More Fun Stuff with Ellen DeGeneres!

This is just...not appropriate at all. Check out Ellen DeGeneres' front page today:



Fun!

In Which I Take the Funny Viral!

First, watch this:



Then, my take:



Comedy!

UPDATE:

I totally forgot about the best side-effect of posting a video on YouTube...INSANE COMMENTS!

So far, I have three. They all RULE in their own unique little way, like deranged snowflakes.

swishersweets2008

dude.. what the hell is wronge with you.

bpmca69

i was in that limo too. that guy was blowing the chimpanzee.

[May I just add that this is particularly clever considering that the entire joke of the video is that I am admitting to engaging in perverse sex acts with fringe political candidates? Is he heckling me or trying to play along?]

themaclady

Obama Hussein Barack is the fringer...

[So many questions...Did she spell his name backwards intentionally? Are we actually going to have to hear about Obama's middle name for another calendar year? Is "fringer" actually a word? Okay, I know the answer to that last one, but...you get what I'm saying.]

Keep 'em coming, YouTube lunatics.

UPDATE #2:

More comment madness! This next one may be the best response I have ever received to anything I have ever done, ever:

Fesheca

Well Buster, that's probably the most feeble attempt I've seen to smear a candidate. To stretch the truth is one thing, but to make up ridiculous stories is another. I see your buddy "LarrySinclair0926" is doing an identical video like this for OBama. You guys aren't just stupid...You are why women have abortions.

[How could anyone have seen Larry Sinclair's original video, recognize that mine was done in the identical style and not get that I'm doing a parody of him? IT'S NOT POSSIBLE, I TELL YOU!]

UPDATE #3:

The "views" stat on YouTube hasn't changed since early this afternoon (around 1700), but I know people are watching the thing, because the comments are coming in fast and furious. Most of them are complimentary, which is very nice. Some of them are really disgustingly racist, violent and horrible. I've been deleting them thus far, but I know eventually I'll get tired of doing this and they'll overtake the entire page. There truly are a lot of sad, insane, ferociously angry people out there.

One guy has posted two "response" videos, featuring himself discussing, at length, some perverse sexual proclivities of other candidates. It seems like he's continuing the joke, but in a vein that, I must say, is fairly creepy. I think the thing to remember here is the key role of a director. I had the multi-talented Michael Gallagher behind the camera telling me to keep the thing under 2 minutes. I think Mitt Romney dendrophilia guy would benefit from an collaborator of some kind. Or a prescription for Lexapro.

Less Than 1% Real Joost

I've been so enjoying Hulu, the free streaming video site where I just watched the entire first season of "Arrested Development," I completely forgot that I still have a beta membership to its competitor, Joost. I went back over to Joost for the first time in a few months today.

The problems began immediately. See, Joost requires you to download software to watch videos (unlike Hulu, which plays videos right there in your browser). But apparently, the beta software I had downloaded a few months ago was no longer operational, not that there was any actual message letting me know this. So, I deleted the old version and went back to the website and downloaded the newest Joost. The whole operation probably took 5 minutes, but it would have been nice if the old software had just told me to download the latest counterpart, rather than just giving me an error message.

Once I downloaded and started up the software and gave them a lot of information they really shouldn't need, I was ready to watch shows. Unfortunately, there is next-to-no genuinely worthwhile content on Joost. They have a lot of film channels, but they're almost entirely devoted to short films. (One "horror movie" channel was devoted to a few, old public-domain black-and-white horror movies, such as you might find on late-night UHF television in the '80s. Most of these can be obtained on DVD for under $5.) Seriously...this is their heavily-invested business plan? Post a couple of public domain horror movies and some shorts?

I was excited to find, on the Saturday Morning Cartoons channel, some Rocky and Bullwinkle episodes, but they don't even have a single full story arc. (Fans will recall that Rocky and Bullwinkle stories carried over from week to week). Weak.

Hulu, on the other hand, contains whole seasons of its shows, and in many cases, that means the current season. So if I miss "Family Guy," it's streaming, free, online (with a few commercial interruptions so money can be made) a few days later. Now that's in the neighborhood of what I'm talking about.

(I see that Hulu has just added several whole episodes of "What's Happening" to their line-up. Well played.)

So I'm not sure if Joost saw itself as directly taking on Hulu, but so far, it's a total rout. (Not only in terms of content and the pain-in-the-ass of downloading software just to watch videos, but the Joost interface also leaves much to be desired. It crashed once on me, froze my computer temporarily on another instance, and twice, I clicked a video on a menu only to be told that it wasn't currently available.)

Joost calls itself "Free Online TV," but that's using the notion of TV pretty loosely. Most of their content reminds me of what you'd see on a public access channel, or the channel in your hotel room that tells you about all the great amenities, maybe featuring Eric Estrada showing you around the resort, letting you know where the clubhouse is located so you can get clean towels.

It occurs to me now that Joost is brought to you by CBS, a Mahalo investor, and the same VC firm that is invested in Mahalo, so maybe I shouldn't even go ahead with this post...I might make some powerful enemies. But hey, I'm helping out the Joost people. Everyone loves feedback, right?

Ledger Domain

As my job largely concerns news aggregation, I spent most of this afternoon compiling pages about Heath Ledger's untimely demise. It can get a bit grim around the Mahalo News section on days like today.

Anyway, I realize that, in some ways, this implicates me in the media's saturation-level focus on grim celebrity news, whether it be Heath Ledger's and Brad Renfro's deaths, Eminem's weight problem, Owen Wilson's suicide attempt or even La Lohan's trips to the police department and/or rehab. My excuse is actually identical to the archetypal "sleaze journalist." I write pages about whatever's being searched. Majority tastes dictate my focus.

A look at Google Trends right now, hours and hours after the news of Ledger's death broke, confirms that he's the main concern of Americans at this moment in time.

Among the top searches are Ledger's name, searches for "Keith Ledger" by idiots who don't know his actual name and presumably don't know how to get to any news sources to find out, his former fiancee Michelle Williams, the term "heath ledger found dead," his daughter Matilda Ledger, his film "10 Things I Hate About You," the term "michelle williams heath ledger," his film "Brokeback Mountain," Gemma Ward (a model Ledger was rumored to have dated) and "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," the Terry Gilliam film which Ledger was in the midst of filming.

So it's not a mystery why Mahalo or anyone else is covering the story so enthusiastically. That's what the public wants, and the media only exists to inform and entertain the public. Interestingly, right now, all the cable news channels are running with the story on their front page. CNN.com, MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com clearly think that's what everyone wants to see. Unsurprisingly, FoxNews.com goes with the most melodramatic, tabloid graphic, showing people crying at a Ledger memorial:



"Tears for Heath"...Wow...

I'd also like to point out that this was featured just below the Ledger story on FoxNews.com just now:



It's an O'Reilly Factor INVESTIGATION! I actually saw a bit of this interview at work today (I watch Fox News at work! Just like Dick Cheney!) and it was hilarious and awesome. I'd love to embed it here or provide you with a direct link, but FoxNews.com has apparently not updated their technology since the late '90s, so it's only available in the next 10 minutes or so on their actual website, in a shitty little pixellated box after you watch an ad. I guess they blew the entire year's website budget on Sean Hannity's Brylcreem. The best part of the segment was when the (I swear this was his caption) "Expert on Demonology and Mystical Theology" said that he has scientific evidence of demonic possession. It's like, "did he just say that on national television? Cause...that's clearly not at all true."

But back to Heath. I was intrigued that, though obviously the Google-searching public and the cable networks felt this was Top Story material, a lot of newspaper's websites (like NYTimes.com) and even web news sites didn't feel the same way. This was the headline box on Yahoo! News just now:



Heath's not even in second place! Is this based on genuine market research, I wonder? Does Yahoo! know that it's news readers are primarily concerned with politics, then economic and business news and then celebrity gossip? Is this just an editorial decision by the staff of Yahoo! News, who personally felt that the story about Bush lying was more important than the movie star who took too many sleeping pills? I'm curious...

RIP Heath Ledger

Wow, this is surprising. I never thought of him as one of the REALLY TROUBLED, NEAR DEATH celebrities. I'm sure we'll get more info in the days to come.



Is it bad that my first thought was, "Oh crap, I hope this doesn't impact the release of The Dark Knight!" At least I had the class to regret this reaction afterwards...

Calacanisfield

Fairly amazing Mahalo Mash-up the podcast team threw together. Check it out:



Masterfully done.

New Destroyer FTW!

The new album from Destroyer (singer/songwriter Dan Bejar), Trouble in Dreams hits on March 18th, but the song "Foam Hands" is already making its rounds around the blogosphere. I can't wait to hear the whole thing.

Conan + Colbert = Comedy

Weitz and Darks

So it seems Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy will not make it intact to the movie screen any time soon. After the The Golden Compass' holiday season box office belly flop, New Line has no desire to invest in two more controversial atheist fantasy films that don't seem to interest Americans. (The movies did better overseas, where audiences are smarter and therefore more receptive to this kind of message. Wait, did I say that out loud or just think it?)

This is a shame. Not because The Golden Compass was terrific - it was stridently mediocre and rushed, rushed, rushed. (Here's my original review). It's a shame because these books get better as they go along, and because the one-half of the team o' doofuses responsible for American Pie, surely one of the most overrated comedies of our time, messed up the only adaptation we're likely to get in the near future.

Why was Chris Weitz put in control of this project? What in his filmography convinced the New Line execs that he was up to adapting a popular, controversial series of intricately-plotted fantasy novels, or any film series told on kind of massive scale? Before this, he directed American Pie with his brother, then the miserable Chris Rock disaster Down to Earth, then the slightly-above-average Hugh Grant comedy About a Boy, then an unsuccessful pilot.

Um...what? "Hey, he did that one where Chris Rock turns into a fat old white guy and dances silly! I'm sure he can handle armies of talking polar bears and witches battling hordes of heavily-armed troops." It'd be like getting Eli Roth to helm "Rainbow Brite: The Movie" Not appropriate...

I'm not really trying to say that it's Weitz's fault that the next two books in the series won't get made, or that American didn't go see Golden Compass en masse. (Though it is his fault that the first movie isn't better). As soon as Americans are told by their churches and media that something is anti-religion, and therefore offensive, they pretty much accept this judgment and even start repeating it themselves in everyday conversation. The message went out from a few prominent sources...The Golden Compass is against God. So Americans stayed home. It's really as simple as that.

That is happens to be true that the His Dark Materials trilogy preach against organized religion is immaterial. I have seen this same phenomenon happen this week with Cloverfield. As soon as newspapers and Fox News began telling the world that Cloverfield mocked 9/11, this verdict was pretty much accepted as holy writ. (A friend told me about a radio call-in show in which a woman who clearly had not seen Cloverfield argued that the only appropriate use of 9/11-style imagery would be to "let everyone know how evil Al-Qaeda is." This is the level of our cultural discourse.)

It was pretty optimistic of New Line to imagine that a few big stars and a nice trailer might make Americans ignore a film series' anti-religion bent. We're talking about a country that's considering electing mad Baptist Mike Huckabee, who wants to actually revert to a Bible-based legal system.

Fast and Loose Change

Fairly brilliant bit of YouTubery here, synching up all the candidates with David Bowie's "Changes." Enjoy:



[Link via Sadly, No!]

Cloverfield

The hotly-anticipated Cloverfield is not the fun monster movie I expected after seeing that cryptic trailer before Transformers. The now-famous shot of the Statue of Liberty's severed head careening down a Manhattan street recalls the White House explosion from Independence Day, one of the most openly, even proudly, brainless popcorn films ever made. But Cloverfield is not a goofy one-off; its premise and style may encourage comparisons to Godzilla and Blair Witch, but it doesn't feel like watching either of those light entertainments.

Matt Reeves' and JJ Abrams' first-person disaster film is pretty plainly about the 9/11 attack on New York (among other things). I'd go so far as to say it's the best, most provocative mainstream film I've seen dealign with 9/11, repurposing the imagery of that day in a context abstract enough to feel appropriate, not cheap or exploitative. Movies like United 93, recreating actual incidents from 9/11 cinematically, can't ever explore terror as a topic and remain respectful to the fallen. Cloverfield, by removing all the historical and geopolitical context and just keeping the sensibility, can get away with actually making us think about how we experience tragedy, and how technology both immerses us in and shields us from our surroundings.



The film we're seeing is allegedly the property of the United States Government, a homemade chronicle of a monster attack on New York City found in "the area formerly known as Central Park." The attack has actually been taped over footage from an earlier date, in which Rob (Michael Stahl-David) and Beth (Odette Yustman) share a beautiful day together at Coney Island. Both joy and terror inspired someone to turn on the camera, and though the sad memories eventually overwhelm the happier ones, they're never completely erased.

On the night of the attack, Rob's brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and Jason's girlfriend Lily (Jessica Lucas) are throwing him a going-away party. He's headed for Japan to take a new, high-powered executive job. That is, he was headed for Japan, until a massive creature decides to wreck havoc on the streets of his home town.

The bulk of the film is "shot" by a different character, Rob's friend Hud (T.J. Miller) who was manning the video camera at the party. It's a testament to the strength of Drew Goddard's writing that Hud comes to feel like a relatable character with a clear, recognizable personality. He's represented entirely through brief scripted asides and Miller's voice acting - he's maybe on screen for a total of 2 minutes. There's not a whole lot of talking in Cloverfield at all, aside from the expected screaming and barking orders ("run!"), but what dialogue there is in the film is extremely crisp, realistic (as it would have to be for a film resembling a home movie) and occasionally even funny.

What follows, in terms of plot, is an entirely routine monster film. The heroes attempt to escape Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge, but can't make it across before it collapses. Rob becomes obsessed with rescuing Beth from her collapsing high-rise apartment building. The military tries to clear out civilians so it can wage an increasingly futile battle against the unknown menace. But because we're seeing all this (or hearing about it in some cases) from the perspective of a few scared individuals not directly involved with the main action, everything feels more real and disturbing than a movie this goofy has any right to feel.

From a filmmaking standpoint, director Matt Reeves' work here is significantly impressive. Cloverfield is a large-scale action-effects film composed of a lot of long takes shot on a single handheld camera. Some of them, such as the scene on the Brooklyn Bridge or a chase sequence in an abandoned New York subway tunnel, use the limited and intimate perspective of the handheld camera expertly to build suspense.

In many ways, the film is about the technology with which it was made, about the way Americans spend their entire lives interacting with media. Cloverfield constantly draws attention to its camera; the action, we're reminded repeatedly, is not unfolding in the present moment, but only exists for us in the audience because Hud kept that camera on. His life is being lived and recorded simultaneously. (He states outright at a few points that people in the future will need to see how this all went down.)

At times, the camera seems to make events more real and immediate for him - he uses the light to guide his way in the subway, and night vision to find enemies lurking in the shadows, and gets his first good look at the monster by rewinding his own tape. But at other times, he seems distanced from the horrors swirling all around him because he's viewing that world through a small lens. Would he be bold enough to rescue Beth without the camera? Could Hud bear to look the monster in the eye if he didn't need to point a camera there for posterity? And isn't what he's doing, watching a tragedy through the viewfinder, pretty similar to what we are doing in the audience, looking at a horrifying event via technology that makes it less present and scary?

It's worth noting that Reeves and Abrams remain 100% faithful to their elaborate concept the entire time: If they need to give you extra information or show an establishing shot, the characters will pass by a television set turned to the local news. I appreciated how nothing is ever explained; no one has time for expository monologues because they're too busy running for their lives.

Which, of course, brings me back to 9/11. Anyone who recalls seeing the footage streaming in from New York that day will recognize aspects of Cloverfield's visual palette. Collapsed buildings coat busy streets and hundreds of pedestrians in a fine, gray dust. Mobs of stunned New Yorkers trudge slowly across bridges, desperate to find any kind of safety and shelter. These images can't help but make any American feel vulnerable - we're threatened, in this scenario, not only by an external danger but by the very structures we've build up around us to make us feel safe and comfortable, like our cars and our planes and our apartment complexes.

Though it's not always pleasant to watch this movie and relive the shock and chaos of 9/11 (an opinion expressed thoughtfully by Stephanie Zacharek in Salon), it's cathartic to feel vulnerable safely, within the confines of a monster movie. Just as the original Godzilla reflected the Japanese people's suffering and lingering fear after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cloverfield speaks to Americans who are still just starting to deal with the trauma of being attacked on our home soil. Perhaps this effort really does, as Zacharek opines, treat 9/11 carelessly and without respect, but I don't think so. Like all horror films, it must first access our phobias before it can exploit them, and Cloverfield very potently speaks to our collective fear of rampant, unstoppable urban decimation.

I Drink Your Milkshake!

Yup, definitely the movie of 2007.



Check out the Mahalo page I made!

Southern Man...

This Lawrence O'Donnell post on HuffPo is strange and hostile. Now, I find John Edwards to be the most appealing of the three candidates for president based solely on their rhetoric, and so thus far I've felt like he'd probably get my primary vote, but I realize this has very little with how he'd actually do the job of president and would be okay with voting for any of the remaining three viable candidates.

Having said that, I feel no particular loyalty to John Edwards as a person, and have not felt the need to jump to his defense before. But this post just feels kind of out of line.

John Edwards is a loser. He has won exactly two elections in his life and lost 31. Only one of his wins and all of his losses were in presidential primaries and caucuses. He remains perfectly positioned to continue to lose with a Kucinich-like consistency. Nothing but egomania keeps Edwards in the race now.

By this logic, anyone who runs for President and does not actually become president is a loser. "What? Edwards didn't win every primary he entered? He's just like Kucinich!"

A loser like Edwards has no status or dignity to lose. Campaigning and losing is his life.

See? Am I crazy or is this just really, really extreme? I mean, say what you will about the guy and his soaring cheesy-poof working class hero routine...he has a lot more dignity than any of the yokels in the Republican race, eagerly raising their hands to proclaim their lack of belief in science and bickering about who loves waterboarding the mostest.

So, he will continue his simple-minded, losing campaign and deny Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton the one-on-one contest they deserve.

And here we come to the crux of the issue. O'Donnell wants Barack and Hillary to get to face one another individually because...well, because they deserve it. No, I'm not sure why either. I mean, HilRod won a primary and B.O. snagged a Caucus win, but that seems a bit arbitrary. "Well, you're in because of New Hampshire and you're in because of Iowa. Everyone else, screw off!" I've been to Iowa, and I'm not sure I'm ready to turn over the keys to the nation to any state that's economy is still barn-based. Where I come from...not a lot of barns. Not sure the barnfolk have my best interests at heart.

Actually, as O'Donnell reveals in a bit, there's a reason beyond the whims of Granite Staters that Hillary and Barack deserve to have a run-off for the nomination, and why that's more important than Democrats across the country, you know, getting to decide whom they'd like to nominate.

If John Edwards stays in the race, he might, in the end, become nothing other than the Southern white man who stood in the way of the black man. And for that, he would deserve a lifetime of liberal condemnation.

Groan...

Believe me, folks, it's not that I wouldn't like to see a black guy become president. I'd really like to vote for a black guy or a white woman. Or a black woman. Or a transgendered Native American. As long as they're not a warmongering asshole or ranting about kicking out the immeygants and conforming the Constitution to the Bible, I'm good with it. I think it sends exactly the right message, both here at home and abroad, and that it would represent a genuine shift from the Bush years, the kind of major step that would confirm in all our minds that we're putting this bullshit behind us.

But you don't vote for someone just because of their race, as O'Donnell seems to suggest. He goes way further than that! Not only should you vote for Barack Obama because he's black (blackness apparently outweighing femaleness in the Presidential Desirability-o-Meter), but it would be a crime to liberalism to even consider standing between him and the presidency. O'Donnell at no point praises anything about Barack Obama. Just his color. I guess it's better than refusing to consider him for president based on his color...but it's not better enough.

Maybe Edwards is already not a factor in the campaign because Edwards voters would split evenly between Senators Obama and Clinton if Edwards dropped out. But we'll never know unless Edwards does the right thing and gets out of the way of the only two candidates who have a chance to get the nomination.

So here, O'Donnell basically concedes that he's not even sure Edwards dropping out would make any kind of real difference at all. But he should drop out on the slight chance that it might negatively impact history, or whatever. This is total Dick Cheney logic: always act based on the absolute worst case scenario, things that theoretically could, but almost assuredly will not, occur.

The white male monopoly on the Democratic nomination has finally come to an end. Someone has to tell John Edwards.

Look, I sympathize with this sort of thinking, even though I think O'Donnell comes off really poorly in this mini-column. But to vote for someone because of what their gender or their color represents is just as bad as voting for them because you'd like to get a beer with them. It has nothing to do with anything that matters.

I prefer John Edwards because I strongly agree with the central message of his campaign. Hillary says: "I have the experience in Washington to get things done whereas these guys are amateurs." Barack says: "I am able to bridge divides and bring people together in order to get things done, whereas these two are divisive figures." John says: "The problem isn't experience or partisanship, but large greedy corporations and wealthy individuals who stand in the way of rational, fair solutions. And these two have already been bought by these interests." That last one sounds about right to me.

As a way to choose a president, it's superficial, but that's about all we have to go on. They've all cast votes with which I disagree. They've all said and done stuff that makes me not want to vote for them at all. I really hate Edwards hedging on something as simple and obvious as gay marriage, find all the dewey-eyed "son of a mill worker" crap to be embarrassing and laughed out loud tonight when he said his greatest weakness is caring about the suffering of others too much! So knock him because of that. But not for having the temerity to run against a woman and a black person. It's called a fucking primary...That's what politicians do. Run against one another in them.

Steve Jobs Keynote (Mahalo Remix)

The minds behind the Mahalo Daily bring you Steve Jobs' 90 minute keynote address from today's Macworld in easily-digestible 60-second form:

Let's take a look at some of the wonders compressed into a slight, watchable 60 seconds.



I've been wondering where to keep all that excess downloaded pornography that doesn't fit on my 160 GB hard drive. I guess now I have my answer...Seriously, unless you're editing Ratatouille 2 on your rig at home, what the hell do you need this much storage space for?



You mean, you're going to keep that $600 toy you sold me (well, not me...a hypothetical consumer) a few months ago working and up-to-date without charging me extra? Alert the media!



Oh, great, another way for me to watch The Simpsons Movie. Because a theatrical run, Pay-Per-View, DVD, Blu-Ray, UMD, illegal download, Amazon Unbox, HBO and an endless loop on every Plasma screen at Best Buy...all of them weren't really doing it for me. What I really want is to get it through iTunes. Truly, Apple is the greatest company of all time.

Mission: Impenetrable

Tom Cruise discusses Scientology for 10 full minutes in this video, and I'm not sure I understand a single thing he says clearly. It's really quite remarkable. If you tried to make up 10 solid minutes of constant gibberish, you'd eventually stumble on to some kind of rational statement purely by accident.

As best I can tell, Cruise's message is that one must decide whole-heartedly embrace Scientology and all of its principles and take up whatever intense, constant fight the Scientologists are waging. Cruise seems to pity those who do not understand Scientology (he calls membership in the religion a "privilege") but has only scorn for what he refers to as "Spectators," presumably those who belong to the Church of Scientology but don't take up the fight with the mania and fervor of Tom Cruise.

He really goes on and on, ranting, about Spectators. I guess this is a big problem for Scientology? Lots of people want the fun and glamor of practicing America's Third Most-Hilarious Religion (behind Mormonism and the all-time champion, Judaism), but without the hard work of...doing whatever it is Tom Cruise wants you to do.

He never comes out and says who, exactly, he's fighting against, but apparently it keeps poor Tom from taking any kind of break or vacation, and it requires a lot of time and effort (though not so much time that you can't run your own movie studio, raise several children and star in a feature film each year). Seriously, Tom's talking about how he never gets a break from fighting, but I guess these Scientology fights are metaphorical, because I can't remember the last time I heard about Jenna Elfman or Giovanni Ribisi kicking someone's ass. In fact, I'm not entirely sure Giovanni Ribisi is physically capable of doing any sort of ass-kicking at all. The guy looks like he has tuberculosis or something. He's more and more pale and sickly with each new film role. In Sky Captain, you sort of wish Jude Law would forget about the robots for a second and get his buddy a cold compress and a grilled cheese sandwich.

I guess I could, in the sort of cynical, pseudo-Freudian gesture you'll commonly find on this blog, explain Cruise's ridiculous Scientological fantasy away...And I will do so right now:

A lifetime of fame, wealth and adulation have given him a delusionally oversized ego and sense of self-importance. And yet, he lives a life of no particular consequence, making silly, typically forgettable films for an increasingly disinterested audience. Once a sex symbol and national obsession, he's now on the verge of becoming a national joke, and the adulation of his peers has turned into a kind of derision. We're talking a middle-aged, thrice-married guy still hounded by gay rumors.

Yet here's this religion that tells him he's a leader who has been given some extremely important, highly secret information, information capable of changing the world if only it were known. And he has to organize and execute a war against the forces of evil, literally holding the fate of the universe in his hands. That's the rhetoric of this video. "How can I know this and do nothing? I couldn't live with myself," Cruise intones, darkly. It's so dramatized. So fraudulent. If he didn't talk to people about L. Ron Hubbard, he couldn't live with himself...

When you think about it, it's not all that different from what all the other religions tell believers. Still, it's more explicit about all this stuff, and that's what makes it so creepy. I mean, Mike Huckabee talking about how we should redo the Constitution to be more like The Bible is kind of scary, but it's also kind of funny. I mean, how do we decide what parts of the Bible get into the Constitution? Cause the Bible's a lot longer than The Constitution, and it also recommends punishing disobedient children by stoning them to death.

So, Huckabee's brand of in-your-face, goofball Christianity would be cute if he weren't a possible contender for the presidency. There's nothing cute about Tom Cruise in this video; he seems like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or possibly in the sustained aftermath of one.

More peculiar and abstract than Cruise's actual statements about Scientology, however, are his mannerisms. He's performing this monologue in the exact same manner he'd use in one of his films. It's as if Aaron Sorkin's Few Good Men script had been reinterpreted by...well, by a hacky science-fiction writer...It's just weird.

Today's Song Over Which I'm Obsessing Is...

Yeasayer's "2080." It just sucked me right in. And it's a good thing, because I've been listening to that Donovan song from Zodiac like non-stop for a week now.

It's Fundilarious!

God bless Gorilla Mask for posting this link. It's the Top 100 Quotes from Fundamentalist Christian online forums. So, I mean...you can just imagine...

Here's the very first quote on the page!

No, everyone is born Christian. Only later in life do people choose to stray from Jesus and worship satan instead. Atheists have the greatest "cover" of all, they insist they believe in no god yet most polls done and the latest research indicates that they are actually a different sect of Muslims.

Most polls? WTF polls are these? Cause I've been an atheist most of my life, and no pollster has ever come by my house asking if I belong to a "different sect of Muslims." Not that I'd know how to answer such a query anyway. ("No"? "Get off my lawn"?) I should think it would be quite difficult to be an atheist Muslim, regardless of sect, what with that whole Allah thing they've got going on.

So, yeah, this page is just pure gold. Hours of entertainment.

several million years for a monkey to turn into a man. oh wait thats right. monkeys dont live several million years.

Yeah, stupid scientists! Monkeys don't live millions of years! Theory of Natural Selection...disproved!

According to evolutionists, it's a fact that aliens ruled the planet before the dinosaurs because that can't be disproven.

It's a fact!

The plain truth is that both the GSA and Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educators Network (GLSEN), the organization that registers GSAs, are part of a vast, interconnected network of Cultural Marxist front groups known collectively as the New Left.

Yes, that's the simple, plain truth. I mean, to lay it out in the most straight-forward manner possible...our problems are caused by a vast network of Cultural Marxists.

Convinced atheists adhere to no concepts of good and bad, but make them up as they go along. To me, they're no different from machines!

Because we all know that's what machines do. Make stuff up as they go along...Oh, no, wait, they do the total opposite of that, they adhere to programs, protocols and repeated patterns set in advance before they're ever used. But it's still a very good point...

If This Is Your First Night at Fight Club, You Have to...DANCE!

Worst idea for anything ever?

David Fincher had a little chat with MTV where he mentioned doing a Fight Club musical. It doesn't look like he was joking. He wants to debut it on Broadway in 2009. That's the 10th Anniversary of the movie. Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, is reportedly on board. Trent Reznor is considering writing the music.

Oh, come on! Honestly...this is just ridiculous. I can't even make fun of this. The very idea of the Fight Club musical makes fun of itself. How depressing...

Top 15 Movies of 2007

I always wait until a bit into January before publishing my yearly Top Movies list. It's the only way to be sure I don't miss anything crucial, though I tend to end up missing crucial films regardless. Once again, if a foreign film opened in America in 2007, I consider it fair game. And even if it didn't, but I saw the film in 2007, it counts. Just so you know.

15. Hot Fuzz

There's a lot to like about Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's loving parody of overblown Hollywood action films, from the deliriously over-the-top violence to the bevy of sly, unexpected cameo appearances - but what I mainly remember all these months later is the fantastic, scenery-chewing supporting performance from Timothy Dalton. The precise quality that made him the worst James Bond EVER (and I'm including George Lazenby here) - the self-conscious smarm - makes him the ideal foil for Pegg's beyond-high-strung hero cop. It runs about 20 minutes too long and starts to wear out its welcome, but it is an homage to Michael Bay movies, after all, so perhaps it's not even overlong enough.

[Read the original review here]

14. Juno

I've heard several people - friends and film critics alike - refer to Juno MacGuff as an unrealistic portrayal of a teenage girl. Now, I agree that the sarcastic, snappy comments Diablo Cody has provided for actress Ellen Page on every page of the Juno script don't always seem to fit the gravity of the situation in which the character finds herself. But that's not the same as saying that the character herself doesn't seem realistic. I'd say Juno is one of the year's most compelling, genuinely human protagonists. Plenty of sharp teen girls have this kind of offbeat, smartalecky personality, if memory serves. Not every teen is the vapid sort you'd see in...well, in almost every other movie.

Also, I'd like to note that, in response to this idiotic argument raised in certain segments of the blogosphere, claiming Juno as a pro-life movie because she considers having an abortion and then doesn't go through with it, the movie is very clearly pro-choice. No one at any point states or even implies that the decision to have the baby is anyone's but Juno's - her parents, the baby's father, the State, NO ONE ELSE voices an opinion on the matter. To claim that a film in which a woman goes through with a pregnancy is automatically pro-life suggests that the pro-choice side roots for abortions. "Why aren't any girls in movies these days getting abortions? That's why I don't go to the theater any more! Too few abortions!"

[Read the original review here]

13. Rocket Science

Rocket Science is about a stutterer who joins the high school debate team to get closer to a girl, which is an extremely silly high-concept premise. That description makes it sound like the latest edition of those reprehensible direct-to-DVD American Pie sequels.

American Pie: Master Debators! Oh, shit, I'm writing that down...No one steal that...

Instead, Rocket Science is a minor-key, extremely heartfelt and personal story about a likable kid who gets in way over his head and then decides to follow through anyway. (Granted, as a former awkward, shy teenager and high school debater, I probably found the movie more relatable than most will, but that doesn't make me doubt its quality as a motion picture).

[Read the original review here]

12. Eastern Promises



At first, I was a it disappointed with David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, which had easily been among my most anticipated 2007 films. I think it's because I'm used to Cronenberg films working on multiple levels at once - most of them are esoteric, cerebral films that function on a superficial level as genre exercises. Eastern Promises, on the other hand, is just a genre exercise. It doesn't really go any deeper than that. But it's an exceptionally well-made genre exercise, and it would spiteful to ignore its pleasures merely because of its limitations.

The script is unfortunately structured and takes some rather outlandish, unnecessary turns. The central character (an unusually stiff Naomi Watts) isn't particularly sympathetic and lacks proper motivation to embark on a dangerous journey through the Russian underworld. The film is kind of all over the place, and winds up telling several different, moderately interesting stories at once rather than a single, relentlessly gripping one.

But Cronenberg's eye and innate understanding of the mechanics of suspense are as sharp as ever, aided by Peter Suschitzky's claustrophobic cinematography. Together with a very brave Viggo Mortensen, they craft the year's most memorable fight scene, a virtuoso, single-take bit of savagery in a Russian steam bath. It's entirely possible Cronenberg made this entire movie just so he could shoot this scene.

[Read the original review here]

11. The Lives of Others

This was the first film from writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, and it's a surprisingly accomplished work for a debut, successful both as a thought-provoking allegory about free will and oppression and as a Hitchockian thrill machine. This is a story of a True Believer who gradually realizes he has been taken in by a grand, sinister lie, and the gradual awakening process is navigated delicately, without a lot of melodramatic speeches or heartfelt confessions, such as you'd get with a Hollywood version of the same story.

It has about 2 endings too many, but The Lives of Others has stuck with me all year, since I first saw it back in March.

[Read the original review here]

10. Rescue Dawn

Herzog's latest adventure film isn't as big or as personal as his standard fare. Like Eastern Promises, this finds a great and idiosyncratic filmmaker sublimating his usual techniques and just telling a story simply, on its own terms. Sure, it's still got some Herzoggian grandeur and fascination with man's struggle against the power of the natural world. Christian Bale and Steve Zahn play U.S. soldiers (based on two real guys) who escape a POW camp through the Vietnamese jungle, and when they're not in imminent danger of discovery by the enemy, they're falling victim to the perils of their unfamiliar surroundings.

But this movie is a true story (previously related by Herzog in the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly), and obviously one that holds a lot of personal interest for Herzog himself, so instead of Aguirre 2, we get an old-fashioned survival story, gloriously shot and filled with some terrific, small moments.

[Read the original review here]

9. Ratatouille



Can Pixar continue improving on the quality of their animation in each successive film forever? Implicit in the concept of computer animation is that the computer gets smarter with every project. That's just technology. But eventually, it feels like these Pixar films are going to reach maximum gorgeous, colorful detail. In fact, the swarms of rats invading Parisian kitchens in Ratatouille may be too perfect-looking - I could see patrons avoiding some of the city's fine dining establishments after the realism of these kitchen sequences. It'd be difficult to eat a really amazing, authentic ratatouille for me now without imagining some rodent who sounds like Patton Oswalt preparing it with his grubby little hands just out of sight.

What's great about Pixar, and particularly Brad Bird's two films with the studio, is that the amazing technology works in service to warm, funny and smart storytelling. There's kind of an awkward, almost Randian quality to Bird's The Incredibles - it's a great, funny, visually-dazzling film with a peculiar, somewhat elitist moral compass. Ratatouille is not only charming but genuinely uplifting. Anyone not at least a bit touched by the conclusion of villainous food critic Anton Ego's storyline should just give up on movies now...you're never going to get it...

8. Grindhouse

It's a real shame that Planet Terror and Death Proof have been split up on DVD and made into two separate films, as the entire experience of Grindhouse works better all put together. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, whether intentionally or not, took 180-degree, diametrically opposed approaches to the task of updating the Z-grade cinema that once ruled the questionable movie houses of New York's Times Square, and the sensory overload of seeing them together - along with some funny fake trailers - was half the fun.

Rodriguez, in Terror, used contemporary technology to essentially "replicate" the look of an old movie, but with a scale and a style that would not have ever been possible for a low-budget film in the '70s. His zombie horror film is essentially more-retro-than-retro; it looks more like we'd imagine an insane Late-Night UHF creature feature than a real Late-Night UHF creature feature.

Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, on the other hand, inverts the formula, turning his movie into a lament for a dying era in cinema, when everything was fashioned by hand and a market still existed for movies made by amateur outsiders. (Like the real films of the era, Death Proof sags in the middle, filling time with pointless dialogue that doesn't really go anywhere. He's so committed to replicating a lost genre, he's actually willing to make his movie kind of boring for 20 minutes or so!)

He does everything he can, really, to actually make the movie like he's an exploitation director with no budget in the '70s, to limit what he can accomplish until the whiz-bang car chase conclusion. And when that conclusion comes, it's both a tearful goodbye to and a sendup of the grindhouse - he mocks the casual misogyny and perverse humor of these old movies while conceding that they have an authenticity that Grindhouse itself can't even touch.

[Read the original review here]

7. Black Book

Paul Verhoeven's Black Book is like some kind of miracle - a realistic, serious WWII film that's never maudlin, even when the story takes a tragic turn. This story of a Jewish spy (an amazing Carice van Houten) working for the Dutch Resistance is an adventure movie for adults, one that's too busy kicking ass for gauzy Hollywood pathos. In fact, the sadness of its characters and the seeming futility of their cause are brought into greater relief because the film's suspense is so relentless. We don't hear about their desperation; we come to feel it, as they do, with each close call and narrow escape. This is Verhoeven reinvigorated, working with some material that's worthy of his gifts, rather than this embarrassing Hollywood sci-fi bullshit he's been doing.

[Read the original review here]

6. Wristcutters: A Love Story



An intriguing premise executed perfectly, Wristcutters is what Defending Your Life would have been like if Albert Brooks could just get over himself for 10 minutes and make a real movie. I'd love for this movie to inspire a mini-trend in American independent film - the mundane fantasy film. This is the Mumblecore Lord of the Rings. The plot, in a nutshell: Zia (Patrick Fugit) thinks better of slitting his wrists over a girl when he discovers the afterlife is just like Earth, only a bit more overcast and dreary. Now, he's stuck in a city filled with other suicides, working a dead-end (literally!) pizza delivery job and afraid to try killing himself again for fear of where he might end up. When he hears word that his lost love has also killed herself, he sets out on one last road trip to find her.

Writer/director Goran Dukic (working from a story by Etgar Keret) has filled this entire world with memorable eccentrics: Tom Waits as Kneller, leader of a ragtag afterlife commune, and Will Arnett as the wannabe cult leader The Messiah are the recognizable faces, but Shea Whigham really steals the show as Eugene, Zia's partner in crime whose entire Russian family have all found themselves in the same disappointing eternity. A fantastic character (who, according to IMDb, is inspired by Eugene Hutz, the lead singer of Gogol Bordello and a friend of Dukic), Eugene bops around this odd world like he finds the afterlife refreshing, a break from his former life even though it's remarkably similar.

5. You, the Living

I wrote about this surreal, plotless Scandinavian dark comedy at length earlier this week when I saw it at the Palm Springs Film Festival. You can go read that review here. It's a breathtaking, haunting and atmospheric flight of imagination, unlike any movie I've ever seen other than Andersson's previous effort, 2000's similarly-brilliant Songs From the Second Floor. This guy is like David Lynch's jocular, perfectionist cousin.

4. Zodiac



Quite simply one of the best police procedurals ever made, this is not a film about the Zodiac investigation specifically, but about the nature of investigation itself. How an investigation quickly involves and even implicates those doing the investigating. The characters in the film stare a bit too long into the abyss of the Zodiac murders, and it sucks them in one by one, obsessing them with its endless string of facts and details and observations and contradictions.

It's hard to find fault with any of David Fincher's decisions here. The music is impeccably chosen, particularly Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man," which becomes the killer's theme music, classic hippie rock rendered ethereal and vaguely sinister. Harris Savides' digital cinematography - this is the first Hollywood film in history made without any film or video tape - is glossy and pristine; it resembles the films of the '70s, but if they had been shot with modern cameras. And everything is so detailed; accurate to the actual Zodiac crimes and making this entire world feel complete and lived-in on screen. Fincher went so far as to use CG blood, so that it would always look exactly right, and even shot some scenes in greenscreen, going back and artificially recreating '70s San Francisco in a computer because the real thing looks too different now. Amazing.

[Read the original review here]

3. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Andrew Dominik's brooding Western is, without a doubt, the year's most underappreciated film. Roger Deakins shot both this film and the one at #2, because he's a genius, and he gives Jesse James the look of a fading photograph; awkward and uncanny and beautiful. It's a long movie, and really something of a slow-motion chase movie, with James pursuing enemies real and imagined, and Robert Ford pursuing James, desperate to share a bit of the legend's glory. It's also the first of three Westerns sitting atop my Top Films list this year, a definitely surprising and clearly unprecedented event. (Not only have I never found 3 Westerns at the top of my list of favorite films, I can't think of any year in which any one genre so dominated the year.)

[Read the original review here]

2. No Country for Old Men



After Ladykillers, I genuinely entertained the notion that the Coen Brothers were lost to us forever. I've put up with longer dry periods from other directors than the one-two punch of crap that was Intolerable Cruelty and the aforementioned Tom Hanks catastrophe...

But the Coens had been so good for so long, just churning out strange, unexpected, perfectly-realized classic after classic, one every few years since 1984's Blood Simple. Their career had almost come to feel like "Guitar Hero 3" - one split-second's miscalculation could throw off their rhythm, and the whole game would be ruined.

Fortunately, the Coen Brothers' filmography is nothing like "Guitar Hero 3" - or at least, me when I'm playing "Guitar Hero 3" - because No Country for Old Men is one of their greatest achievements, and it succeeds on the same strengths the Coens have been exploiting for years: Unbelievably clever dialogue (this is easily the year's best screenplay), an extrasensory skill at pacing and designing set pieces and an ability to coax career-best work from talented character actors.

Many were turned off by the film's abrupt, low-key and intentionally anticlimactic ending, and it's certainly not a conventional way to close out this story. So much of the film is about what we can't know and can't understand: What drives a man like Anton Chigurh? Where does the money come from and to whom does it belong and why are all these people willing to die for it? What is the nature of Llewelyn Moss, who seems alternately sympathetic and repugnant, or for that matter, Ed Tom Bell, a sheriff who doesn't maybe try as hard as he could to solve crimes any more? It seems only fitting that we'd be left with more questions than answers, that we'd forcibly change perspective the moment the pieces actually fall into place, and once again have to readjust our viewpoint on the film's violent events.

[Read the original review here]

1. There Will Be Blood



Not much of a surprise here. I've been raving about PT Anderson's latest and greatest for a while now to anyone within earshot, and have seen the film twice theatrically. It's a masterpiece - quite possibly the best American film of our present decade.

What makes it so good? Well, I have to tell you...I'm not 100% sure. I mean, I could go on here at length about the film's qualities: how Jonny Greenwood's spastic orchestral score compliments the unpredictable and hazardous work of drilling for oil or the way Daniel Day-Lewis can make a long, pregnant pause both FUNNY and TERRIFYING. I could spend at least a good paragraph on a single shot, in which Day-Lewis watches oil burn in the distance, his smudgy red face the only thing visible in a sea of blackness.

But I couldn't really tell you why the life story of a lonely, misanthropic, greedy alcoholic, an intense and provocative character study of a horrible man, effected me on such a deep level. Perhaps I sympathize with the angry atheist Daniel Plainview, forced to abide and respect the religious majority in order to get by while secretly disgusted by their self-righteous piety? Perhaps my love of historical films, Daniel Day-Lewis films and Paul Thomas Anderson films just collided in a Perfect Storm of Shit That Appeals to Lons?

Or maybe 2007 was just the right year for There Will Be Blood. A year when a movie about a desperate, empty sociopath, fueled by a bitter distaste for humanity and an insatiable lust for wealth, status and power, felt suddenly relevant.

[Read the original review here]

Also, This...

Michael Cera on the latest "Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis." Face.