[The hip new way to keep tabs on Rob, without all that time-consuming conversation.]
I watched this movie on my only trip to Andrew Norton’s house. I ruined it for him and Ben, because I jokingly guessed the twist in the first 20 minutes or so.
Andrew, are you out there somewhere? Anyone know where he might be? Last time we talked he was en route to the middle east. The e-mail addresses I had are bouncing back, but I’m hoping that’s just because by now he should be home, discharged and doing something else.
After a slow start to the year in which I was ready to start making rent as a professional gambler, I landed some jobs doing video editing instead.
Most of the prominent and interesting stuff is UCB-centric, including demo reels for turning live shows you can see at the UCBTLA into TV shows, including things called “Back Talk” and “Live Green or Die.” I think those were in June, as was the start of an hour-long special for Comedy Central called “This Show Will Get You High,” which bled over into July and was followed up by some work on a feature film adaptation of a UCB stage musical, Freak Dance. I saw / taped the stage version at least half a dozen times and I’m jazzed to be part of the movie version. That’s going on now and probably will for a little while. I’ll also be shooting a pilot for a web series sometime next month.
New episodes of Better Radio are written and await recording. We’ve got some great guest actors, well, not booked, but in vague agreement to do the show.
Some other stuff’s getting written, just to keep me busy.
As always, other projects are brewing and broiling. Shot a new short a couple weeks ago. Contributing somewhat to Better With Thriller, had a question read out on Answer Me This that got Olly in trouble with his mum, folded a million t-shirts for Maximum Fun, trying to rev up something new which is the #1 reason you haven’t seen 2-line reviews of the last 60 movies I’ve seen (I reckon we’re up to at least #1681: Daybreakers), although I’ve written a couple longer essays about some movies that will go here or there, if there becomes a place, and I’m still doing some standup, although not with the frequency and drive that someone who’s going to get anywhere doing standup ought to be getting up. It’s good fun though.
What else, what else?
If you’re here in LA this weekend, I have honestly zero idea of what you’ll get, but SOMETHING I’ve written will be read out at a place called Wordlab, this Sunday, Aug 1. It’s found at 3191 Casitas Ave, #156, Los Angeles, CA 90026
(EDIT: NO. NO IT WILL NOT. THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED. DON’T GO TO IT. IT’S NOT GOING TO BE THERE. YOU’LL THINK YOU TRAVELLED THROUGH TIME AND THEN GET CONFUSED AND THEN QUIT YOUR JOB AND THEN SELL YOUR CAR AND THEN YOU’LL TURN TO THE STREETS AND NEXT THING YOU KNOW YOU’LL BE SELLING IMPORTANT SECRETS TO THE RUSSIANS. DON’T MAKE THIS MISTAKE AGAIN.)
I don’t think I know anyone in Chicago, except maybe a couple actors from Carpet Kingdom, and I don’t think they check the site too often, but if they did, they could go see Matt Walsh and say hello in a week or two:
In a burst of productivity, I made three videos for the MaxFunDrive 2010 Blowout Finale Bash Marathon. I shot almost everything on Wednesday afternoon and put ‘em together Thursday evening.
I threw out my first idea as too impractical to shoot of and by myself and made this one instead, featuring three tropes-of-me. All three were shot on my phone, and final cut had no problem with that. It didn’t like the HD stock footage from artbeats though. That stuff caused a lot of problems.
This one is a video of the serious and heartfelt variety. It’s still a little bit silly. As a video professional, I managed to shoot this with my camera/phone in portrait mode, rendering my travel to the actual locations where I listened to the episodes I mention useless. This also lead to the layering effect, so as to do something more interesting than EXTREME letterboxing.
A third video idea that came up during the first two, this is as deliberately low-fi and late night hack infomercial-y as can be. I’ve attempted to keep continuity to a minimum, and it doesn’t, strictly speaking, make a lot of sense. I’ve been waiting ages to find a use for all these gigantic diamonds though.
It made me happy that all three had extra stuff I ditched to keep the time down, that they all went together quickly and easily minus dumb [GENERAL ERROR]s, and that I got such a reasonable looking product out of a telephone.
Also, today is the last day of the MaxFunDrive, so if you haven’t given, you oughtta give. Every new person that gives takes one more nickel out of my pocket as part of the New Donor Challenge, which is rapidly exceeding the amount of spare change and bills I’ve been able to find around the house.
“You get to the age where you just like everything, ya know? Or you just find value in everything.” -Patton Oswalt
I want to like everything. All of it. I don’t, of course. And that’s okay. A lot of it is terrible. Too many things escape their creators without the time and attention they deserve; short films that aren’t short enough or blog posts that nobody proofreads. Still others are just what their creator intended, and I’ll have to settle with disagreeing philosophically with speaking abominable internet phrases aloud or paintings that aren’t blue. But very rarely is anyone struggling with an eye to producing badly. So I want to like it, just like I want to believe in all the ghosts and magic at the peripheral of our world, but sometimes that’s hard to do.
What I don’t want is to join in the (ever-less-)anonymous horde of internet commentators who shout dismissive, obvious, vicious, partisan, or thoughtless jabs at the news and gossip of the day. Much of the crowd, for instance, that was taking up arms in January in support of Team Coco demonstrated that they are not listening, they are just swarming around the flavor of the day when one week later they’re fully engaged in this decade’s equivalent of the e-mail forward re: Tiger Woods or the iPad announcement.
Social Media has allowed us to combine John Gabriel’s GIFT with a rousing mob mentality. I hate the deluge of variations on a one-liner that clog facebook feeds and twitter streams for the first two or three days months after a news story breaks (here’s looking at you, Mr. iPad Nano Jokester!). It is as though this is a group who is afraid to like anything at all, in case it turns out to be the wrong thing. This is far from the worst thing on the internet, but I think we can aspire to better.
So how to sort the signal from the noise? More to it, how to do so gracefully? Can I poke at Mr. iNJ without dropping to his level? Is there any reason to, or is it as inevitably ironic as complaining about the co-worker who talks behind everyone’s backs?
Well, there’s no sense being dismissive by class – to write off an entire genre of film would be – at best – to miss out on its most redeeming, shining examples. I don’t know what the shining glorious example of a teen sex comedy is, but I’ve seen a couple that were a whole lot better than the advertising suggested. I’m more likely to watch a heist movie, but I’ll bet at least half of the surprisingly vast American Pie saga is better than, let’s say, How to Rob a Bank.
I imagine myself an open-minded sort. And yet, I find myself turning off more movies in the first ten minutes than ever before. I can’t possibly see every show or hear every podcast that catches my interest, certainly not while maintaining the notion that I create as well as consume, and especially because for all the offal on the (comforting graphic of tasteful wooden) shelves, there’s such an awful lot of good out there too. Not middling, not decent, not inoffensive, but terrific! Even by IMDB’s standards, I’ve still never seen 95 of the 250 best movies ever. And really, of the 1650 or so that I’ve seen so far, there’re less than 200 that I would enthusiastically recommend.
What I’ve settled on, for now, is narrowing the field. My plan last year, to Improve My LA Experience, wasn’t just about surrounding myself with better things. It was about identifying the bad influences, the drains on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and excising them. So why not do the same here? Certainly an artist who has repeatedly disappointed could come around and create something I enjoy, but after a few strikes it might just take some extra outside recommendations before I’m keen to give them another shot. I’d be delighted to have new facts sway my opinion, but for now I don’t know if I need to see another movie from Ang Lee or Paul Greengrass or Doug Liman or Ron Howard. And it’s oddly liberating to unfollow Mr. iNJ.
Remaining open to new experiences doesn’t require staying open to negative ones. I don’t doubt that any number of chefs could make a delicious meal chock full of eggplants, but every experiment so far has been a round failure and I’m in no hurry to try again when there are so many other fine foods available. The important thing here is that closing off certain avenues already explored means making a note on your map, not bricking up the alleyway, and certainly not standing in front of it for the rest of your life, chasing off anyone who comes near.
With the unprecedented amount of choice available, a life spent focused on just the stuff you hate is something I find baffling. In the maelstrom of options, it can be difficult enough to focus on anything at all. Having so much choice is a luxury, and the opportunity to cultivate tastes is an even greater luxury, but there’s a distinction between tastes acquired and acclimated. Either one can be numbing on its own, and I’ve found the acclimated tastes fall by the wayside right quick in the face of a quality alternative.
There aren’t a whole lot of people, places, or things that I love. For me, that means a genuine boundless desire to grow and prosper and be joyful. It’s the purest form of well-wishing (not well wishing). On the other hand, I have even fewer objects of enmity. There are people I would not do business with or want to call on the phone. There are movies I would not choose to see again. They have all been strained out of my day-to-day and year-to-year life. I rarely think of them, they are not even given the privilege of being the subject of my daily 5 minutes’ hate. But I’ve seen and known people who do choose to spend their days being furious. The ones who are the best at it get themselves twisted up into this little, angry, ineffective coil of bitter. These are the bigots who lie in wait for someone to mention one of their favorite topics so they can spring out at you from their peanut brittle can of choice into a well rehearsed, if ridiculous, tirade.
Might as well be angry at the moon.
“The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas, letting all the ships in all of the oceans drop down to the bottom. The bomb will not blow out the bottom of the sea, and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy.”
-Vice Admiral W.H.P. Blandy
Don’t kid yourself, we’re living in the future over here.
Think of that storage! How many times could you store the data of your first hard drive on, for instance, your phone? Crazy.
It’s not like I’ve operated a punch card computer here, but the rate at which neat stuff passes us by is fantastic. (Although, as Louis CK reminds us, we’re still not happy.)
I noticed it today as I sometimes do – in an electronics store. And not for the first time. It’s happened to me before, in a gamestop, when an employee was trying to describe the then-elusive and sold-out classic controller accessory for the Wii. Because I’m very helpful, I jumped in and said it looks just like a Super Nintendo controller. Yeah, says the clerk, but with sticks. Kid customer turns to me then. ”What’s that?” What’s what? ”What’s a Super Nintendo?” Right. I’ll just be going now. Can’t be late for the bus back to the retirement center or I’m stuck in gamestop for a week.
Today, it was by my lonesome, in a Best Buy, checking out camcorders. And for around $100, I can get a thing that fits in my pocket and shoots 1080p. That’s one hundred United States Dollars. That’s crazy. And I considered it briefly. It’d be just fine to shoot some shorts for the internet, and I could do some post trickery and make it look perfectly usable – more than youtube needs, anyhow. The hardest part would be trying to get actors to take it seriously when it’s sitting on its tiny tripod. The SVHS shoulder mounted monstrosities I shot on at SCTV weighed a ton, but at least you had an air of authority during an interview.
And even then, what I was doing was more or less a technological miracle! This used to be so hard – at least by comparison. It used to require taking dozens of actual photographs per second! You had to wait until Thomas Edison invented a way to develop your film before you could even see what you’d shot! And what do we do with all this completely amazing stuff? Well, we do the exact same thing humans have been doing with motion picture technology for the past 120 years. If only Étienne-Jules Marey and his big luxurious beard could see what he’d started….
I saw a trailer for a new movie the other day, Death at a Funeral. It reminded me a lot of another trailer. For Death at a Funeral. Here’s a look at both so you can decide which actor you think is best at saying all these great jokes!
In second grade, in reading groups, at St. Pascal Baylon, the teacher for our group made fun of me for not grasping the concept of blindness. She described it as being ‘just like having your eyes closed all the time.’ But, if my eyes are closed, I can still distinguish when a light is turned on in a dark room, for instance. We went around on this point a couple of times.
A couple years ago, I worked for someone who would, perhaps once a week or so, tell me “You look just like Mike Myers.” and if one of his friends or family members was near by, he’d bring them over to weigh in on my similarities to Mike. He needed confirmation so much that I would get asked my opinion on the matter too. ”That depends,” I’d say, “serial killer Mike Myers [from Halloween], or comedian Mike Myers [from SNL]?” Neither, it turns out.
I’m not sure why the above never got posted back in May, but I hope you all had yet another SpoooOooOOOOOoky ThaaaAAaaankgiiiIIiving!
Surviving Disaster ended last month. Better Radio rages on. Applied for UCB’s Maude and Beta teams. Writing a lot of things. Booked holiday plane tickets. Watched some movies. Watching movies faster than I’m writing 2 liners about ‘em though, so I’m just going to do that in sections for a little while.
-The Last Temptation of Christ – Courtesy of the hulu. Started off funny. Became less so.
-Let the Right One In – Cool, especially for explaining what happens to a vampire who ISN’T invited in. I may have been late to the scene, but at least I saw it before the remake.
-Secret Beyond the Door… – Not a very good secret, frankly. The orchestra liked this movie significantly more than I did.
-Closed Mondays and Your Face and Kiwi! -Animated shorts, like you read about, presuming you read about short films, or animation, or something. Maybe a general interest publication with a particular focus this month on award-winning short subjects. Kiwi was great.
-Shooter – I guess if they explained the shock reveal of the last couple minutes at the beginning when it was equally valid, it wouldn’t be much of a movie. Certainly, Marky Mark wouldn’t've had to commit the dozens of murders he ought to be prosecuted for instead.
-Battle for Terra – Humans are the invaders! Oh no! It wasn’t clear why flying creatures need flying machines, or what they have to fear from falling.I think it looked good except for the humans, but it didn’t stick with me.
-The Girlfriend Experience – A Soderbergh experiment. Better than Bubble. Making the story non-linear just seemed like a technique to spread a thin story…thinner? That can’t be the analogy. That’s not something you’d do on purpose.
-Toy Story and Toy Story 2 – in 3D! Hadn’t seen these before, but part 3 is coming. Except now I don’t want to see it. Part 2 was almost exactly the same movie the first one was, with the same jokes, the same one song, same…everything. Seems like a waste.
-Zombieland – Yuck. This is to the zombie genre as timecrimes was to time travel. It’s the smallest possible amount of story they could bother with and still technically be a zombie movie. Just terrible.
-The Informant! - Hey, this was really good. Soderbergh’s 90s by way of the 70s. Lots of great comics in cameo roles, cool story, funny, well done, this is the opposite of cinematic warm mayonnaise.
-The Strangers – Worth it for one long genuinely creepy shot of Liv Tyler on the phone, with one of the strangers hanging around in the house, unbeknownst to her.
-Redbelt – I heard sometime later that this is a movie people don’t like. Those people are wrong. Fancy Mamet-y plotting unfolds, honor is preserved.
-KRAA! The Sea Monster – Truly a misunderstood horrible monster of the sea. Courtesy of Doc Mock’s Movie Mausoleum. (still, better than the sequel, KRAAmer Vs. KRAAmer)