Two Unconventional Teen Comedies

Superbad

Judd Apatow is Todd Phillips 2.0. Phillips collaborates with comedians skilled enough to improv around his sub-retarded set-ups and plotlines. When in doubt, they throw something slapsticky together. (Naturally, once he shifted his cast from improvisational geniuses Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn to Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, the work suffered.)

Apatow also works with really funny actors and devises stories that give them a chance to shine, and then kind of depends on that to just generate laughs for 2 hours. When it doubt, he has a guy crash a bike into a truck or get hit by a car.

I don't mean to make too much of this comparison. The difference between these two is clear. Apatow and his team of writer/director/actors, who have turned out hits like 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up thus far, are geniuses with character, far beyond the shallow types of Phillips' best film, Old School. The Apatow films (this one directed by "Undeclared" and "Arrested Development" vet Greg Mottola) are always stacked with funny and above all charismatic performances. Michael Cera, Jonah Hill and particularly 18 year old newcomer Christopher Mintz-Plasse have some great bits of dialogue here and there in Superbad, but this is not exactly Woody Allen-level material in terms of one-liners. The movie is funny because they are funny, not because of anything in particular that they say or do.

But still...potentially record-breaking dick joke quotient aside, there's not a whole lot going on in Superbad. It's generally amusing, sometimes hilarious, but otherwise unremarkable.



I think the largest single problem here is that the humor is so front-loaded. Superbad starts really strong, with the cool '70s vibe of the intro and the swift but memorable establishment the three central relationships. It has considerable trouble keeping up the tempo once the adventures begin in earnest, and a lot of the material in the second half just drags everything down. (A detour to a wild, coke-fueled party, for example, goes on way too long.)

Long-time best friends Evan (Cera) and Seth (Hill) are named for the script's co-writers Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, and it's not hard to imagine that the film is fairly autobiographical, but this also makes it kind of self-indulgent and navel-gazing.

Feeling like nerdy outcasts, befriended only by a fellow outcast Fogle (Mintz-Plasse), whom even they push around and bully, Evan and Seth have isolated themselves from the general high school population in a basement, talking about all the things they would do with a girl if only they could get date with one.

Unexpectedly, the guys land an invitation to a big graduation party being thrown by the attractive and popular Jules (Emma Stone), but it comes loaded with a considerable request - would they mind using Fogle's new fake ID to obtain $100 worth of booze for the party?

It's a great set-up for a horny teen comedy, kind of a Porky meets John Hughes thing, with these guys absolutely desperate for some action and so close to making it happen, but just barely missing the mark. Rogen, Goldberg and Mottola, no offense, seem to have a genuine understanding for these guys' dilemma. The intensity of the biological drive to procreate has nothing on the social pressure to "get some" before going away to college, and the more desperate horny teen guys become to make this happen, the less likely girls are to help them out. All of the best moments with Seth and Evan - from Seth's anecdote about obsessively drawing penises as a child to his run-in with a menstruating girl at a party - build off of this undercurrent of sexual frustration, exposing in the most humiliating fashion possible their shared, neurotic need to complete this challenge and fit in.

But though Cera and Hill make a solid comic duo and will probably work together again soon, it's Mintz-Plasse who steals the show. Fogle, called McLovin after the name on his fake ID, doesn't actually share much screen time with the two leads. Early in the film, he's essentially kidnapped by a pair of unruly, bro-ish cops (played by SNL cast member Bill Hader and co-writer Rogen), and what begins as their side-story tends to overshadow the main action of the film.

McLovin brings an innocence to the film that was sorely needed amidst the overwhelming tide of body part humor. Not that I don't enjoy body part humor, but Superbad is relentless and unsparing with it. (Doodles of penises dressed up as historical figures run behind the closing credits, just to ensure that there's not a moment of screen time someone involved in the production could proudly show their Mom.) McLovin's just as horny as the other two, if not more, but he's not so repressed about it, so tied up in his own thoughts. He's like a sexy cheeseburger...

Rocket Science

The guys from Superbad are like Casanova and James Bond rolled into one compared to Hal Hefner. Hefner (Reece Thompson) develops a crush on school debate champ Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) so intense, he's compelled to join the Debate Team. The only trouble is his stutter, one so severe it prevents him from ever getting his preferred cafeteria lunch or even saying a proper goodbye to his family-departing father.

Writer/director Jeffrey Blitz, whose previous effort was the spelling bee documentary Spellbound, turns out a rather brilliant character study featuring a nearly-silent protagonist, which can't be an easy thing to do. He and Thompson have just connected here, come together to craft a portrait of an intelligent young man cripped by a speech impediment, but determined not to hold himself back any longer. The film was a hit at Sundance, and I'm pretty sure it will be one of the best films I see all year.



I did a little debating in high school, and had largely assumed when starting out that it was an argument contest. Whoever could argue with the most forcefulness and rhetorical skill would win. Of course, actual debate competitions are nothing like that. The judging is actually quite mathematical. Both teams make arguments and refute the arguments of the other team. Whoever gets through the debate with the most unrefuted arguments wins, and the way to do this is to talk really fast and get out the most information in support of your case as possible in the time provided.

The metaphor to Hal's life is not too difficult to surmise. He's constantly aiming for an unattainable perfection, afraid to speak unless he knows the words will come out correctly. (We hear him rehearse the phrase "I'd like the pizza, please" on the school bus, and then see him freeze up that day at lunch when the lady asks him "pizza or fish?") What he must learn is that there is no perfection, and the secret is to try as hard as you can and hope that more things work out for you than don't. It's not...you know...rocket science.

Blitz builds these ideas into a story that's fairly conventional yet wildly unpredictable. This is an occasionally raw and always honest film, but it's not a painful portrait of tortured youth like Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse or anything so much as it is a fairly straight-forward comedy about an awkward teenager coming to terms with himself. Having said that, I never knew where the story was actually going to go, and Blitz comes up with some real left-turn surprises that nevertheless feel true to his impetuous teenage characters.

Hal eventually gets together with Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D'Agosto), a former team debater who freaked out mid-match and left school to work as a dry cleaner in Trenton. They look alike and compliment one another well, and the sequences with the two of them preparing for the State Tournament are the best in the film.

Rocket Science is a quiet, subtle kind of movie. It's a comedy, but a dry and laconic one, not a big crowd-pleasing goof-off like Superbad. I enjoyed them both, and may have to revisit McLovin's antics at some point in the future, but it's Rocket Science that will be most likely popping up in my Best of the Year list.

ALERT THE MEDIA!

This is truly hilarious:

So...that happened...

Dwarf's penis gets stuck to vacuum cleaner

Do I need to keep going?

A dwarf performer at the Edinburgh fringe festival had to be rushed to hospital after his penis got stuck to a vacuum cleaner during an act that went horribly awry.

Awry is right. This is objectively the most awry thing I have ever heard of in my life, ever.

Daniel Blackner, or Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf, was due to perform at the Circus of Horrors at the festival known for its oddball, offbeat performances.

The main part of his act was for him to appear on stage with a vacuum cleaner attached to his member with a special apparatus.

Now this, on the other hand, is a massive understatement. Having a dwarf place his genitals in a vacuum cleaner is not an offbeat performance. It is a perverse display, an affront to all that is good and sacred. It also has the potential to be hilarious and awesome, sure, but I would scarcely describe it as "offbeat." A Jarmusch film is offbeat. A dwarf putting his cock in a powerful home appliance is "deranged."

The attachment broke before the performance and Blackner tried to fix it using extra-strong glue, but unfortunately let it dry for only 20 seconds instead of the 20 minutes required.

Wow. How much was he being paid for this performance again? It was Linda Evangelisa who famously said, of her and her fellow supermodels, "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day." Well, I think I can say, on behalf of most of my fellow men, that "We don't put our penises anywhere near a large, noisy, electrified sucking machine for less than $800 billion." Unless, you know, they have been designed expressly for said purpose (and you know that this invention's bound to be right around the corner...)

"It was the most embarrassing moment of my life when I got wheeled into a packed A & E with a vacuum attached to me," Blackner said.

"I just wished the ground could swallow me up. Luckily, they saw me quickly so the embarrassment was short-lived.

He said to the reporter writing a news story using his full name set for international publication and distribution.

Man, this guy is not bright.

[Hat tip, Perez]

"Laguna Beach," "The Hills," "Newport Harbor"...Fake, fake, fake

I've been saying this for years, that these shows are clearly pre-scripted. You couldn't make documentary-style reality TV into this kind of glossy, multi-camera show. It just doesn't work. But people would never believe me. Seriously, I've had at least 10 arguments in the past two years on this very subject.

"I'm telling you, 'The Hills' is fake. They just make up pseudo-realistic stories about these kids and then have them act it out like it's happening to them live."

"But they cry on cue and stuff! No way Lauren Conrad's that good an actress!"

Surprise, surprise...It's FAKE:

They call MTV's "The Hills" a "reality" show, but we've had our doubts for some time. Fueling our skepticism, on Tuesday night, the star, Lauren Conrad, showed up at Da Silvano for dinner with three friends and a camera crew. One irked diner told us, "It was clear that this show is not a reality show. They took five takes of Lauren ordering dinner. The film crew took over the outside eating area by setting up lights and cameras everywhere. They should go back to California."

Waiting for the Netflix Killer

Someone's got to come along and do Netflix better than Netflix. Seriously, Internet DVD rental is such awesome idea, but these guys are mucking it up.

I outlined some of my problems with Netflix in this post from May. Basically, if you rent from them too much, and your account ceases to make a satisfactory profit for them, they begin to tinker with your queue, sending movies that you want to other, less obsessive users first or even holding back on sending your new rentals for a day. The site's Terms of Service make note of these tactics (because of a lawsuit), but it's one of those fine-print jobs that no one really looks into.

So that's annoying, but it's still worth having Netflix because of the convenience and the depth of their library. (They always have something around that I want to watch.) In fact, I'm busy enough between Mahalo and writing that I've been watching fewer movies, and I've noticed lately that I tend get movies from the top of my queue rather than 1/3 of the way down. So at least they've made their Fuck Over Cineastes System (or FOCS) self-correcting.

But this week, the Red Envelope's really starting to try my patience. Kenneth Branagh's 4-hour full-text version of Hamlet just came out on DVD on Tuesday, and I haven't seen it in years. (Laser Blazer had a laserdisc version, but I never got around to watching it.) So I made sure to keep it at the very top of my queue, hoping to get it quickly. And I did...but only Disc 1, which is the first 2.5 hours of the movie.

Now, I know that Netflix sleeves usually hold just one disc, and that they divide up 2-disc special editions into two rentals. (Like, you'd get the film first, then the special features later if you wanted them...I usually don't bother...)

But I had no idea they would go so far as to do this with movies divided between two discs. That is completely asinine. When I rent a film, I feel it's safe to say that I'm renting that entire film, not the portion that fits on a standard single DVD. (You could make the case that mini-series, placed on 3 or 4 discs, would count as separate rentals. But one long movie?)

There's two problems here:

(1) Sending customers one half of a movie at a time is a ridiculously stingy, bullshit practice that's going to do nothing but engender mistrust and derision from the general public. Considering that Netflix turnover is about 4 days even if you watch the film as soon as it arrives in the mail, they're basically asking me to watch a single movie spread out over a week.

and

(2) Netflix felt no need to inform me in advance that they planned to split up my rental this way, giving me no opportunity to return two films in anticipation of watching Hamlet all at once.

Failing to correct #1, they should really do something about #2. I wrote them a very nice e-mail saying so, as a matter of fact...LAST WEEK, and they have thus far felt no need to respond.

So this is why I'm thinking that someone should figure out how to do Netflix better than Netflix. I don't know what that way is...but there has to be a way, right? Charge a bit more, but guarantee you'll get the movie you want? They just cut my rates by a dollar, which is nice and all, but I'd rather they keep that dollar and improve their service. I'd probably give them a few more dollars a month, actually, if it would guarantee that I'd have the three movies (COMPLETE movies, preferably) I want at any given time.

And also, hire a customer service department that can actually deal with customer service issues in a semi-timely fashion. Firing some of the developers and designers they've obviously hired to turn their site into yet another redundant social network no one wants to bother with would be a good place to start. Why can't the movie rental site just rent goddamn fucking movies? Why does it have to be Facebook Films?

You're a video rental service. I don't want complaints about the films you've sent me dealt with two weeks later. I clearly wanted to watch this movie now. That's why I have ordered it from you in advance. Grrr...

Headline Rubes

So, I'm here at Mahalo HQ, where the News Department has just added a nice, big widescreen HDTV which we keep tuned to CNN Headline News. Unless "Big Brother" is on.

They just did a story about the USC Trojan Football Team, and I shit you not, the anchor said this:

"Much like their namesake from Greek mythology, the USC Trojans..."

Um...excuse me? Greek mythology? I mean, yes, the Trojan War provides the backdrop for much of Homer's writing and all, but CNN Headline News is aware that the Trojans were an actual group of people who really did exist, right? I mean, this would be like saying "the mythical Ancient Greeks." The Ancient Greeks often interact with their own mythology (Zeus, in particular, was fond of disguising himself and bedding their nubile young persons), but that doesn't mean they were themselves mythological. A-duh.

Internet Famous!

Check this Fast Company video about Mahalo. That's my brother they interview about halfway through talking about bacon placemats!



I'm so proud...

Why did this randomly pop into my head today?

Just weird. Haven't heard this song in years...

I take back everything bad I ever said about Christians...

Okay, not everything. In fact...nothing. But this is still pretty hilarious, though I'm not certain it's hilarious in quite the way that was intended:

Brand Reps and Impacts

So, someone got to my blog today by doing this Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=any way to switch from impact to model at abercrombie%3F&hl=en&star

"Switch from impact"? What could this mean? Here was the CBI post, or rather, string of posts, that randomly came up in this Google search. In it, I insinuate that Conor Oberst tries intentionally to resemble an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog model. Later on in the page, I mention the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Double Impact. Such is Google...

This sort of this happens fairly often. But there was something about this Google search that just struck me as creepy and ridiculous in equal measure. What could it mean?

God Bless Wikipedia:

Abercrombie & Fitch brands offer three main part-time positions: Impact Team, Model (formerly "Brand Rep"), and Overnight. Impact are responsible for the back stock rooms, Models primarily interact with customers on the store floors, and Overnight associates are in charge of floor sets and store recovery (maintenance and presentation of merchandise for the following day).

This is not just another example of how retail environments become insane little pockets of delusion. Very different, sometimes very odd individuals thrown into a very small, social environment for 8 hours a day, five days a week will form little communities and then they will all slowly go absolutely mad together from dealing with the inanity and frustration of customer service, until they become like the two girls from Heavenly Creatures, dreaming of the days when they didn't have to act friendly and take extra special care of obnoxious, needy strangers and secretly plotting during every extra moment the delicious pleasure of savaging the establishment on their final days of work. This is standard.

But Abercrombie actually seems to nurture this kind of environment, to encourage its employees to turn on one another in fits of paranoid, uber-competitive self-aggrandizement.

This blog post is one of the first you see if you search for Abercrombie impact models. (NOTE: I'm assuming that the term "brand rep" in the post and the term "model" in the search are referring to the same position. This NYT article seems to confirm that assumption.)

here's such a tension between brand reps and impacts at my store! brand reps tend to be cliquey (it's a second high school) and act like they are superior than the impact people. i'm a brand rep myself, but other brand reps have this "we're brand reps because we're hot, and impact people just fold in the back" attitude. i feel so bad because brand reps generally stand around and talk while impact people do all the work. when there's an attractive impact person, i hear brand reps say, "why is HE an impact?" as a result, impact members hate their job and don't last long.. we're always short of impact people. does this happen in other stores too!?

Sometimes, reading a blog can be like watching someone in the shower. I could never write dialogue like this, hard as I might try. I don't have the kind of creative mind that could invent the phrase "Why is HE an impact?," though I plan on peppering it into my daily conversation from this point forward.

Anyway, you have to feel for whatever person performed this initial search. Clearly, they work in an Abercrombie child pornography studio store as an "impact" and has observed the same trend as this blogger: impacts have the shitty jobs and get disrespected, while brand reps get to lounge around and not do much.

The searcher performed this Google search, I'm sure, hoping for good news. Maybe a post on someone's personal blog who had made this transition. But, no, instead they found very little helpful information - including my blog, which had information about JCVD movies and overrated singer-songwriters - save a blog post about how their boss finds them physically unappealing. Weak...

I Hate the Bizarros

What must it be like to go through life as Blogs for Bush writer Mark Noonan?

I'm kind of a neurotic, self-aware kind of guy, so I can't really conceive of leading an unanalyzed life. Whether I want it to or not, my internal running monologue just keeps going, all day long, picking apart everything I do, breaking it down, considering it and then reconsidering. I wasn't always certain everyone's mind functioned in this way, in fact, but now I'm fairly certain they do. At least, the somewhat intelligent, functional minds.

Clearly, not everyone has this kind of running mental commentary track. Some people say or do the most ridiculous, appalling things and never give them a second thought. They're creature of pure impulse, like squirrels that have somehow grown to human height and mastered some basic English phrases. Many of them, if not most, become politicians, TV pundits or right-wing bloggers.

How else to explain this Noonan post, which I will now cite in its entirety:

Congratulations, Jenna Bush

Good news for the Bush family:

CRAWFORD, Texas - Is a White House wedding in the works?

Jenna Bush, one of President Bush's twin daughters, is engaged to be married to her longtime boyfriend, Henry Hager, the White House announced Thursday.

Asked if the two were getting married in the Rose Garden, Sally McDonough, press secretary for first lady Laura Bush, replied: "They have not set any details, date or place."

Jenna Bush, 25, and Hager, 29, were engaged in Maine on Wednesday, she said.

The two have been dating for several years, and Hager is often seen at Jenna Bush's side at family Bush functions and formal events, such as a White House dinner in November 2005 in honor of Britain's Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

Hager will be returning to school this fall to complete his master's degree in business administration at the University of Virginia. He has an undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University.

Hager, who has been a White House aide and worked on Bush's re-election campaign, is the son of John and Maggie Hager of Richmond, Va. His father is chairman of the Republican Party in Virginia, former assistant secretary of the Education Department's office of special education, former lieutenant governor of Virginia and former director of Virginia's Office of Commonwealth Preparedness.

We here at Blogs for Bush want to extend our congratulations to this young couple as they start their life journey together. We ask the blessings of God be on this union and that love and happiness be their portion for all the days of their lives.

Note to liberals: This is your chance to just say something nice.

[Italics mine]

Can it be that Noonan doesn't realize the ludicrous, self-defeating hypocrisy of this statement? He's a guy who writes blog posts every day and it doesn't occur to him? He's mocking the way his political enemies turn even a happy event into an occasion for criticism and vitriol by turning a happy event into an occasion for criticism and vitriol.

"Hey, liberals, why are you always criticizing us, you lousy stupid jerks!"

I would say he should make swift use of the "stop hitting yourself" defense, but I'm pretty sure that was deemed unconstitutional in the landmark case of Rubber v. Glue. But I'll have to check my files to be 100% sure...

The only other option is that Noonan's aware of the stupidity of that statement but makes it anyway, because it sounds kind of pithy and condescending. And maybe, just maybe, the composition of 100,000 straight blog posts in that exact tone of voice, which would most likely qualify as a new Guinness World Record, is his only real aim in the blogosphere.

Either way, it doesn't reflect well on the man, nor his capacity for rational thought.

And while we're hanging at the B4B, here's a post of Noonan's from today that may very well represent the complete, polar, 180 opposite of a Crushed by Inertia post. Mark Noonan is Evil Lons. Or Bizarro Lons, depending on your preferred division of nerditry.

Your Prayers for Me, if You Please

Later today I shall undergo a colonoscopy - a general look at the innards to figure out a particular problem I have. I ask your prayers that it will all go smoothly and that nothing serious will be found.

I'm a firm believer in the philosophy that blog readers don't generally tend to care about the author's physical well-being unless it's extremely dramatic. As in, the blogger is dying. (Preferably dying of something trendy or sexy. I doubt tales of gout slowly leaking away a writer's will to live would drive a ton of readership to a blog, even though I'd probably subscribe to the RSS feed.)

Otherwise, I feel like people who don't know me personally but enjoy my occasional film/political commentary would just as soon I keep that kind of shit to myself. I wouldn't regale my mother with tales of my own colonoscopy, let alone anonymous readers of the Internet worldwide.

Other things Noonan does here that I would not do:

- Ask anyone to "pray for me," adding the caveat "please," as if these sorts of conversational niceties could convince someone who wouldn't do so otherwise to clasp his hands in prayer. "Well, normally I would never do this...but Jesus, can you save Mark's colon? He said please!"

- Refer to a colonoscopy as a look at "the innards"

- Use the terms "colon" and "go smoothly" in the same paragraph without the requisite quotation marks to render them non-disgusting.

Now, and I'm just thinking aloud here, but if you prayed to Satan for things to go really well for Mark, would he then die during this routine procedure? What if a Satanist prayed to Satan? What if a Christian, using reverse psychology, prayed to Satan for things to go horribly awry for Mark? Is Satan too clever for that sort of trick? Maybe...and bear with me here...but maybe Satan doesn't answer prayers at all, because he's completely evil, so praying to him would do nothing but make God angry. BUT if your prayers angered God, maybe he'd do the exact opposite of what you wanted, so praying to Satan that horrible things befall Mark during his colonoscopy would actually have the effect of saving his life!

I'm not suggesting you should really ask Satan to make something go really wrong with Mark's colonoscopy. Really, I'm not. But if you did, it just might save a life...Think about it.

DOWN GOES FRAZIER! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!

Oh, this one really chokes me up...

HALF HOUR NEWS HOUR SHELVED

In a memo to senior producers this afternoon, FNC's SVP of programming, Bill Shine announced the network "will not continue the Half Hour News Hour beyond its current 15 episode run." Shine did leave the door open, however: "we are considering ways to retool the show for future scheduling needs."

Naturally, I have some suggestions...

(1) You've got to open big. Put your best foot forward. This...



is no way to open a comedy show. It's a little grim. This is, however, a way to open a B. Dalton Red-Sticker Clearance Sale.

(2) Try to be a little less forceful and a little less predictable. Everybody already knows how your "comedy" is going to come down every time. Feminists are ugly, libruls are pansies, gays is queers, immigants should go back t'where they come from, etc. Throw us a curveball now and then.

(3) Write much better jokes.

I hope this has been helpful.

The TV news satire show which airs Sunday nights, stars faux anchors Kurt McNally, played by Kurt Long, and Jennifer Lange, played by Jennifer Robertson.

They were using fake names? That's weird...I didn't even realize that these anchors were fictional characters. Does that mean they don't necessarily believe all this crap? Can you imagine if Kurt Long were himself...a librul? Working undercover as a right-wing hack at GOP-TV? Did I just give away the best comedy pilot idea I'll ever have?

Much to my delight, Mediabistro has graciously published the Fox memo killing the show. It's the Crushed by Inertia Corporate Document of the Day!

August 14, 2007

TO: Senior Producers

FR: Bill Shine

RE: Half Hour News Hour/Weekend Programming

I'd like to share some news with you about weekend programming.

What a drama queen. News about weekend programming.

"Some news about our weekend programming. Some recent...unfortunate...unpleasantness concerning a show we all...thought we knew. It turns out, "The Half Hour News Hour"...is pregnant. But we'll get it taken care of quickly. Fortunately for us, our efforts to criminalize the required procedure have...thus far failed. I'll leave you now."

Joel Surnow and I have mutually decided that we will not continue the Half Hour News Hour beyond its current 15 episode run. The last show will be presented on September 16th.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Joel and his team. He is a visionary in this business and he created a contrarian program that fulfilled an untapped niche in the comedy genre.

Joel Surnow of course being the hi-larious producer of America's wackiest TV series, "24," a wonderful satire of contemporary America in which constant, shocking terrorist threats loom over major American cities while a loose cannon government agent with a penchant for "extreme" interrogation methods heroically races around saving the day. Surprising that one should could be such a ludicrously campy comedy hit while the other languishes in hiatus. Go figure...

You've Got to Admit, It's Getting Better

It's getting so much better all the time...

Been Listening to This a Lot Today

I have no idea where I stumbled across this Lily's song, "Black Carpet Magic," but it came up in my iTunes here at work today and it's really really good:



That is all...

Evil Dick

Hey, look, Dick Cheney's speaking sensibly about Iraq! Somehow, goodness has prevailed and...

oh, no, it's from 1994. We're still fucked...



Never mind. He's still crazy, everybody. We're still fucked. As you were.

Follow Up

We've just added a fairly awesome new feature to Mahalo - Mahalo Follow. It even has a cool logo featuring dolphins or, if they are unavailable, porpoises.



What you do is, see, you install the Mahalo Follow add-on into your browser (if you're all using Firefox like good little nerds, this should be relatively simple). Then, Mahalo stalks you around the Internet like a creepy overweight mouthbreather with a new Facebook account. But, you know, in a good way. It checks out whatever you're searching for online and, if Mahalo has a search result for that topic, brings up our results in a sidebar.

So, let's say I'm looking up "Snorg Girl" in Google. (She's that cute girl who appears frequently in blog banner ads.)


Snorg Girl

So, let's say I'm looking up "Snorg Girl." Cause, in this hypothetical situation as in life, I'm kind of a sad little man. I would go to Google and do a search, and because Mahalo has a page about Alice the Snorg Girl, it pops up on the screen as well, allowing you to compare the Google and Mahalo results without ever leaving the page or clicking the mouse.



If Mahalo doesn't have any direct hits, like with Snorg Girl, but it does have some closely related links, they will appear in the sidebar. Much of the time, this feature works really well, as you can see in this search for popular liberal blog Firedoglake. We haven't gotten around to an FDL page yet, but check out the results that do come up...



No FDL, but you get results for Crooks and Liars, Daily Kos and Eschaton, three other popular left-leaning blogs. Still pretty cool and very on-target.

As we continue to add pages to the site (and we're clocking almost 150 a day presently), these results will become even more refined. As of now, we have around 9,000 total pages on Mahalo, so there are still some gaps. When Mahalo has no relevant results to share, the Follow plugin stays closed. Type in "Taxi Driver" (man, how did we miss that one?), "Crushed by Inertia" or "hardcore pornography," and you'll just get your normal full-page Google results.

Mistakes are possible but rare. Sometimes the program will get the wrong impression from a given page and show you some irrelevant results. This was a huge problem when we were first testing everything, but honestly, now that it's live, the developers seem to have figured out a solution. I tried just now for a full five minutes to stump the machine, to get some goofy, silly, totally wrong results to show all of you, and I couldn't make it happen. And I was typing in really weird, obscure shit - in other words, I was trying to make it fail, and couldn't.

If you just leave that sidebar open, it's like leaving Mahalo running, so it will run all your search terms through the system, and then you'll get some irrelevant results. But close the sidebar, and you can go right about your routine forgetting you even installed the thing.

I didn't even mention the best part yet. It has a browseable directory, so you can surf around Mahalo right in your Firefox browser. Sweet!

Anyway, I can't recommend this thing enough. If you have any doubts about whether or not to use Mahalo, give Follow a try for a week.

First Earthquake in a While...

but it was mild. There's always that split second after it's over when you think it's just going to keep going and turn into the Big One they used to talk about all the time and, like, shear away half the building...but that never happens. Was that all a myth or what?

Anyway, I turned on the TV right after the quake, to see if it was a really big one that was just far away, and instead I was delighted to see Internet sensation Tay Zonday performing live on Jimmy Kimmel! Awesome:



He says he hasn't listened to the John Mayer cover of his song. Face.

The War on Supernatural Apocalyptic Terror

I love this clip. Mad props to CK for the link.

Great Moments in Conservative Humor, or Why I Should Write for The American Prospect

Me, 2/11/07
Staunchly ideological, partisan kind of thinkers are rarely as funny as those who can see both sides of an issue. I don't always agree with moderates, but they're more funny. Great satire can be designed to convince an audience, but the best jokes are usually focused solely on being jokes as opposed to expressing a political viewpoint.

...

You'll never come up with something funny if you go in with that attitude. "I've got to find something some liberal has done to make fun of!" It's lame and predictable. First, find something FUNNY. If you need to do political comedy, then find something political that's FUNNY. Then talk about that, and your ideology should come through naturally. If you have any talent as a comic.

The American Prospect, 8/8/07

What the Konservetkult has failed to grasp through all this is that art is most successful when it is not put slavishly in the service of political ideology. To be sure, art and politics have commingled in the past, from Beethoven's symphonic tribute to Napoleon to Goya's graphic depictions of war, to South Park's barbed libertarian social satire. But lasting political art uses politics as its inspiration; in the Konservetkult's calculus, politics must always use art. Normal people look at a piece of art and ponder how it changes their view of the world, or how it deepens their appreciation for life. The right's culture critics look at art and ask, "How can this help us win?"

I really liked the article, but damn...how come I can barely eke out 200 readers a day if I'm this far ahead of the curve? Also, I was hating on Zach Braff for, like, 2 years before it was cool, and I first saw TV on the Radio right after the "Young Liars" EP first came out. Face.

The Bourne Ultimatum

You know, if Paul Greengrass could stop showing off for ten minutes to shoot an action scene, this third Bourne film might have been really great. As it stands, I feel kind of torn. I really admire this series, which is far more clever and inventive than most American spy fare and which provides a perfect vehicle for the steely distance of Matt Damon. But I can't get past the chase sequences, which are jittery and blurry and indistinct and awful. I'm not sure if D.P. Oliver Wood actually suffers from epilepsy, but if not, someone needs to put a stop to Greengrass before he ruins another savvy, globe-trotting Hollywood thriller.



After three films, screenwriter Tony Gilroy (who here teams up with Scott Burns) just absolutely nails the Bourne formula. Really, Bourne's a reverse spy, and his entire story is one long, relentless chase. Bond pursues the villains by using assumed identities and gadgets. Bourne spends two hours running from the villains at top speed. Rather than using state-of-the-art technology to track criminals and evil-doers around the world, he is constantly being tracked and spied upon, and must escape using his superior wits and super-strength. That formula essentially describes every moment of Bourne Ultimatum. Will Jason manage to usurp the greatest tactical and surveillance forces on the planet by repeatedly punching people really hard in the solar plexus? Let's watch...

And it works; for the better part of 2 hours, it works. David Strathairn makes an excellent addition to the series as Jason's latest foe within the CIA, Deputy Director Noah Vosen, and the great Albert Finney takes an important, if small, role as Dr. Albert Hirsch, the man who holds the secret to Bourne's memory loss and backstory. Bourne tracks Hirsch, Vosen tracks Bourne and Bourne's old allies Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) and Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles, who has appeared in all three films but only gets an actual role to play this time around) help out whenever they can.

That's about all there is, folks. Lots of chases, lots of close-calls, lots of one-ups, and an ending that doesn't really add any new information about Jason that we didn't get in the first two films, but at least provides the series with a sense of closure. (The door is, of course, left open for what Damon and Greengrass have termed The Bourne Redundancy.) I can't say I was totally satisfied by the ending. It seems like the film is building to some kind of crazy twist, a previously unimaginable wrinkle in Jason's story, what with the extensive use of flashbacks and the ominous atmosphere surrounding the Finney character. Instead, Jason's backstory is pretty much what I've assumed it would be all along - Wolverine's backstory minus the adamantium.

Greengrass manages to settle down a little from spazzed-out Bourne Supremacy mode, in which the camera never stopped rattling around for long enough to focus on a subject, like an excitable old lady who's off her meds. Here, a brutal back-and-forth between textbook-wielding Bourne and another assassin actually uses the shaky handheld technique well, highlighting the claustrophobia of the setting and the visceral force of the punches.

Alas, as he did in Supremacy, Greengrass hopelessly botches the film's car chase. I suppose it's impressive, in a way, that he's actually able to physically capture an entire car chase using handheldc ameras, but it's a pyrrhic victory because you still can't tell what's going on. The exciting part about watching a car get bashed into a center divider is, you know, watching it, not getting a sense for its impact by seeing blurry shards of glass flying near your head.

Look, I'm not a fan of this guy from Part 2 in this series and particularly the woeful United 93, which just felt like a tremendously self-involved wank session, Greengrass attempting to substitute his personal vision of events for their reality. So I guess I'm a little biased at this point when he hauls out his old tricks on every single movie and asked to be acclaimed anew. Yes, Paul, you're the Parkinson of Cinema, the Sultan of Shaky-Cam. Now will you cut it the fuck out and direct a movie I can actually watch without developing Ménière's disease?