I haven’t seen “The Other Guys.” Like Wahlberg. Like Ferrell. But the trailer looked hideous. Now, however, I might have to break down if the whole movie is like this scene, which seems to be an exercise in who refuses to break onscreen while Ferrell continues to improvise circles around everyone. The entire scene you can see both guys barely holding it together. I’m guessing oh, fifteen, twenty takes to get this exchange?
Case in point: the “Plums” scene in Eastbound & Down. Robinson and McBride are helpless while Ferrell just has his way with them (NSFW).
Bill Simmons has posted one of the best things he’s ever written onGrantland, “The Movie Star,” which examines both Ryan Reynold’s and Will Smith’s perceived stardom, and the differences with the average fan knowing, definitively, who is or isn’t a movie star. His read on Will Smith seems (for now) spot-on, and I hope the future proves Simmons wrong (and suspect it will).
Simmons on his (and my) complete mystification of all things Kevin James:
I took my daughter to see Super 8 last week … they showed a preview for The Zoo Keeper and she laughed her ass off for three minutes, then said, “I want to see that one!” That’s when the Kevin James Era finally made sense for me. By the way, taking her to Super 8 wasn’t the worst idea I’ve ever had, but it has to rank in the top 10.
I’ve loved Grantland and the Grantland model since its inception- it’s a bold, brilliant move that I think really works: a literary super-team of writers that sit in their Hall of Typerwriters (they’re all steam-punk and shit with leather codpieces- the atosphere is part City of Lost Children, part Sky Captain) and send out the occasional Mark Twain-style missive that keeps rock bands, NBA stars and terrifyingly aspirational Will Smiths of the world honest. And then, cuddle up in their plasma-ed Man Caves to debate how Pavement’s is the Detlef Schrempf of indie rock albums.
I cannot believe he is on this shooting spree. And there’s nothing in the news about it. No outrage, no congressional attention- will no one think of the children?
There’s no way I’m buying his reggae album now. Reggae is about peace, AM I RIGHT?
In this trailer, devil-horned Obi Wan Kenobi and hot manga apprentice Lucia Skywalker escort space cowboy/smuggler Indiana Jones Solo towards a courtroom/jail cell, when SUDDENLY- Lucia, what do you sense? “Darkness.” Jesus, not darkness!
Sith Attack!!!
Thank God Indiana Solo has the fastest ship in the galaxy. He can “get ‘er out on the Falcon.” Let’s go!!!
Uh-oh. Here come the Sith. How many lightsabers? I don’t know. How many can you EFFING HANDLE, CHUMP?!?
Thank the Maker that Obi Wan DevilHornObi can sacrifice himself so that Lucia can Jackie Chan her way to the Falcon and they can “get to those guns/don’t get cocky kid” while getting ready for the hyperdrive and fly through a Destroyer like a Death Star trench and then they can OH WHO GIVES TWO SHITS.
That being said, the thing is effin’ gorgeous. The uncanny valley is almost gone, the movement is fluid, the sets are unbelievable, and the overall design is really spectacular. It’s a beautiful trailer that could’ve been directed by Micheal Bay. Every character looks like a superhero (yawn). The tropes are all there, in mind-numbingly predictable fashion. If everyone in your “film” (even if created by CG) is beautiful (or beautifully scarred/ugly/EVIL), well, your story probably sucks. And this one does.
But none of this should stop Lucas from casting me in the live action Star Wars. Just sayin’. I’d ugly up that stuff with some authentic cynicism, lemme tell ya.
del Toro discusses his process, trials with Hollywood, The Hobbit, At the Mountains of Madness, monster theory, and squashes his daughter with his gut in Daniel Zalewski’s fantastic New Yorker profile.
“The Hobbit,” he said, “is much less black-and-white. The monsters are not just evil. They’re charming, funny, seductive. Smaug is an incredibly smart guy!” Del Toro later said that he inevitably imposed his sensibility on source material: “It’s like marrying a widow. You try to be respectful of the memory of the dead husband, but come Saturday night . . . bam.”
I don’t know why British people make the best animal voice-over artists. Or why they make Imperial Officers in the Star Wars films seem at once menacing parts of a fascist machine and comically inept choke-donkeys for Lord Vader.
“A million people die in Iraq, and all these people go, ‘Hey, as long as it doesn’t happen over here.’ But it is over here! It’s over here=over there! It’s people you don’t know, who were born somewhere else, who fucking got jacked.
You get trapped in that whole idea of ‘this is my team, these are my people.’ And someone fucking plays a country music song, and throws up a flag. I’m in. Fuck it. Feels good. Feels good to be in, doesn’t it?”
I haven’t always been a Joe Rogan fan- his Carlos Mencia call-out was pretty epic. But this video definitely puts me in his camp. Do I believe that Obama is equal to Bush? God no. I believe that Obama will be a transformational two-term President. (Who’re the Republicans gonna run? Huckabee? Romney? Pawlenty? PALIN? Please.)
But questions being asked are never a bad thing. And 90 percent of his points are spot-on.
And his points on Eisenhower’s “Military Industrial Complex” speech are so apt as to be goddamn depressing. Roll on, great river, roll on.
I plan to see Tron: Legacy in the theater. I know it’s getting bad reviews. One of the President / Also-a-Customer founder-members of this blog has a position on the use of CG “salt” in a movie. His position is that the Star Wars prequels are a creation of pure salt. I disagree. The Star Wars prequels are a bouillabaisse gone bad: over salted as hell to hide the flavor of contaminated shellfish. The first Tron was a creation of pure salt: a beautiful inorganic structure, as perfect as a crystalline crystal. I loved Tron.
There is also a sniffling, douchebaggy position that likes to hold spectacle/popcorn/explode-a-ganza movies to some kind of Dan Day Lewis acting standard. This is like complaining that they changed the recipe for steak tips at the The 99. If you are getting steak for $5.99, there is something you need to know: you are eating a steak that cost $5.99. Some people complained that the plot was paper-thin in Jurassic Park II* (49% rating on Rotten Tomatoes). And it was. But to be fair, I’m not sure there was a plot in Jurassic Park II so much as an arbitrary sequence of semi-logic, contrived to run a boat filled with kickass FX into Port of San Diego. (I think it was the also only time Vince Vaughn tried to play a character that gave a shit about anything other than Vince Vaughn.) But the reason I went to see Jurassic Park II – the only reason – was to see a Tyrannosaurus Rex rex run ripshit through downtown San Diego. It took a long time too long for that ship to finally hit the docks, but it was worth the wait.
David Edelstein – who’s opinion I very often agree with – said that Tron: Legacy was an extraordinarily bad film, and that I should send people that I loathe to see it. And that it reminded him of “Disco Night at the High Life Ran Tan.” (You understand what he means even though you have no idea what he’s saying?) And that he thinks it has given him a brain tumor.
If Tron was an inert polyhedron, then Tron: Legacy looks to be a silicon-based life form. I’m prepared for the tumor.
* Roger Ebert said this of Jurassic Park II: The Lost World, “It can be said that the creatures in this film transcend any visible signs of special effects and seem to walk the earth, but the same realism isn’t brought to the human characters, who are bound by plot conventions and action formulas.” Since we’re working a theme.
I love these. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues against the ethics of charitable giving, which I don’t fully agree with, but the method of communication of these videos is fantastic. If all dry economic philosophy talks were this fun, we’d be much more savvy. I can’t find the artist’s name anywhere (who, I think, is the real unsung hero of the pieces), but they’re all pretty great, and keep getting better. Zizek’s argument about an impending world-wide cultural “zero point” is simply ‘declared’ and barely touched upon, but I think it’s salient- in many ways, we as a planet are heading towards a point where old answers don’t seem to be enough. This, to me, is a point for optimism, not fear- using the phrase “turning point” versus “apocalyptic vision” would be my choice.
But then again, I’m not a big Roland Emmerich fan. I think anyone who uses the idea of the world ending to scare up box office seems a bit ethically dubious, to me.
Imagine this as a sort of note-taking- what if students all learned “comix” as a second-language, as a device for retention. I read somewhere that the Army uses comics to illustrate a number of sensitive training points, as comics (and, I would assume, this form of dense-animation-comics hybrid) apparently engages both the right and left side of the brains, leading to faster neural connections (that last part is my own b.s. hypothesis- disregard as necessary).
Either way, these are great, keep ’em coming, RSA.
Here’s a fun little trailer for League of Legends Season One:
I don’t play WoW. Apparently, this is a spin-off from it, and the Trailer is marketing for the game. Which is cool.
If one peruses the LoL website, you can check out the multiple characters, and it’s pretty staggering: artistically, it’s like you took comic books, Mortal Combat, pro “wrestling”, steam punk elements, Harry Potter, Frank Frazetta, Pokemon, D&D, pin-up models, cute anime characters, and Capcom into an blender, and this is what you’d get. It’s like a unified theory of role-playing, power-wish-fulfillment, and avatar-powered escapism. And it’s pretty grand.
These MMORPG games are an artistic borg- “What? Superheros? Sure. We’ll take ’em. A He-Man-type comic Orko sprite-thing? Yep. Magic chick in an improbable bustier? Yes, please. Sauron-huge guy with proportionally ridiculous armor? Uh-huh. Werewolves? Well, WHY the f*@k NOT?!?” And I’m not even capping on the sensibility; there’s something amazingly, geeksomely democratic about the whole thing.
Watching the two teams of super-hero archetypes in fantasy-sheep’s clothing Avengers Assemble! into two fighting forces for “the Final Battle” would make Jack Kirby proud. You’ve got your huge bruiser-type, your hot-chick-who-can-best-any-man, your thief/mage, your magician, your small-yet-mighty lil’ guys- it’s the Superfriends vs. the Legion of Doom, WoW-style. When I saw it, I was like, “Of course it was heading in this direction: take the proven super-hero soap-opera, skin it with fantasy elements, add some FIGHTING…” and there you go.
When I saw BioShock a couple of years ago, I was really taken by how it combined Myst-like storytelling, remarkable cinematic design (both character and sets), with Doom and Silent Hill-like scary atmospherics and action. Intense. I think at this point, it’s beyond safe to say that the true visionaries are working in games, not movies.
Taking chances in the box, not worrying whether someone’s nephew (who got the studio job because of staggering nepotism) will greenlight a project if he can get his client/good friend on board. Game production is punk rock, in the box (the computer, rather “artistic box”), with an unlimited budget for effects, costumes, and sets.
Even though I’m going through Andrew Sullivan withdrawal, I thought this was a nice summation of current memes:
Simultaneously, the Morlock “I’ll click on anything” side of the Internet and the Eloi “I only read Boing Boing on my iPad” side decide that it’s funny, and indulge the joke. It churns for a day. It wins a place in meme history. And now that we know the joke, it’s over. These concepts are approaching the lifespan of fruit flies while getting us closer and closer to the phony interactivity of Max Headroom. As deodorant concepts go, that’s fairly exciting.
I’m more of a Morlock, “Click on Anything/Hunter-Gatherer”-type. Old Spice Man (as if you haven’t seen it):
I will never forget Johnny Depp retelling a conversation (I think it was in Rolling Stone) between he and Bill Murray about what it was like to play Hunter Thompson. They both exchanged accounts of how, even months and years later, they would have little moments where some dormant shred of Thompson’s psyche would wriggle inside them. “It’s just Hunter,” Murray said. (I paraphrase)
Based on this glimpse of Rango (and I realize that Depp is probably not producing this, ILM’s “fledgling” animated feature, but you never know!) it certainly appears that a big chunk of Johnny’s psyche is still in the desert with Hunter:
Here’s a little animation I’ve been working on for about a month, using the audio from a stand-up performance I did in January at Room 5 in Los Angeles.
I know. Fourteen curse words in 3 minutes 50 seconds (they are bleeped out in case anyone’s worried ’bout work). I’m not proud of it. But I do think the overall piece turned out ok.
I cannot wait to see this. The scene in the trailer where Banksy scales the wall effortlessly to escape the cops is tre´ Ninja.
This, to me, is the purest example of art needing a valve. When people will risk criminal prosecution to exercise free speech, creativity, and really, hard-ass-work, I think there’s a pretty compelling case for the world always getting its prophets when it needs them.
Great short in which New York is attacked by 8 bit arcade characters.
My favorite (of course) are the Donkey Kong and Tetris bits. Could use a little Sinistar and Kangaroo, though.
UPDATE: I was given the following comment below from the One More Production Company- my apologies. I’ve embedded the official version now. Questions arise about how much anything can be official when you’re using characters that are other people’s intellectual property, but I’m assuming One More has permission from Nintendo, et al. I’d be surprised if it’s simply a Fair Use deal.
Regardless, it is truly stunning work. Sorry, Karen and One More!
“Adam Lambert: You’re on the right path, but still too subtle.” That is true. I’m not really sure where Adam Lambert is coming from. With the football shoulder pads and feathers, he does look like he’s about to take the field and drive 70 yards, Adrian Peterson-style, at a moment’s notice. Oh no! What’s he doing? Forcibly kissing a guy? I think I’m supposed to be offended by how much he got in my face about that. Yawn.
I was lucky enough to meet Jane Lynch at a Hollywood premiere a couple years ago (don’t even ask how I snuck into that). I was sauced. She was incredibly nice and personable, much more so than I would’ve been had some drunk idiot been yammering my ear off.
I don’t follow college ball, mostly because I went to art school, and I don’t have an alma mater team, unless there’s a World Champion Thunderdome of Chiaroscuro or Font Kerning of which I am unaware, where you’re allowed to use a color wheel, linseed oil and a mace. (The Color-arnage!) I do, however, follow the NBA like a sterilizing rash I need to keep an eye on, lest it flare up and destroy my swimmers.
My team, the T-Wolves, is, well, agonizingly bad despite a potentially encouraging future (possible Ricky Rubio, 217 draft picks this year, Kevin Love, and an improving Corey Brewer.). And despite the fact that David Stern is, well, a wretched person (2007 Suns-Spurs debacle; the New York Ewing crapfest; the 2006 NBA Finals screw-job against Dallas- and I hate Dallas, but they were HOSED by the officials. Don’t believe me? Do a Google search for “2006 NBA Finals.” What’s the 2nd and third choices? Smoke there’s fire, son), I keep getting drawn in like a tubby kid passing Cold Stone Creamery.
I also always check out Canis Hoopus (weird, unhealthy Darko-mania indeed), the T-Wolves fan blog that has like, 20 guys on it that are either basketball savants, or they work in mind-numbingly boring jobs in Minneapolis skyways and have nothing better to do than run complicated algorithms on Evan Turner vs. John Wall. Most likely a combination of the two. Not that I’m complaining- I love the site. Makes me feel like I’m still ice-fishing instead of cursing a blue-streak at L.A. drivers. But it can be discouraging: “Yeah, I follow ball a bit.” No, you don’t, dood. Not like these guys do.
The point is this: because of the Hoopus guys salivating over the chance that the Wolves get the number one pick (we won’t- we’re McHaled- the new synonym for “doomed”) and running the numbers on Ohio State’s Evan Tuner, I was introduced to one Mark Titus, Pine-Rider Extraordinaire.
Check the style, one-time:
(Warrant song is great, but it could use a “Heaven Isn’t Too Far Away” third chorus key-change to elevate it to Code Awesome.)
Mark’s blog ‘n charity here. Buy a t-shirt. Help some kids, dammit.
KENWOODE UPDATE: Been quite the slug in 2010, I know. Just moved, had some freelance illustration to finish, and I’m finally settling down. I really do have finished pages to post, so I’ll be doing that this weekend. Promise. (Takes shot of tequila)
Because, really, why wouldn’t Lil’ Jon be coaching tennis players how to return fireballs?
Contra is, if possible, an even better album than their debut. A perfect little pop masterpiece. And I bet they wrote this song ’cause someone in the band said, “Hey, we need to do something to the drum beat of In A Big Country.
When I was 17
I had wrists like steel
And I felt complete
And now my body fades
Behind a brass charade
And I’m obsolete
But if the chance remained
To see those better days
I’d cut the cannons down
My ears are blown to bits
From all the rifle hits
But I still crave that sound
I realize this came out ages ago, but damn, I love this song. Fell asleep in the movie, but I think this song is just makes yer face go all screwy, in a good way, like you’re about to watch the Corey Brewer dunk over D Fish for the forty-second time on YouTube (if you haven’t seen that, do yourself a favor). The FUZZY guitar tone, that great room sound on the drums, the Linn “Computer Blue” echo-y hi-hat, that piano riff, all righteous. Even if Alicia seems to be flat on that bridge part. Well, maybe it’s not her, but SOMEONE’S flat.
People destroyed it on a lot of the YouTube comments, but they’re wrong. It’s just vicious. And if that’s actually Jack playing drums, man has got some taste, feel, and chops. It’s a perfect nasty little pop song.
Just watched Brett Gaylor’s Rip! A Remix Manifesto on Hulu last night. I’m actually shocked that NBC, Fox and ABC (Disney) would have this online, in this format; despite its lionization of Disney the Man, Disney the Company is really taken to task here. Maybe it’s the “if we join them, they will disappear” belief. Or maybe they (Los Corporations Grandes) figure the animals have already left the zoo, and they can’t stop it, exhibited by their mere acceptance of Hulu as a business model. Don’t know.
What I do know is that the film is pretty damn good. I’ve been loosely paying attention to these issues since the U2 vs. Negativland debacle in the early nineties, which really made U2 look backwards at a time when they were actually creating some pretty forwards-looking music. I think Negativland would have looked a bit more serious if they hadn’t included the cover, which is pretty much a giant “U2” over a much smaller “Negativland.” You can claim “culture jamming” all you want, but when you transparently are looking for huge sales by being cheeky, I understand Island’s concern. Maybe not the legal overreaction, but the concern is valid.
(I also think Greg Ginn’s re-release with Negativ(e)land: Live on Tour album on SST is about as brilliant a response as possible- Negativland may have posed and said, “EXACTLY! That’s what we’re talking about!” but the loss of their “intellectual property” and the realization of Ginn’s masterful chess move must have stung a little.)
Regardless, I think Rip! and Girl Talk (the “band” that Gaylor champions- those quotes are not sarcastic, it’s actually one guy) are completely necessary right now, and Girl Talk to me is more of an idea than an actual band. (Much like The Sex Pistols are a better idea than a band- Never Mind the Bollocks… is a pretty good album, but it’s a better call-to-arms. The Clash were 10 times the band the Pistols were.) I love the idea of “everything is fair game, ’cause we’re all the same person” and I think the spirit of Girl Talk is much more interesting than the actual music- I listen to the songs and think, “That’s interesting,” but there’s an aspect of it (to me) that seems like a novelty. It’s not the music that’s important, it’s the crowd’s reaction to said music- much like the Pistols, it’s the movement that’s the star. And I think Girl Talk completely understands that.
Got some new panels and pages posted; I go back and forth on their quality, but the Dude abides. Plus, I had a huge India ink accident that I don’t want to talk about. Seriously. Dude. I don’t want to talk about it.
Saw Men Who Stare at Goats the other weekend, and really loved it. Clooney is just getting better with age. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave it an F. But I give Owen Gleiberman an F, ’cause he gave I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell a B+. I ain’t linkin’ to shit ’bout that movie.
Kenwoode 
