This is one of the most incredible, trippy, impressive pieces of animation I've ever seen. It makes Jan Švankmajer look like The Cheat. Forget the Human Flipbook. Watch this clip immediately, particularly if you have just ingested an eighth of an ounce or more of psilocybin-packed mushrooms.
[Hat Tip, Sullivan]
she's smart. You've got to give her that. Maybe she's not quite as fast a talker as Bill, but who are we kidding here? No one is. That guy's the white male Scheherazade.
After 7 years of listening to the tortured syntactical nightmares of Preznit Stumblefuck, hearing a politician actually speak in a manner that's lucid and sensible now has the ability to shock and delight. She actually sounds kind of convincing here. I'm not fooled, mind you. Being old enough to remember the Clinton years means knowing that, behind the nice speeches, pop culture knowledge and comforting hand gestures, they're basically just sane Republicans. (A rare commodity in the actual Republican Party, but still plentiful in the Democratic.)
I didn't watch the whole debate...I've been catching up with it on YouTube. Here's about a seven minute segment of Clinton kicking everyone else on the dais' ass.
They're all going after her, directly, yet it's Biden who comes off looking like the pasty, hopeless chump. Dodd seems to think people are voting for College Comic of the Year, Southwest Region, not President. I'm all for lightening the mood a bit, but it's important to actually make some kind of point between the Bush zingers.
Seriously, she's gonna win, people. She's not my personal choice out of this crop, but she's going to smoke all these other fools. I'll take bets right now on Clinton v. Giuliani down the stretch.
We don't often think of murderers and criminals as being assassinated. Usually, they are killed, or taken out, or even executed. In fact, aside from Jesse James, the only other criminal I can recall being "assassinated" is Lee Harvey Oswald. It's a weighted term reserved for the legendary or notorious, and James was both.
James' killer, Robert Ford, sought exactly this kind of noteriety all his life, only to find it constantly unattainable. Andrew Dominik's masterful, anti-epic The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford opens with the future assassin presenting himself to Jesse (Brad Pitt) and his similarly famous brother Frank (Sam Shepard) as an eager young apprentice, hoping to learn about the outlaw life at the feet of two masters. He's stung when rejected, probably because it brings to mind all the taunts and torments passed down to him by his older brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), a member of the James Gang. Ford claimed to have killed James out of fear for his life, and in the hopes of receiving a $10,000 reward from the Governor, but Dominik's film seems to suggest that it all comes back to this initial meeting. Ford had idolized James, had seen himself following in the James legacy, and no devastation could be more complete than to be mocked and humiliated by his idol.
Of course, this is just one theory. Dominik's film wisely remains ambiguous to the end, quiet and reserved, observing these men as they navigate increasingly complex and uncertain relationships from a distance. Apart from some occasional voice-over narration (most of it likely taken from Ron Hansen's novel on which the film is based), events unfold with a keenly natural grace.
As in David Fincher's similarly-impressive Zodiac from earlier this year, there's a precision and exactness to Dominik's film; he recreates these events with an acute sense of mounting dread, allowing incidents to collect into a narrative at their own lifelike pace. We don't so much hurry from once event to the next as we connect inevitable dots. These individuals - the increasingly-paranoid James, the emotionally brittle Ford, the flippant womanizer Dick Liddel (Paul Schneider), and the remainder of James' crew - are on a collision course. We know they will find their way to one another eventually, and Dominik gives us the space to really wonder how, and what the aftermath of these encounters will be like. This is clearly one of the smartest and most satisfying films of 2007, an ingenious exploration of the weight of infamy and the despair that naturally follows overzealous ambition. It's not to be missed.
Brad Pitt's performance as James melds two of his most disparate characters. We have the unpredictable frenzy of Tyler Durden married to the enigmatic, occasionally baffling Joe Black in a single persona. By virtue of his fierce intelligence and the legends that have sprouted up around him, Pitt's James has clearly grown used to being the center of attention and the smartest man in the room. So accustomed is he to manipulating and controlling all those around him, these ploys have become a kind of second nature, until, by his own admission, he can hardly recognize himself or know his true feelings.
We encounter James as he and his brother Frank are pulling their last job together, robbing a train with the aid of a newly-assembled gang. (Their initial band of outlaws are all deceased or in prison). The robbery is unsatisfying; they don't collect all that they hoped for, and Jesse kills a man in anger and frustration. The brothers part ways, and Jesse returns to his family, entering a long, tortured descent into paranoid madness.
It's this Jesse to whom Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) attaches himself. Awed by the man's celebrity and impressed by his devil-may-care attitude, Ford at first wants only to ingratiate himself into James' circle, to impress his idol like a boy performing for his father. But as the film progresses, Ford makes some disappointing discoveries - mainly that James is just a man, and a cruel one at that. Dominik, unlike almost any of his directorial peers, demonstrates a great deal of interest in actual performances. He gives his actors space, stretching scenes on for far longer than a typical film, even a period drama, would typically allow. We don't hear about Ford losing his faith in the legendary Jesse James; we see it play out in real time, watching the events of 1881 wear down James' resolve and disabuse Ford of his childhood gunslinging fantasies.
The temptation to overplay James' mounting dread must have been significant, but Pitt shrewdly keeps it all bottled up inside, masking his outbursts and temper tantrums as playful humor or theatrics. Hence the Tyler Durden comparisons. Just as Durden knows he's really the same guy as the Narrator, but allows his alter-ego the time to figure this out, James constantly knows more than he lets on and turns each conversation into a challenge. Right up until the moment of his death (hey, it's not a spoiler if it's in the title!), James is trying to play those around him, to show them one thing while secretly plotting another outcome entirely.
The result is one of the most intense, white-knuckle 3 hour movies imaginable. Assassination of Jesse James takes its time developing, but once it has established the key relationships, the film enters a kind of desperate end game. Dominik (who also wrote the screenplay) composes this verbal gamesmanship expertly. The dialogue is reminiscent of some of Patrice Leconte's films (particularly Ridicule), with each statement secretly betraying a hidden reality behind (or, more accurately, above) the surface.
Even the slower, more elegiac sequences are riveting due to Roger Deakins' gorgeous cinematography. Still photography is a frequent motif in the film; much of the denouement concerns the still photos of James' corpse peddled in dime stores in the years after the film's events. Deakins works this into the visual structure of the film brilliantly, sometimes patterning the style to resemble images shot with an old-fashioned pinhole camera and other times allowing an eerie, photo-like stillness to settle into real life.
At one point, James lays a barricade for an oncoming train and rather dubiously stands atop the structure, willing the train to stop with his bare hands. Shot from behind by Deakins, with the train's lights catching the locomotive steam and surrounding the silhouette of Pitt in the center, we see James as Ford must have: serene, regal, larger than life, almost superpowered. No real man could live up to this kind of glamorized imagery and mythmaking, and James was a very real man.
There's an odd nostalgia in Dominik's film, but it's always unclear for what he's actually nostalgic. His film seems to argue that reality is always subordinate to a well-told yarn, that the tragedy of Robert Ford's life was finally doing something noteworthy and attaining fame only to be haunted by the path that brought him there. Yet the film seems to yearn for a time when mysterious, shadowy, highly fictionalized legends could still walk among us. (Having Nick Cave write the music for the film, and perform a song himself near the conclusion, highlights this theme beautifully. He writes old-fashioned songs about folk tales and grim fantasies, stories about a lost time in America's past that never really existed but which tells us about ourselves all the same).
In the era of YouTube, it takes very little to become well-known, and celebrity can last a few weeks before dissipating. Thousands of people today are as famous as Jesse James once was, so in a way, no one could possibly be that famous ever again. Perhaps this is the real lament at the core of The Assassination of Jesse James - real or not, this sort of shared cultural moment can't be replicated in the era of television and cyberspace. The world's too small and everything's watched too closely. This may be the singular film of 2007. See it in a theater.
David Cronenberg's transition from sci-fi and horror films to crime thrillers was both sudden and seamless. With the raw, unforgiving Eastern Promises, the splatterhouse god behind The Fly and Scanners has now entered Scorsese territory with an assured confidence. This isn't as complex a film as Cronenberg's last outing, A History of Violence, which disappointed some audiences by being a more cerebral than visceral take on the nature of bloodletting. Eastern Promises is more of a showcase for actor Viggo Mortensen, who handled the sudden transitions in Violence well but gives the performance of his career this time around as the mysterious gangland enforcer Nikolai Luzhin.
In fact, if I could identify the lone flaw of Eastern Promises, it's that by far the most compelling character isn't actually the protagonist. The rather straight-forward A story follows London midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), whose discovery of a dead mother's diary leads her into the hazardous world of the Russian Mafia (the Vory V Zakone). We get a bit of background on Anna, an explanation for why she's so motivated to find a family for her deceased patient's baby, but there really isn't much to her character, and Watts spends most of the film looking worried and forlorn while more interesting personalities pivot around her. It would be as if Goodfellas focused on Morrie the wig salesman or The Godfather spent all its time with Kay's family.
It's doubtful that any performance or subplot, no matter how intriguing, could have stood alongside Mortensen's here. Nikolai Luzhin is really an ideal film character in that he's a mass of contradictions. He's charismatic, and even friendly, but also a cold-blooded murderer. He's handsome, but covered in fearsome prison tattoos. He's interesting and worldly, but he spends his time babysitting the spoiled, psychotic son (Vincent Cassel) of a cruel and manipulative mob boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl, in the film's other great performance).
What's so amazing about Mortensen in the part is his control. He's doing a big, over-the-top character with a realistic Russian accent, but continually resists the temptation to take over a scene or overstate his presence. He really does very little for the first half hour of the movie, but you're constantly aware of his presence in the scene. He takes up all the oxygen without saying a word. And when Cronenberg finally breaks the tension, in a brutal knife fight no less, it's one of the most audacious and essential sequences in his entire catalog. (I'm a huge fan of Cronenberg's, too, so I don't say that lightly). Film students are going to study this virtuoso scene for decades; it's remarkable.
Like Scorsese's presentation of Daniel Day-Lewis' Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, there is a sense that Eastern Promises exists largely to provide a platform for this one character and a singular director's vision. Little else in Steven Knight's script really stands out from any other garden-variety mob movies. There are a few scenes with Anna, her mother (Sinéad Cusack) and her feisty Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski) that recall History of Violence in their treatment of normal people caught in a grim, violent situation wholly outside of their experience. And as I indicated, Mueller-Stahl does typically great work as the heartless criminal Semyon, who'd sell out just about anyone and anything to protect the family business. (Cronenberg's attention to atmosphere and cultural details, such as setting the bulk of the film's action in a Russian restaurant and filling the soundtrack with Russian songs and dialogue, similarly recalls Scorsese).
Eastern Promises works because that performance and that director are of such a high caliber. Clearly, Cronenberg has seen something in Viggo Mortensen that few other directors have managed to tap, and their collaborations have both been daring and thoughtful in equal measure. The film is worth seeing, really, for that knife fight alone. Everything else is just gravy.
How can anyone say they "don't know" if the Earth is flat on television? If you're stupid enough to believe that, keep that shit to yourself. Grounds for permanent dismissal from television right there. Our young people have a hard enough time learning in the American educational system without subjecting them to Sherri Shepherd's idiocy.
That's John McCain today, unable to decide if he is an Episcopalian or a Baptist. But at least he's not one a dem mud peoples whut don' even believe in our Lord Jeebus.
Seriously, religion in modern America is getting so fucked up and tribal, it's making Biblical Rome feel like a bastion of rationality and tolerance.
The comment came after a weekend during which McCain corrected an Associated Press reporter who asked him how his Episcopalian faith plays a role in his campaign and his life. While it's well-known that McCain and his family for years have attended the North Phoenix Baptist Church in his home state of Arizona, the senator had consistently referred to himself in media reports as Episcopalian.
"It plays a role in my life. By the way, I'm not Episcopalian. I'm Baptist," McCain said Saturday. "Do I advertise my faith? Do I talk about it all the time? No."
Wait, now I'm confused. So, it's extremely important that everyone know he's a Christian, but it's not important for him to talk about his faith all the time? Seems contradictory. That statement doesn't hold together unless...he just thinks being a Christian ought to be a pre-requisite to be President. Like, "Okay, I'm qualified to be President...because I'm in the secret Jesus club. But I don't like to be painted with that brush..."
Which is kind of totally un-Constitutional.
In a June interview with McClatchy Newspapers, the senator said his wife and two of their children have been baptized in the Arizona Baptist church, but he had not. "I didn't find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs," he said.
So he's just a faker. Someone who really believes in a religion, any religion, actually takes it's core principle and namesake seriously. It's, like, the crucial component of your personal instructions on how to live from God, not a checklist of suggestions from the D.W.P.
- Okay, not coveting my neighbor's ass, gotta remember that one.
- Good, good, turning the other cheek, I'll go with it...
- Wait, I have to get water spilled over my head? In public? Nah, fuck that one.
You don't get to pick which rites and covenants you fancy and which don't work for your spiritual needs at this time. But you certainly don't get to ignore the single most important symbolic act of your entire faith, you fucking douchebag. How can you be an unbaptized Baptist? That's just declaring openly that you're full of shit.
"Well, yes, I am a lifetime member of the KKK, but I love black people. I just like the hats. And it's good for networking. If you need some moonshine, I've got a great moonshine guy."
NewsBusted, the hi-larious stand-up conservo-comedy podcast, actually made me physically cringe. Now, I know rhetorically, the notion of "cringe-inducing" material is thrown around a lot, but I'm telling you, I shuddered in fear at the mathematically-impossible depths to which this doofus in an ill-fitting suit sinks attempting to squeeze a laugh out of hardcore right-wing nutballery.
Conan O'Brien's mongoloid, malnourished cousin, Mark Ellis, doesn't get a single line off that's not excruciatingly hacktastic. It would have been less painful to just give him an anaesthesia-free root canal on YouTube than encourage him to do his best five minutes on clueless libruls. He clearly learned all he knows about comedy by watching, and then rewatching, all six weeks' worth of Chevy Chase Shows. But how are you going to recreate that phenomenon? Like lightning in a bottle, that Chevy Chase charisma...
Half of Ellis' statements don't even come off as jokes. More like "desperate cries for help." When he blatantly calls Sean Penn a traitor...that's I think when the clips shifts from irritating to pathetic.
And is that canned laughter? It looked like he had a studio audience in the beginning, but the laughs themselves sound really tinny and fake. Plus, there's no way actual humans were laughing at jokes about Michael Moore enjoying ice cream and Barack Obama liking Starbucks. You could give Robin Quivers 8 massive bong rips and she still wouldn't laugh at a joke about Michael Moore's weight problem. It's played...Sooooooo plaaaaaaaayed...
A while back, I discussed Jay Leno's preferred joke-writing technique, which is extremely simple:
(1) Pick a popular news story
(2) Pick a famous person who is not directly or obviously connected with the popular news story
(3) Connect the two
Ellis won't even put in this amount of effort. He's simplified the Leno style into an even more basic, and even less funny (which I wasn't even sure was possible) 2-step formula:
(1) Pick a stupid librul
(2) Insult them
Here's some free advice for anyone attempting to write sharp political humor. If you're writing a joke about how Bill Clinton loves pussy and it's no longer 1997, you suck ass. Thank me later.
[Hat Tip, Mr. Willis]
So, I started another blog over at WordPress along with a friend (though she's yet to post anything over there.) Socialite Dog Party will deal mostly with celebrity gossip that I'm too embarrassed to discuss over here on my main blog. With all the news dives I'm doing at work, I end up hearing about almost all the big juicy gossipy stories anyway. Or at least, all the "accidental" vagina shots, which now compose 85% of all celebrity gossip, according to statistics I have just invented.
Anyway, WordPress blogs have that little "tagline" under the title. The default says "Another WordPress Blog", and I changed it to read "Suck it, Jesus," a play on Kathy Griffin's censored Emmy speech from earlier this week. See, because both of the site's bloggers are Jews and because a celebrity just said that, it's a perfect description of our blog! Unfortunately, WordPress seems to have no sense of humor, and keeps reverting to the generic tagline.
I've tried a non-blasphemous one, so if it's a mechanical/caching error, we'll find out soon enough. But if WordPress is trying to actually prevent me from titling my blog in some kind of anti-Christ fashion...well, that would be a big strike against them, blog platform-wise. (The second strike of the day, actually. I also discovered this morning that they don't have the capacity to embed MySpace TV videos. Which is just really silly...)
DeathCold 2007 just keeps on rolling here in my apartment. In addition to my myriad other ailments and complaints, I've actually developed a sore neck from sleeping so much lo these past 96 hours. Heading out to the doctor at 3, so hopefully he'll have some helpful advice that doesn't include the old "drink plenty of fluids" line. I've imbibed a ton of fluids, usually orange juice, during every cold I've ever had in my entire life, and I'm not convinced it has ever done me any good at all. Not once have I chugged a liter of Tropicana and bounded out of bed eagerly greeting a new, no-longer-infected day. Usually, the citric acid burns the back of my throat, I get pulp mixed in my post-nasal drip for the rest of the day and that's about it.
I'm even running out of non-online reading material. I finished Bret Easton Ellis' "Lunar Park" yesterday and may have to swing by the bookstore on the way home from the doctor for my next selection. Four hours of essentially solitary confinement has made me fairly desperate for entertainment. I actually watched about 2 hours of the Emmy Awards last night before I couldn't take any more, so you know it's getting ugly around here.
A few questions about the Emmys last night for anyone else who watched:
- Has Robert Duvall lost his marbles? I'm not trying to be mean. The guy's a brilliant actor; I'm a fan, even though he makes approximately 22 bad films for every good one. But he made two really weird, rambling speeches last night that almost made me question his sanity. In the first speech, he went on and on about Westerns being the great American genre right before waxing nostalgic about filming his most recent Western, the three Emmy-winning Broken Trail, in Alberta, Canada. The second "speech" made even less sense, and wasn't really even for him, but was intended for the film's producers. Just strange.
- The little mini-films introducing the writing staffs for the nominated variety/comedy shows was the highlight of the entire broadcast. That seems kind of sub-optimal for the Emmy Award producers, seeing as it's, comparatively, kind of a minor award.
- I get that Frankie Valli is from Jersey, and The Sopranos are from Jersey, and Valli's even made a few appearances on the show, but what the hell was up with that "tribute" featuring the guys from "Jersey Boys"? I mean, a montage of "Goodfellas" with the Four Seasons in the background, okay, that I get. (He even gets name-checked in that film. "Who the hell do you think you are? Frankie Valli or some kind of big shot?") But Sopranos is set in the present day and the music is largely contemporary. They should have booked Journey.
- I'm no fan of the Fox network, but in the interest of fairness, can we agree that they probably censored Sally Field for saying the word "goddamn" and not because she was talking about Iraq? Sally Field always irritates me at award shows (and, more generally, in life). She's won a ton of these things at this point, it should be totally old hat to her, but she still has to do that lame, over-excited, spazzy, "Oh I didn't expect this!" act every single time. Compare her faux-jittery, discombobulated style to the composed grace and impeccable wit of Helen Mirren's speech. It's just embarrassing.
But watch the video for yourself...They let her rant (meaninglessly) about Iraq for a few moments, even getting in that hacky old line about "if moms ran the world, there'd be no war, blah blah blah..." They only cut her off when she started swearing.
It's a separate matter whether or not you should be allowed to blaspheme on television. I think you should. You're allowed to say racial and sexist slurs on television ("30 Rock" laced one hilarious episode this past season with epithets ranging from "queerburger" to "faggotron"), so why not "suck it, Jesus" or "goddamn"? But still, those are the rules and it seems to me, in this case, they were applied as fairly as possible. With so much to be genuinely outraged about these days, including AT&T's genuine censoring of Pearl Jam's anti-war sentiments, this is a distraction.
- What was up with that Tony Bennett/Christina Aguilera thing? They sang for about 4 minutes, the dancers in front of them were distracting and not particularly impressive, and he looked like he barely knew what was going on. Plus, she's very pregnant. What's she doing climbing on top of a piano?
- The thing about Lewis Black's whole persona and style of comedy is that the jokes themselves have to be really funny. If he's working with sub-par material, as he was last night, the whole yelling-ranting-psycho schtick just gets kind of desperate and irritating.
- Was it me or did Ryan Seacrest actually do an okay job? Not that I laughed at any of his jokes, but hiring Sanjaya Malakar's foil to host a big awards show seemed like a basic error in judgment to me. But he kind of pulled it off, kind of. Only improvement would have been to have Randy and Simon at the foot of the stage critiquing his performance mid-broadcast.
- "Hell's Kitchen" wasn't even nominated for Best Reality Competition Show. WTF?
- Was happy to see "30 Rock" win. It really is the best comedy on television right now.
This concludes the Pathetic Sick Bastard's Frustrated Guide to Watching the Emmys Because He's Too Nasally Congested to Sleep.
Today is the third day in a row I've quarantined myself in my bedroom. I'm suffering from some odd illness - it's not quite a head cold, it's not quite the flu, I'm not sure what it is. (Believing myself no longer contagious, I did join my father and brother for a birthday celebration last night at Ye Olde King's Head in Santa Monica. Then I came home and collapsed.) All I know about my illness is that it sucks and I feel worn out all the time, even just after I wake up from 12 hours of fitful rest.
The last time I felt this way, I went to the doctor and he told me I had something called Pharyngitis, which is a fancy medical term for a sore throat. Since I'm fairly certain I had told him that I was suffering from a sore throat at the beginning of the appointment, this turned out to be a largely wasted afternoon, though I did get some nice antibiotics out of it that I wish I had held on to.
It would seem to be a perfect time to get some writing/blogging done, what with my total inability to go anywhere and do anything. I've got a script that definitely needs some attention. Unfortunately, my brain can't seem to focus in on anything - I have mental in addition to sinus congestion. What the hell? So, instead of just being locked in my room alone, I'm locked in my room alone with the most boring version of myself possible. And, let me tell you, that's pretty goddamn boring.
Yesterday, I actually watched Armed and Dangerous...that's how bad it has gotten. I've sunk that low in 3 days. Hopefully, my white blood cells can turn this thing around in the next 24 hours or so, or I'm doomed.
One thing I did want to talk about was this article about disgraced Senator David Vitter from the other day. It's just about how the specific claims made by a New Orleans prostitute don't seem to bode well for his political future.
On Tuesday, Wendy Ellis, a former New Orleans prostitute, presented her case at a Beverly Hills, Calif., news conference arranged by Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. She said Vitter was one of her clients in 1999, the year he won a seat in the U.S. House.
Vitter has denied those claims, but Flynt said Ellis recently passed a lie detector test that confirms her side of the story. Ellis was previously identified as Wendy Cortez, the name she used as a prostitute.
Nothing too shocking there. The guy liked whores and didn't feel that this should keep him from running a Family Values-themed campaign. Some people are actually still surprised by revelations like this:
"The conservative anti-gay crusader liked to hook up in bathrooms with men!"
"The Family Values candidate spent money visiting whores!"
"Newt Gingrich, immediately after divorcing his cancer-stricken, hospital-bound wife on whom he'd been cheating, ate an entire side of beef and had enough room left over for a triple-serving of Boston Cream Pie!"
You just have to remember that these individuals don't think any of the rules apply to them. None. So, when they advocate any principle, from bans on gay marriage to commemorating July 12 as National Ovaltine Awareness Day, they're just advocating it for you. You should be aware of Ovaltine. You shouldn't be allowed to be gay. They're already in the Senate, so what they do is their own business.
This sense of entitlement really does explain a whole lot. It's why Republicans get so upset when liberal bloggers call them "chickenhawks." They're not avoiding sending their kids to Iraq (or going themselves) just because it's dangerous. They're avoiding it because serving America is not what Senators and Congresspersons do. They leave that to the commoners. Their job is to sit around and decide how the rest of us should act. Duh.
I mean, just take a look at this comment at the end of the Vitter article, from Louisiana talk radio host Lee Fletcher:
"The consensus even among the folks behind the scenes is that it's not going anywhere. It's been tried and it didn't stick," Fletcher said about the allegations. "What's really helped Vitter, the people going after him are a pornographer and a prostitute. And therefore they have less credibility than anybody I can think of."
See, because David Vitter is a Senator, his word automatically overrules that of a common prostitute, even though he's being accused of, you know, having sex with prostitutes. "Find a witness to David Vitter's covert use of prostitutes who has no connection with prostitution," that's Lee Fletcher's legal motto. If that kind of stupidity doesn't tip you off that these people just consider themselves better than you, and therefore above your petty American laws, I don't know what will.
Man, this is totally brilliant...
Missed it on TV. Glad Comedy Central finally wised up and started streaming this stuff online.
[Hat tip: Sullivan]
Check out this hilarious, likely-to-be-a-hoax website Marry Our Daughter It allows prospective grooms, provided they are good Christians, to bid on teenage brides!
The late Founder and CEO of MarryOurDaughter.com
Kyra's 14 and a half. She's a real bargain at $27,995:
Kyra likes the outdoors, more the open air of the beach or the desert than the woods. She would love to live somewhere away from it all. She is bright and funny and full of life and while she has little direct experience with the opposite sex we have made sure she is aware of everything she needs to know to be a good wife and mother.
See? It's almost creepy enough to be real.
But, alas, it's not. How do I know? Well, first off, the folks at Snopes, who are always on top of such things, have pretty much declared the thing fake.
There's very little actual information on the site, save for a FAQ:
Q: WHAT IS A BRIDE PRICE?
A: The bride price is an ancient custom, somewhat like a dowry. A man wishing to marry a woman would offer her family a Bride Price in cash or kind, or sometimes offer to work for their family.
Q:WHAT IF NO ONE ACCEPTS MY PROPOSAL?
A: In that case, you might want to closely examine how you are proposing and how carefully you are matching your likes and dislikes, your goals and dreams, to those of your prospective bride.
Also, lines like this kind of give it away:
Please do not propose to multiple Daughters or you risk having all your proposals disqualified.
Plus, the "testimonials" are just too perfect:
"Thank God for your site! Our daughter was really nervous walking down the aisle, but she seems okay now and the money we got let us keep our farm and even add on a few acres."
—Mrs. Addrien L.
[Hat tip: Tristero at Digby's blog]
Just got home from the Dinosaur Jr. show tonight at the Wiltern. Unbelievable show. Really incredible. Their new album from earlier this year, "Beyond," was impressive considering how long it has been since these guys played together, but the show tonight still blew me away. Seriously, you'd think this band hadn't taken a break since the glory days - they're still incredibly tight.
The opening act was Band of Horses, a well-regarded indie outfit best known for the single, "Funeral," a really solid song.
Unfortunately, the band's just intensely dull live. They didn't seem very into their own music. Very distant, even during the up-tempo songs and solos. At one point, I remarked to my friend Dave that they sounded like a not-at-all-fired-up My Morning Jacket, and the guy in front of my turned around and agreed. I think that's all that needs be said on the matter.
But Dinosaur Jr. was just non-stop, in-your-face intensity from minute one. They played a bunch of cool songs from "Beyond" as well as some of the old-school classics, and everything souned great - blazingly-loud noise-rock at its best, and the guys were clearly taking joy in performing. When the band's having a good time, it's just infectious.
I was actually a fan of Lou Barlow before I got into Dinosaur Jr. (I got very into Sebadoh my freshman year at college), so it was great to see him play some of his own songs, but the real treat was J. Mascis on guitar. His voice has completely held up, don't get me wrong. I guess it helps that his singing was almost more quirky and idiosyncratic than pretty, even on the classic albums. But the guy just fucking shreds.
Did I mention this concert was incredibly loud? My ears are still ringing. Seriously. But it was all worth it. Here's just a sample of the great Dino Jr. songs I heard tonight:
An Elmore Leonard short story provides the basis for both Delmer Daves' 1957 version of 3:10 to Yuma and James Mangold's new remake. The author, better known for crime comedies like Get Shorty and Jackie Brown, is a master with plot, and the set-up for 3:10 brings a variety of colorful characters together in an intense situation so smoothly, you don't even realize you're watching a complicated story coalesce.
Down on his luck rancher Dan Evans (Christian Bale) desperately needs money to save the family business. (As the film opens, Dan's banker has sent a few employees to set fire to his barn.) When an unscrupulous railroad official (Dallas Roberts) offers Dan $200 to escort the infamous murderer Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to Yuma, where he'll be arrested and sentenced to hang, Dan has no choice but to accept, despite his concerned wife's (Gretchen Mol) protests.
In Daves' original, the tension between these two men drives the entire film. (The entire second half of the 1957 version, in fact, takes place in a Yuma hotel room, as Evans and Wade converse while awaiting the titular train.) Mangold sets his sights on larger themes about redemption and sacrifice, and clearly sees this story as an excuse to work in as many classic Western scenes, conventions and set-ups as humanly possible. For the most part, it works...until it doesn't.
I think my largest problem with Mangold as a filmmaker is that he doesn't seem to respect his audience. His "thriller," Identity, contains arguably the lamest twist ending in recent film history. His last film, Walk the Line, while well-made, includes some truly groan-worthy dialogue, as when Reese Witherspoon chirps "you cain't walk no line!" to our hero, in a ludicrously obvious echo of the film's title/theme.
Here, too, the script by Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas occasionally gets silly, as when Ben Wade repeatedly tries to charm women by asking if they have green eyes. But that's not the film's largest problem by a longshot. I'll try my best to avoid spoilers, but it must be said that the last 15 minutes of 3:10 to Yuma are intensely silly, even ridiculous. It's as if Mangold thought that 100 minutes or so of really watchable, entertaining Western action would put everyone in such a positive, upbeat state of mind, they'd overlook the fact that his conclusion makes no sense - he tries to fall back on our goodwill towards his movie. This is not a strong bet.
Now, if it were just a plot twist or two that seems far-fetched, that I could deal with. That wouldn't ruin an otherwise solid movie (and Yuma really is a solid, well-done genre film for that first 100 minutes). But the conclusion of the film seems to cancel out all that has come before. A character makes a transformation that feels terrifically out of touch with all that has been established about his character; not only are his choices not foreshadowed by the screenplay, they are not set-up in any way. A man suddenly decides to change everything about himself and his life, for no real reason, and nothing we have seen about him before indicates that he'd be likely to do such a thing.
The film seems to say that anyone can be redeemed, that our present actions say more about who we are than our mistakes in the past. But Mangold fails to show us anyone actually redeeming himself or herself, save for the one character who was pretty much good from the beginning. Everyone else's redemption just sort of arrives, on cue, out of nowhere like a gift from Screenplay Heaven.
The pat, on the nose conclusion is particularly disappointing because Mangold, his writers and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (who also shot Walk the Line) get so much right. The action scenes in particular far exceed any recent Western. (I honestly can't think of a single contemporary Western to build to a shootout as intense, gritty and stylish as 3:10's climax.) The film feels natural and authentic, not glossy and overly-polished like so many Hollywood period films. And it's amazingly permitted to be violent, and to show the consequences of its violence. Some scenes in 3:10 are surprisingly brutal, not because I'm shocked to see such gore depicted in what was once thought of as a family genre, but because the violence in such films tends to be fraudulent, delighting in the kinetics of a gun battle without wanting to linger on the aftermath, with its resultant blood and dead people.
Performance-wise, Christian Bale's kind of saddled with the non-arcing, predictable straight-arrow ranch-hand part, flatly played by Van Heflin in the original. He's good but it's a pretty staid, reserved turn. Western vet Russell Crowe (you'll recall, he was Cort in The Quick and the Dead) has the showier role as the steely, unflappable criminal Ben Wade, and makes the most out of every scene. The last time we got an appearance from this Russell Crowe, rather than his phone-lobbing, overacting, Oscar-grubbing doppelganger, was 2003's Master and Commander. Before that, 1999's The Insider. Once every few years, Crowe just finds the right role and absolutely kills it, and he's so good in 3:10 to Yuma, I'm willing to overlook Cinderella Man.
The supporting cast is likewise above reproach. Ben Foster, whom I recall most clearly as Claire's squirrely, bisexual art school boyfriend on "Six Feet Under," goes big and theatrical as Wade's psychopathic right-hand man Charlie Prince, and it somehow works. (His performance reminded me of Michael Biehn's in Tombstone, but in a good way.) Peter Fonda gives terrific "old coot" as a Pinkerton detective trailing Wade. And "Firefly" veteran Alan Tudyk injects some much-needed levity in a minor role as the Bisbee, Arizona town doctor.
I was really really with this movie for a while, which made the peculiar conclusion all the more unsatisfying. After the jumbled third act of Copland, the sub-sub-sub Shyamalan idiocy of Identity and now the highly questionable turnabouts in the last moments of 3:10, this is clearly something Mangold needs to work on. Endings matter.
I'd make this into a caption contest, but it's just too easy...Plus, you know...no one ever leaves comments.
Apparently, Will Ferrell's impression of our president is a lot more accurate than any of us ever imagined.
The article that goes with this picture is about a book coming out tomorrow that makes a shocking, brain-melting revelation. Get ready this...after months of careful, close research, journalist Robert Draper is ready to declare...George W. Bush may not know what he's doing!
I know, I know, I didn't believe it either, but Draper apparently has it on good authority.
Here's some excerpts from the New York Times:
Mr. Bush went on to share private thoughts that appeared to reflect a level of sorrow and presidential isolation that he strongly implied he took pains to hide, a state of being that he seemed to view as coming with the presidency and with which he professed to be at peace.
Telling Mr. Draper he likes to keep things “relatively light-hearted” around the White House, he added in May, “I can’t let my own worries — I try not to wear my worries on my sleeve; I don’t want to burden them with that.”
“Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Draper, by way of saying he sought to avoid it. “This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.”
Bush seems unaware that the entire conservative rhetorical strategy pivots around self-pity. "The media never reports our side of the story." "Liberals don't tolerate our views." "We're not free to practice our majority religion." "The terrorists hate our freedoms." "Gays are infringing on our right to marry."By now, at least a third of my fellow U.S. Americans must have seen this amazing video from the "Miss Teen USA" Pageant, in which Miss South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton, utters the following masterpiece of garbled incoherency. She's asked to explain a random statistic that indicates 1/5 of Americans can't find their own country on a map:
Miss S.C.'s response in full:
"I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that theyshould...our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S...or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our...(inaudible)"
Awesome.
I kind of figured that would be the most stupid statement that I'd see, hear or read this month, and felt alright with that. I mean, I know George Bush has given a few speeches this month, but he's generally capable of completing at least 50% of his sentences.
Then, Brad from Sadly, No! found this little nugget of wrong-headedness over at Wizbang. I'm fairly certain I've never met anyone as stupid as the author of the following blog post.
BLAMING THE VICTIM IN THE MISS TEEN USA DEBACLE
In a way, she's a victim. Any fair look at her answer shows she got mired in liberal taking points.
Pageant questions for the last 30 years are just fluff designed to extract from the young girl her liberal qualifications. So young girls practice spouting liberal buzz phrases, no matter the question.-- Because looking good isn't enough to win a beauty parent, you must have the proper liberal credentials, or there's no sparkly tiara for you!
The core assumption of Paul's post is that beauty pageants tilt liberal. This strikes me as kind of counter-intuitive, if only because I stereotypically associate beauty pageants with Middle American (or, if you prefer, "Red State") culture, but this is just a lazy assumption. I don't know anything about beauty pageants, really, so perhaps Paul is right and they're totally biased against conservatives. You don't really need an opinion on this topic to grasp the inanity of Paul's post. Though you kind of have to wonder about someone who looks to turn anything, even the Internet's version of the "dumb blonde joke," into an opportunity for lame political hackery. This is roughly akin to writing a dense, angry screed applying identity politics to Homestar Runner cartoons or debating the impact of that fat guy singing about the Montgomery Flea Market to the Dow.
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don't have mapsEverybody is a victim. The first rule of being a good liberal is to find a way to say these hapless morons who can't find the U.S. on a map aren't really morons, they are victims... Victims of the map deficit. The map deficit grew under Reagan, got better under Clinton but has exploded under George Bush. "We should have a program" so everyone can get a map.
and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South AfricaAnd this is where her coaching really kicked in. Mention the poor people of South Africa. No matter the question, South Africa MUST be in the stock pageant answer.
and, uh, the Iraqand what good is a good liberal answer without the word Iraq in it?
everywhere like, such as and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S.(pageantbot) Education, must speak about education.... OK in fairness, education really should be part of a reasonable answer but by this point, she can't even tell you the question, she's just trying to hit the liberal talking points.
should helpEVERY pageant answer is required to have a call for someone being helped. Because we all know this "help" is a liberal codeword meaning tax increases and income redistribution.
the U.S., er, should help South AfricaOf course we should honey. You've been practicing that line for a year, it was going to come out no matter the question.
and should help the Iraq and the Asian countriesBecause being a good liberal means we care about all the dark people.
so we will be able to build up our future for our children.Because it takes a village to raise a moron.
Here's sort of a grab bag of songs I've been listening to a lot this week, thanks to the fine, upstanding individuals at The SeeqPod Corporation:
The first song is off of the new Okkervil River LP, "The Stage Names," and the second is off Blitzen Trapper's latest disc, both of which were passed on to me by my brother. The third is one of my favorite tracks off of The Boggs' disc, "Forts." They're from New York and I read somewhere that they're part of the same scene as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Walkmen, I guess, but it actually reminds me more of '80s British rock than anything else. Like Echo and the Bunnymen with less realistic British accents.
Then there's two really weird songs, the first one by Jesca Hoop and the second by a French collective called Malajube. The Hoop song's in English but I have no idea what it's actually about, and the second one's in French, so I really have no idea what it's about, but they're both good songs. Finally, a great bit of comedy from Patton Oswalt's latest CD, "Werewolves and Lollipops," which I actually went and purchased for myself in a real store! Hey, whatever will get the Bronfman's that extra island they've been itching for, that's my philosophy...
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.
