - "This American Life" - Episode #393 - "Infidelity"

Watching, reading, listening ... June 12-18

2011-06-12T14:25:00.000-07:00

Saturday, June 18

Movie - "The Knack ... and How To Get It" (1965)

Movie - "Jimi Hendrix" (1973)

Movie - "RoboCop" (1987)

Podcast - "The Smartest Man in the World" - "Pages"

Friday, June 17

Movie - "Jackass: 3.5" (2011) - Johnny Knoxville's temples are now grey. But so are mine.

Thursday, June 16

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Jill Soloway

Podcast - "Fresh Air" - Stephen Colbert/"The Trip"

Wednesday, June 15

TV - "How I Met Your Mother" - Season 4, Episodes 1-14 - Editor's note -- Kind of a cheat because I didn't actually watch all of these today, but this is the easiest way to document it. My ritual this week has been to go to bed about midnight and watch two or three episodes until I'm tired enough to sleep. Although last night I watched four eps, including #9, "The Naked Man," which is the highlight of the first half of the season -- a season that really isn't hitting the heights of the first three. This is not a great show (I get tired of the gooey-ness between Marshall and Lilly [Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan] and the Charlie Brown-ish-ness of Ted [Josh Radnor], and the lecherousness of Barney [Neil Patrick Harris] is, by this point, wearing a bit thin). But I do like the way the creators inject a standard three-camera sitcom with narrative twists, recurring jokes, and the flashbacks and flashfowards that often fill in what I thought were plot holes. Even and all, it's a fair enough way to fall asleep. Especially considering that, on DVD, half-hour sitcoms are an easily digestible 21 minutes long.

Book - "Life" by Keith Richards. Reading in fits and starts, particularly during the late night hours when I can't fall asleep.

Tuesday, June 14

TV - "The Sarah Silverman Program" - Season 1, Episode 3 - "Positively Negative"

Monday, June 13

TV - "Game of Thrones" - Season 1, Episode 9 - "Baelor" - I quote a key scene from "Freddy Got Fingered" : "I wasn't expecting that to happen!" Um. Holy shit. Holy shit.

Sunday, June 12

TV - "McEnroe/Borg - Fire and Ice" (2011) - Short, tight, fascinating HBO Sports documentary.

Friday to Sunday, June 10-12 (out-of-town weekend)

Movie - "Midnight in Paris" (2011)

Movie - "When We Were Kings" (1996) - I've seen this, too, a dozen times over the past 15 years, I really like it. But my most recent viewing dispelled my notion that it's a perfect documentary (it could easily be a sharp hour-long affair, rather than 84 minutes) and having read Norman Mailer's book about the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, I was curious why the producers didn't talk to Hunter Thompson (who covered "The Rumble in the Jungle" for Rolling Stone magazine) or whether they did and he offered no coherent insights ....

Movie - "Super 8" (2011) - "Super 8" is to late 70s/early 80s Steven Spielberg fare what the Black Crowes are to Altamont-era Rolling Stones, or what the first Lenny Kravitz album is to "Magical Mystery Tour"-era Beatles. Which is to say, hugely influenced by it. But when a movie owes as much as "Super 8" does to other artistic creations ... can it really be considered its own thing? Critics were saying that after "Mission: Impossible III" and the recently rebooted "Star Trek" movie, J.J. Abrams was finally attempting something that wasn't a remake. But both "M:I3" and "Star Trek" took something old and made it wildly new (I'm an enthusiastic fan of both of those films), but "Super 8" is so entirely beholden to "Jaws," "Close Encounters...," "The Goonies," "Gremlins" and "Amazing Stories" that it feels like a colossal step backward for Abrams. The child actors are superb ... but this is a movie so busy spinning plates and covering bases that I will almost certainly never watch again. But I've seen "Jaws" and "Close Encounters" a dozen times or more and will probably see 'em again before the year is out.

Rhetorical and somewhat spoilerific "Super 8" question, so don't read this if you haven't seen the movie: Was it ever established whether or not the shipwrecked fugitive alien was actually eating people? I'm fairly certain he was. And I liked that, because the entire time the movie was teasing me with vague appearances by him, I was dreading that when we finally met the sucker face-to-face, he'd be some big-eyed, round-mouthed sweetheart.

TV - "Twin Peaks"(1990) - Season 1, Episode 2

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - 6/10/11

Watching, reading, listening ... June 5-11

2011-06-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 9

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 3, episode 6 - "Sunset" - On blu ray, w/commentary. The subsequent episode, "One Minute," got most of the hype because of its (admittedly great) climax. But "Sunset" is the best hour of TV since Lost's Season 4 ep, "The Constant," which is one of the best hours of TV ever.

Wednesday, June 8

Movie - "True Grit" (2010)

TV - "Breaking Bad" - Season 3, episode 13 - "Full Measure" - On blu ray, w/commentary

Tuesday, June 7

TV - "Twin Peaks" (1990) - Pilot - Jeez, louise, there was a time, back when I was 20, when I could convince myself Angelo Badalementi's score wasn't annoying as fuck. That time has passed.

In other news, the exchange, "Could you leave us please?" "Jim," as well as "Diane, I am holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies" may be the funniest lines ever uttered on a TV show.

Monday, June 6

Movie - "Bobby Fischer Against the World" (2011) - Portrait of the artist as a complete pain-in-the-ass. Fascinating, I thought, but marred somewhat by a) the deeply sad, infinitely frustrating nature of the subject and b) the tremendously stock nature of the rock music used -- "Bang a Gong (Get it On)," "Rock 'n' Roll Part 2," "Shaft," "Green Onions." Seriously? No "Sound of Silence" or "Born to be Wild"? The first is unavoidable, it's part of the point, and the second just seems sloppy.

TV - "Game of Thrones" - Season 1, Episode 8 - "The Pointy End"

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Brian Posehn

Read - "Badlands: An Oral History" - GQ online

Sunday, June 5

Movie - "Pusher" (1996) - The most incompetent street thug in Denmark has a really bad week. Frank, as played by Kim Bodnia, has a tough guy's baby face (he reminds me of a pre-meltdown Tom Sizemore) that initially masks his character's ruthless self-centered-ness. That facade falls away over the course of the story, which plays a little like an early version of the Grand Theft Auto games. I hadn't heard about this movie until I started getting into director Nicolas Winding Refn joints. Was surprised to see it was more than 15 years old, and tried to view it from an "immediately post-Tarantino," "immediately post-"Clerks," pre-Trainspotting perspective.

TV - "Children's Hospital" - Season 3, Episode 1 - "Run, Dr. Lola Sprat, Run"

Movie - "Knight and Day" (2010) - Perfectly passable "Sunday afternoon on HBO" fare, and double-point score for you if you're one of those moviegoers who think the typical rom-com doesn't have a high-enough body count. Odd point: There is a character named Knight (Cruise) but not one named Day.

Podcast - "Sound Opinions" - "Gil-Scott Heron, Bob Dylan Part 3, My Morning Jacket" - I walked five miles in the sun today, much of which while listening to this. The podcast has been profiling three loose segments of Dylan's career -- folkie; beat poet; and everything else -- and oddly enough the final "everything else" section (which isn't my preferred area of Dylan-ology) turned out to be the best episode.

TV- "Love Bites" - Big, bright, very-HD anthology comedy, with a uniformly attractive cast, that attempts to channel sassy "Sex and the City"-esque storylines into 18 minute short films. If I was a big time TV executive, I would've totally greenlit this series, because it's a cool idea -- a throwback to "Love, American Style" that's so old it seems new. Unfortunately, if I were the big time TV executive who greenlit this series, I would've made the creators miserable in an attempt to kill the gooey tone, which is so bright and bubbly it comes off as completely disingenuous. Love stories drained of any hint of pessimism are not love stories that can be taken seriously, so they shouldn't be told. Also, two of the tales end with characters telling truths ("I lost my job," "I am not a virgin") they should've spit out 17 minutes earlier.

Watching, reading, listening ... May 29-June 4

2011-05-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

Saturday, June 4

Movie - "The Fighter" (2010) - Second viewing. It seems tighter and more focused than I remember from the first time, and the seven sisters (surprisingly) seem less cartoonish than I first thought. Being braced for Christian Bale's big, cuckoo clock performance helped me appreciate what Wahlberg is doing. His Micky Ward is doe-eyed and sheepish on the level of Elisha Cook, Jr., I now realize.

-- Also: On first viewing, I completely missed director David O. Russell's cameo, as a TV watching prisoner who really seems to be enjoying Dicky's ill-fated HBO documentary appearance.

Podcast - "KCRW's The Treatment" - Todd Phillips

Podcast - "American Film Institute: David Cronenberg/'The Fly'" - This interview unfortunately largely concerns an operatic version of the "The Fly," rather than the 1986 film (which remains the most chaotic and hilarious theatrical screening I ever attended). The one detail that really stands out -- in the years before he made "The Fly," Cronenberg was working on a failed version of "Total Recall" to star a then-at-his-peak William Hurt. I actually really like the Schwarzenegger/Verhoeven version, but man I would've loved to see the Cronenberg/Hurt take.

Friday, June 3

Movie - "X-Men: First Class" (2011) - Occasionally fun, but (like most X-Men movies) too crowded with heroes, too devoted to scenes involving laser beams and sonic booms. The film gets a big boost from its period setting, its Cold War context, and Jennifer Lawrence (who is like a big, tall, sexy glass of cold milk). January Jones looks great, too ... but her character and her portrayal are ultimately ridiculous -- how is it possible for an actress to wear literally nothing but lingerie start-to-finish, yet still seem shy and disconnected? The best parts involve the always fine Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy (surprisingly spry here, despite constantly being required to touch his index finger to his temple) as they engage in intrigue and mutant recruitment.

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - Kevin Pollak, Ali Nejad, Samm Levine

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - Randy Newman

Podcast - "Sound Opinions" - Mike Watt, "Double Nickels on the Dime"

Podcast - "All Songs Considered" - Brian Eno plays DJ

Wednesday and Thursday, June 1 and 2

Nothing but work.

Tuesday, May 31

Movie - "The Loss of Nameless Things" (2006) - Solid documentary about a fascinating subject -- playwright Oakley Hall III.

Part Sam Shepard, part Orson Welles, part Jim Morrison-minus-the-bullshit, he was writing and staging daring (reportedly amazing) plays with his own theater company in upstate New York during the 1970s, until a devastating head injury reorganized his face and scrambled his mind (an interview subject paraphrases a doctor's claim the accident essentially lobotomized him). What happens when a talented and charismatic figure, touched by apparent genius, is suddenly struck down and loses all but everything ... yet doesn't die?

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Maron" - Dan Harmon

Saturday/Sunday, May 28/29

TV - "Game of Thrones" - Season 1, Episode 7 - "You Win or You Die"

Movie - "No Strings Attached" (2011) - This movie might've been infinitely better if they'd cast, say, Mila Kunis instead of Portman and ... maybe Justin Timberlake instead of Kutcher. If only .... Not without merits, specifically Kevin Kline as an aging lothario. The story completely throws Lake Bell's likeable-if-unlikely character right out the window at the end.

Movie - "All Good Things" (2010) - Murder. Money. Mayhem. Surprisingly dull.

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - James Ellroy

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - Stephen King

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - Roger Waters

Watching, reading, listening ... May 22-28

2011-05-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

Saturday, May 28

Podcast - "Doug Loves Movies" - 5/27/11

Podcast - "Slate Culture Gabfest" - "The Edge of Glory ...." I stopped listening to the Gabfest regularly a few months ago, largely turned off by the casual arrogance and dismissive condescension of co-host Stephen Metcalf. He's a sharp guy, but frequently a dick. So I particularly enjoyed hearing him deride Bob Dylan's later work and get instantly and effectively called out on it by guest host Jody Rosen. Rosen had just finished an authoritative critique of the new Lady Gaga album, but switched into Dylan-mode on a dime and quickly got Metcalf to admit he couldn't name a single song on the past few Dylan albums. Instead, Metfcalf sputtered, back-pedaled, tried to shoot at easier targets and hid behind bad jokes and fake chuckles. I'm not even a particularly big fan of the albums ("Love and Theft," "World Gone Wrong," et al) that are supposed to be evidence of Dylan's ongoing genius, but I do enjoy hearing an annoying critic get his ass handed to him in a musicology fencing match.

Podcast - Filmspotting #348 - Hangover 2/Bridesmaids/Raunchy Comedies

Friday, May 27

Read - The New Yorker - "Just Write It" - Amusing piece on how some fans of uber-popular author George R.R. Martin have turned on him because he's not producing books fast enough.

TV - "The Sarah Silverman Program" - Season 1, Episode 2 - "Humanitarian of the Year"

TV - "Archer" - Season 2, Episode 2 - "Pipeline Fever"

TV - "Archer" - Season 2, Episode 1 - "Swiss Miss"

Thursday, May 26

Movie - "Making Taxi Driver"

Short Film - "Bitch" (2007)

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - David Suchet

Wednesday, May 25

Movie - "Daydream Nation" (2010)

Tuesday, May 24

TV - "Game of Thrones" - Season 1, Episode 6 - "A Golden Crown" -- My least favorite character makes an absolutely amazing exit. And one of my new favorite characters -- Bronn, the armor-less, street-fighting knight -- makes a kick-ass entrance.

Podcast - "The Nerdist" - Patton Oswalt

Monday, May 23

Movie - "The American" (2010)

Podcast - "WTF with Marc Marcon" - Garry Shandling

Sunday, May 22

Movie - "Un Flic" (1972) - (aka "A Cop," aka "Dirty Money") . Jean-Pierre Melville. Catherine Deneuve. Alain Delon. The seeds of lots of Michael Mann and John Woo. Even a piece of "Bladerunner" in there. Plus some hilarious miniature trains and helicopters.

Movie - "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" (2010) - Third viewing. An underrated gem, should've been Cera's defense against oft-compared Eisenberg's turn in "The Social Network," but (marketing and budgetary snafus aside) the fatal factor* is that, as alluring as Mary Elizabeth Winstead is, her Ramona and Pilgrim have zero chemistry. Like, none. She could be his sister. In fact, he has a better, flirtier rapport with Anna Kendrick ... who actually does play his sister. Other than that, though, it's smooth, witty fun.

* Other fatal flaw -- Kieran Kulkin, whose ease and good humor repeatedly recalls Robert Downey, Jr., is a far more interesting character than the protagonist.

Watching, reading, listening ... May 15-21

2011-05-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

Saturday, May 21

Movie - "Night Train to Munich" (1940)

Early morning re-watch, "Night Train" is a curious, cool little movie. British secret service agent Gus Bennett (Rex Harrison) breezes into Nazi Berlin, disguised as an SS officer, to rescue an absent-minded inventor and his dishy daughter. Carol Reed -- seven and eight years before he directed "The Fallen Idol" and "The Third Man" -- hurtles the story forward with wit and confidence, but there's dread and menace here, too. The movie was shot during the first year of World War II (before the United States had been persuaded to participate) and the movie's spark is in how it balances a sense of swashbuckling fun with the awareness that terrible things were afoot and about to get worse.

Harrison's jaunty spy, who doubles as an undercover singer-songwriter and sheet music salesman, is hilariously awesome. Glorious basterd.

Short film - "Successful Alcoholics" (2010)

TV - "Game of Thrones" - Season 1, Episode 5 - "The Wolf and the Lion" Lots of violence. The story expands, somewhat. Dinklage rules, he truly does.

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - Nick Hornby

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - Jeremy Clarkson

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - Sir Christopher Frayling

Podcast - "Desert Island Discs" - Steve Coogan

Podcast - "Filmspotting #347" - Top Five Revisionist Westerns

Friday, May 20

TV - Game of Thrones - Season 1, Episode 4 - "Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things"

Podcast - The Benson Interruptions - Burbank

Movie - "Worth Winning" (1989) - Why did I watch this? I have absolutely no idea -- it was late and I was tired, got pulled in. I also vaguely remember seeing this on a date that went pretty well during college.

Smug, smarmy and over-decorated "romantic" comedy from the first Bush administration. A vain, can't-lose weatherman (Mark Harmon, whose character always wears a flower in his lapel [eww] and who talks to the camera like a corrupt Ferris Bueller) makes bet w/ghoulish friends that he can get engaged to three women in three months -- and guess what happens by the end. Everyone dies in a fire. Not really, but you can tell the screenplay by Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott probably read great on paper (it actually has some of the rhythms and asides of 30's screwball) but it's smothered by a gross glossiness and a sour aftertaste. Helped along greatly by Madeleine Stowe, who at 31 resembled sculpture. Her character, a wacky avant garde pianist, produces music that sounds like soft jazz and complains about men who brag about owning a VCR. Heh!

Thursday, May, 19, 2011

Movie - "Blue Valentine" (2010) - Through alternating chapters we see a couple (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling) during both the beginning and the end of its relationship. Gosling acts up a storm, but his latter-self is such a broad, balding boob in unrealistically ugly glasses (given to brain-damaged tantrums and prone to bellowing the same sentence over and over and over and over) that I was constantly asking myself, "Would the young him really turn into the old him? Was there a massive head trauma, during the intervening years, that we weren't shown?" Williams' character's transformation into a perpetually unamused ice queen seems moderate by comparison.

As a result, the "before" scenes have a lot more charm, but eventually they're just as synthetic and contrived. The movie looks great (shot by Andrij Parekh, who photographed "Half Nelson" and a really fine documentary about Chuck Connelly) and it has a unique & compelling score by Grizzly Bear, but the film just doesn't realize the "realism" it's trying to shovel actually came from an overpriced vintage boutique.

Watch it on a double-bill with "Revolutionary Road" next time you never want to fall in love again, with movies or with other people.

Wednesday, May 18

"Making Somewhere" - Loosely structured "making of" doc. In some ways better than the movie it's about.

Tuesday, May 17

Movie - "Somewhere" (2010) - Best Bret Easton Ellis adaptation ever filmed, despite the fact that it's not based on any of his actual books. Unfortunately it's ultimately not very good. But it does have one of the greatest scenes of the past year, a hilariously hot sequence involving, among other things, tennis racquets.

Monday, May 16

TV - Re-watched the first three episodes of "Game of Thrones." I'm not a fan of swords and sorcery, but I do dig me some Peter Dinklage and I also appreciate that the characters and story aren't spoon-fed to the viewer. It's not rocket science, but it's dense and you have to separate the information that's there from the plot points that pay-off later, like time release capsules. Hate to use the phrase, but "Game" ... rewards repeat viewings.

Sunday, May 15

Movie - "Lost in Translation" (2003)

TV - Game of Thrones - Season One, Episode Three - "Lord Snow"

Watching, reading, listening ... May 8-14

2011-05-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

Saturday, May 14

TV - "Game of Thrones" - Season One, Episode Two, "The Kingsroad"

TV - "Game of Thrones" - Season One, Episode One, "Winter is Coming"

Podcast - "Filmspotting #346 - The Top Films of 1995, Thor, Strongman"

Podcast - "Slate Spoiler Special - Bridesmaids"

Friday, May 13

Movie - "Thor" - Dumb. Really, really dumb. No fun, either.

Movie - "Bridesmaids"

Thursday, May 12

Movie - "Death Proof" (2007)

Tuesday, May 10

Movie - "Kill Bill vol. 2" (2004)

Monday, May 9

TV - "60 Minutes" - Obama discusses the raid on bin Laden's compound - Watched a second time for comprehension. The timeline of that weekend was pretty amazing -- Obama visited storm damaged sites, watched the space shuttle take off, spoke at a graduation, crushed at the press club dinner and then went into the situation room. Who has a nervous system that can handle a chain of events like that? He completely ducked out on the question of whether he told Michelle about the plan by talking so long about secrecy that he drove the answer into the first-quarter commercial break.

Podcast - New York Times Review of Books - "Robert Gottlieb on Charles Dickens"

Sunday, May 8

Podcast - "The Nerdist" - "Dana DeArmond"

Podcast - "Fresh Air" - "The Beastie Boys"

Podcast - "The Smartest Man in the World" - "Antipodes"

TV - "The Amazing Race" - Season finale, "This is Where it Ends."

TV - "60 Minutes" - Obama discusses the raid on bin Laden's compound

TV - "The Twilight Zone" - Season 1, Episode 13 - "Four of Us Are Dying."

Read - New York Times Op Ed - "Killing Evil Doesn't Make Us Evil" by Maureen Dowd.

Movie - "Inglourious Basterds" (2009) Already a big fan. Saw this three times in the theater. Once on DVD. Once on cable while at the beach last summer. I put on the blu ray late last night to check it out and ended up watching the whole thing. Rich, profane, visually cool, thoroughly satisfying.

Watching, reading, listening ... May 1-7

2011-05-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

I've decided to try and catalog some of the things I see, watch, read and listen to. When it comes to movies and TV shows, unless noted, I will only list titles I watched start to finish. Stuff glimpsed in passing and while flipping doesn't count ....

Saturday, May 7:

Movie - "Blow Out" (1981)

Friday, May 6:

Movie - "Murder a la Mod" (1967) - Deeper into DePalma.

Podcast - All Songs Considered - "Splitsville: Breaking Up With Your Favorite Band"

Podcast - Marc Maron/WTF - "Sue Costello"

Podcast - Filmspotting - #345

Thursday, May 5:

Video - Brian DePalma, interviewed by Noah Baumbach. Supplement on "Blow Out," Criterion Collection edition.

Movie - "Hereafter" (2010) - Some occasionally clunky dialogue and awkward moments (what the hell kind of night school cooking class coerces students to participate in flirty/sexy blindfolded tasting exercises?) don't hobble this sprawling, somber mosaic about the work of getting through life while facing both loss and the inevitability of death. The film reaches high for answers it can't possibly deliver but, still, reach high it does, to satisfying effect. Had I not known this was a Clint Eastwood joint beforehand, I never would've guessed (although the spare guitar recalls the theme from "Unforgiven"). Cecile de France, as one of the leads, is gorgeous to the point of special effects, and the opening scene -- an astonishing depiction of a tsunami that struck Indonesia in 2004 -- is one of the most moving, most harrowing sequences of the past year, amazingly executed.

Read: "Magnificent Obsession," Vanity Fair, January 2002: Lengthy but fascinating magazine piece on the history of "The Magnificent Ambersons" that I put a Post-It on (nine years ago???) and then completely forgot about until a recent "Ambersons" viewing.

Wednesday, May 4:

Movie - "Kill the Moonlight" (1994)

TV - "The Rockford Files" - Season One, Episode 15 - "Sleight of Hand" (1975)

Movie - "Monsters" (2010) - I actually saw this early last month. Watched the last seven or eight minutes again. The finale is really unusual, coming as it does after such a long, deliberate movie. Is it ridiculous or awesome? I still can't tell, though I lean toward the latter.

Reading: Updated accounts of the assassination of bin Laden. I love the revisions. The most surprising thing I read today was that unless the SEAL team, when it raided his bedroom, could definitively tell that he didn't have a weapon on his body -- like a grenade or an exploding codpiece -- they were shooting to kill. So, apparently, by that explanation, if he'd slept in the nude, he'd still be alive. Or were they counting his beard as a sufficient visual obstruction? I'd love to know what the other rules and regulations were.

Tuesday, May 3:

Movie - "Leaves of Grass" - Stacking the plates and glasses of broad comedy, culture clash, intellectual and existential concerns, and extreme violence onto a single tray is a delicate balance. Tim Blake Nelson's shaggy dog caper spills them all on the dining room floor. He's clearly shooting for the humor, dread and sudden jolts of the Coen Brothers (right down to the extremely Carter Burwell-esque score) , but like a fair number of the characters in this film, his aim is askew. Edward Norton plays twin brothers who are polar opposites -- a feat that once again proves dual roles are rarely a good idea.

Monday, May 2:

TV - "The Killing" - "Pilot" - I've heard it gets better. But right now it feels like "Twin Peaks" with twice the hysterics, more rain and none of the fun or intrigue. The climax -- with grieving parents screaming at different people who are unable hear them (for, like, five straight minutes before finally collapsing onto the ground) -- felt laughably overwrought.

TV - "How I Met Your Mother" - "The Perfect Cocktail" Haven't seen it since season four. Just dropped in to see what's changed. Some laughs, but it ain't what it used to be. Who's the mom, again?

Podcast - "The Nerdist" - "Damon Lindeloff" Pretty cool chat.

Sunday, May 1:

Movie - "Raising Cain" (1992) - The point at which Brian DePalma's cinematic gymnastics actually start to parody the moves made in his early classics. He wants this to be the ultimate head game but it's really just him chowing down on his own tail (with ample chewing assistance by John Lithgow).

Movie - "Bright Lights, Big City" (1988) - Stripped of the author's light, spicy prose, and left with just the thin story and arch dialogue, Jay McInerney's go-go 80's New York novelette falls flat. Michael J. Fox is earnest but miscast as an irresponsible fact-checker for a version of The New Yorker. Director James Bridges tackled coked-up yuppie disillusion with infinitely more heft in his film "Mike's Murder" four years earlier. "Lights" has aged better than "St. Elmo's Fire" or "About Last Night..." Although Fox's character decides to stop having fun in the film's last scene, a half-assed happy ending in which the protagonist gazes optimistically at the World Trade Center towers in the distance.

Movie - "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942) - Snapshots of a wealthy but stubborn family, across many decades. They slowly turns to dust as the world changes around them. Its nostalgia and wariness are amplified by the fact that the movie was made and released during the first year of U.S. involvement in World War II. A bit stifling (intentionally so), but often heartbreaking. Tarnished by a studio-mandated tacked-on happy ending ("He's going to be allll right!") and boggled considerably by the studio-mandated loss of more than 30 minutes... but still great.

Movie - "The Way Back" (2010) - Cold weather. The story -- about a half-dozen escapees from a Siberian prison on a Cacciatto-esque hike to someplace ... anyplace that will have them (China? India?) somehow shirks Peter Weir's usual ability to make the simple things fascinating. He packs infinitely more heart and detail into the brisk nature hike in "Master and Commander" than he does into all 133 minutes of this. At various points, I wasn't even sure how many guys were still on the trek.

TV - "The Amazing Race" - "Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen" At the last minute -- with Zev and Justin desperately trying to find the pit stop before Kent and Vyxin's 30 minute penalty expired -- I thought the Race editors were just screwing with my head. But they weren't and my least favorite team finally made an overdue exit. Which seemed like the big vanquish of the night until ...

TV - "Obama Press Conference/Osama bin Laden gunned down in Abbottabad."

My media obsessions April 24-30

2011-04-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

I've decided to try and catalog some of the things I see, watch, read and listen to. When it comes to movies and TV shows, I will only list titles I watched start to finish. Stuff glimpsed in passing and while flipping doesn't count ....

4/30 - Podcast: "Doug Loves Movies April 29, 2011"

4/29 - Movie: "Hanna" (theater) - Director Joe Wright steps away from prestige Oscar bait like "The Soloist" and "Atonement" to drop a loud, fast, violent graphic novel of a movie. The film -- about a young girl trained to exact brutal revenge on a high-level spook -- can't quite rise past its extremely familiar story and characters. While it has style to spare, a lot of its quirkier elements feel completely contrived (circles are a recurring, heavy-handed motif), and an odd, jolting score by The Chemical Brothers at times makes the picture feel more adventurous than it actually is. Villainess Cate Blanchett -- totally channeling Tilda Swinton -- has killer suits, cool hair and a mind-boggling sorta-Southern accent, but she and the other bad guys never really seem all that threatening when placed against Saoirse Ronan's pint-sized assassin. Two key fights scenes -- one in a ship yard; the other, an eye-popping six-on-one brawl in a subway station -- are the high points.

Movie: "Uncle Kent" (TV) - I like Swanberg movies but -- stuffed as they are with cool kids with thick hair -- they always make me feel about 90 years old. This one made me feel 40, which was nice.

4/28 - Book: "Fire and Rain: 1970" (completed), writing review for Book Page.

Book: "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (started)

4/27 - Movie: "Animal Kingdom" (2010) - Australian thriller about a young orphan drawn further into his corrupt family of bankrobbers by his grandmother "Smurf" (played in full Lady Macbeth-mode by Jacki Weaver and her spooky eyes). The turf is familiar and the ending is pretty clear from the beginning -- imagine Mann's "Heat" crossed with James Foley's "At Close Range," set in Oz. But writer/director David Michod (who previously only made docs and shorts) knows how to do moody atmosphere and the film is peppered with deft, spooky surprises (the early exit of one extremely likable character, an eerie police raid). I was never clear on exactly how smart James Frecheville's protagonist was supposed to be -- he seems almost disabled at times, but still is able to steal cars and make a complicated last minute play. On the other hand, Ben Mendelsohn is extremely effective as the evil brother Pope (the terrible acts he commits always seem at odds with the weird fragility in his eyes) and Guy Pearce is flat out great as Police Det. Leckie -- his character is a perfect mesh of script and acting and never strikes a wrong note. Overall, I wasn't crazy about "Animal Kingdom," but I'm very curious to see what Michod does next.

4/26 - TV: "Cougartown" - episode "Pilot"

4/25 - TV: "Archer" Season 1 - episode "Skytanic"

Podcast: Maron/WTF - episode "Greg Fleet" (listened to twice, actually)
Podcast: The Nerdist - episode "Jimmy Fallon" (gave up about halfway through)

4/24 - TV: "The Amazing Race" - episode "We're Good American People"

So long, cowboys. You're amiable as can be, but you played like crap this time around. Of course, playing like crap hasn't hindered The Goths at all. How they're still in it is a mystery to me.

The real thing

2010-11-20T07:06:00.000-08:00

Back from away

2010-09-28T14:57:00.001-07:00

The Next Generation

2010-05-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

I got into MP3 players pretty late in the game, and have been kind of a purist about them.

A lot of people want to keep their entire music library on one portable device, but as someone who owns a buttload of music (several thousand CDs, culled during stints working at record shops, reviewing music and haunting used bins) my feeling has always been: less is more.

Which is odd, because my usual take is MORE is more. But my first MP3 player was a Sandisk with a 512 MB memory, that was just right for me. Even after I upgraded to an iPod, I didn't feel the need to walk around with 10,000 tunes in my back pocket and, in fact, generally restrict myself to four or five playlists, a few recent podcasts and two particular videos that I've long hung onto out of sentimental value (Wes Anderson's short, "The Hotel Chevalier" + the chapter in the Watchmen motion comic where Dr. Manhattan hangs out on Mars and remembers his origin).

Anyway, my old 2nd-gen iPod recently crapped out on me, so I broke out a 5th-gen that someone gave me for Christmas way back. I had wanted to just upload the exact same tracks on that I had on the 2-Gen but iTunes has a mind of its own and during the sync process it automatically loaded up 1,500 songs -- filling the 8 gigs to capacity.

And I have to say I'm kind of enjoying the expanded range. The difference between shuffling through 300 hand-picked tracks and 1,500 tunes arbitrarily selected by the evil computer is kind of like going from full-frame to CinemaScope. We'll see if that feeling lasts.

Not that anyone asked, but here's 10 random plays right off the top....

"Soul Love" - David Bowie
"Ghost Life" - Bowderbirds
"The Ballad of John and Yoko" - Beatles
"Venice" - Beirut
"Ride into the Sun" - Velvet Underground
"She's So Fine" - Jimi Hendrix Experience
"Shine a Little Love" - ELO
"The Mystery Zone" - Spoon
"Deception" - Miles Davis
"Diddley Daddy" - Bo Diddley

Kick Ass: False Advertisement

2010-04-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

So in what world is not a monstrous notion for a father to train his 11-year-old daughter to be a mass murderer? In the world of "Kick-Ass," of course. I don't shy away from violent movies at all, at least as long as the violence carries some sense of satire, irony, justice or is just flat-out entertaining. But even in the glossiest, most colorful fiction, I just can't get behind the idea of a child, led by an adult, to kill dozens of others in the blood-thirstiest ways available. Especially when those actions are presented as heroic, noble and occasionally bunny-cute. That isn't the least of the film's problems, but it's a large one among many. The film also has a sappy lead character, seriously sloppy cinematography and too many confused ideas about what it's trying to say. Half the time it wants to subvert the superhero realm, the rest of the time it exemplifies the genre at its worst. There's also an eager, trying-too-hard masochism to the brutality that reminded me of another recent bad movie, "Wanted." Which, coincidentally, was also by comic book artist Mark Millar and also casually tossed around the notion that if a geek wants to leave behind the life of a loser, all he has to do is get a gun and start shooting. Bad idea jeans.

Genius

2010-04-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

I've been a fan of "Real Genius" for years now -- I like its heart, I like its smarts and I love its humor.

But there's an element of the movie that I like in a completely separate way and that is ... its opening credit sequence.

The movie opens with a slideshow of blueprints that depict the evolution of weaponry, from the slingshot to the atom bomb, set to Carmen McRae's version of "You Took Advantage of Me." As the credits tick off various cast members, the weapons shown almost seem to echo the character played by the various actors.

Plus, thanks to McRae, it swings.

As entertaining as "Real Genius" is, the credits almost seem to belong to a more sophisticated, more complex film.

Proof of presence

2010-04-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Scrounging around today trying to find my birth certificate. I let my driver's license expire and while you can easily renew by mail when it's fresh, once it's expired even by a week you fall under suspicion and have to go through the whole DMV spanking machine to prove your "presence" as a real American.

I hope I don't get in some kind of "Brazil"-ian trouble for griping online about that....

---

How big of a music geek am I? So much so that I spent the morning watching another video in the "Classic Album Under Review" series [the subject of which was: Oasis' "...Morning Glory."]

This series is not to be confused with Eagle Rock's excellent "Classic Album" series, which focus on rock touchstones ("Dark Side of the Moon," "The Band," "Nevermind," "Nevermind the Bollocks") and break the records down on a song-by-song basis by talking to the people who produced and recorded the tracks.

No, "Classic Album Under Review" is kind of similar in that it focuses on the work or works of an artist, but the C.A.U.R. producers don't talk to anyone remotely connected to the artist. Instead ... they strictly talk to the critics, and a motley, limey bunch of critics do they trot out.

For example ....

It's like Jack Black and Dave Mustaine spawned offspring... and he's one of the fresher-looking dudes.

And yet ... I watch 'em all. Sometimes they even do pretty good work -- I like their look at Pink Floyd's "Meddle," and the career of Neil Young (circa 1966-1974), and the way they track the Rolling Stones' evolution from cover-based bluesband to self-penned classics.

I am apparently alone in this, though. Visit most of the "Classic Album Under Review" pages on Amazon.com and experience a level of wrath usually reserved for arguments about health care or NASCAR. Customers, seemingly expecting a concert video, routinely trash these discs. "There's no live footage of Zeppelin here ... just a bunch of geeks TALKING!" For some reason, that makes me enjoy them a little more....

Sympathetic

2010-03-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

One Graf Movie Review: "Moon" (2009)

2010-02-20T09:00:00.001-08:00

It's entirely possible that, in my case, "Moon" benefited from lowered expectations. The film -- about a lone human worker dispatched to the moon for three years to gather fuel materials for an energy conglomerate on Earth -- looked to me like a lo-budge rehash of "Solaris," with a touch of "Silent Running." That's due in part to the fact that I'm not a big sci-fi fan, but even more to the film's trailer, which tells the viewer way too much. It's to be avoided if at all possible, but fortunately it doesn't give the whole game away. Despite its obvious inspirations, "Moon" is an evenly-paced, increasingly absorbing "locked-room" thriller. At its best it poses deft, provocative questions about the nature of identity and the concept of what exactly constitutes a "main character" in a story. In that sense it reminded me of the woefully-unsung B-grade sleeper, "X-Change." "Moon"'s director, Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie), gets far more mileage out of his lean $5 million budget than he should've.

Three Things on a Freezing Cold Winter's Day

2010-01-02T12:31:00.001-08:00

1) Here's a set of shelves I put together yesterday. Not the finest stick of furniture I ever bought, but it was actually fun to assemble and it'll hold some fraction of my shit in one place.

2) Song #2: "Northern Lights" by Bowerbirds. I know nothing about them, I don't even know what a bowerbird is. But the song was automatedly suggested to me and I like it a lot. They remind me a little of Dr. Dog, which in turn reminds me of The Band. But this song sounds both older and newer than most of the Dog stuff. The piano, which sounds like an upright to me, is I think what really sold me on it.

3) I recently re-watched the first two Kill Bills, essentially back-to-back, and I think they're better than I remember and I also caught more Brian DePalma allusions than I had before. I also recently found a photo of Uma Thurman during the Texas Funeral scene. I don't think this is a "still" per se, because we didn't see that actual image in the movie. But it might've been a cut scene. It reminds me of a similar shot of a similar situation in Brian DePalma's "Body Double." The riffing continues. I don't mind.

Anyway, I love this shot. Especially because there should be no roots in the soil above Thurman's casket and we should also be able to see something of the coffin of the luckless Paula Schultz, whose grave Budd co-opted during his revenge ....

Repose, A Rerun

2009-12-10T19:06:00.000-08:00

Shenandoah Sunday

2009-11-15T14:28:00.001-08:00

around town

2009-11-12T14:15:00.001-08:00

Better than bad

2009-10-03T09:36:00.001-07:00

Splenda (a short, short story)

2009-09-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

We'd been in the bar just long enough to order drinks when the stiff-looking guy came in with his daughter.

Khakis. Oxford. Tie. Tortoise-shell frames. Stroller and sippy cup.

The sight of her was frustrating to me because it'd been a long day and I'd been good and I wanted a cigarette. I didn't particularly want to smoke around some kid. I may be a smoker but I'm considerate as hell about it, and I didn't like the notion of blowing carcinogens within eyeshot of a 2-year-old-looking baby girl.

He set her down on the bar and, almost as if to mock me, the first thing she did was she started playing with an ashtray.

He was tall and bland, a young father but not that young. He acted a little like he'd walked in out of the rain, but it was clear and humid outside. He squinted, then seemed startled by the bartender.

"Can I get an ice tea in a to-go cup," he asked her, holding one hand about six inches over the other to describe what he was looking for. Then he stared up at the television screens while his daughter slapped her hand against the surface of the counter and went, "uhhh," and I thought about lighting up a smoke anyway because, you know, a father who brings a baby into a bar would have to expect a little of that anyway.

There were big two games going on. Both local teams eventually lost, one of them very badly to a team they should've well smeared. But neither was done just yet. There was still futile Saturday afternoon hope. And the father squinted up at two different screens, two different games, wearing an expression of disbelief and equidistant regret. And then his daughter fell right off the bar.

One second she was there. And then there was a clatter and she was gone, out of sight, down onto the floor between the legs of two high-backed stools. I think the bartender reacted first, but the father caught on soon enough. He whirled his attention back around, and then he kneeled down and disappeared from view. He stayed down a long time. Seconds passed. Each one became exponentially uncomfortable.

By the time he stood back up with her in his arms, she'd begun to wail and it seemed like everything was going to be OK. Her wail wasn't so much the sound of pain as a beacon -- "I didn't like that. I'm embarrassed. What just happened?" It was a wail, but it was a healthy, non-terminal wail.

The father began to bounce her against his shoulder. It didn't seem at all soothing. The bartender brought him his ice tea in a lidded styrofoam cup and she set it down almost right beside the ashtray.

"She all right?"

"Yeah, it's fine. She's fine."

"Want some ice?"

"Eh?"

"A little pack of ice? For her head?"

"No, no. It's fine."

The bartender slid his tea diagonally closer to him. The little girl wasn't crying anymore.

"No charge on the drink," the bartender told him. He nodded and held up two fingers and said, "Could I get you to put two Splendas in it for me?"

It took her a second to hear what he'd asked and she rolled and said, "Oh. Sure," and patted her apron pocket for packets of sweetener and about that time I snapped my lighter open and started my cigarette.

The most depressing thing I've read so far this month ... ?

2009-09-03T14:46:00.000-07:00

... was the beginning of an Atlantic Monthly review of a biography of John Cheever that ran in April.

"Nineteen sixty-eight wasn't the most wretched year in the life of John Cheever, but it was close. On poor terms with his three children, bitterly angry with his wife for daring to initiate a career outside the home, and having recently had the last of his teeth removed, he spent his mornings struggling weakly to postpone his first drink of the day. Even though he was set to publish his third novel, Bullet Park -- which he suspected, correctly, wasn't very good -- his alcoholism had so crippled his ability to write that he was in the midst of a creative drought that would see him complete only one short story in three years. Tortured by his self loathing his homosexuality engendered, increasingly estranged from his neighbors social circle by his drunken excesses, he was so lonely that he not only answered all the fan letter he received but would frequently invite their authors, total strangers to him, to come to his house. He was just a couple of years away from touching bottom -- living alone and all but insensate in a Boston apartment, where he would come so close to drinking himself to death that his brain function was permanently impaired."

-- Johnathan Dee

"Suburban Ghetto: John Cheever, misread and misunderstood"

Late August roadtrip

2009-09-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

Random tableaux

2009-09-02T18:09:00.000-07:00

Late August clutter

2009-08-26T19:29:00.001-07:00

Movie review in 75 words or less: "The Purple Rose of Cairo"

2009-06-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

Not quite a great film, per se, but still just about a perfect movie. A square-jawed explorer in a 1930s studio comedy becomes smitten with a woman in the audience and magically steps off the screen to meet her. This sparks problems for the other characters, for the theater owner and his patrons, for the up-and-coming actor who plays him and, most of all, for the object of his affections -- a bullied and beaten-down naif who uses the movies to escape both of her depressions. Woody Allen's funniest and most successfully realized supernatural riff works on a variety of levels, most importantly in the way it celebrates the power of fantasy but also subverts it. The ending is like a terrible punch to the heart, not softened in the least by its obvious inevitability.

Movie review in 75 words or less: "Duel in the Sun"

2009-06-11T19:19:00.000-07:00

Q: What would happen if “Gone with the Wind” overdosed on Spanish Fly and wandered into the desert? A: This, which is a Technicolor fever dream from David O. Selznick’s speed-addled memo pad. Jennifer Jones comes between saint (Joseph Cotton) and his cruel brother (Gregory Peck, eons from Atticus Finch). Jones is frequently shown scrubbing floors on all fours, boasting of her bareback prowess or literally writhing with sexual frustration. Her mind-boggling changes of, um, heart make this much more fun than it might’ve been, as does Lionel Barrymore’s snickering, racist patriarch.

Movie review in 75 words or less: "Day for Night"

2009-06-11T19:10:00.001-07:00

Low-key, amiable behind-the-scenes pastry from Francois Truffaut about a film's clumsy production. Props go awry, actors flake out, love is won, lost, teased. Truffaut directs onscreen and off. Amusing but neither the fictional film nor the general article amount to a lot (Wes Anderson’s homage covers almost as much material in two minutes). Most absorbing when it depicts just how hard moviemaking is (Valentina Cortese’s breakdown is excruciating; a problem with a kitten, hilarious).

Movie review in 75 words or less: "Crank"

2009-06-11T18:04:00.001-07:00

As close as you can get to a live-action Popeye cartoon – poisoned hitman Jason Statham has to keep his adrenaline flowing full-stop as he searches for an antidote or he'll die. Cartoon violence galore, but frequently witty and has fleeting moments (like, two) of actual sweetness. Sounds like a splitting headache and almost is, but utterly sold me on its crazed premise and bizarre worldview. Also does its thing and wraps it up in one hour, twenty.

One month later?

2009-05-25T22:28:00.001-07:00

May was busy. Sorry, silent masses.

Pieces of the weekend

2009-04-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

Spotted early, early Sunday morning while watering grass: A 40-something dude in gargoyles and a pick-up truck, windows rolled down, cranking The Marshall Tucker Band at a volume usually reserved on car stereos for music with a vocoder and a bumpin' bass. And it would've been funny and kind of cool, too, if he hadn't been singing along at a similar volume, sounding like a cat getting a pedicure. Where was he going? Home Depot? Famous Anthony's? Fishing? Into a Larry Brown short story?

Yesterday: My car sat under a thick layer of green dust, making me think of comic book villains, Swamp Thing and Poison Ivy. When I ran El Honda through a car wash it dawned on me that I hadn't washed it all winter, rock salt or not. This morning my blue Civic was just as green as it had been the night before.

Housecleaning: Takes me forever because I find so much stuff to look at -- I can get distracted just looking thru the register of an old checkbook. I created more files yesterday -- business papers colated and categorized; snippets of scripts and short stories corraled; countless notes and postcards from Truck finally tucked away in one place so I can avoid stepping on a landmine every other month or so; clippings from magazines and newspapers archived.

Things I found I thought had been lost: My map of America; a bootleg of a '68 Who show at the Fillmore West; the third arrow for my crossbow; a WSJ piece on John Kennedy Toole; the rejection letters for "Wave" and "Jones," which are hilarious and perhaps only slightly less wrong than I remembered.

Things I'd like to secure before the day is done: A new pair of jeans to replace the beloved old pair of jeans which developed a whole in, of all places, the crotch (not gonna happen); six pairs of extra-large (size 12-16) grey athletic socks (if the jeans don't happen, the socks ain't gonna happen either); a pizza from Bellachinos (shouldn't happen); some sunshine (it's right outside).

Final shot

2009-04-23T19:56:00.001-07:00

A photograph of director Jean-Luc Godard, cinematographer Raoul Coutard, actor Jean Paul Belmondo and the passersby of Paris '59 during the filming of the final scene in "Breathless." (click on the photo for an enlarged version)

I've always liked candid shots of Godard working because he always directs in a nifty suit. He's doing that here but he's taken his necktie off. Thanks for my friend J-Sap for pointing that out.

Thursday night lights (In Blurry-Vision)

2009-04-23T19:50:00.000-07:00

My movie of the week

2009-04-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

Having just re-read Richard Brody's New Yorker fascinating and hilarious piece about the amazing friendship/rivalry/feud between Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard (which, alas, is only available online if you're a member ... but why wouldn't you be???), I've decided to go through their movies chronologically, alternating back-and-forth between the two directors who spearheaded the French New Wave movement.

I'm starting with "The 400 Blows," then "Breathless," then "Shoot the Piano Player," "A Woman is a Woman" (which I just saw but need to see again), "Jules and Jim" and so on.

This plan, of course, might be altered because of the five Antoine Doinel movies I've only seen the first ("The 400 Blows") and I've always felt guilty about that. So I may immediately change course and plow through those instead ....

Plant!

2009-04-20T19:51:00.001-07:00

Here's a vaguely-lit, almost abstract cell phone photo of a plant I've somehow managed to keep alive for over a year.

A Tradescantia zebrina, purchased at Kroger in 2007, that lived at my home for a while and now rests on the nearest window to my work space.

It can't look but if it could it would be looking down onto Second Street.

Its name is Ringo.

The funniest thing I read today + One of the saddest songs I've ever heard

2009-04-18T10:03:00.001-07:00

I noticed this remark today at a Nick Drake fan Web site.

The funny thing is, the poster is not only hilarious but also exactly correct.

"Nick Drake is ideal sensual back ground music when making love to your gorgeous neighbor who has been shy and depressed and living like a hermit for the past 11-years."

Anyway, here's my favorite Nick Drake song, "River Man," a tune that never fails to make me feel a little sad and introspective:

The saddest thing I read today

2009-04-08T19:59:00.000-07:00

OK, so I freely admit I don't know much about Sylvia Plath. Haven't read much, didn't see the Gwyneth Paltrow movie. If you know a modicum of info about her, you know more than I do and this'll probably be old news.

Here's what I knew: Wrote poetry and "The Bell Jar," married the poet Ted Hughes four months after they met, asphyxiated herself in her kitchen.

But I'm reviewing this book called "Goners: The Final Hours of the Notable and Notorious" and there's a chapter on Plath.

Apparently, the day she died, she was depressed about the dissolution of her marriage. She woke up early, opened the windows of her childrens' bedrooms, left food and milk for them and sealed each of their doors, then gassed herself in the oven.

That's sad. But what I found even sadder is a post-script about Assia Wevill, the woman Hughes left Plath for, with whom he was living at the time of Plath's death.

Six years and a month after Plath's death, Wevill committed suicide in the exact same way -- gassing herself in a kitchen oven. The difference is, Wevill also asphyxiated her and Hughes' four-year-old daughter, Shura.

Double cold-blooded.

Other odds and ends from the book:

- When Mata Hari was killed, no one claimed her body. It was reportedly taken to a medical school where it was dissected by students.

- Joe DiMaggio reportedly sent a half-dozen roses to the grave of Marilyn Monroe three times a week for 20 years after her death.

- Mary Surratt, one of eight people found guilty for conspiring to kill Abraham Lincoln, was the first woman executed by the U.S. government.

-- Nathaniel West, who wrote "Day of the Locusts," died in 1940 -- killed in a car wreck while en route to the funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book says he was a terrible driver to begin with but was so distraught about his friend that he ran a stop sign.

Silence

2009-04-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

What I've chilled out to every single night for the past month. When it comes to kick-back-music, IASW is pretty damn hard to beat.

Lies

2009-03-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

I saw "After Hours" back when I was a kid, 15, too young to even drive myself to see it.

The only place it was playing was in that old twin cinema that used to sit behind Crossroads Mall and I rode down from Radford to Roanoke with my mom one late (fall?) Saturday afternoon. She was doing some shopping and dropped me off.

The Crossroads theater at that time was a dive -- you didn't want the popcorn -- and it was raining hard enough to hear through the ceiling, and there weren't a whole lot of people in the theater, which was very dimly lit even before the movie started. I remember they showed several "red band" trailers first before the movie for films that didn't exactly seem to be aimed at the "After Hours" audience.

In other words, it was the perfect atmosphere in which to see that particular movie, which is a 90-minute jack-in-the-box wound up by anxiety and guilt, lust and selfishness, self-loathing and paranoia. With a fair amount of dubious plotting and awkward comedy thrown in.

Which all leads up to the fact that I was surprised to read recently that the screenwriter, Joe Minion, was accused of stealing elements of his script from an NPR monologue by Joe Frank.

I don't know the facts, just the details, which are here, but it's pretty clear that one inspired the other in some form or fashion.

I mean, somebody didn't even bother to change the sculptures from "plaster-of-Paris bagels and cream cheese." He couldn't just make 'em croissants?

Anyway, the original monologue, called "Lies," is here and while it's not great, it's evocative and atmospheric and worth checking out. And I can easily see someone listening to it in a car on a radio while driving at night and getting to the end and wanting to know more and then just, well, making up the rest.

Doomsday relief

2009-03-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

"In a doomsday scenario, dollars and cents don't really matter anymore, and I think that's really appealing to people. Who cares about mortgages anymore if the world's going to blow up?"

-- Box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian, explaining in the New York Times why the loopy Nic Cage disaster movie "Knowing" (with a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) was the number one movie in theaters this weekend.

Open Door

2009-03-18T08:48:00.001-07:00

I just found this picture of Thelonious Monk performing at the Open Door in New York.

Everything about the photograph -- the spartan set-up, the not-quite-grand piano, Monk's slender build -- made me think it was shot very early in his career, during the 40's. But it was actually taken in the fall of 1953.

This means it happened a couple of years after he lost his cabaret card for refusing to rat out his friend, Bud Powell. They'd been caught sitting in a car that had (Powell's) drugs in it and when Monk wouldn't testify against Powell, he lost certification to perform in any club that served liquor -- basically any place people went to hear jazz. Against that restriction, a musician might as well have quit but Monk performed anywhere he could and spent the rest of his time at a piano in his kitchen, composing and practicing and practicing and practicing (supported, it's well worth noting, entirely by his wife).

But one year after this photograph was taken, in 1954, everything changed. He went to Europe, where he could perform freely and where race wasn't as much of a hindrance. He became friends with the influential jazz patron Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter (hostess to Charlie Parker the night he died; inspiration for the tune "Pannonica" off Brilliant Corners). And, for less than $110, his contract was bought by Riverside Records, the company that respected his talent and marketed him properly and finally launched him into the major leagues. One year he was a problem child, the next year he was a complicated genius.

Looking at that picture makes me wonder if he was aware, by that point, that things were about to change, or if he was still just muddling along, waiting for something to happen. Using a saucer for an ashtray. Playing a grimy-looking upright piano with no sheet music. Speaking into a microphone that didn't even sit in a stand.

The Curmudgeon

2009-03-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

It's St. Patrick's Day weekend (extended to three glorious days by the furlough) but I'm home sick with a cold that's been around since Tuesday night and which mysteriously increased its force last night.

Fortunately all my friends, and lots of people I just sort of know, are keeping me abreast of their merriment and happy times out there, via the internets.

In honor of my sour mood, here's a list of things that people really seem to like but which I just can't really get into:

-- LinkedIn
-- Contact lenses
-- Mexican food
-- Pickles
-- Theme parties involving fake mustaches
-- Twitter
-- Bands that use movie titles for their names
-- Movie titles that use a number to substitute for a letter ("The Thre3")
-- Flight of the Concords (total rip-off of Tenacious D, but not nearly as funny)
-- Jack Bauer
-- Talking on the phone while driving (I coined the phrase "hang up and drive!")
-- Football (and I'm probably straighter than you)
-- The Arcade Fire (which sounds like Amish rock to me; fortunately this has ceased to be much of an issue)
-- Hand sanitizer (cleaning without water is not cleaning)
-- Facebook bulletins disguised as messages ("Oh, hey, I got a message! Oh, it's just a thing about an art gallery ....")
-- Potluck
-- An interest in "American Idol," even if you claim it's "ironic."
-- GPS
-- Unconvincing special effects (seriously, watching "Spider Man" is like watching a cartoon)
-- Coffee
-- Camping
-- "ER" (fortunately this has ceased to be much of an issue)
-- chewing gum
-- dessert menus
-- Any U2, post-"Achtung Baby"
-- For that matter, any Springsteen that isn't off the "Born to Run" album
-- Suddenly getting fanatical about soccer, but only when the World Cup is on
-- Butter on your popcorn ("And could you layer it throughout ... oh, yes, thank you!")
-- Blogs

Here is a cat ....

2009-03-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a cat who would really like his roommate to kick his cold and stop spending so much time at home.

March 12

2009-03-12T16:29:00.001-07:00

Smart Economy

2009-03-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

I'm home sick today, but during a wane of the chills I stepped down the street to return some movies and pick up some fresh ones.

The clerk was a familiar kid whom I've quietly disliked ever since I asked if the store if they carried "In Bruges" and he made a face and replied, "I haven't even heard of that."

Now, granted, "In Bruges" is kind of an awkward, unwieldy title but a) it's a freakin' Colin Farrell movie, not exactly some obscure French New Wave bootleg and b) they ended up having it after all, although it was filed away from the I's and c) I don't go around asking video store clerks for movies that don't exist. But back to today ....

"You wanna make a small donation for muscular distrophy?" he asked as I was paying for "Happy-Go-Lucky."

"I dunno," I said, then asked the question I always ask when a cashier asks me to throw in a buck. "Does [the company] match donations?"

"Eh? What does that mean?" he asked.

"Y'know, like ... for every dollar a customer donates to a charity, some companies match it with a dollar of their own," I said.

I would say he snorted at that notion, but that would sound subjective.

"With the economy like it is, a company would be stupid to do something like that," he exclaimed, shaking his head, and once I realized he was not being ironic, I decided to be ironic myself.

"Yeah, I guess they're doing enough just by hitting customers up for the dollar," I said.

"All the money that gets collected does go to the charity, though, I know that," he assured me. "[The company] doesn't keep any of it."

"Nice," I replied, and then I recalled that just yesterday [the company] had basically made their (and my) online rental plan more expensive by getting rid of the in-store return bonus. "They'll be keeping some money, though, now that they've lowered the number of free rentals for online customers."

It was clear he knew what I was talking about. Even though it was early, I got the impression from his face he'd already handled a few complaints about the change.

"That's just the economy getting smarter," he declared, in what I think he thought was the tone of a newscaster, offering wisdom and without the slightest twinge of malice.

"Yeah, I guess so," I nodded and we said goodbye.

March 10

2009-03-10T16:16:00.001-07:00

One week later

2009-03-09T21:55:00.001-07:00

I had to roll down my windows an hour before I went to work today so that the heat in my car could escape. Even so I burned myself on the hot plastic seats.

This time last week there was a quilt of snow on the back porch.

It's a strange experience to drive in sunlight and 77-degree weather when the interstate is still stained white from rock salt.

Strange day

2009-03-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

This is a strange day. Something feels askew deep within the gears of things.

I've gone to a fire at a Burger King.

I've seen a telephone pole splintered right in the middle of a sunny afternoon by an SUV.

Maybe it's me ... or maybe it's the axis.

But I parked at work tonight after dinner and was walking across the lot when I spotted a library card lying on the ground.

I wondered, smiling, whose it could be and when I picked it up I discovered it was mine. I recognized my signature even before I touched it.

This is particularly odd not just because I haven't used my library card in years but mostly because I don't even carry it anymore. Had I been asked beforehand, I couldn't even have said where I even keep it these days.

Maybe my dresser?

Maybe my glovebox?

Apparently the parking lot.

Who's watching the Watchmen? I am watching the Watchmen

2009-03-05T19:33:00.001-08:00

This will brand me even further as a total geek but this week I am watching -- and very much enjoying -- the "Watchmen." Not the movie (of which I'm still rather dubious ... jeez, those costumes ...) but rather this new motion comic thing that just came out on DVD.

Basically it's a panel-by-panel reconstruction of Alan Moore's graphic novel, accentuated with an orchestral score and mild-but-fluid animation.

I tried to read the damn thing on paper a couple different times, but it just didn't hook me.

The motion comic, however, is extremely cool -- maybe even better than the version on the page.

I always predicted that once I got into the novel, it (like "The Wire" and "The Corrections" and a couple other pop culture icons I've yet to get around to) would strike me fascinating and it does. I can't believe this thing is nearly 25 years old. It's a little overwrought, a little doom-and-gloom, and the female characters, who get the weakest dialogue, are largely cast as shrill, shallow and selfish. Still, it could've been written last year and feels like it was.

I also now totally understand why critics have found parallels between "Watchmen" and "Lost."

Chapter IV (called "Watchmaker") is incredible, even for someone who generally hates sci-fi, like me. And as I was watching it I was thinking I should find it ridiculous -- I mean, c'mon, it's about a character, who happens to be naked and blue, who travels to Mars to muse over the nature and physics of time -- and yet it's poetic, haunting, depressing and also strangely reassuring at the same time.

Silent TV at work

2009-03-04T19:17:00.000-08:00

I work at a desk that sits beside a bank of scanners, beneath a TV whose volume is usually turned all the way down.

Night after night, I catch glimpses of television shows I've never watched and can't hear -- which is a little like dreaming when you've got the flu. Who are these people? What are they saying? Narrative without sound or context makes time stretch.

It's odd to watch unfamiliar sitcoms and dramas in bits and pieces as silent movies -- "The Ghost Whisperer," "Shark," "Black in America," "The Biggest Loser," "Jericho," varieties of CSI's and "Law & Order"s, they all float by.

For the longest time "Cold Case" really confused me because I would look up and it would look like a cop show centered around a blonde detective with carefully mussed-up hair ... but then suddenly I would glance up and catch the show wandering through the 1950s or during the Depression-era or once, I'm fairly certain (but can't be sure) set in and around Atlanta circa the 1850s. Only later did I learn how a contemporary police procedural could wind up in Antebellum South.

The only show that's ever actually gotten a reaction out of me is, oddly enough, "The Office," which is much more verbal than visual but which, admittedly, I'm more familiar with than 90-percent of the other stuff that floats by during a shift.

I've sat near the quiet television for literally hundreds of hours, but the only sight that ever prompted me to laugh was this:

Snowy day rituals

2009-03-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

OK, yeah, awesome, we're finally getting some snow this year. Looks like about three inches so far and word is the temperature is gonna drop hard tonight and freeze all that stuff solid, especially the slush in the streets.

And although it's a rare occasion that the snow finds us here in Roanoke, I have a little ritual I tend to follow when it does: Once the sun sets and the driveway is shoveled, I usually kick back in the basement screening room with a little bourbon, sometimes a little cigar and always my favorite inclement weather double-feature: "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and "The Fearless Vampire Killers."

Both films are snow-centric movies that are fun to watch on a cold winter's night, especially when the heat pump is working properly, the robe is freshly washed and there's a little Early Times on ice in a glass.

The sun has set but the driveway isn't scraped. I need to do that, especially if it's going to freeze, but I think I'll take a walk first and listen to the snow settle on the branches.

I'm mentally composing a list of future replacement snowy day movies: "Jeremiah Johnson," "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," John Carpenter's "The Thing," "Gremlins," "Slap Shot," "Nobody's Fool," maybe "Diner" ....

The more you know ....

2009-03-01T09:16:00.000-08:00

It's way too complicated to go into the reasons why, but early this morning I was reading the Wikipedia page for Savage Steve Holland, the writer-director of the cheap-and-bizarre-but-charming-and-amusing mid-80's John Cusack comedy, "Better Off Dead. "

First of all on that page, there's a long, impassively written Cliff Notes synopsis of the movie that's pretty hilarious. I have to wonder what someone who has never seen "Dead" would make of it.

Secondly, though, is the factoid that during the three years before he shot "Dead," Holland also designed and animated the Whammies. The Whammies were the 'Noid-like cartoon creatures that magically descended and made off with the money of losing contestants on the (almost certainly rigged) game show, "Press Your Luck."

This is something I did not know.

Rules for living with an elderly kitten

2009-02-28T11:51:00.000-08:00

One of the hardest parts of having an elderly cat, I'm discovering, is dealing with his changes in appetite.

My cat used to eat anything I put in front of him -- wet food, dry food, cheese, the covers of magazines I loved and wanted to keep.

But as he pads through his seventeenth year, he's become increasingly picky.

Used to be if I filled his bowl with Cat Chow, and he'd eat it all in one sitting.

Now, he ignores the Chow. Now, he only wants wet food, and it's a shell game as to whether he'll eat the particular flavor I serve him on a given day. One day he'll be all over Fancy Feast Marinated Morsels and I'll think I've found something he likes, the next day he'll let it sit until it congeals in the bowl. I now throw away more food than he actually eats.

And, yes, I realize I am a grown man blogging about my cat's dietary habits, but honestly I think I could compose an entire scientific study on the changes that occur in him as he advances in age.

A flash from my very early childhood that still holds up pretty well

2009-02-28T09:17:00.000-08:00

OK, the music sucks, and Rikki occasionally morphs into Jerry from "Tom & Jerry," but the story and the dialogue are still surprisingly mature for a kid's cartoon. I remember being eight or nine and watching a re-run of this on a TV in a now-defunct department store while my parents were shopping. And I remember thinking, "Wow, the cute little hero is actually killing the bad guys."

Field Trip With Bashir

2009-02-27T20:54:00.001-08:00

I caught the Grandin Theatre's first showing of "Waltz with Bashir" this afternoon before work.

Went into the lobby at 1:05 p.m. and it was jammed with young people.

"What's going on?" I asked the concession kid.

"It's a field trip," he explained as dozens of high schoolers buzzed around.

"Grrrr-reat!" I replied with the signature sarcasm that makes me a figure beloved by so many.

"It shouldn't be too bad, there are teachers in there with them."

"I'm sure it'll be fine," I said, suddenly humbled by his attempt at solace, and laughed. "I'm just a grouchy old man."

And the kids seemed to be drawn into the movie, a film I found to be eye-popping and mind-blowing and thought-provoking and all the other critical bullet points. I was a little unnerved by the very graphic (yet still animated) sex scene, but aside from a slight audience vibration they didn't seem outraged.

The final scene -- which unexpectedly but effectively cuts to live action -- staggered me.

As I filed out among the juniors and seniors, though, I heard one guy (who wore a backwards baseball cap [seriously?]) complain to his girlfriend, "That didn't make no sense at all!"

And in a way, he's right. Just not in the way he meant.

The Most Interesting Paragraph I've Read Today

2009-02-26T18:55:00.000-08:00

"The office of chief of staff was created by Dwight Eisenhower, who redesigned the working structure of the White House along the hierarchal staff system he had learned as supreme commander of Allied forces in the Second World War. His chief of staff—though he didn’t officially use the title, because Eisenhower worried that “politicians think it sounds too military”—was Sherman Adams, who accrued enormous influence, power, and enemies. Neither John F. Kennedy nor Lyndon Johnson had a chief of staff, and largely managed the White House themselves. Richard Nixon returned to Eisenhower’s system and delegated vast managerial authority to H. R. Haldeman, the Watergate conspirator whose ironfisted management of the White House abetted Nixon’s own self-destructive behavior in office. In reaction, both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter tried to operate without chiefs of staff, but both men reversed course when the flat management structure of their respective White Houses produced staff disarray. Since Carter, every President has acknowledged the need for a strong chief of staff."

-- from "The Gatekeeper," by Ryan Lizza; The New Yorker, March 2, 2009.

Who knew? Not me.

Reasons I'm Obsessed with Howard Hughes, No. 337

2009-02-24T20:20:00.000-08:00

"Between 1966 and 1968, Hughes built the greatest Vegas kingdom ever assembled. His investments in the city soon made him the largest single investor in the history of the gambling capital. His Vegas buying spree began with the $13.25 million purchase of the Desert Inn in 1967 ... four months later he bought the Sands for $23 million ...

"... He bought the Las Vegas television station KLAS, a CBS affiliate, for $3.6 million -- after frequently complaining to his aides about the station's policy of going off the air during the wee hours. Hughes wanted movies to be run all night. Moreover, he wanted his favorite pictures to be shown. With the Hughes purchase, all-night movies were a mandate."

-- from "Howard Hughes - The Untold Story" by Peter Harry Brown & Pat H. Boeske (p. 339)

Mystery Train

2009-02-23T20:47:00.000-08:00

Early this afternoon I drove down to the courthouse in Bedford County to cover a preliminary hearing.

The hearing ended up getting rescheduled, but I really didn't mind. It was a nice day for a drive, despite the cold. It was sunny and the road, U.S. 221, is straight but not boring and I was ahead of schedule going down for a very rare change.

On the drive home I ate French fries and drank a Coke and listened to Fred Neil on the stereo.

The part of U.S. 221 I was on runs parallel to a set of railroad tracks and about halfway back to Roanoke, I realized there was a train running beside me, pulling a series of silver cars -- boxcars but also passenger cars, all nondescript and metallic and each one bearing the seal of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

I was literally riding alongside a circus train.

And although there were no giraffe heads sticking out or elephant trucks poking out the windows, I realized they were probably aboard. I had flashbacks to "Dumbo" and "The Greatest Show on Earth" and, yes, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

I stopped for gas at an Exxon and froze while my tank filled, then when I got back on the road I caught up to the train and passed it again.

"This is good," I thought. "I want to remember this. I'll have to write about it so I don't forget it."

I went on in to work and about 7 o'clock I got an e-mail from my dad, who lives in Radford, about an hour from Roanoke. He's on a walking kick and likes to do laps around Bisset Park.

He wrote: I just finished a 4-mile walk at the river and of all things, I got to watch a Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey circus train come though. It was awesome. I will give you a report. I almost got in the car and followed it to Dublin.

February 8

2009-02-08T22:14:00.000-08:00

September 9

2008-09-09T21:37:00.001-07:00

"Six Shooter" (2004)

2008-08-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

I always got of a snide kick out of the how, during "In Bruges" warm-up and release, press notes occasionally referred to its writer/director Martin McDonagh as "Oscar winning."

Yeah, sure, he did win an Academy award for his first directorial effort, "Six Shooter," but that was a short film.

And, sure, short films count, too, but it ain't exactly like he pooped out "Boogie Nights," "Pulp Fiction" or "The Royal Tenenbaums" (the three of which -- combined -- have exactly the same number of Oscars as "Six Shooter").

Still, I haven't read or seen McDonagh's well-regarded plays, but I liked his feature debut "In Bruges" well enough. It didn't reinvent anything, and it seemed a lot like an "already ran," but I enjoyed the characters, central and side, and their dialogue amused me and I really dug the story's willingness to behave any way it wanted to, particularly in such polite surroundings.

And basically "Six Shooter" is like "Bruges'" shorter, simpler sibling.

Give it 27 minutes and it'll give you most of the same elements: Sad-faced but endlessly amiable Brendan Gleeson; a chatty wild boy who causes problems; skewed-but-eventually-rational perspectives on everyday topics; startling moments of violence and equally startling moments of tenderness.

Certainly worth the dollar-ninety-nine you'd pay to buy it on iTunes or the time it would take to mojo it up if you have bit torrent or something like that.

"Strangers When We Meet" (1960)

2008-08-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

A soap opera, sure, but one that's perfectly extravagant and surprisingly grown up, with unexpected moments of surprise and tension -- "Strangers," it's worth noting, has the best, most nerve-wracking unanswered phone call this side of "Once Upon a Time in America," and that's by no means faint praise.

Kirk Douglas plays a driven, artistically-inclined, vaguely-Zen-without-saying-Zen architect who builds high-dollar homes around Los Angeles. He's contentedly married but you couldn't call it "happily" -- to turn the old phrase, "his wife just doesn't understand him." Seriously.

Kim Novak is a troubled neighbor Douglas' character meets, befriends and then falls into an affair with. No way around it -- she's beautiful but seriously damaged goods and while an expensive big studio film from 1960 can't lay out everything we'd like to know about her past, it's still surprisingly frank: Her husband seems to have gone cold toward her following a rape she may or may not have set herself up for.

We follow the couple through their rendezvous, awkward meeting and changes of favor, and the movie really takes its time establishing their environment and telling their story. It should be boring but it isn't. Part of that is due to the overall backdrop -- with its moneyed flavors, stitch-perfect clothes, painstakingly appointed sets and barely covered subtext, "Strangers" feels right in line with Sirk from the same period. But director Richard Quine and screenwriter Evan Hunter eschew Sirk's overt melodrama and lace the story with some unexpected maturity.

Novak, her blonde hair tinted vaguely violet, plays the whole movie on edge, phrasing her lines with tense whispers that shouldn't work but mostly kind of do.

Walter Matthau is also good as a sleepy-eyed suburban shark who makes trouble, and the character could've supplied the basis for a fascinating film all on his own. As he and his son stroll the neighborhood, Matthau spies a beautiful housewife and says to his boy, who is about ten years old, "Love 'em all." Funny for a second, but hearing the leer in that friendly, familiar voice made my skin crawl.

Ernie Kovacs is also on-hand as one of Douglas' clients, a best-selling author. Kovacs doesn't appear to have a literary bone in his body (jet pilot, clothing magnate, casino owner, magazine publisher and lottery winner all would've been more suitable-seeming careers for the character) but he sells their friendship far better than he sells the character. Plus, it's Ernie Kovacs, which is cool period casting you can't argue with.

I'm still working out the ending -- maybe it's a cop-out, but it's also devastating. Throughout the film, Douglas and Novak are constantly putting their fling on hold, then rushing back to each other, apologizing and basically asking to never fight again. Onscreen, it seems wildly indecisive and chain-yanking, but it also carries truth. That's how passion frequently operates. So at the end (SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT) when Douglas tells Novak he's going off to Hawaii to "build a city" and he's taking his wife and kids instead of her ... we have to wonder if that's really his final answer. Or an answer dictated by the studio. On top of which, hours earlier Douglas' wife banished him from her life with blunt economy, only to return almost immediately and successfully take it all back.

These questions and concerns, however, pale in harsh light of the final shot in which Novak, freshly dumped and taking it well, almost immediately encounters another smiling man (the same way she met Douglas, the same way she met the man who raped her) and drives away, crying, screwed again. It looks like a gimmick ending, it feels like a gimmick ending, but as it extends to show us her long drive away from something that really should've work out, it asks a particularly bleak question: What the hell is she going to do now?

---

An odd footnote: The house Douglas builds during the course of the film was actually a real house that was constructed in Bel Air during the film's production. Quine's producer raised about $100,000 for it by offering promises of product placement. None of the goods they received are actually identified by name, but a featurette was shot that presented Kovacs giving viewers a tour of the house. The house reportedly burned to the ground in 1970 but has since been rebuilt according to the original plans.

"Vicky Christina Barcelona"

2008-08-16T08:38:00.001-07:00

A four-course dessert -- beautiful people, sexy problems, lush scenery, literate dialogue, warm atmosphere and fine music -- but just not as tasty as it might've been. Still, it looks so good on the plate you might not even mind, because this is a movie that was seemingly invented as an oasis away from rainy Sunday afternoons.

The problem, I think, is that this might be Allen's only non-thriller without a single solitary joke*. And while pratfalls and glib one-liners would spoil the mood, the utter lack of humor (beyond, of course, the folly of love and sexual attraction) mostly hobbles the story.

But Cruz is fine. And Bardem has charisma to shred -- I liked how his confident-not-cocky Lothario makes some bold moves but never lies, never presents himself as more or less than he was.

And Rebecca Hall (whose British accent I sorely missed) inexplicably didn't get to be on the poster (she's a title character! and she's stunning!) but still rises beautifully above Allen's designation of her as The Judy Davis Character (in other words, the shrill hypocrite).

* Maybe I'm just weird, or maybe I was humor starved, but I laughed at length over the only moment I took for an actual scripted joke -- the moment Johansson reveals the second language she knows, and her reasons for semi-learning it. In a crowded theater yesterday, I cackled alone. A few more of those moments would've been a great help to the film.

"The Furies"

2008-08-13T06:45:00.000-07:00

In one year, 1950, director Anthony Mann made four films: There was the crisp Farley Granger noir adventure "Side Street" plus three Westerns, including "Devil's Doorway," the rousing classic "Winchester '73" and "The Furies."

That's how you hustle, and that's a damn good year.

That last title, "The Furies," refers to a sprawling southwestern ranch owned by the proud, controlling blowhard T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston in his last role, one year after winning an Oscar for "Treasure of the Sierra Madre.").

During the course of the film, the main characters refer to the estate often but it is never called "the ranch," "the property" or even "our land."

It's always called "The Furies," and as if to underscore the self-consciousness of the conceit, most of the people who say it seem to be resisting the urge to lick their lips immediately afterward.

But the film's three principal characters tote their own serious grudges, so while it's a clumsy subtext, the title could also refer to these agents of vengeance. Bastards, the set of them, but in the end sympathetic as well.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as Jeffords' daughter Vance, whose devotion to her father is second only to her fondness for standing in boots and jeans with her gloved fists pressed defiantly into her hips. That stance is basically how she lives and she lives to work the ranch (er ... I mean, The Furies). Surely that's not too much to ask, is it?

My facetiousness aside, this is a wonderful and frequently astonishing film. I kid because the movie is a breathless mix of influences and high emotions -- there's Sophocles here, and a lot of King Lear and sundry other Shakespeare. It's also Wellesian -- the Jeffords could be southwestern cousins to the Ambersons. But there are also hints of "Dallas" and "Falcon Crest," as well as other more serious but still-soapy fare in which doomed offspring stand beneath towering portraits of their parents.

Despite Mann's eventual seminal Westerns, however, "The Furies" seems more like Sam Fuller than, say, "The Naked Spur" or even "Man of the West" -- it has Fuller's grit and shrewdness and his tendency toward the baroque. That is, in part, because producer Hal Wallis didn't want to pay for Technicolor so -- highly unusual for a Western of this time -- he ordered the movie shot in black-and-white.

That decision absolutely sealed the film's greatness because Mann, with cinematographer Victor Milner, created a nightmarishly beautiful landscape as a backdrop. With some exceptions, the exteriors are largely shot day-for-night, even in cases where it's supposed to be daytime -- most of the scenes seem to exist in that alien space where the cattle drive began in "Red River." The sky is almost always stark and bleak and strewn with beautiful clouds and the desert is always somewhat shadowy and peopled with the silhouettes of riders. This lends the melodrama the air of isolation and purgatory; it transforms The Furies everyone wants so badly into a wasteland and makes "The Furies" something of a ghost story that is all the more unsettling because it's so lovely to look at.

"Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson "

2008-08-13T06:21:00.000-07:00

It's better than your average "A&E Biography" episode, and it hits most of the important notes, but "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson" never really ignites or explodes in the unique ways that a great or even excellent documentary should.

We get talking head interviews. We get scads of photographs and old footage. There are re-enactments which are occasionally clever. Johnny Depp reads the writings (and while it struck me as redundant that the man who played Thompson onscreen is back to basically do it again, he knows the music well enough). The old friends weigh in and seem glad to be part of the club. The director works a little of the way into the obvious but overwhelmingly valid notion that the persona that made Thompson eventually melted him down. The movie does its job. Fair enough.

But the only real charge I got out of "Gonzo" was seeing the rare clips of Thompson appearing on a 1960's public debate program as well as the old game show "To Tell The Truth." The author, caught before the genius or the fermentation started and looking like a mere kid, seems shy but sly and I'll enjoy seeing the entire broadcasts if they're included on the DVD. I'd post any part of them here but this is one of those rare moments when YouTube's 600 trillion clips cannot offer me what I really most want.

"Pineapple Express"

2008-08-08T19:38:00.000-07:00

I guess it makes sense that a movie which takes its title and its narrative fuel from demon weed should be mellow.

But "Pineapple Express" is almost mind-boggling in its laziness. Aside from a few scattershot moments of humor and amiability, and two great lived in performances by scene stealers James Franco and Danny McBryde, this feels phoned-in from top-to-bottom.

Co-writer Seth Rogen and Franco play bud-enthusiasts who have to go on the run after Rogen's character stumbles onto the killing of a gunman by a druglord and a cop.

Every element of the story is half-assed, which wouldn't matter if the jokes were funnier but by and large they just aren't (and, based on the draft of the screenplay I read, a surprising number of the better lines aren't on the page but apparently came from improv).

Director David Gordon Green normally specializes in inspired, arty fables that owe more than a dollar's worth of inspiration to Terrence Malick. I'd say he's swinging for the fences by working on a larger-budget Judd Apatow production, but curiously he barely lifts the bat. Scenes run on forever without much punch, occasionally awakened by Green's eccentric eye but those moments are so infrequent they stick out (yes, chubby Asian girl wearing horn-rims and a bathing suit on the basketball court, I'm looking right at you).

Tellingly, the villains lack any sense of urgency -- how do you get Gary Cole to play the head bad guy, then make every scene he's in feel like a tiresome requirement of the plot? Cole is one of the funniest deadpan actors around, but Green presents all of his scenes like they were shot in a single day on a handful of bad sets, separate from the rest of the production.

Worst of all, Green seems to treat it all like it doesn't really matter. The reason such director-cited influences as "Midnight Run" and "The Blues Brothers" and "Raising Arizona" work is because the filmmakers care about their characters and make the audience care as well. They're telling stock stories, but they don't hold back because of that. Green on the other hand seems to think that since it's all just an homage to Cheech and Chong and 80s action comedies anyway ... what's the difference? Or maybe he just thinks that the key to comedy is to take nothing the least bit seriously. He would be wrong.

There's also never a moment that captures why these guys love smoke so much -- aside from a brief montage of Rogen and Franco clowning around in the woods, Green never really articulates the fun, the surreality and the sensation that comes from the film's title element.

Even more troubling, the violence -- which is considerable -- is treated with the same lack of conviction. With the exception of one funny brawl, brutality is viewed as a lark -- it's like the characters are kids playing war, but there's a rigged body count. Bad guys die when they get shot (or are crushed by cars or set on fire) but good guys go to breakfast, even with lead in their spleens. There's an "it's all in fun" merriment that doesn't ring true and is genuinely off-putting. And, honestly, I wouldn't mind all that much if the action were entertaining or at least involving, but it's not. It's repetitive and dull (and is even being treated as a critique on violence by some critics whom I suspect have no problems killing a unicorn). The actors clearly had much more fun slinging around prop guns than I did watching them do it.

Action movie homages deserve better. And, damnit, stoner movies deserve better, too. Designer weed is supposed to mellow you out, fuel your groove and maybe even expand your perspective, not throw you into catatonia.

M-A-D #17: "The Bank Job" (2008)

2008-07-26T08:55:00.000-07:00

For a while, it seemed like everybody I knew had seen "The Bank Job."

Friends, family, co-workers. Even acquaintances who don't normally go to or talk about movies very much.

I'd meant to see it but didn't, somehow, and seemingly everybody around me wanted to talk about it and tell me what a good movie they thought it was.

And now, having finally seen it on video, I agree. It's good.

Not "really good." Not "very good." Just flat "good," and perhaps a hair above "kinda good."

It's a Brit caper, very loosely based on a robbery that occurred in London in 1971, but despite the clothes, the hairstyles and lots of muttonchops, the film feels extremely contemporary.

Jason Statham plays a small-time grifter/car salesman named Terry Leather ("yeah, baby, yeah!") who gets roped into a bigger, titular scheme by stoolie-for-MI:5 Saffron Burrows (as Martine Love -- "oh, behave"). Leather puts together a crack team of amateurs, staffed by Brit types -- the stuffy old con man; the mechanical expert; the smoothy photographer; and of course a cockney simp who from his first scene ought to be wearing a T-shirt with iron-on letters that read, "I'm The Idiot Who's Gonna to Screw The Whole Thing Up!" (see if you can't spot him in the photo above)

What, you say? Where's the ska-loving, joke-cracking, malaprop-prone Jamaican who never takes off his shades, drives the van and dies nobly? Looks like they forgot him.

But caricatures are represented here by a side-figure, a black militant named ... Michael X ... (!) ... a thuggy politico-pimp-pusher who always seems like he should be somewhere else -- namely chasing Roger Moore's James Bond around the Everglades in a speedboat or something.

Things heat up a little toward the end (when it seems representatives from nearly every British crime syndicate and law enforcement agency has kinky bondage photos of themselves they need to protect) but it's hard to get very worked up about much other than Burrows, sultry and six feet tall in a leather trench coat, boots and saucer-sized shades. Otherwise "The Bank Job" is a lot like "Sexy Beast" minus the sexy and most of the beast.

Movie-A-Day #16: "Death Race 2000"

2008-07-14T18:36:00.000-07:00

A sorely missing check mark on my "list of movies I've seen" can now be drawn with a triumphant Steadman-esque splattery swipe of India ink.

I'd somehow overlooked Paul Bartel's Roger-Corman-produced 1975 cult classic (about a cross country auto race in which garishly-costumed drivers score extra points when they mow down pedestrians).

But I saw it this weekend and while it's clearly a product of the 70s, it fits right into contemporary times....

-- A trivial contest broadcast non-stop on television?

-- A "reality show" whose outcome can be affected by fans?

-- An annoying, enthusiastic, Seacrestian host?

-- A gang of protesters who want to rain on the parade?

-- A president who feels a contest built on carnage supports "the American way" ?

-- A right-wing TV commentator who blames a rebellion on the French? ("After all, they invented the word 'sabotage'....")

"Death Race 2000" has all these contemporary elements, as well as surprisingly effective performances by Mary Waronov as wistful driver Calamity Jane and a very young Sylvester Stallone as prime nemesis Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. Too bad the script forces David Carradine to be such a stiff .... Interestingly enough, he made this during the final year he starred on "Kung Fu" and a year before he played train-hopping-guitar-strumming-anti-fascist Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's "Bound For Glory."

A sad program note -- the "Death Race 2000" remake had a preview before "Hellboy 2" and it looks like a big ol' piece of shit. Directed by hack master Paul W.S. Anderson it stars Jason Statham ("bald action star represent!!!") as well as, inexplicably, the amazing Ian McShayne (!) and Joan Allen (!!). They can't possibly be there for the money. Is it conceivable that they really didn't have anything better to do?

Movie-A-Day #15: "Hellboy 2: The Golden Army"

2008-07-14T18:21:00.000-07:00

"I bought you a pair of shoes
A trumpet you can blow
And a book of rules
On what to say to people
when they pick on you
'Cause if you stay with us you're gonna be pretty kooky too...."
-- David Bowie, "Kooks"

***

I scoffed just a little when I read that Guillermo del Toro, fresh off the success of "Pan's Labyrinth," passed on making "I Am Legend" because he wanted to do "Hellboy 2."

That was largely because I thought del Toro could've dodged the pitfalls that felled the otherwise admirable "Legend" in its third act.

But it was also because I really didn't feel any great affection for the original movie. It was fun. It was noisy. It had a surprisingly amiable title character. But, at least in my memory, it was too clogged up with karate fights and Nazis in fetish gear.

I may have to go back and see the first one again because the sequel is fun and surprisingly heartfelt -- it divides its time between big action set-pieces and scenes that underscore the humanity of this band of freaks that fight off ... well, bands of freaks.

These characters may have tails or gills or diving bells on their heads; they may be able to start fires with their mind or scan memories and intentions with a single touch. But they're human in most other respects and the movie has a lot of fun juggling the characters' contradictions. Whereas Batman stands on rainswept rooftops brooding over it, Hellboy and his makeshift family bicker and drink beer together.

del Toro also gets another chance to trot out his clickety-clackity Rube Goldbergian mechanisms, his jittery insects, his outlandish characters that seem to have stepped straight off the page of a sketch-book. Somehow he manages to return to the same ground make it seem fresher the second time around. He also plants a final-reel seed that -- much to my surprise -- made me anxious to Hellboy 3 bound onscreen sometime in the distant future.

Movie-A-Day #14: "The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly, Not For Sale"

2008-07-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

Does the ability to express one’s self artistically give a true artist any wiggle room at all when it comes to personal behavior?

Can we forgive a guy for being an asshole if that same asshole is also capable of creating works of staggering beauty or deep spiritual articulation?

Woody Allen – an artist with his fair share of questionable behavior – has pondered this quandary again and again in much of his post-80s work, and it’s a valid question.

It becomes even more dicey a proposition when the artist in question is not well-known or successful.

Jackson Pollock, for a prime example, was a verbally inarticulate falling-down alcoholic with severe anger issues who stopped painting completely in the last year of his life and whose self-destructive tendencies culminated in an auto accident that injured his girlfriend Ruth Kligman and took the life of Edith Metzger (who, unlike Pollock and fellow artist Kligman, doesn’t even merit a wiki-listing of her own).

But when you say “Pollock” most don’t think murderer straight away, and while some might think “drunk” or “angry artist,” front and center is the fact that he changed modern painting, modern art and the business of the business.

Chuck Connelly, meanwhile, based on “The Art of Failure,” almost certainly has more raw artistic talent than Pollock (despite his lack of innovative ability) but it’s hard to see that aspect around the bellowing, slobbering, chain-smoking blowhard he represents.

Connelly came up in the 1980s art boom with Baquiat and Schnabel, but apparently took a flame-thrower to every bridge in sight. He was the model for the volatile artist at the center of Martin Scorsese's segment in the trilogy "New York Stories" (which, in the interest of full-disclosure, was one of forces that led to my own teenage interest in art).

Now he lives in a big house cluttered with junk but filled with astonishing paintings -- reportedly more than 3,000 -- and yet he seems to be standing on a figurative runway with two flashlights furiously directing a stroke the size of a 757 toward the tarmac of his brain.

During the course of the 70-odd minute documentary, we see him make ugly scene after ugly scene (in public and alone), and alienate his wife, his patron and more than a few gallery owners and potential customers.

Desperate for cash but loath to compromise on the price of his work, he hatches a brilliant scheme for a comeback … and the resolution of that plan has to be seen to be believed, even if the movie seems to skimp on the full details in the end.

This is rough-going, and there’s a lot of cringe-inducing, angry posturing on Connelly’s part. But there’s also a lot of fantastic painting to see, particularly during a montage at the end that simply goes too quickly to fully enjoy.

I watched that sequence and felt that the works – dozens and then hundreds that fly by in a blur – are shortchanged by not being exhibited, or at least that they should be kept in a secure, climate-controlled environment.

Alas, they exist in neither circumstance. These pieces, which could offer integrity and artistic immortality to the man who made them, reside in the attic of the home of their creator, a chain-smoker frequently shown curled up in bed with a brainful of booze and a orange-tipped cigarette resting and sometimes forgotten between the knuckles of his hand.

Movie-A-Day #13: "The Visitor"

2008-07-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

I am not one of those people who didn't know who actor Richard Jenkins was before he showed up as the laid back ghost of Nathaniel Fisher on "Six Feet Under." I'd seen him as the doctor who pops up long enough to make a grim prognosis in "Hannah and Her Sisters," as a detective in "Wolf," and as a gay Federal agent who accidentally takes LSD in "Flirting with Disaster."

I am, however, one of those people who didn't know how good he was until he played a dead father giving advice to his kids which -- since the conversations occurred within their imaginations -- was sometimes contradictory and of unreliable value. He owned the role, even though he showed up infrequently.

"The Visitor" is all Jenkins' ballgame. He's like an old shoe or a well-worn jacket in the part and he creates one of those perfect characters you want in a small comic drama like this -- someone who so quickly and easily establishes what he's about that within the first 15 or 20 minutes, you have a pretty good idea what's going to make him happy and what's going to make him mad. You can also see where his progress will likely occur, but it doesn't ruin the film or make it overly predictable.

But I went to see "The Visitor" because I really liked Tom McCarthy's first film, "The Station Agent," the story of an emotionally distant man who inherits a train station. When he arrives to survey his new property, he makes three friends who -- for better and worse -- force him to end his isolation.

And "The Visitor" is based on an identical narrative model -- Jenkins' Walter Vale is a widower and a buttoned-down economics who befriends a couple of illegal immigrants in New York City. They bond over drum lessons (it's less awkward than it sounds) and when Tarek, from Syria, is jailed and threatened with deportation, Walter tries to come to his aid and winds up in a low-key romance with Tarek's mother.

I liked "The Station Agent" more because it was colorful and funnier, but the movie is a solid, performance-driven, hand-crafted piece of furniture. Not essential, but sometimes just right.

Movie-A-Day #12: "Wall-E"

2008-07-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

Yet another fine, fine film from the Pixar geniuses.

It's whimsical.

It looks beautiful. Perhaps even more, it sounds beautiful.

It's moving, even when there's no dialog, which is frequently the case. You will care about a cockroach before this film ends.

And it has a noble message which is -- just in case you were in a coma while watching -- "THE EARTH WILL BE A BAD PLACE TO LIVE IF WE KEEP MESSING IT UP!" and "OUR BODIES WILL BE A BAD PLACE TO LIVE IF WE KEEP MESSING THEM UP!"

Fortunately and despite my facetiousness, those are two highly worthwhile sentiments for a major motion picture to put forth and underline. Perhaps somewhere in the world's multiplexes this weekend was the child who, duly inspired, might grow up to save the planet and us along with it.

So, a good movie. But you don't need me to tell you that because it's got a 96-percent FRESH rating from Rottentomatoes, which means only 4-percent of all the registered critics in circulation didn't like it -- six versus 162. For example, Kyle Smith from KyleSmithOnline calls it "Too gloom-E" and Cinema Signals Jules Brenner says, "Cutes-E, but not enough gravit-E." Mm.

Eschewing nods to the title, Salon's Stephanie Zacharek (a damn good movie watcher who, alternately, either perfectly articulates my own opinions or leaves me wondering if we saw the same film) said, "The picture feels weirdly and disappointingly disjointed ... something that starts out as poetry and ends as product."

While I'm still positive on the subject of "Wall-E," I think she's onto something there.

So I have to drop just a couple of notions, and they are ....

1) I am 96-percent positive on "Wall-E" ... while he's on Earth, when the movie is wry and wistful, cautionary yet happily optimistic. Once our little Woody Allen-esque load lifter stows away to the starship Axiom ... it falls to more like 65-70-percent.

2) I would've found Wall-E's pining for Eve a lot more touching if the story had given us just a little more time between them, just a little more connection. They do start to form a bond before she's, er, called away, but they're not there yet. As it is ... Wall-E could conceivably be seen as a kind-hearted interstellar ... stalker, sorta? I think so. Yeah, a little. Take a drink every time he says, "Ev-a" and you won't make it to the end credits.

3) So we have the fictional retail behemoth Buy-N-Large, clearly patterned after Wal-Mart and big box stores like Best Buy. I find it charming that the good folks at a little mom-and-pop operation like Disney will warn us about the dangers of massive, omnipresent corporations and the wasteful folly of excessive consumerism.

I feel certain, too, that in about six or seven months time you will be well-notified of your ability to purchase the double disc "Wall-E" DVD at those very same retail chains for $18.88.

4) Over-eating and obesity is a huge, active issue. But as I watched the movie have laughs at the lazy, bloated passengers of the Axiom, I found myself worrying about the fat kids. Yep. There's no other way to say it, the fat kids. I worried about the big boys and girls in audience, too young to make their own nutritional decisions, who might think the movie was teasing or even bullying them. And I wondered if the movie's creators had considered that possibility and shrugged it off. And I worried that I might be navel gazing just a little too much.

5) The end was a cheat. It was lazy. Worst of all, it was dishonest. Those big guys ain't gonna grow no plants. As presented by the movie, they're not the right people and that ain't the right place. They are the hippies in "Easy Rider," and they will try to grow corn in sand.

6) Lastly: The opening scene -- Wall-E happily buzzing around a wasted city to the tune of Michael Crawford singing, "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" -- is one of my favorite scenes of the year. Absolutely.

Movie-A-Day #11: "Funny Games" (2007)

2008-07-07T08:34:00.001-07:00

** Mild, unavoidable spoilers about the nature of the ending **

Hey, I like thrillers and Polanski-esque tension and films that zig when they should zag as much as anybody.

Hell, I like 'em probably more than most.

But I don't think movies should serve the kind of function "Funny Games" attempts to perform.

The film, essentially, wants to punish its viewers for first watching the movie and then for caring about the characters. It's like a toaster that aspires to shave your whiskers with its high heat -- you want to say, "Just make the toast, bud."

There's been a lot of talk about how this thing is anti-American or anti-bourgeois or anti-wealth.

I don't care about that perspective, whatever. All I know is Naomi Watts and Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart play a well-to-do family who go to their vacation home one sunny day and encounter two cherub-faced white boy crackpots who let themselves in and politely-but-firmly mess with the family's minds, bodies and lives for an hour-and-a-half straight.

The movie is apparently a reaction to ultra-violent movies. It doesn't follow arcs or acts or even include much in the way of twists. It's just one ascending scale as the family's plight gets worse and worse and worse. Every time you think the family is going to get away or get to kick a little ass, the boys get the upper hand. And their upper hand is clammy.

The notion Haneke seems to be putting across is, "You think you like messed up situations? Here is a really messed up situation. It's going to make you want revenge. But there is no revenge." Presumably because in life, with the worst instances of human behavior, there's rarely satisfactory vengeance.

This overlooks two important things:

1. Messed-up people who can't disassociate movie violence from real violence will not get the point. They will just get off. Because while Haneke is surprisingly able to keep the violent activity off-screen, this is a movie with a shitload of bad ideas buzzing around and it is one intense piece of work.

2. Haneke is not just defying the expectations of thriller fans, he's going against the basic rules of drama and narrative. If a story -- violent or otherwise -- has no arc, no resolution, no satisfaction, no closure, no hope ... what the hell's the point of telling it? Much less telling it twice, since this is a remake of Haneke's 1997 Austrian film of the same name.

And this is unfortunate, too, because director Haneke is the real deal. He's got the gift of a true and unique craftsman. He's especially good at using long, largely static takes and at using camera distance to heighten tension. An early long shot of four well-dressed people standing in an expansive yard bathed in amber sunlight literally made my skin crawl with dread.

Added to which: Anybody who likes powerfully creepy movies should have already seen Haneke's "Cache," which handles similar subjects but with a far subtler and more effective approach.

A side note: I'm a big Naomi Watts fan. I am not a big fan of Michael Pitt, who plays one of her tormentors. Yes, he's frequently in good movies and he reminds me a little of a young Malcolm McDowell. But there's something about him ... his face, his eyes, his mouth, his hair ... he just strikes me as a guy who spends part of each day blowing saliva bubbles.

That's an admittedly surface impression based entirely on perceptions of fiction, but it just goes to say that any movie in which Pitt tortures Watts has an uphill battle with me. At least Haneke didn't cast Jeremy Davies ....

Movie-A-Day #10: "Hancock"

2008-07-05T15:51:00.001-07:00

Wait, "Hancock" gets a 36-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and "Wanted" a 72?

Which means, what? "Wanted" is doubly better than "Hancock" ?

I don't think so.

Aside from its blurry, oddly bargain-basement digital effects, "Hancock" has one major problem ~ the final 20 minutes.

But the first hour is funny, entertaining and inventive.

You know the plot so I won't even waste your time.

Well, maybe just a little: A guy who's invulnerable and can fly has alcohol and self-esteem issues that cloud his relations with the public he occasionally tries to protect. It's like Batman meets Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Will Smith gamely drops his charm and slips into Justice League Bad Santa mode. He even looks somewhat different in the eyes and the nose ~ Has he changed his face somehow? Or am I just not used to see him not smile?

Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron are also fine and funny, and it's good to see them back onscreen together after their previous roles as, respectively, Michael Bluth and "Mr. F" on Arrested Development.

But that ending .... The finale is the toughest part of any movie and here they seem to have just suddenly started making it up as they went along.

Any movie can do anything it wants as long as it establishes its ground rules and sticks to those rules.

I could handle the twist that kicks off the third act (and if you haven't already had that spoiled for you yet, I'm not doing you the favor) but once the main characters all congregate at the hospital, it goes to shit. The last 20 minutes is no time for a movie to create new rules that essentially violate a good deal of what we've already seen, but that's what Hancock does.

Unfortunately, when you end on a note as bum as this (Jesus, that thing they do with the moon ....) people come out saying "it sucks!"

But I'll take a movie that's three-quarters fine and ends in disaster than, say, something that's just OK from start to finish.

Movie-A-Day #9: "Burn Notice" Episodes 1-7 of 11

2008-07-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

Matt Nix, creator of the spy thriller/comedy/actioner "Burn Notice," must be a big fan of two things: 1) Christopher Nolan's "Memento" and 2) the work of television typist and pipe smoker Stephen J. Cannell.

His series is a loving, unabashed nod to both.

Jeffrey Donovan plays Michael Westen, an abruptly discharged government agent who's trying to support himself with PI work while figuring out why he got fired. But he's basically Guy Pearce in "Memento." He wears the same tan Armani suit, he talks with the same air and he uncovers the same kind of secrets about himself. Westen simply looks and sounds like him to a degree that's impossible to ignore (although, curiously and perhaps tellingly, I found his voice on the commentary tracks vastly different from his voiceover narration).

And his character is smart and endearing -- like Rockford and Magnum before him, Westen would rather outsmart than outpunch or outblast his enemies, although he usually has his choice of all three.

The problem is: "Burn Notice" basically has a heart of CBS-toned goo. There are lots of cool tricks spinning through the overall story, but each episode trots out less-than-threatening villains, hits the same structural beats, strikes the same corny notes, utilizes the same faux-edgy stutter-start-freeze-frame editing and always includes lame banter between Westen's buddies, played by Bruce Campbell and Gabrielle Anwar, who trade the same hacky digs show after show. And if a comedy can't get prime use out of Bruce Campbell ... what's its point?

I've given the show 6 hours. And Netflix has just brought me 4 more. I feel like I should finish what I started, and I keep hoping it'll get better, but I see the wires showing every single time.

Movie-A-Day #8: "Be Kind Rewind"

2008-06-26T17:21:00.000-07:00

Ordinarily, I can't stand movies in which characters chose the most complicated possible solution to a problem.

For example ...

"50 First Dates" (Adam Sandler romances a woman with 24-hour amnesia by starting over with their first date every single day ... for about a month-and-a-half ....)

"Goodbye Lenin!" (During the year the Berlin Wall comes down, a young man tries to prevent his mother from finding out about the fall of communism despite the fact that they live in East Germany)

"Life is Beautiful" (While confined to Auschwitz during World War II, a Jewish father tries to fool his young son into believing that concentration camps aren't terrible places where awful things happen but are actually kind of fun)

All three situations could be resolved with a little shrewd, rational discussion and you can't help but reflect on that fact all through those movies' running times.

"Be Kind Rewind," too, involves a problem that could be solved with talk.

But worse than that, the approach the characters take is not just ill-conceived but could never, ever serve as a rational remedy in the real world.

Basically: In order to satisfy a woman's request for a copy of "Ghostbusters," two video store clerks (who have inadvertently trashed their boss' library of VHS tapes) decide that the only thing they can do is film a recreation of "Ghostbusters" themselves and hope she, like, doesn't recognize them onscreen.

That, to me, is a headache plot.

Where "Be Kind Rewind" transcends the headache plot, however, is where the pair eventually just start making film recreations for their own personal profit and enjoyment.

The movie is a confused, disorganized mess that's sometimes tiresome, that frequently spreads itself too thin, and often relies too heavily on director Michel Gondry's whimsical, Rube Goldbergian style (only in a Gondry movie would characters create suits that provide them with camouflage when they're standing in front of a chain-link fence; and I'm at long last tired of the way cardboard cars keep appearing in his scenes).

But in the final 10 minutes -- and I almost didn't make it to that point -- the movie becomes a surprisingly effective, surprisingly touching fable about creativity and film and friendship and community and, yes, to some extent, choosing the most complicated possible solution to a problem.

Movie-A-Day #7: "The Last Winter"

2008-06-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

The Last Winter appears at a timely moment, even if it only played in six theaters last year before turning up on video this month.

About the same time President Bush uses rising gas prices to leverage the moratorium from offshore drilling, here comes a horror movie about nasty things that can be sucked up out of the ground.

The protagonists are employees of an oil conglomerate, stationed in the Alaskan wasteland near a creepy old well that’s been plugged up since 1986.

They’re surrounded by frozen fields of ice ... but apparently the fields aren’t frozen enough: The temperature is mysteriously rising of late, the permafrost is thawing and something kooky is definitely going on.

“It’s haunted,” says one character of the plugged well and the weirdness. “We’re grave robbers. It’s coming up from the ground. Ghosts. I mean, what is oil anyway? Except… dead plants and animals from a long time ago.”

That’s a chilling line and an intriguing premise, a notion it shares with “The Happening” — that the earth might just be sick of our shit and it ain’t gonna take it anymore.

Unfortunately, “The Last Winter” is also terminally glum, unfocused, slow and underdeveloped, with a bombastic ending that’s both confusing and contradictory of what came before.

Almost like a remake of John Carpenter’s remake of “The Thing,” the inhabitants of a frozen outpost get picked off one by one. But the characters (well played by Ron Perlman, Connie Britton, Kevin Corrigan and the once ubiquitous/now in short supply James LeGros) are hastily sketched and the demises that follow are varied and vaguely defined.

I’m still not sure what, exactly, is after these oil workers. It could be poisonous gas; it could be evil spirits; it could be moose-ghosts. All three seem to make an appearance at one point or another.

And perhaps co-writer/director Larry Fessenden (who also produced and edited "The Last Winter") wanted to keep things vague. After all, who knows what horrors our thirst for oil might create, or how they might eventually affect us.

But lacking a clearly defined threat, “The Last Winter” just doesn’t have enough momentum as a horror movie or a thriller.

Worse, it’s one of the most humorless films of recent memory, not a joke in the whole thing. I’m not saying there should be more laughs in a ecological horror film, but Fessenden did much better with his 1997 micro-budget vampire drama “Habit,” which was shot through start-to-finish with wit and was all the scarier for it.

Movie-A-Day #6: "The Happening"

2008-06-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, fictional characters are required to discuss events that are common knowledge between them, just so the viewers can understand stuff that happened before the movie started ....

Elliot: Do you remember our first date? You were so quiet.
Alma: You bought me the mood ring.
Elliot: It turned purple when you wore it.
Alma: Then you said "that means you're in love."
Elliot: Got you to talk, didn't it?
Alma: But then we checked the little paper chart and it turned out that it meant that I was horny. You loved that.
Elliot: I had no idea.
Alma: Yours was blue. Peaceful, right?
Elliot: Right.
Alma: What color was love?
Elliot: I don't remember.
Alma: Me neither.

And then other times, fictional characters just completely wing it ....

Nursery Owner: We're packing hot dogs for the road. You know hot dogs get a bad rap? They got a cool shape, they got protein. You like hot dogs right?

Elliot and Alma shake their heads, "no."

Movie-A-Day #5: "Californication"

2008-06-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

No, it's not a movie.

But I watched it and, in fairness, the first season has a running time equal to about three or four movies ... so screw it.

"Californication" answers the question: What would happen if you put "Entourage," "Sex & the City" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" into a writer's blender and hit "puree."

On the surface it sounds to me -- a fan of all three -- like it can't miss. But during the closing credits of the pilot I decided it was not a very good show. I then watched 11 more episodes over the course of three days.

My opinion didn't change much, it just got deeper and more detailed. But "Cali..." is, at least, engaging and less painful than, say, "Swingtown," which is another faux-HBO show and one I like to refer to as "Boogie Lights" and "The Nice Storm."

I say engaging probably because it brings in so many elements I like in my entertainment: Hard drinking writers, movie and music references (it bats about .500 with its pop culture name dropping); misbehavior; beautiful women; promiscuity; wealth; the film industry; architecture; music; Porsches.

Unfortunately, it's a show that's smug, indulgent of bad behavior and works way too hard to be edgy and off-color.

Take the opening scene of the pilot: David Duchovny's character, Hank Moody, enters a church, puts his cigarette out in the holy water and launches into a talk with God. He's interrupted by a lovely nun who, after a brief discussion, offers to go down on him. She does and then ... he wakes up to realize it was only a dream. Fortunately, he happens to be in bed with the woman who played the nun who is in fact a one-night stand who's performing the exact same service she was in the dream.

Don't you just love it when your dreams and your reality work together for the purposes of telling a story? I know I do.

What the show more or less does is co-opt the premise of "Sex and the City" -- a rough-around-the-edges writer columns/blogs and sleeps their way toward love in a big city.

But since this time the protagonist is a rich, ne'er do well Lothario living in L.A., the creators can also borrow elements of "Entourage." Hank even has an obnoxious agent played by Evan Handler who attempts (unsuccessfully) to channel Ari Gold. Call him Ari Bronze. He's pretty lame and his character really can't carry much in the way of a B-story.

Mostly, though, the show mimics "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with its concept of a protagonist who's an asshole, but who is constantly set upon by bigger assholes. That's the crucial element that makes "Curb" bearable, is that Larry's usually right. "Cali..." on the other hand, presents a protagonist who's an asshole but who's constantly set upon by characters who've been given less intelligence by the writers. Like Jim Profitt or Dr. House, however, Hank's poor behavior usually turns out to be cleverly camouflaged kind-heartedness sometime around the show's third act.

The bottom line is: I quickly get tired of stories in which I'm constantly told -- but never shown -- what a great writer someone is. Ordinarily it doesn't matter but in this series it excuses all manner of poor behavior.

"Californication." A show smart enough to mock Death Cab for Cutie, but dumb enough to take its title (a lame play on words, even) from a Red Hot Chili Peppers album.

Sadly ... I'll probably watch season two when it appears on disc. I've no idea why.

Movie-A-Day #4: "Beyond the Sea"

2008-06-23T08:07:00.000-07:00

Kevin Spacey's 2004 Bobby Darin biopic opens with a strange, bold scene in which we see -- with Scorsesean sweep -- the singer's circuitous route to the stage of the Copacabana. When he reaches it, he launches into his signature tune, "Mack the Knife," which he sings until he has a mild breakdown over the sight of himself as a boy, standing just by the stage.

He freaks, the song stops and we realize there's a camera crew filming the whole thing. Everyone in the audience is an extra, the musicians are actors and apparently multiple takes of this scene have already been shot and bungled.

That's the point at which the young ghost Darin reappears and chides his older self for making a lame, standard-issue music biography. "You're too old for the part," the kid says.

It's an intriguing scene and an interesting notion, but aside from the occasional break from reality -- designed to underscore the artificial bait-and-switches of stardom -- it takes the movie nowhere. Spacey had been trying to get a Darin movie off the ground for years and the device feels largely like his way of letting himself off the hook for having grown older than Darin himself was at the time of his death (Darin died in his mid-30s, Spacey was in his mid-40s when he made this).

So basically, this is a standard -issue music biography that makes frequent asides to remind the viewer they're watching a movie.

I understand the sentiment -- music biopics from "Amadeus" to "The Buddy Holly Story" to "Walk the Line" are often loaded with inaccuracies (Salieri didn't kill Mozart; Buddy Holly's parents didn't try to curb his ambitions but actually fueled them; Joaquin Phoenix looks very little like Johnny Cash).

But when it comes to making a biopic, unless you're "I'm Not There," I think you have to dive in all the way or not at all. To tell a story and then repeatedly remind people they're watching a story is hedging your bets. It's frustrating to both the audience and to the memory of the figure it serves.

Movie-A-Day #3: "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired"

2008-06-22T16:46:00.000-07:00

This is the best film I've seen in the past few months.

Even if you know how it ends -- or think you know how it ends -- it's still very surprising and intense.

The filmmakers bring together most of the principal figures in Polanski's 1977-1978 unlawful sexual intercourse trial.

Two are missing from the scene -- Polanski himself and Judge Laurence Rittenband, who presided over the case.

The filmmakers have a clear respect for Polanski the artist, but they make two points painfully clear: that, in 1977, he gave a 13-year-old girl Quaaludes and champagne before having sex with her; and that the case was poorly (in some cases illegally) handled by Rittenband, who was eventually removed from the case.

Rittenband is dead and Polanski fled to France rather than face his judge's increasingly sketchy demands but most of the principals are here, particularly defense attorney Douglas Dalton, former assistant D.A. Roger Gunson and the victim herself, Samantha Geimer, who's now in her mid-40s, a mother of three children and seems ready to put the whole matter to rest.

The account is fascinating, and artfully punctuated by scenes from Polanski's films, particularly those he appeared in including "Chinatown," "The Tenant" and "The Fat and the Lean," which was made a decade-and-a-half before the trouble but which features Polanski dancing on cue to a drum beaten by a man who, ironically, bears no small resemblance to Rittenband himself.

I never like to assume that I'm an expert on a situation simply after seeing one documentary about it, but it's a persuasive argument when a Mormon district attorney sides with a sex offender and his defense lawyer against a judge. That's pretty convincing evidence this movie is spouting something close to the truth.

Movie-A-Day # 2: "Cassandra's Dream"

2008-06-22T16:27:00.001-07:00

Hey, just because I wasn't writing stuff down doesn't mean I wasn't watching the films. I've got #2, 3, 4 and 5 in the works....

So here we go:

Woody Allen's latest release is another one of his cold, crisp British-set thrillers like "Match Point."

But really this one just feels like scraps and scenes from that somewhat overrated but still better film.

Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor play cash-poor brothers who agree to commit a murder in exchange for the needed funds.

Think everything works out for them? Think crime pays? Think again.

This is a handsome piece (photography courtesy of Vilmos Zsigmond) and there's some sequences with genuine suspense.

But the brothers are such wide-eyed simps, and so hastily sketched, it's hard to care much about them. Aside from their drinking, smoking and shagging, they almost seem to have skipped off the cover of a Hardy Boys adventure. They can barely handle the prospect of murder, much less its aftermath.

Allen's often-effective tendency toward expositional dialogue this time draws attention to the lethargic plot, and his often-returned-to-themes (the effect a crime has on an assailant; the divide between rich and poor members of the same family) don't advance as much as they have in previous efforts, specifically "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Philip Glass' railroad locomotive of a score calls attention to itself, and to the fact that Allen is better off sticking with his habit of selecting pre-recorded music for his soundtracks.

While certainly not a waste of 110 minutes, "Cassandra" doesn't come across like it should and it seems even less assured when considered against the similarly-themed, similarly-plotted "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" released only a few months earlier.

Movie-A-Day #1: "Control" ...

2008-06-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

... or "24 Hour Party Poopers."

And that is not a slam at Anton Corbijn's bio-pic of the late Joy Division-frontman Ian Curtis. It just means I was a little jarred by the similarities and differences between "Control" and "24 Hour Party People," which cover some of the same ground.

Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour..." is an exuberant look at the Manchester pop scene of the late 70s, early 80s, as seen through the eyes of broadcaster/mogul/bighead Tony Wilson. I was indifferent to that movie when I first saw it, then gradually became obsessed with it and watched it maybe a little too much.

Corbijn's "Control" on the other hand is a beautiful, loving, carefully-depicted fan's look at Curtis' place within that scene. His life -- fraught with depression, illness and inclement weather -- is painstakingly drawn by the photographer Corbijn in inky blacks and grays and blinding whites.

And while portions of "Control" are inspired and present a distinct storytelling voice, the film eventually becomes weighed down by Corbijn's fandom.

We never get any real insight or speculation into how Curtis transcended his humble surroundings and created music that's both a firm and respectful nod to the past but also pointed toward the sounds of the future.

The singer-songwriter, who committed suicide at 23, wrote tunes (particularly "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Transmission") that have lost none of their beauty and urgency three decades later. But the only glimpse we get into his creative life is a scene where he changes a title from "She Lost Control" to "She's Lost Control."

We also don't get any understanding of Curtis' relationship to his wife, Deborah (who later published her memoirs and served as a producer on this film).

Yes, Curtis suffered from epileptic seizures and what has to have been a deep depression -- he hanged himself just as his band was breaking big, virtually on the eve of their American tour.

And yes, it's pretty clear that Curtis simply and unoriginally traded his high school sweetheart for a sleek French femme fatale once he had the means to do so.

But actor Sam Riley, markedly prettier than the real Curtis was, mostly seems bummed that he has to come home and find the fairly delectable Samantha Morton (!) slaving intently to take what appears to be perfectly good care of the child he helped spawn. He's sulky, but Corbijn's black-and-white photography eats that sulk right up.

If you couple the sulk with the scene in which Curtis' two-sentence suicide note addressed to Deborah is about a) himself and b) his request that Deborah send his love to his mistress, a viewer has to ask him or herself ... "Jeez, was Ian Curtis the author of one of the greatest love songs ever written just a complete douchebag?"

The movie's answer seems to be "maybe," which left me wanting to read more and find out for myself. Which is, of course, the same inclination most biopic's leave me with.

And maybe it's just my general disposition or protagonistic preferences, but for all the critical talk of Riley's and Morton's performances, the one that struck me the most was the one presented by Craig Parkinson. Parkinson, as it happens, portrays Tony Wilson.