WALL-E

To sum up my reaction to Pixar's WALL-E in one word: "astonishment."

I am astonished not only at the beauty and craftsmanship of WALL-E as a film, but at the very fact that such a narrative would unspool on the heels of the Walt Disney Pictures logo. Though the film is certainly appropriate for young audiences, and the children in the theater when I saw the film seemed transfixed enough, this is a piece of genuine, mature science-fiction, with all the attending Big Ideas and Complex Themes associated with that tradition. With this movie, Pixar completely steps outside of the realm of "family entertainment" to create something that is not only entertaining, whimsical and cute but also provocative and vital. It could very well end up being the year's best film.



Think I'm overstating the case here? WALL-E opens on a dystopian future Earth where all the humans have vanished and everything's coated in a thick layer of trash and grime, most of it bearing the logo of the Buy 'N Large Corporation. That's got to be a first in the Disney canon, right? Apocalyptic visions of the future in which rampant consumerism has somehow led to the end of human life on Earth?

A plucky, self-aware robot named WALL-E wanders around this hellscape picking up crash and crushing it into neat blocks. He does not speak. His only friends are a cockroach, the only living thing that seems to have survived the calamity, and the trinkets, remnants of human civilization, he finds during his travels.

Things change for WALL-E when he falls in love with another robot, EVE, who has flown to Earth on some kind of intergalactic mission. It's a tentative romance: neither WALL-E nor EVE have lips, nor can they speak, which can complicate such matters.

And it's about at this point that the tightrope Pixar is walking comes into clear relief...This is a complex love story about two robots, told without any dialogue. For pretty much the film's first half, the storytelling is entirely visual, pure animation. These characters are brought to life with such clarity, even their tiny gestures carry meaning and move the story forward.

Typically, when I hear people praise Pixar's animation, it's because of the gorgeous, eerily realistic, colorful worlds in which their stories take place. The bustling Scream Factory of Monsters, Inc., or the Paris of Ratatouille, or the scenic desert vistas of Cars. WALL-E certainly carries on this tradition.

After the film, we were discussing how accurately the animators managed to covey weightlessness when the characters are in space. All of the film's environments have been rendered in lush detail, from the brown, sand-coated Earth to the sleek, immaculate interiors of the Axiom Spacecraft. In a particularly nice touch, ancient live-action footage of the Big 'N Large CEO (played by a perfectly-chosen comic actor) urging you to shop till you drop plays on video screens in the background on Earth.

But beyond all the majesty of the settings, WALL-E works as well as it does because of the character animation. I'd say the work done here on WALL-E himself, the way his camera lens eyes constantly focus and refocus to take everything in, the way his neck extends slightly when he feels encouraged, his slight mechanized klutziness, more closely resembles the classic era of Disney Animation than anything the studio has released in my lifetime.

But WALL-E has more emotional resonance and adroit social commentary than many of Disney's animated classics (not all, but some), which sometimes used brilliant animation in the service of disposable fairy tale retreads. It's nothing less than a movie about the human race and its place on this planet, how the choices we're making right now about the way we live impact both ourselves and our environment. Plus it stars the voice of Jeff Garlin. Oh, just go see it already...

The REAL Love Guru

Dmitri, you are my hero. Most of us would not dream of calling an attractive woman who had just given us her number and telling her to look up the meaning of the term "passive aggressive." But that's because we're not the Mack of the Century.

[Link via D'Emilio]

RIP George Carlin

I know he was pretty old, and lived an amazing, full life, so this isn't really a tragedy, per se, but I'm seriously bummed about the loss of George Carlin today to heart failure. I think you could pretty easily make the case that Carlin's the greatest single stand-up comedian of all time.

No point in trying to sum up this guy's career and impact in a single blog post, so I'm just going to leave you with one of my favorite of his routines...The "stupid, full of shit, nuts" routine:



I had the pleasure of seeing Carlin perform a few times in person, including a classic "Tonight Show" performance back during my UCLA days. The man was a genius. He'll be missed.

The Dream Police

Okay, some background: I'm trying to write something about a guy trying to remember his earliest memory. So, in order to capture the realism, which is what writers do, I'm myself trying to discern my earliest memories...

I know one, probably the earliest. When I was about 4 (which would make this the summer of 19831982, I believe), I think my mother may have even been pregnant with my brother at the time, we took a trip from our home in Pennsylvania to California. We stayed at this complex in Burbank right across from an office building that had the General Lee from "Dukes of Hazard" mounted on the roof. You could, like, see this car on the top of this building from the street. And obviously, it made an impression on me, because I remember how this thing looked all these years later.

I think tonight I may have just isolated my next-earliest memory. I recall distinctly riding to school in a neighbor's car, leaning my head against the window, while The Police's "King of Pain" was playing on the radio. Because the song a single from the 1983 Synchronicity album, which would correlate neatly with the era in which I would have carpooled with this neighbor to school, I'm thinking that puts me at roughly 4-5 years old.

It's just weird how certain little things like smells or sounds can trigger these kinds of peculiar, random memories. I'm pretty sure there was nothing significant about that ride to school when this song came on. I mean, it's kind of a creepy song, maybe it spooked me a bit.



(I also recall a time, probably when I was more like 6 or 7, when I was lying in bed with the radio on - because I liked the radio on while I fell asleep when I was a kid - and I got really creeped out because fucking "Thriller" came on, and it had that part with Vincent Price cackling. Man, 6-year-old me was such a wuss...)

While we're on the subject of "King of Pain," every lyrics site on the Internet says that Sting is singing:

There's a skeleton choking on a crust of bread

But it sounds nothing like that in the song. It's like, "There's a skeleton...choking on a crux bray!" Or something.

I For One Welcome Our New Musical Robot Overlords

Via Jeff at I'm Only Sleeping, we learn that the evil super-intelligent robots' plan for world domination somehow involves climbing the YouTube "Most Discussed" charts. (What type of music does a robot band play, you may ask? I'm guessing math rock. One...two...three...try to keep up.)

Some Thoughts on Baby Brains

Leah and I, along with intreped producer Conrad Quilty-Harper and cameraman John Porter, went deep inside the 1-800-AUTOPSY compound in Downtown LA to bring you the following chilling Mahalo Daily.



I can honestly say it was the only interview I have ever conducted that was interrupted by the sentence: "I'm sorry, I have to go to children's hospital to remove a baby's brain." Well, okay, the second interview...but that's still pretty rare.

I think the episode's really entertaining and informative, but we couldn't really capture the ridiculous scope of this place in one 5 minute podcast. The company, in addition to performing autopsies, also rents out equipment and space to TV and film productions replicating autopsies. And they turn coffins into couches. The guy who owns it was a forensic investigator for decades, and is just kind of grimly fascinated in this stuff, so the whole place is something of an autopsy museum. There's one room that's a replica of a 1920s embalming room. It's seriously like walking into an Alan Moore story.

ATTENTION BOING BOING TV: I love experimental animation as much as the next guy, but you should mix it up more with some visits to peculiar, real-world locations. You all could get 2 weeks of shows out of the coffin couch factory. Maybe we can put some steampunk goggles with brass fittings on one of the skeletons, if it would make you more comfortable.

I Said What What in the Mutt?

Seriously? Is there anyone out there that would pay money for a collectible Mutt Williams figure? Unlike some other people I know, I wouldn't say that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Interdimensional Blanchett Eaters was a bad movie, necessarily. But it's hardly the sort of thing I can see inspiring the level of enthusiasm necessary to invest in a statue, particularly the Shia LaBeouf character.

I know Mutt uses a sword in the movie, but he just looks extremely dippy holding it here. Like a rejected "Street Fighter" character, or a schizophrenic guy's Halloween costume.

So how much would you pay for this handsome LeBeouf semi-likeness, handcrafted from the finest Vietnamese sweat/plastics. $500,000? $28 billion? Can you believe Sideshow Collectibles will actually give you this thing for the low low price of $150? Get on it now, people. They're only making as many of these as nerds will buy! After that, they're gone forever.

Also, you've got to love their little blurb:

These outstanding 1:6 scale figures are of the highest quality and detail, ready to take life on your shelf in any dynamic pose that you desire. Medicom Toy's RAH body is one of the most articulated 12-inch figure bodies available, capable of nearly any pose that the human body can achieve.

"Any dynamic pose you desire"? "Any pose that the human body can achieve"? What the hell are people doing with these things? Before, I just thought it was hilarious and silly. Now I'm genuinely disturbed. If 12'' Mutt is anatomically collect (in perfect 1:6 scale!), I'm fully prepared to write my Congressman about this.

The Incredible Hulk

With The Incredible Hulk, Marvel Studios have proven a few things comic book movie fans already knew, but perhaps studio executives did not:

(1) More is not always better.

I'm not saying this movies should be low-key or action-less. The Incredible Hulk gets rather outsized in the second half, to great effect. But it's not overloaded with tons of characters, constant computer-enhanced spectacle or a loud, booming soundtrack. Sometimes, taking your time, developing some tension and telling a simple story well is all it takes.

(2) Continuity matters.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of serialized comic book-style storytelling is the forging of connections between characters, creating an entire alternate reality, with its own rules. Marvel writers have spent decades fleshing out their Universe...it's ridiculous that, in translating the stories to film, they have been unable to introduce it to audiences until now.

The Incredible Hulk, even more so than this summer's triumphant Iron Man, really introduces the Marvel Universe on-screen, setting up not just a future Avengers film but a whole collection of potential connections and stories. The movie strikes just the right balance, including some references and nods to events going on outside the margins without getting too inside or complicated.

(3) The Incredible Hulk's backstory is not the stuff of high drama.

I personally think that Hulk, and his Bruce Banner side in particular, is among the least interesting mainstream comic book characters. Banner's just this kind of meek guy who's afraid of his powers. And while it's tremendous fun to see The Hulk smash things, he's basically just a buff monster. We're not talking a character the way Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne are characters. We're talking about a cipher.

Ang Lee tried to make an entire movie out of Hulk's origin, turning it into a Shakeapearean story about Fathers and Sons, when it's really just a bunch of silly nonsense about gamma rays and then a riff on Jekyll and Hyde. This new film wisely dispenses with it during the opening credits.



Though the new movie represents a complete break from Ang Lee's dull, plodding, nearly-Hulkless 2003 version, it nonetheless picks up pretty much right where that film left off. Bruce Banner (Ed Norton), doomed to transform into the out-of-control, violent Hulk whenever he gets angry, has fled to Brazil in the hopes of finding a rare flower that might cure his condition. Back in the U.S., Banner's girlfriend Betty (Liv Tyler) has moved on with her life. Her father, General Ross (William Hurt), has enlisted the aid of a notorious British soldier, Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), to help him find the Hulk. (Ross wants to capture Banner, naturally, in the hopes of turning his Hulkness into a weapon).

Most of the film is taken up with this chase, with Ross and Blonsky pursuing Banner across the globe. A variety of not-particularly-convincing circumstances will slowly turn Blonsky from a normal man into the monstrous Abomination, leading to an epic final showdown in the streets of Harlem.

The film's major strength is in its simplicity. None of the technology or science is ever explained, because that stuff doesn't matter. "This machine will cure you from Hulking Out, or maybe it wont. Let's find out!" And because Incredible Hulk doesn't bother with an origin story, and keeps the narrative strongly focused on the chase, and the larger relationship between Banner and the Rosses, there's plenty of time for (1) large-scale, extended action scenes and (2) development of the Hulk's world and environment without rushing everything.

The decision to open the action in South America, in particular, really pays off. The movie's just visually interesting, even when there's no Hulk or explosions. Banner himself can be something of a blank (though Norton does a nice job of expressing his inner angst without getting too emo), but the world he occupies is very inviting and compelling on its own terms. Director Louis Leterrier has a tendency to show off a bit, throwing in a lot of visual noise and flair unnecessarily, but he nevertheless has made a good-looking, fast-paced film, and knows how to put an action scene together.

The only time things really slow down is when Tyler's Betty Ross takes center-stage. Zak Penn's script pretty much lets her down here, setting her up as a brilliant scientist and then giving her essentially nothing to solve and even less to do. It's essentially the same part Tyler played in Armageddon - the girl who really really loves the hero - and her boredom with the part is palpable at times. (Her one real bonding scene with the Hulk reminded me of some of Naomi Watts' work in King Kong, only I actually think this film plays slightly less ridiculous.)

The Happening

I'm not sure if writer/director M. Night Shyamalan meant this film's title ironically. It seems unlikely, but then again, it also seems unlikely that a man who has made so many other films would produce anything this hacky and amateurish. Yet here we are.

Nothing happens in The Happening. Absolutely nothing happens. This is a premise, not a story. In fact, The Happening lacks even the barest bones of a story. There is no beginning, middle or end. There is no inciting incident. Characters do not change, grow nor develop. Events do not progress in a logical manner. People are introduced and then discarded thoughtlessly.

I think it might be time for us to become seriously concerned about M. Night Shyamalan. Not for his career, but simply his mental health and well-being. It's not normal for a person who had, only a few years before, mastered the craft of screenwriting and directing to suddenly and without cause forget, on the most basic level, how to put a movie together. We're not talking about a dip in quality here; The Happening is like the work of a completely different man than The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, hell even Signs. Has Manoj suffered some sort of head trauma? Has he become hooked on oxycontin? Should we start considering a nationwide cinematic intervention?

Because his last two efforts - The Village and Lady in the Water - were themselves so dreadful, much of the discussion about The Happening and its complete failure to entertain or enlighten will naturally focus on relative comparisons. Though I still maintain that Lady in the Water remains Shyamalan's most delusional and embarrassing work to date, overall, it does have a few things going for it that Happening does not. Like, you know, a story to tell. Not a good story, mind you. But a story nonetheless. The Village has a reasonably watchable story; it just relies on a nonsensical twist ending.

The Happening is Cinema of the Inert, the introduction of a concept in the opening 5 minutes of a movie that is meant to sustain an audience's attention for 100 minutes. I'm noticing this about Shyamalan's work more and more. His initial films - The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable - certainly had high-concept premises, but they developed them into narratives that were themselves compelling. With stuff like Lady in the Water and The Happening, it's as if he no longer feels the need to tell stories. He thinks a single one of his ideas, alone and unencumbered, should be enough to sustain an audience's attention. He's mistaken.


About 3/4 of the movie is composed of shots just like this one, in which Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and a young girl run away from nothing through the Pennsylvania countryside. Print this still out 300 times, turn it into a flip book and save yourself $10 ($20 with popcorn and parking!)

We open in Central Park, where a large crowd of people suddenly stop what they are doing, freeze in place for a moment, and then kill themselves in the quickest and most convenient method possible. News reports inform us that the phenomenon is sweeping through the city.

Cut to Philadelphia, where the school of science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is being evacuated in response to what is perceived as a terrorist threat in NYC. Moore and a co-worker, Julian (John Leguizamo), plot to get their families out of Philadelphia and into the countryside, to wait out this weird suicide thing.

THAT'S IT, FOLKS. That's all that happens. The rest of the film follows Elliott, his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), Julian and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) as they wander around central Pennsylvania in a confused daze. They meet no one of consequence. They find out small details about what's going on via listening to radios or watching TV's, or from meeting random helpful strangers who introduce new information and then disappear.

I can't really express to you how many basic, fundamental errors Shyamalan makes here, strictly in terms of the screenplay and structure. Movies are driven by conflict. This is the single guiding principle for pretty much all drama - you introduce characters and set them at opposing goals. It's not really that hard. Everyone from Uwe Boll to the writers of "Two and a Half Men" have managed it.

Not only does The Happening lack any kind of tangible antagonist or enemy, it lacks any kind of conflict whatsoever. There are two types of scenes - scenes in which Wahlberg finds out something about the "happening" second-hand and scenes in which Wahlberg watches people in the middle distance kill themselves in increasingly laughable ways. You may notice, neither of those scenes involves any kind of conflict.

So you get a lot - A LOT - of shots of newscasters announcing that the plot is developing somewhere off-screen. And a lot of statements like this:

"Hey, everyone! I'm a stranger who has just walked here from 10 miles down the road. Everyone's dead down there! We're going to have to go some other way!"

(At one point, I shit you not, a random stranger shows Elliott a grisly death scene that apparently happened hours before on her iPhone! Are you fucking kidding me? He couldn't come up with a way to actually have anything happen on screen in his own fucking movie? Shyamalan's reduced to inserting footage into his own movie via YouTube?!)

It's also clear that the complete lack of conflict has confused and frustrated the actors. Deschanel has just given up on giving a performance, sleepwalking through the film. Wahlberg seems to be playing the character as a likable goofball, even though there's only one or two jokes and he should by all rights be traumatized. The most compelling bit of dialogue in the entire film is played between Wahlberg and a potted plant.

At a random point, the film just ends, without purpose or explanation or any kind of pay-off or showdown or denouement whatsoever. The last scene is meant to be chilling, but it's so obvious what's coming and so silly by that point that it actually plays like a joke. And that first credit - "A Film By M. Night Shyamalan" - is the punchline.

WARNING: POTENTIAL MINOR SPOILER, EVEN THOUGH THE MOVIE DOESN'T REALLY HAVE A GENUINE TWIST, AND THE PLOT IS OBVIOUS WITHIN THE FIRST 30 MINUTES OR SO

One final note on this film, because I think you all get the idea at this point. Unless Shyamalan is just playing dumb because it's easier, his understanding of the Theory of Evolution is seriously lacking. The way evolution is discussed in this film, by characters presented as scientists, is not only wrong but egregiously so, misleading in the extreme. I have read critics suggest that the film is an argument for Intelligent Design, but I think this is just a reaction to the fact that Shyamalan's misrepresentation of evolution and biology resembles the fabrications of ID proponents. Shyamalan's ignorance about evolution resembles Ben Stein's, but I'm not sure if they're working towards the same goal.

Suffice it to say, individual living things cannot spontaneously evolve in response to a predator. When biologists use a term like "rapid evolution," they're using the word "rapid" in the relative sense. It's like "taking fewer than several million years," not "by Wednesday." It's almost irresponsible to be this cavalier about representing bonafide scientific information, even in a silly fictional movie.

David Lynch on Where Ideas Come From

The Atlantic has put up this terrific video interview with director David Lynch, in which he discusses the nature of creativity and how he develops his ideas for films and TV. Enjoy.


Lynch rejects some of the traditional ideas about creative inspiration, particularly that writers should try to "write what they know" and that artists must suffer for their art. He seems to feel that writing and creating is less about having an initial spark of inspiration and more about having the talent and discipline to collect numerous, stray thoughts or ideas into a worthwhile/coherent whole. Anyway, the guy's a genius, and it's just fun to hear him pontificate about bubbles of consciousness and oceans of the transcendent for a few minutes.

[Hat tip, Matthew Yglesias]

My Fan Site is Nicer Than My Blog

A plucky Mahalo Daily fan, the infamous Connected Geek, has built a fan site for yours truly, if you can believe such things...I can honestly say, despite having only one post, it's much prettier than this blog, which was thrown together hastily around one of the 3 basic Blogspot themes many, many years ago.

While we're on the subject of this blog's general aesthetic crapitude...I'm considering moving the site over to crushedbyinertia.com or lonharris.com, both of which I own and neglect. This, and the visual overhaul I'd like to commence along with the move, would require me to actually learn something about how the Internet works. (You know, aside from "don't click on things called goatse" and "if it's the phrase Check this out...OMG! followed by a tinyurl, it's a Rick Roll.") Which is unfortunate, cause I'm kind of squeezed for time as it is.

Thoughts? Does the fact that this page is disorganized and, let's be honest, butt ugly, seriously diminish your desire to read Crushed by Inertia? Don't worry about hurting my feelings...I've had 100,000 YouTube viewers dissect my physique, Howard Stern-style, this month, all while composing sonnets memorializing my latent homosexuality. I can take it.

Go Go Gadget

Before working at Mahalo, I was not particularly gadget-conscious. I'm the sort of guy that thinks to replace his cell phone only when it suffers irreparable physical trauma or dies of its own accord, and not a moment before. (My current cell phone is from the first era of "camera phones," when the notion of taking a picture using your portable phone felt roughly as bleeding-edge futuristic as hovering skateboards and automatically-resizing Nikes.)

However, now that I'm immersed in the world of tech and gadgetry (tonight I went to what is essentially an adult science fair to check out homemade robot tables), I've actually started to lust after new shiny objects of consumer goodness. Such as the new ultra-deluxe 3G JesusPhone announced just yesterday by Captain Turtleneck. The mere fact that I understand the term "3G" is a big plus for me...That's the sort of thing I once assumed was arbitrary, like the naming system for new Terminators. (How do you go from T-1000 to T-X (which looks like T-100)? Shouldn't she be the T-10,000?

Here's the thing about the iPhone (or, if you prefer, the iPhone 2.0)...I will probably use 1/500th of the actual available features. (I frequently hear people complain that the phone is missing things I would never in a million years even think to put on there, sometimes with intimidating acronyms like VPD and SQL.) I basically just want a phone that I can also use to watch YouTube videos while I wait in lines and airports. (I'll consider playing this rumored Cro-Magnon Man Rally game, perhaps.) So my desire for the thing is almost entirely manufactured, a function of living every day in this world of gizmos and gadgets more so than any kind of practical application. It's sort of a new feeling for me...

Kerry Wins an Argument?

John McCain's case for the presidency is so weak, even John Kerry can effectively make the point on television. And that guy sometimes had trouble introducing himself.

This...is...John...Kerry...reporting...for...duty...

In this clip, courtesy of the excellent blog of Oliver Willis, McCain surrogate Lindsay Graham openly admits that, yes, a new Republican Administration would extend and enhance the economic policies of the Bush era. So if you don't ever want to sell your home, retire or get any kind of medical treatment, McCain may be the candidate for you!

From the Files of Police Mod

Brilliant mash-up of "Naked Gun" and "Grand Theft Auto IV." There's really nothing textual I could add that would enhance this.

I Will Do Anything For a Laugh

DOUBLE UDPATE: The comments on this thing are amazing. I'd say a good 4/5 have generally nice things to say - they enjoyed the video, they find me intensely sexually attractive or they support Leah in the contest. Those other 1/5 are just...well, it's the kind of hilarious obscenity you can only get from YouTube comments.

A lot of them feel the need to inform me of my own latent homosexuality. And I think we can all sympathize. How often have you been watching a clearly comical video on the Internet and thought..."Hey, the gentleman who made this is wearing something typically associated with females, or those of a different body type! He must therefore be gay, and is most likely unaware of his own sexual orientation and proclivities! I think I ought to inform him of such, lest he go through his life not realizing that he was physically attracted to members of his own gender!"

UPDATE: Leah's video may actually be going viral. It has been up for less than 24 hours and is currently showing 25,336 views on YouTube. Holy crap.

Seriously. I mean...this is too far...



Can I please stay on the Internet, please? I promise not to wear any more midriffs.

To be honest, when Leah first suggested it, I was a bit conflicted about this one. Are people laughing with me? Or at me? It took approximately two comments on the Mahalo Daily page for someone to show up and make a cheap shot at my lack of fitness.

In the end, I decided...If it's funny, it's worth doing. Call it the Chris Farley Principle.

By the way, here's Andrea's video from the day before, that was also fun to shoot and features me in a guest role:



Sorry I forgot to post that this morning...Total oversight.

AND of course, there's your Behind-the-Scenes bonus feature:

Save the Clock Tower!

This afternoon, a fire at Universal Studios consumed some of the King Kong park tour attraction, the "New York Street" sets and much of Hill Valley from the Back to the Future films. (Mercifully, the film's most iconic landmark setting, the Clock Tower, was spared).

Reading this Slashfilm post about the fire's aftermath was actually kind of trippy. I mean, these are sets for movies that have already been made. They are no longer functional at all, but exist only as part of a guided tour showing people behind-the-scenes of how movies are made. And yet...there is a real emotional attachment to these places, because of their involvement in classic movies. I bet a lot more people would be upset to hear that the fictional Back to the Future clock tower burned down than some random actual clock tower in a real town.

I mean, they're going to rebuild the Hill Valley set. Rebuild a set for a movie that's long-finished! Just so they can drive tourists in front of it! Now that's real, authentic, behind-the-scenes movie magic!

Now here's where things get...really pomo. This Hill Valley set...it wasn't the real one from the movie.

The courthouse square set was not the original set used in the time-travel trilogy. Just after the sequels finished shooting, almost the entire square was burned down in the 1990 fire (which also took down New York Street). It was rebuilt from the original blueprints.

What's with all the horrific Universal Studio fires? Is that Backdraft attraction behind all of this? Because it's really not all that cool anyway...you guys could probably ditch it...

Welcome to Reality TV

When the idea first occurred to us to turn the search for the next Mahalo Daily host into a reality show, it was totally meant in the spirit of parody. The whole notion was to mock reality shows, particularly how overblown they are and how they pit people cruelly against one another. Hence, me in a hot air balloon with my shirt unbuttoned introducing something called "The Bachelon," or Jason doing his Trump impression in the boardroom.

See, there were always two levels to the whole thing, to my mind. On the surface, we're genuinely conducting a real contest, looking for someone to host the show. But on another level, we're pretending that the contest is this massively important, epic thing, that lives were literally in the balance, and that our competition would feature all the drama and excitement promised on shows like "The Amazing Race" and "The Bachelor."

Now that we've had a month of great shows and two amazing finalists, I think I can safely say that there are two things we did not consider when planning this thing:

(1) Pitting people against one another, even in jest, creates rifts, divisions and hurt feelings;

(2) The reality format itself is powerful, and creates strong emotions in viewers, even when presented ironically

I'm still very glad we did the contest. I think the episodes themselves have been some of the most entertaining we've ever done. Even better, we got the chance to get to know and collaborate with some fantastically talented, interesting and, of course, beautiful women - not just the Final Two, Andrea and Leah, but also Sarah, Nadine, Michelle, Kristina, Lisa, Martine, Pili, Roxy, Alice, Melody...and more. I have a feeling you'll see many of them on the show again in some capacity.

But having said that, I do kind of regret taking part in anything that would inspire this kind of angry, mean, vitriolic comment thread. We never intended to create a show that would turn people against the contestants. ANY of them. The whole point was to celebrate all the talented aspirants, not to make them look bad and unleash the rage of the Internet upon them. MD viewers and fans...please do try to keep your commentary professional and respectful.

This little incident is largely our fault, for blurring the line between fake funny reality show and real reality show too much at times. I hope we can all put it past us as we declare a winner this week and start making new shows.

If we end up not choosing your preferred choice, I'd suggest you at least give the new host a chance...They're both really creative and fun, they both have a lot of enthusiasm and ideas for the show, and I promise you, they're both really genuine, nice people, no matter how a competitive 5 minute podcast featuring my boss might make it seem.

WTF MoMA?

No. No no no no no no no no.

One of the Museum of Modern Art's latest film acquisitions isn't an art-house experiment by Andy Warhol or Michelangelo Antonioni. It's the spy-action blockbuster "The Bourne Identity" and its sequels.

This week the museum is screening the films and hosting a panel discussion with "Bourne" director/producer Doug Liman and a noted neuroscientist to talk about memory, identity and the mysterious workings of the brain.

Really? Really? Not a David Gordon Green series? Or bringing over some Roy Andersson? Guy Maddin doesn't get a MoMA series...but you'll give one to the goddamn Bourne trilogy?

"You say the word 'action movie,' and everyone's standards go down," Liman said Tuesday.

And with good cause.

"And it was my goal with 'The Bourne Identity' to create a movie wherein the drama would hold up even if you took the action out."

Liman, who directed "Identity" and served as executive producer of sequels "Supremacy" and "Ultimatum," called the films' inclusion in the museum's renowned collection "a huge, huge honor."

Cinemaphiles have praised not only the movies' technical skill and heart-pounding pace, but their relatively realistic feel and character development as Bourne strives to find out who he is and why killers stalk him wherever he goes.

I mean...please. The Bourne movies aren't bad movies. Far from it. I actually think they're pretty good.

But COME ON, this is not, like, cinema as art. There are plenty of people actually making art films right at this very moment that are being ignored by this large museum as it praises the rare Hollywood action film that manages not to be horrifyingly, egregiously schlocky and embarrassing for all involved. It's like having the President come to your school to give you your "Best Attendance" medal.

Highly, Intensely Suspicious

This is the new My Morning Jacket single? Seriously? Is this awful or brilliant? I actually can't tell...



WTF? Hard to believe this is even the same band:

New Jews!

I'm really liking this new song from The Silver Jews, "Strange Victory Strange Defeat," from their upcoming Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. Found via Stereogum.