45 minutes well spent.

I did this on an online thing designed to waste time. I'm publishing it here to justify the three quarters of an hour I spent making it.



More interesting things to follow, I'm sure.

What a Wookie!

I'm working on a longer entry, but I just had an epiphany and I needed to share it with someone: And what better place than the Internet to publish your every brain fart? Nowhere, that's where.

When I was a kid back in the wild, lawless 70's I had my share of Star Wars toys. I had my favorites: Luke, Vader, R2...but for some reason I really enjoyed playing with the Chewbacca figure. It was strange because I didn't really feel that strongly about the character in the movie. I never thought about it too much at the time, but as the years wore on it started to gnaw at me.

What was it about the Chewbacca action figure that caught my interest? The bandolier? The pouch? The weird crossbow weapon he carried? Those baby blue eyes?

It came to mind today and I think I've finally worked it out once and for all:

I think it's because the Chewbacca figure looks like it's made out of chocolate.

Seriously, look at it.




The colour, the imprecise moulding, the shiny texture: Tell me if you didn't know what that was and it was wrapped in foil you wouldn't try to eat it.

When I was a kid, I loved the hell out of chocolate, and we didn't get a lot of it except at Halloween and Easter. Because it was such a rare commodity in my life I may have had a predisposition to be drawn to things that looked like they were made of chocolate.

This could be a whole new sideline for Lucasfilm, come to think of it: On a birthday, annicersary or other occasion, who wouldn't want celebrate with a delicious Choco-Bacca? I personally don't want to go another minute without one.

A shaky start

My new years resolution is to neglect this blog less in the coming year. You heard me: Less.

And to that end I am going to write down- right now- some stuff that I'm gonna put on this blog in 2009. This is what you're gonna see, this isn't gonna be some "Alien 3 is gonna take place on Earth, no wait it's now taking place in Space England" bullshit. Hell no. This shit is shit you can take to the shit bank.

Ok, that sucked. The rest of this blog in 2009 will be better than that. Here's a rundown:

-I plan to rip off Capone from Ain't It Cool and review DVD's I have lying around that I haven't watched yet, including:

Beerfest

Lethal Weapon

Lethal Weapon 2

Late Night with Conan O Brien 10th Anniversary Special

Columbo Mystery Movie Collection 1989

Dark Rising

-An as yet unnamed feature where I dig up random comics and write ups on them, an idea that I partially ripped off of Seanbaby from seanbaby. Mine will be different, though, in that it won't be as pie-based...or funny.

Also, a video feature with the working title of "Things with Faces".

All this and more in 2009! Chew the excitement!

Two pictures that I took and tried to make funny.

I remember a time when you couldn't take a camera into a mall, store, or public restroom. This was not too long ago, if you're in high school now it probably wasn't even before your time. If you whipped out a camera in a public space and started snapping away in those hoary days of yore, chances were that someone wearing a blue dress shirt and combination cap in such a way as to suggest a sense of policelike authority would confront you and ask you to leave. I'm not sure what kind of state secrets they were trying to protect at the local K-Mart, but they were pretty rigorous about keeping foreign recording devices out.

These days almost everyone has a camera of some kind which they carry with them everywhere they go. And it's pretty easy to stroll into the mall and pop off a few shots, take 'em home and upload them to the web for all to see. But at the end of the day all you wind up with are some shots of the mall, which makes me wonder what the allure of Mall Photography was in the first place.

Anyway, what I'm getting to here is that on occasion I see something, usually packaging of some kind, that I think could elicit a laugh or two but there's no one around to share the joke with. I'll take a picture with the intent of showing it to friends later, but I'll promptly forget about it because...who in hell looks at cell phone pictures anyway...then come across them months later when I'm flipping through my memory card on an unrelated matter.

Anyway, long introduction aside, I was doing that very thing yesterday and came across these two images. Here they are with their respective captions:

Herein I shall complain about Spider-Man some more.

It was recently announced, and I don't know if this is official because I'm an unpaid blogger and that means I never have to fact-check under any circumstances, that Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire have signed on for two more Spider-Man movies.

I don't think I've ranted on in this particular blog about how much I dislike the approach Sam Raimi chose to take with the first three Spider-Man movies, so let me give a quick recap on why I hate them the way I do:

Yes the effects were fine, and no I'm not one of those "no organic webshooters" people, and yes I thought that the supporting characters, particularly Schillinger as James Jonah Jameson, were very good. But when the best thing you can say about a superhero adaptation is how great the actress playing the hero's ailing aunt is, then there's a problem.

I did a big rant on everything I hate about the SR's SM movies in another blog I was contributing to. That blog is gone now, but I think I have it saved somewhere and it goes into exhaustive detail about all my major hate-points with the three movies as they stand right now. I'll post it eventually, but for now here's a bulleted list:

-Spider-Man peppers his foes with smartass wisecracks when he fights them. He would never play straight man to the Green Goblin.

-Having Spider-Man scream "Yahoo!" as he is fighting badguys is not a substitute for wisecracks.

-Spider-Man keeps his mask on when he's out doing superhero things. There are several good reasons for this: Among them are the protection of his loved ones and the fact that Spider-Man with his mask off looks like a grown man in Spider-Man underoos.

-Rescuing Mary Jane, Gwen Stacy, or Aunt May from being dropped off of something is not Spider-Man's only job as a superhero. It certainly shouldn't be the climax of every friggin' movie.

-Spider-Man, while he goes through some emotional rough spots, does not blubber like an infant.

Every single one of those things: Deal. Breaker. As far as I'm concerned.

So even though I'm a fan of Spider-Man I don't own any of the movies, and the only time I've watched them beyond the one theatrical viewing mandated by law to determine their level of suckage was to watch the Rifftrax versions. Tobey Maguire can make doe-eyes all day if he wants to, actually that kind of adds to the problem come to think of it.

So, needless to say I was very disappointed to learn that team Raimi was coming back aboard for a couple more movies. I thought that there was a tacit agreement in our culture that, no matter what you think of it, the Sam Raimi era was drawing to a close as far as Spider-Man was concerned. Usually in your big franchises three movies is the cutoff before the director and the talent that made any given film series great lose interest and want to move on to making period drama or Japanese horror remakes or what have you and the studio forges ahead with a new creative team. Usually what they forge to is abject failure, but that's immaterial. I was hoping that just this once Hollywood's merciless howling engine of sequel production would work in my favor and I'd magically get a Spider-Man movie directed by Guillermo del Toro. Nope. Not this time. The whole gang is coming back, isn't that just super!

I know that in all likelihood if Raimi dropped out they'd give it to Brett Ratner or one of those Captain Shakycam asshats they have ruining every movie with an action sequence these days. And they would then proceed to make Spider-Man suck in ways as yet undreamed by man, but it's a gamble that I was willing to take. Had it been, you know, in any way mine for the taking.

I guess you can't blame the studio heads for playing it safe. The lone island of sense that represents my feelings on the Spider-Man movies is but a tiny dot in a sea of unconditional approval. Even the third movie couldn't really put a dent in the Spider-Man Love Express. The movies made billions of dollars worldwide. People seem to like their Spider-Man with extra supporting characters and hold the humor as a defense mechanism. I wonder, though, if this is because of the decisions that were made for the Spider-Man movies or in spite of them.

Because I have nothing to do on Friday...

The Max Payne trailer looks fine but if it doesn't have Nikki Payne in it: Fuck it, I'm just not interested.

John McCain has announced his running mate to be Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. This election is going to be historic no matter which way it goes: If Barak Obama wins the US gets a black president. Historic. If McCain manages to win, not only will the US have a female vice president, but between her and Cindy McCain it'll be the first administration to be surrounded by a weird aura of MILFy fuckability. Historic and strangely arousing.

I don't know why, but I'm not ready to hop aboard the Hamlet 2 bandwagon just yet. Maybe it's just a case of We Can't Show Any Of the Good Stuff in the Trailer Because it's Too Darned Offensive-itis, but the little I've seen of it is just leaving me cold. Christ jokes? Just not as outrageous as they used to be. Also for something that's supposed to be so amazingly controversial, I haven't heard about one Christian group protesting it. How offensively hilarious can it be if Christians can't be bothered to make a few bristol board signs and effigies in a vain attempt to stop it?

I'm usually in the "It's possible to make a movie out of anything" camp when it comes to video game adaptations, but Guitar Hero? The only thing more pathetic than wanting to make a movie out of a game that's essentially a Simon with a whammy bar and delusions of grandeur is Brett Ratner's description of what he'd like to do with this potential "Franchise":

“It could be about a kid from a small town who dreams of being a rock star and he wins the ‘Guitar Hero’ competition. One of these dreams-[come-true] kind of concepts.”

So this hypothetical kid wants to be a rock star: Worshipped by millions of screaming fans while making horrendous amounts of money, and spending his off hours engaged in crazed sex acts that would make the internet blush. But then, through some fantastical twist of fate, he instead gets to pound brightly coloured buttons on a hobbit-sized toy guitar at a competition sponsored by some local bowling alley where he can hopefully win 10,000 dollars and a lifetime supply of Red Bull? That's not just depressing, that's a fucking tragedy.

Tropic Thunder

Watching Tropic Thunder, I got the distinct impression that this all could have gone very, very wrong. It tippy-toes ever so carefully along the thin, wiggly, often blurry line between funny offensive and offensive offensive. It's easy to imagine that somewhere, perhaps in an alternative universe not too far from our own, there's a version of Tropic Thunder playing in theatres that will make you shit your pants in righteous outrage.

Don't feel too bad for the denizens of that universe, though. Scientifically we're not even sure they exist, and if they do maybe in their universe they got some decent Star Wars prequels and their version of Jessica Alba actually got naked like she was supposed to in Sin City. These things have a way of balancing themselves out.

Actually, Ben Stiller takes very few real chances in his making of a Vietnam war movie movie. The rightrope act is ultimately an illusion: On the surface there's a lot of blood, bombast, blackface, and use of the word "retard", but the bulk of the satire is directed at sociologically agreed-upon safe zones: The grotesque results of Hollywood's attempts to be subtle and meaningful through mawkish excess, and how their isolation from the rest of society at large has rendered them blind to their ignorance.

In the hands of Matt Stone and Trey Parker this material might have gotten pushed a little harder and its talking points might have been tweaked a little more, but Stiller is not Stone and Parker, or even one of them. That's not to put Stiller down: Just because Tropic Thunder is a little thin on depth, doesn't mean it skimps on the funny. For a guy whose last big hit was Night at the Museum Co Writer/ Director Stiller shows a remarkable willingness to take the targets he's allowed himself and tear them to hilarious shreds. In fact, other than Pineapple Express this is the funniest film I've seen this year.

The premise, in case you need to know it, involves a big-budget Hollywood production that has come to Vietnam to make a film adaptation of "Tropic Thunder", a Heart of Darkness analogue written by a grizzled apparent veteran (Nick Nolte). The film within a film has gone wildly over budget due in large part to the fact that the director (Steve Coogan) cannot control his overindulged self centered actors. (played by Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., and Stiller)

So at the suggestion of the author the director flys his leads into the jungle equipped with only a scene list and fake guns. There he plans to make an authentic "guerilla style" film which in this case seems to mean exploding stuff around them and filming their terrified reactions with hidden cameras. Beyond that it's not clear how he planned to make this into a coherent movie, since there seemed to be no arrangements made for extras to attack them so they'd have someone to shoot at, or any other crew present except the author and the overzealous pyrotechnics guy (Danny McBride) both of whom are miles away from the actors.

I guess none of that really matters since the plan falls apart nearly immediately, leaving the actors stranded in the jungle being stalked by a drug cartel who believe that they are DEA agents. Stiller's character, (Tugg Speedman, an action star past his sell by date), in turn thinks the drug dealers are day players and stunt men. His conviction persists long after his fellow actors, and indeed any sane person, would have realised the truth.

Downey Jr. once again turns in a superior comic performance as Kirk Lazarus, an Australian method actor who has his skin artificially darkened to play the role of a gunnery sergeant who also happens to be black. It seems preordained that of course RD Jr is one of the best things in the movie. The difference here is that unlike in Iron Man and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, he's given a role that's not just a riff the usual blithe, self-aware smartass he does so well, but something that's almost the flip side of those characters. Much of his screentime is spent playing the role within a role of a man so un-self-aware that it almost seems like he had his superego shut off while he was getting his pigment done. What could easily become an uncomfortable caricature instead is a cunning, almost affectionate, parody of an actor playing an uncomfortable caricature, but being too far up his own ass to realise it. Junior pulls this off so effortlessly that it's easy to forget what a misstep this role could have been.

But even that's not the most unlikely long shot in this film that pays off, that award goes to Tom Cruise, slathered with Rick Baker fat makeup, playing a borderline psychotic, bullying movie mogul. Displaying comic timing and range of which I honestly didn't think him capable in this day and age, Cruise simply walks away with the film every time his character appears to deliver an apocalyptic tone poem of obscenity. His wild, glassy stare is hypnotic and his rage is delivered with such earnestness that I sometimes wondered watching him if he was informed that he was in a comedy. Whatever he was doing, it worked.

Those two roles alone make the film worth going to see, but it also boasts a phalanx of comic ringers sprinkled throughout the cast, all of whom have something to add to the proceedings. Stiller even manages to extricate some great stuff from Matthew McConaughey, who in hell has done that lately?

Tropic Thunder might not be everyone's cup of tea, in many ways it's a throwback to the 90's when multi camera setups were soley the domain of sitcoms, improv was curtailed, and cartoonish characterizations roamed free across the plains. However, its success does prove that while it helps in this brave new world, a big studio can still make a good R-Rated comedy even if there's no one involved named Apatow.