Kids:
A few hours ago, I landed in Los Angeles, turned on my phone, and confirmed what you already know. Sony Pictures Television is replacing me as showrunner on Community, with two seasoned fellows that I’m sure are quite nice - actually, I have it on good authority they’re quite nice, because…
I love this. I love everything about this. I love this more than I loved almost all of my ex-girlfriends.
First of all, of course, fuck you! I’ve been expecting you for a while, and now you’ve finally arrived in droves to the inbox. I assume I’ve been linked to by some neo-nazi bullshit somewhere, but, you know, who really cares.
Congratulations for opening my eyes to a whole new level of hateful…
Tomorrow I am going to represent my first client (I just became an attorney) at a pre-trial. I. Am. Terrified. I graduated top of my class, studied hard, did internships, learned from the best attorneys around, “shadowed” attorneys and judges. I know what to say. I know what to do. But, it still…
Masquerade (1964)— This is a British spy caper from the 1960’s that somehow ended up on my Netflix queue(?), starring some lame dudes and also Marisa Mell— maybe best known today for rolling around naked in a pile of cash in the Danger Diabolik movie. British spies, working on behalf of the government and an oil company, kidnap a 14 year old Arab prince in order to install him in charge of an oil-rich country, but then wind up in a “comedic” morass of double-and-triple crosses.
As is usually the case in a certain kind of old, forgotten movie, there’s one scene that had some pizzazz to it. At one point, the luck-less hero is trapped in a cage with Mell and needs to get out. The keys to the cage are hanging across the room. The hero’s cage is next to a vulture cage— the hero has to reach his hands into the vulture cage in order to pull out a metal stick, so he can use the stick to get the keys. So, they show the guy putting his hands into the vulture cage and the vulture (or a muppet of a vulture at least) PECKING at his hands until they’re bloody. Finally he pulls out a stick… and it’s not long enough. He needs to get a SECOND stick from the vulture cage. So again, he puts his hand into the vulture cage— gets them pecked to shreds, pulls out a stick and… gets the keys. But none of them are the keys to his cage because his guards aren’t idiots. Nothing in the rest of it was as good as that, but the part where a vulture eats the hero’s hands was pretty excellent… Somebody oughtta steal that…
Transformers 3 (2011): The list of great movies in theaters right now that I haven’t seen would make the fact I went to see this pretty embarrassing if we were to look at it that way. That said? Easily the best of the three movies. After you get through that first hour of Shia Lebouf’s comedic stylings, and it turns into a proper macho-nonsense Michael Bay movie— the whole Chicago stretch of the movie was fun; Bay doing his chaotic war action storytelling, which I think he does better than almost anyone else. The new actress in the movie though doesn’t act as well as Megan Fox, which … I don’t even know what that means or how it can be true but she’s truly, truly atrocious. Weirdly, I think Tyrese Gibson kinda walked away with that movie…? He really seemed to believe he was under attack by giant transforming robots, more than anyone else in the movie.
I don’t understand why all of these movies have to end with Optimus Prime babbling about how great the Transformers are, though. All three end with speeches by Optimus Prime, but none of the speeches are any good. This one ends with him just babbling away about, “The one thing you can count in this life isn’t friends, family or country— it’s that Transformers love human beings and we forever shall be the best of cuddle-buddies.” What? How is that the take home message for the audience…??? Can’t he ever say something about friendship instead, or…?
Also, every-time I’ve seen a Transformers movie, the audience has applauded the robots. Which I just find incredibly weird.
American Swing (2008): Last night I went to a show at the UCB— Shitty Bosses. It’s Ben Schwartz from Parks & Rec, Donald Glover and DC Pierson and Dominic Dierkes from Derrick, and Sean Clement & Charlie Sanders, character actors— every Sunday they do this improv show. Funny guys; good show. But they get to the part of the show where they interview someone from the audience about their worst job… and the person sitting right in front of me turns out to have worked between the ages of 10-11, cleaning up the defecation of mentally challenged children and doing other chores in order to “pay” for schooling at an “alternative home school” in which the owners were nudists who fed the children their breast milk and… at one point, there’s a story about her little brother (in the audience, mind you) getting a cup of pee poured on him and… everything is “liberal” and “alternative” and in Topanga Canyon somewhere and awful and illegal-sounding… Just this fucking crazy, nightmarish story of why-never-to-trust-hippies.
The next day I watched this documentary, and it was hard not to think of that story because this documentary was all about the “swingers movement” between the 70’s and 90’s, and a swinger’s club in New York called Plato’s Retreat. And … I think I caught herpes-of-the-eyeballs watching the movie. I just had it on to listen to while I drew but anytime I’d look up… The thing is the people they’re interviewing are now all in the late 50’s and 60’s, were never good looking to begin with— no one in this country was even remotely good looking in the 1970’s somehow and I don’t know why that is or how that’s possible but people in the 50’s, 60’s, this country was super-hot until you hit the 70’s and then everyone, girls, boys, they all look like Dustin Hoffman. And all these old, tore-up people are talking about, basically, the skankiest behavior imaginable.
And the way everyone in documentaries talk about their life’s stories, you know, fucking some anonymous dude into, you know, a tale of self-discovery or whatever… Like, as much as you want to describe a bunch of 70’s dudes ejaculating into a swimming pool to sound like it’s the fountain at the Bellagio, it’s just so endlessly gross… Or then there’s the people who try to make it all sound like one big family. Like, here’s a quote from the movie: ”We played ping-pong.” Why are you playing ping-pong at a fuck-club?? My favorite quote from the movie though is definitely: ”All of the sudden, he really was on the runaway tiger. Of Sex.” …What?? the?? fuck?? (I’m pretty sure he said tiger and not train). Oh and plus, it’s set in New York so everyone has a New York accent which … I hate to say, is not the sexiest accent…
I don’t know. It was a funny movie to me because time was you could look at an old person and think, “Old person.” You know, the Greatest Generation and all that shit— maybe the old person you’re talking to killed Nazis in World War 2. That’d be the kind of thing you’d wonder about. But with the old people we’re going to have in a few years, old people from the Scumbag Generation, any given old person could have been the former bottom rung of a NYC Moustache Org. You just don’t know anymore. That… that is not a pleasant thing to think about…
Stella: Live in Boston (2008): Performance movie of Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black and David Wain performing in Boston. Some clever stuff— clever jokes; those three guys all do silly so well… Nothing to rush to see but pleasant…
Seeing Attack the Block later— trying to stay awake…
“I walked past the brothel as though it were the house of a beloved.”—
Franz Kafka, in an entry in his diary in 1910.
Is it an atavism that desire can metamorphose —in the right circumstances, in conditions either desperately arid or instead lush with pressures which we deeply…
