02.24.08

Other current events

Posted in Comedy Jokes at 6:55 am by Rob Schultz

Forgot to mention – here’s the video from the 02/08 Sketch Cram. You can’t distinguish my voice from the rest of the screaming in the screamy part. Or at least I can’t.

And this isn’t from anything at all:

02.23.08

#1,238: Juno

Posted in Movies at 11:45 am by Rob Schultz

Moving this week. Found a place to move TO last week. Leaving the valley Hollywoodward.

Stacking up little edit jobs to work on here and there. Writing things. And there’s a radio-show-to-be.

Recent movies:

Sunshine – Wanting to like a movie isn’t always enough. Already starting from a deficit by bearing similarities to Event Horizon (one of film’s greatest embarrassments), this chronicle of human failure and monument to (as I understand it) bad science didn’t win me over. There might be a lesson available here, since Danny Boyle movies never do. Extra demerits awarded for requiring outside reading to explain the plot.

Michael Clayton – Solid. Monument to human weakness. Somewhat too neat and tidy an ending.

Harvey – Fantastic! Surprisingly ‘modern,’ given the kind of Hays Code-ish santization one imagines in movies from 1950. Dowd, Elwood P. is an American Hero.

Funny Games – The remake looms nigh, so I saw the original. It should be a fun movie to see with a big audience. It was much more tense viewing based on what I’d been told about it than through its own merits. Even the new trailer is a shot-for-shot remake of the old trailer, at least until they get to the ‘explain things to Americans’ bit. And there’s a genuine worth to repeat viewings, “to enjoy the opening in the context of the ending,” I might say.

And, since I’m moving away from convenient close proximity to an enormous cinema that doesn’t care, I commemorated the event with a slate of fresh releases:

Be Kind, Rewind – Gondry movie, shares some of the joy of the TV series Home Movies, in seeing the homemade solutions to fancy effects and costumes. Doesn’t fret much more than it needs to on plot to string along the fun bits.

Jumper – a ‘necessary evil’ to staying inside until other showtimes lined up. Pretty much nothing happens after the first 15 minutes. The effect grows tiresome and that’s all the movie has going for it. Points for showing someone use a power selfishly (you’d use the Force to reach the remote if you could), demerits for Hayden Christenson. Points for having a snowglobe in the movie, demerits for having such an expensive snowglobe that there was no money available for an ending to the movie. Too soon to tell if it earns enough money for sequels, but it’s kind of funny to see franchise-hungry companies make bold advances on trilogies that fizzle (ie, Eragon). Although I would have liked a XIII sequel.

There Will Be Blood – More like There Will Be Boring. There was a fair amount of slapping though.

Juno – I had been avoiding this because it looked like a very calculated Napoleon Dynamite / Little Miss Sunshine -styled monstrousity. Somehow, finding out Jason Reitman directed it tipped the scales for me. And there are some neat directorial ideas going on, but the movie drew a lot more Kif-shaped sighs than laughs for me. You can just wave at the jokes as they cruise by. Points for the notion of vacationing in Gettysburg, dozens of demerits for inclusion of the Moldy Peaches. For all the grabs at quotability it makes, I like how not-quoted it seems to be. At least, in the tiny circles I’m travelling lately.

02.12.08

What a letdown. Boo!

Posted in Life at 2:16 am by Rob Schultz

Today was a miserable day, but I don’t feel miserable about it.

02.08.08

Words and photos*

Posted in Work at 6:07 am by Rob Schultz

First off, I’m writing for Sketch Cram at the UCBTLA on Saturday, Feb 9, 2008.
Writers start scribbling in the morning, performers come in and learn the stuff in the evening, and by the time YOU show up at midnight, we’ve assembled a show you’ll love like a precocious niece.

Also, last week, I wandered around LA county looking for billboards and taking photos. See the fruits of this effort on the internets, and go visit Project Nightlight (the organization responsible for said billboards) if you want to.

*Photos, while still valued at 1,000 American words apiece, are now only worth an embarrassing 978 Canadian words.

02.07.08

If you haven’t anything nice to say….

Posted in Life at 3:26 am by Rob Schultz

Separate thoughts:

  • Some websites have a space for users to leave comments on content. This is almost never a genuinely useful feature. Some blogs, maybe your slashdots or your ars technicas, they can attempt to foster a discussion of some kind. This is their purpose, they take the good with the bad, for the sake of community. Your imdbs, your youtubes, those comment sections are part of What’s Wrong With the Internet. Like the fuss over not allowing Dr. Who fans to post comments to the show’s creators on the BBC website – as a fan, no, you aren’t entitled to having your voice heard. I don’t think I want to discuss whether (serialized) art should be created in a vacuum, but these are not repositories of thoughtful comments. It’s kids posting FAKE!!1 to animation clips and calling other users Gh3y and generally shitting on someone else’s creation and/or effort. That’s not useful.

  • Websites that ‘take over,’ (whether it’s by stealing focus, or sneaky pop up triggers, or playing audio unbidden, or redirecting users to a rick astley video) are anathema to me. These aren’t sites with a well-meant feature gone bad (comments), they’re aggressively taunting users, flicking their ears and stealing their erasers.

  • I’m especially good at getting people mad at me without trying. I think this is because I assume things will work out great. Sometimes this occurs while trying to make friends, in events that backfire in spectacular ways.

  • I listen to more podcasts than I can hope to keep up with, and starting in on new shows from the beginning of their run doesn’t help the situation any. I’ve been burning through one in particular lately, maybe more because of how it sounds than what it says. I don’t learn anything, I don’t think about it, it’s just background chatter while some work gets done (one hopes).

    • SO:

    Why on earth would I write a message to a stranger and include any kind of negative comments? About anything? What good could result? In what situation does that turn out well?

    …and this isn’t even the first time a radio host has told me not to listen to his show.

    02.03.08

    Honest-to-goodness updating!

    Posted in Life at 12:33 am by Rob Schultz

    Mostly just little things around the site.

    Did some work for the fine folks of Project Nightlight this past week, which yielded a new !Art wallpaper:

    and the Valentine’s card is up before Valentine’s Day for once. Both of those can be found off the front page

    It’s great to have new stuff to put up and to tinker around in dreamweaver instead of the web-based blog thing. There’s new video stuff brewing, so there should be more htmlery soon. Anyone out there interested in a weird audio-mixing project?