Ç September 2008 | Main | November 2008 È
October 26, 2008
RETRACTION
RETRACTION:
Last week I told some dude that my favorite part of the Tesla song SIGNS was the part when the sign says "Long Haired Freaky people need not apply" and the lead singer of Tesla takes off his hat and responds, "Imagine that, huh, me working for you." However after hours of soul-searching, I've changed my mind. My favorite part of the song is when he sees a fence, yells at it ("Hey! What gives you the right!"), and then decides that it's wrong to keep him out and keep Mother Nature in.
If anybody sees that dude, please tell him this. I'm not sure what his name is, but he was wearing one a Maryland hoodie and he had a beard.
Posted by Andytown at 1:57 PM | Comments (1)
October 22, 2008
10 SCARIEST MOVIES
ANDYTOWN'S TEN FAVORITE SCARY MOVIES OFF THE TOP OF HIS HEAD (Proof that your comments can inspire blogposts!)
These are the SCARIEST, not the best. PSYCHO is a better movie than any of these, but it really isn't all that scary.
1) THE SHINING - The only movie that made me want to sleep with the light on in my adult years. The book is about a haunted hotel; the movie is about the dilemma of man's inability to live with himself or anyone else. An absolute nightmare, in which the heightened realism and illusory dream-like imagery compete to make a film experience unlike any you've ever seen. One thing often overlooked in this film: the music. It's soooo spooky. I bought it on DVD. I don't know why; I haven't watched it since.
2) THE EXORCIST - A masterpiece of building dread, suspense, and shock.
3) ROSEMARY'S BABY - While its 60s fashions date it a bit, Polanski puts you in the claustrophobic perspective of a neurotic mother who may or may not be making up this business about her baby being the devil.
4) THE SENTINEL - A creepy horror movie about a model living in a haunted brownstone that is actually the portal to Hell. The ending is one of the most tripped-out things I've ever seen.
5) CAT'S EYE - Three Stephen King stories about a cat who sees everything (hence the title). The last, and most famous, is least interesting - as a troll attacks Drew Barrymore. But the first, where James Woods joins a group that uses creative methods to help him quit smoking, and the second, involving a guy forced to walk around the ledge of a building are the scariest. Did I mention I'm terrified of heights?
6) THE GATE - I saw this movie in 1987 and don't want to see it again. It's about demons with telekinetic/psychic powers who live in the backyard of this kids house where there is a portal to hell. Three creepy parts: the kid sees the ghost of his mom who turns into his dead dog; a record played backwards to reveal the way to destroy the gate (or something); and a hand with an eyeball on it. Crappy special effects aside, this excursion into the teen horror genre is much better than any of the FRIDAY THE 13TH/NIGHTMARE movies.
7) MAGIC - Anthony Hopkins and an evil talking dummy. Need I say more? Watch this trailer if you dare.
8) ARACNOPHOBIA - I don't like spiders; neither does Jeff Daniels. This is a really underrated movie; its what would happen if Frank Capra made a horror movie. One of my favorite John Goodman roles. Does an amazing job of playing up the smallness of the spiders as what makes them so terrifying.
9) INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS - Either one; though the 70s one is a bit more gruesomely scary.
9) TRICK OR TREAT - Undead hair metal rocker terrorizes dorky teenagers led by the guy who played Skippy on Family Ties. Another movie I shouldn't have been watching when I was 11.
10) THE RING - The best horror movie of the last ten years.
11) TRANSFORMERS - Shudder . . .
Posted by Andytown at 12:03 AM | Comments (3)
October 7, 2008
"You got Mom's calves; I got Dad's."
I've seen every episode of ENTOURAGE, the shallow, wish-fulfillment fantasy that everyone seems pissed off about but still watches. Self-loathing, thy name is ENTOURAGE - by watching it, you implicate yourself in a cult that you, more than likely, deride. I enjoy the show primarily because of Kevin Dillon's hilarious caricature Johnny Drama, who stands in for all the mediocrity of 90s television and film - writing about his small role in "License to Drive," Roger Ebert called it "the end of a golden age of cinema." He also once played "Uncle Jesse's tough guy nephew" on FULL HOUSE. Drama, hunting down calf-implants, romantically-fuddled, always caught in between his obvious weaknesses and his high self-image, is one of the best characters television has ever come up with. The Emmys praise Jeremy Piven to death for his role as the golden fire-breathing Jew Ari, but Dillon brings a mix of pathos and brilliant comic timing to create a secondary character secondary only to such supporting sitcom luminaries as Kramer, Bill McNeal, Gob Bluth, and about five characters from the glory days of THE SIMPSONS.
ENTOURAGE's glaring and obvious weakness are its two pretty boy stars: movie star Vincent Chase and his boring manager Eric. Its not the characters are improperly conceived; they're just boring. No one cares about Eric's career as a manager or his love life, and equally dull is his tumultuous friendship with Vince. And to top it off, the actors who portray them are irritatingly inexpressive, and alternate between brooding, shouting, and staring wistfully at the camera.
(Spoilers start here, BTW; so avoid them if you want)
But I'm sure I just described the best part of the show to a certain demographic. What I enjoy most, besides Drama, is the inside baseball Hollywood stuff. It seems real, for the most part, the way studios and stars and agent jockey for position and use each other as pawns in their game. In the best plot of the series, Vince decides to do a low-budget indie, which is successful enough to get him noticed by James Cameron, who casts him in AQUAMAN, which becomes (I think) the second highest grossing film ever. This makes Vince a huge star, and he decides not to do AQUAMAN 2, but instead an edgy biopic about Pablo Escobar, MEDELLIN. In between this, there's a bunch of dopey, emotional crap about friendships, allegiances, honesty, and relationships, but the momentum of the industry carries it forward.
Here's the latest turn: MEDELLIN was a tremendous failure, and Vince has gone from being in the top-grossing movie to a high-profile direct-to-video dud. This is fascinating stuff, but I don't like where they've taken it; it's unrealistic. Vince is now, apparently, uncastable, and in a hilarious but, again, unrealistic moment, his only substantial offer is to make a movie with Benji in Alaska.
I don't buy it. Vince has often been compared to Mark Wahlberg, one of the executive producers and occasional cameo, but this is more nose-dive is more akin to Ben Affleck. After a string of supporting roles made him a movie star, Affleck chose several indulgent lead roles that failed to capitalize on his normal-guy image. His best role ever, Chucky from GOOD WILL HUNTING, showed him as a goofy but loyal fella; four years later, he's completely miscast playing CIA Analysts, big star Ad men, fighter pilots, and lawyers. And then he got involved in a high profile celebrity romance that led to two historic bombs (GIGLI, JERSEY GIRL).
Here's the point: Vince does one bad movie, and now he's on the bottom of the feedbag? At one point in the new season, he loses a role to Emile Hirsch, but Hirsch was just in SPEED RACER - a much higher profile failure than Vince's fictional one. One movie is not enough to sink a star's ship; Hirsch is still a player in both the indie scene and the summer movie scene, as Vince would be too.
Still, it does feel like the season has found new life by focusing more on the inner workings of a system we're all fascinated with but know little about. Here's hoping it continues.
Johnny Drama's hilarious wikipedia page
Posted by Andytown at 9:54 AM | Comments (2)
October 3, 2008
SOMETHING I LOVE
This picture:
One of my favorite little aspects of SEINFELD is the way that Newman is conceived. Whenever he sees Jerry, he tenses up and stares at him with a glare of pure hatred. But, somewhat less familiar are scenes like these - every time someone walks into the room, Newman is sitting perfectly still, thinking. And what is that in front of him? Army men? Toy dinosaurs? Meanwhile Kramer always enters in mid-sentence, completely absorbed in his latest wild scheme.
This episode is "The Millennium," when Kramer and Newman plan competing Millennium parties two years in advance. Newman got the jump on things, booking a revolving restaurant and Christopher Cross. However Newman allows Kramer to participate in his party because he has a lot of cubed ice ("That's good stuff," Newman notes).
From this point the scheme becomes a lot less interesting: I wish, instead of having the party hinge on whether or not Jerry is invited, they had just gone on planning it.
But, if you will, please notice that Newman has a poster for Butter on his wall. And a Hot Dog Phone.
I love this show.
Posted by Andytown at 7:57 AM | Comments (1)
October 1, 2008
THE COEN BROTHERS (PART 2)
FARGO - Enough has been said already about FARGO, certainly in the handful of best movies of the last thirty years. FARGO is perhaps the blackest black comedy ever made, an absurd feat considering the whole movie is covered in snow and Midwestern niceties. William H. Macy's performance as a tragically stupid bumbler put him on the map; years later it seems silly that Cuba Gooding Jr. beat him for the Oscar. Steve Buscemi plays one of his many awful, unredeemable bastards, but this time even he is befuddled by a play that increasingly strange. The iconic scene is when Francis McDormand's Marge announces she's "gonna barf" - it goofs on the movie tradition of the rookie who throws up at the crime scene. Marge is anything but a rookie, her seemingly dopey friendliness hiding a keen mind. Therefore she's the most redeemable of all the Coen's characters, a warm, pregnant maternal figure who is also a master detective. Only they could come up with something like that.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI - I blogged about it a few weeks ago. Where even the most convoluted of Coen stories is tightly plotted, LEBOWSKI feels like an explosion at the screenplay factory. When the nihilists show up with a marmot, you realize you're in the kind of story that even Sam Spade couldn't make sense of. The brilliance of this story is that rather than the keen, deductive mind of Spade, you get the marijuana haze of the Dude. Perhaps the most consistently funny movie ever made.
O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU - The Coens took on the depreshun South with O BROTHER, which plays on the "serious" film that Sullivan from SULLIVANS' TRAVELS (a masterpiece) planned on making. "Written by" the Coens and Homer, it's a story about getting home through an odyssey of tribulations and larger than life characters. Its similar to THE ODYSSEY is its least compelling feature; rather I appreciate its loving mythologizing of bluegrass music, gangsters, pomade, and Southern archetypes. In 2000, George Clooney was a revelation; he looked like Clark Gable but carried himself with more comic swash. In his first scene, he's explaining the prophetic potential of the blind, and he's always chatting his way out of a situation. Like the Dude, he's a bad Odysseus for this journey, but the Coens realize that's all part of the fun. This is a fun movie, sun-bathed in sentimental imaginings of a South that never existed, but that somehow pays homage to the one that does.
THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE - The least remembered of all the better Coen films, the black and white stylings of this film made it once distinguishable and unmarketable. Billy Bob Thorton plays a dull, dull man who gets in over his head in classic noir tradition. My thought is that the Coens just wanted to make a movie about a barber because they liked the barber pole and the potential for the happenings in a barber shop. Watching this again recently, I wished that John Goodman could have played the James Gandolfini part, and it's the only time I ever thought Frances McDormand miscast. And when Tony Shalhoub shows up as a philosophizing lawyer, the movie goes where most noirs don't: the aftermath. The Coens usually avoid the blatant commentary of revisionist films, but TMWWT consistently invokes the tropes and reinvents them. The normally self-serving noir hero, here embodied by Thorton, is a man who longs beauty and passion but lacks the means to express it - normally a subtext of a genre, here blatantly portrayed. Still, like all Coen movies, this is an experience that feels at once familiar but completely new.
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY / THE LADYKILLERS - The less said about these two the better. The former doesn't seem like a Coen bros. Movie, while the latter clearly does. THE LADYKILLERS is one I keep meaning to revisit, but I don't want to sit through Marlon Wayans completely out-of-place jive-talkin' homeboy (even though I do want to see J.K. Simmons and his yodeling girlfriend, if I remember right). The Clooney film was an incomprehensible gag film, but the Hanks/Coen pairing was a sad failure.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN - A perfect adaptation in many ways, it offered career roles to its three leads. I've heard criticism that this is "just another serial killer movie," but I couldn't disagree more. This killer is singularly motivated, yet never explained. Chigurh is not pure evil, nor is he not not pure evil. The coin flip metaphor is appropriate - Chigurh sees the world operating on chance, while Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell views it with an apparent moral order. NO COUNTRY reminds me most of the great Sergio Leone movies, where there is always a good (Jones), a bad (Bardem), and an ugly (Brolin). The "ugly" character, while principled, can't settle between his greed and desire to do something heroic. Of all their films, this one is populated with the best performances: everyone is excellent, from Bardem's oscar winning role to Brolin and Kelly Macdonald in their revelatory performances to Woody Harrelson's stoic but self-serving bounty hunter. I'm particularly impressed with the mood, which is tone-perfect in adapting the subdued suspense of Cormac McCarthy's novel.
BURN AFTER READING - The Coens satire on the spook paranoia story has been criticized for being neither that suspenseful or that funny. As suspense, it's a mess, but it's supposed to be. Like the many characters I've mentioned before, Frances McDormand's sad sack of a computer dater and Brad Pitt's hilariously daft fitness freak are the last two twits on earth who should be blackmailing anyone. This is a hi-tech version of that 80s classic RUTHLESS PEOPLE, where schlubs try their hand at duties best left to professionals. But in this the professionals are nutjobs as well, as George Clooney and John Malkovich play swaggering neurotics in various phases of self-destruction. It's not quite so fun to single out two big movie stars like Pitt and Clooney for being hilarious, but their roles give them the ability to show off their considerable comic gifts. Clooney's nervy, scatter-brained, romantic marshal plays ever scene with the type of confidence only a really stupid person can have, while Pitt indulges in a spazzed-out caricature that (surprisingly) never stops being funny. The score here is a little off, it's probably the most mean-natured of the films, and occasionally the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach gets a bit tedious. But I like the way they imitate the cinematography and stylistics of the genre. The two scenes with JK Simmons are inspired in their own weirdly underplayed way. BURN may not be the supreme work of these two supremely gifted filmmakers, but it definitely reminds us why they need to exist.
THE COEN BROTHERS AWARDS
Best Picture: FARGO
Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Best Actress: Frances McDormand, FARGO
Best Supporting Actor: M. Emmett Walsh, BLOOD SIMPLE
Best Supporting Actress: Judy Davis, BARTON FINK
Most Rarely Talked About But Awesome Supporting Performance: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Best Score: MILLER'S CROSSING
Best Soundtrack: THE BIG LEBOWSKI
Best Scene-Stealer: Glen from RAISING ARIZONA
Best Big Man Behind A Desk: Michael Lerner in BARTON FINK
Best Opening Credits: BLOOD SIMPLE (watch it again; it perfectly sets up the mood)
Best Beginning: The unusually long intro to RAISING ARIZONA
Best Ending: BLOOD SIMPLE
Most Underrated Coen Performance: Tim Robbins, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY
Most Powerful Scene: Bernie's "death scene" in MILLERS CROSSING
Funniest Scene: "The Whites" (If you don't know what I'm talking about, we don't have much to talk about).
I'm sure there are more. If there's another filmmaker you'd like me to put under the microscope, post it in the comments.
Posted by Andytown at 10:04 PM | Comments (1)