fourfour

A love like in the movies

So, I was sitting at the Union Square Regal Cinemas with my friends Mark and Kerry, waiting for The Final Destination to start (shut up, it's in 3-D). Behind me, I heard this woman freaking out and fawning at...something. I turned to see a young couple sitting behind me. The girl had a bouquet of cellophane-wrapped roses in her lap. It was about as tall as she was, from the waist up. At some point, it came out that it was the couple's first anniversary, and the fawning woman was some sort of Regal worker. She was sassy, brash and loud, wearing a wet-looking wig and was probably around 60. Imagine Frankie...

 

...in a maroon Regal vest and you have the complete picture of this person.

I guess she gagged herself out of breath because she soon shut up. How much can you say about an anniversary, anyway? More than I ever would have imagined, per this woman's gushing, but everyone has limits. Soon, the Regal pre-trailer trailers package (whatever it's called: The Regal 20 or The Regal Beagle or The Regal Appetizer of Shit We're Shoving Down Your Throat Before The Other Shit We're About To Shove Down Your Throat for the Next 15 Minutes Before the Inevitably Shitty Movie You're About To Watch) ended. I'm sorry, since this post is mostly pointless anyway, I have to go off on tangent: Can you believe they have the nerve to show you pre-trailer trailers? You know how the nachos at Pizzeria Uno have tomato sauce and mozzarella on them and so they just basically taste like the pizza you're about to eat, or how cheese-covered breadsticks at Pizza Hut are just Pizza Hut pizza with some heavy seasoning but without sauce, but they give you that to dip them in, anyway? You know how pointless that shit is? I know it's yummy and all, but when you come down to it, I don't want pizza before my pizza and I don't want trailers before my trailers. Life is too cyclical for self-imposed redundancy. But then what can you do? Go late to the movies? Then you'd never get a good seat. Not eat breadsticks? Then you'd be cheated of the entire point of Pizza Hut.

So anyway, that shit ends, a few more commercials play, and I'm cursing existence as the, "Turn off your cell phones" notice comes up. After that, there's always about a minute of eerie silence. Except not this time because it filled with, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have in the theater a couple here that's celebrating their first wedding anniversary!!!! Give it up for them!" Frankiealike was now addressing the entire crowd and when she got done basically leading a Coke Zero toast, she said a few more words to the couple, now so slumped in their seats that the giant bouquet was about a head taller than both of them.

"You feel good?" asked Frankiealike. "Good. You're supposed to. Thank you for choosing Regal. Happy anniversary." The purpose of this post is to report that the finest couple of sentences ever spoken by mortal tongue are, "Thank you for choosing Regal. Happy anniversary." Realistically speaking, there is a good chance that these two crazy kids won't last (the first-anniversary screening choice of The Final Destination screams omen to me), but bound for eternity will be those two beautiful sentences.

Frankiealike addressed the crowd once more, between the first and second trailers, to announce a birthday of someone else in the theater. I assume that after she made her first address, someone felt his special day wasn't getting the proper attention, so he notified her. Fair is fair. Birthdays are as important as anniversaries and watching people die by getting cubed from being pushed through wire fences. After Frankiealike announced that, she said, "All right, New York, I'm out," as though this were Def Comedy Jam or some shit! Actually, it might as well have been -- she was more entertaining than anything in the movie. The tampons a character stuck in her children's ears to muffle the sound of racing engines were the only thing that came close.

This should be a huge smash

Warning: this is so NSFW (for both sex and violence) that I can't even believe it's still on YouTube even days after it was uploaded. In other words: enjoy!

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I'm less interested in Black Devil Doll's warning on its official site ("THIS FILM OFFENDS EVERYONE") and more interested in the disclaimer included the end of this trailer, "If the thought of a wayward white woman having sexual relations with a demonic jive ass black puppet offends you, DO NOT SEE Black Devil Doll." Dude, I am so there. OH MY GOD am I there. HE'S A MUTHAFUCKIN PUPPET.

I bet this movie could break my dick. Truthfully, I think it already has.

The Marky Mark Workout

Yo, wassup. It's the monk-D, cock-D clip of all the awesomeness of Mark Wahlberg's 1993 workout video, from before he was a serious actor and was a...semi-serious actor:

My friend Steve gave me the VHS source of this material. Apparently, a few years ago Steve was working on a TV special or doc or something and wanted to include footage from this. The request was shut down by Marky or his people or whatever, obviously out of embarassment. I'm sure Marky has a closet full of those VHSes. I'm jealous. Anyway, I uploaded this to my secondary YouTube account because it very well could be quickly yanked if Marky really is sensitive about this shit. Watch while you can. Pow!

The real housewife

Above anything, Chantal Ackerman's 201-minute 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is. It just is. It is a very still, very detailed portrait of domesticity, as it follows three days worth of its titular character's daily tasks (especially household chores), with what seems like a non-averting camera. Not long into my viewing, my boyfriend walked in the room and asked me if this was "like a reality show." In fact, it is the inverse: on reality TV, relatively real people are put into fantasy situations to have their behavior chopped down into something consumable. In this, an actress is put into banal situations, and many of which are seemingly deemed too precious to be scarred by the editor's knife. The end result is, in fact, difficult. In its portrait of daily routine (and gentle unraveling), Jeanne Dielman confronts us firmly with what cinema typically believes is unimportant. Part of the way to gauge if you think the movie's a success is whether it convinces you otherwise.

In honor of today's DVD release (via Criterion, of course), I tried to block out the necessary three hours and 21 minutes on Sunday to watch it. My goal was to view it uninterrupted and to record my thoughts live-blog style for my very own portrait of (different but similarly banal) domesticity. Much like Jeanne, though, I found myself knocked off course...

Warhound

What a weird series of contradictions Inglourious Basterds is. It's epic in look and feel, but it ends on a whimper and wisecrack. It never stops explaining itself (creating the illusion of complication), but at the end of this simple tale of revenge, it feels like the line from A to B has been a straight one. It's a Quentin Tarantino film about atrocity, yet none of the violence feels gratuitous (at least to desensitized me). It was as brutal as its story demanded, no more and certainly a lot less than the much-maligned original trailer suggested.

Despite my gorehound tendencies, I'm not disappointed about that. It felt mature, as did the dialogue, which was deficient of the fast-talking, pop-culture worship that has defined Tarantino up till now. In that respect, making a period piece must have been something of a personal challenge. I guess he got some references in by saluting things like spaghetti Westerns and the French new wave. That stuff's off my radar, and I can't imagine how far it is off the average teenager that I shared space with on Friday. It made me chuckle that these kids came expecting a bloodbath and were instead presented essentially a reading assignment, given the amount of dialogue and the fact that it's almost all in French or German. It felt like a very gentle fuck you. That's yet another contradiction.

At this point, you can't really amputate a Quentin Tarantino picture from his body of work -- it's all part of an ongoing discussion (and sometimes that discussion feels like one long declaration of self-satisfaction). More than any other working director, I can't help but judge all of his movies against his past work. I wonder how Basterds would be taken on its own, not as Tarantino's grown-up quasi-historical epic. For one thing, I suspect it would have been made to come in at under two hours. Basterds didn't feel bloated to me, save the entirely expository scene, in which a pointless Mike Myers explained Operation Kino (the military plot to assasinate Hitler and other important members of the SS). Still, I can see how it is patience-testing, as it is a lot of sitting around and talking for relatively obvious pay-off (although Mélanie Laurent laughing at her oppressors via a projection on thick smoke is about as good of cinematic imagery as any I've seen this decade -- that alone was pay-off to me). I felt like the whole thing was tense, though. It affected my physiologically -- my pulse elevated, my hand strained from clenching. The movie is essentially a series of uncomfortable conversations, in which some powerful bad guy doesn't and can't know the secret of the good guy he's talking to (whatever it may be). I think it did a tremendous job of conveying the claustrophobia of occupation.

I just have one more point, but it's a major spoiler, so it's going under a cut...

Reconsidering Project Runway

I've recapped a lot of shit at this point, but I never worked harder on any show than Project Runway, when I wrote about it during its second and third seasons. I remember one specific recap taking me over 10 hours to prepare and complete. What a stupid waste of time that was. (Although this did come out of it, and long after I stopped caring about Project Runway, I still look back on it fondly as one of my very best Photoshop jobs ever). The problem is that I never really bonded with Project Runway the way that I have almost everything else I cover. It was never outrageous enough for my taste, so I always felt the need to inject it with the amount of absurdity necessary to make it relevant to me. (I don't know why I had the weird sense of obligation to keep with it as long as I did. Blogs make you do weird things, I suppose.) As much as I grew tired of Tim Gunn and his shtick by my second season of covering this show (quick question: What's the difference between Tim Gunn and a talking Tim Gunn bobblehead? quick answer: A pulse.), I followed his advice. I made it work.

So I fell out for sheer lack of interest, but I've been wrong a million times and I enjoy surprises, so I thought that I'd check out the long-delayed sixth season premiere. From what I can tell, the show has only changed in its location on the dial (from Bravo to Lifetime) and in the country (from New York to Los Angeles). Yawn. Shrug. Auf wiederzzzzz. 

Bash or pass?

Oh boy, do I love this clip. I guess it might be old news to a lot of people who have followed Mike Tyson's career or who enjoy YouTube supercuts. But I didn't know about this shit till my friend Dean told me it was included in the mesmerizing and sad documentary Tyson (out on DVD this week). It's from a 2002 press conference, in which Mike Tyson also bit Lennox Lewis' leg. I guess he was on a homoerotic roll that day. I understand that Tyson is a convicted rapist, so telling anyone -- man or woman -- "Come here tell me that before I fuck you in your ass," isn't so surprising. Then, to gay-bash the guy you just said you were going to have sex with by calling him a "faggot," is strange. To go on to promise, "I'll eat your asshole alive," is curiouser! And to climax with, "I'll fuck you till you love me, faggot," is simply amazing. People say that rape is about power, not sex, but Tyson here casts it in the realm of affection. He's on another plane for sure.

Below is another WTF-moment from Tyson, revealing he doesn't just eat assholes, he also performs fellatio. Seriously, that's what he says. All these years later, his oral fixation is still being used on man parts.

Brother's keeper

Do you know how you tell if a Jackson’s lying? Their lips are moving! Or, in the case of La Toya Jackson, her pen was moving. Er, make that her ghostwriter's pen was moving. It zipped along to the deliriously tall tales that fill her 1991 memoir La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family. Now that the Jacksons are something to obsess about all over again (are you sick of them yet? I'm not!), La Toya is the deliciously trashy beach reading that comes along but once a summer. There's something morbidly telling about the fact that up until June 25, this shit went for pennies on eBay (my boyfriend bought it for me a few years ago for literally $0.01) and it now starts at almost $50 in Amazon's Marketplace. I'm not judging: it wasn't until this summer that I finally cracked the spine. And I'm so glad that I did.

La Toya's fascinated me for a while now. She's a three-legged dog in a family of champion racers. She is runty in sight, sound and intellect. She's so desperate for attention that, even today, all it takes is some charity advocacy to wind her into a frenzy (scroll down). That's pure camera-driven adrenalin right there. It's tragic, the lengths she's gone to and the ears she's damaged in search of even Jermaine-level success. The only thing sadder than watching her is not watching, since she's so needy for attention.

Desperate enough to be a telling reflection of its "author" (even if it's by way of fun-house mirror), La Toya is appropriately full of lies. It climaxes with a series of her own family's attempts to kidnap her after she finally left their Encino compound Hayvenhurst at around age 30. Reading this section, I was like, "Toy, no one likes you enough to put that much effort into being near you. Stop flattering yourself by way of creating a plot point!" There are pages on end devoted to exonerating her then-husband Jack Gordon, who was accused of bribing feds for the approval of some slot-like gambling machine. Reading page upon page of obviously planted defense, my eyes glazed over but not so much that they kept me from scrawling in the margin, "WHO FUCKING CARES?" I wanted to get back to the dirt about Jermaine's bitch-assness (he was so jealous, he pronounced Thriller a flop upon pre-release listens) and Janet's anti-Semitism and Michael's introspection inspired by (what else?) The Twilight Zone ("...He was sitting in front of the TV asking himself, 'Who am I? Am I really real?'") or La Toya's own delusions of grandeur ("['Wanna Be Startin' Something' is] not about Michael at all, it's about the friction between me and my sisters-in-law"). Who knows what in there is true? (Somehow I just can't picture Janet as a Jew-hater.) Who's gonna let it stop them from being entertained by the possibilities?

To La Toya's credit, she did blow the lid off of how severely fucked-up the Jackson clan is. I'm inclined to believe virtually everything she says about Joe Jackson's abuse (it definitely is a buzz-kill in the scheme of the book, but not enough to make the entire thing a downer -- all else is just too ridiculous). Last week, in going over my archived footage for this post, I found and posted a Phil Donahue Show clip from '89, in which he raves about how scandal- and drug-free all the Jacksons were and how Joseph and Katherine are to be praised. I know he's an asshole, but the fact that anyone could say that with a straight face is pretty amazing considering all that's transpired in the past two decades. And La Toya, for better or worse, wielded the lightning rod as though it were a baton in a parade.

And people were pissed! Check out this clip from a different Donahue appearance (from '91), in which the crowd is livid that she'd be telling her family's secrets. I mean, they are in so many words accusing her of opportunism, which: fair enough. I love that she is both belligerent and completely air-headed in response. Either response wouldn't have helped her cause, but the two together makes this thing full-on farce:

So yeah, the point is that she's kinda sad, really desperate, a little fun and totally hilarious. A sampling of my favorite quotes from her memoir is below. Watch out though: read them and you're gonna get rocked!

Ham!

District 9 was exciting and oddly moving (and I hate bugs!) and a triumph over botched format (there is usually no excuse for something so lazy as switching from faux-documentary style filmmaking to an omniscient POV and back several times...except when the movie that does it is this engrossing). I loved it, I did, but it wasn't my favorite movie that I saw this weekend. Instead, it was Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, a delirious Little Mermaid reimagining whose plot hinges on a goldfish with a human face who wants everything about her to be human, but whose love with a 5-year-old must be real in order for that to stick. It's like what would happen if acid were blotted on a Love Is... comic. And I know "X on acid," is such a cliched way of endorsing something critically, but I've never seen a film where it's more apt. You don't have to be on anything to get your head blown out by this shit -- it hallucinates for you. (Like those fish in the gif above that lap like waves and crash against dry land, but reemerge as fish...and something for Ponyo to run on.)

And speaking of medium, Miyazaki his married to his, and it's such a loving union to behold. His imagination is so boundless, his associations so bizarre, his imagery so colorful that it could only be accurately translated via animation. He strikes me as equally concerned (if not more so) with composition than action, and so his old-fashioned 2-D style feels particularly appropriate for him. He likes to fill the screen like it's a painting, spoiling us with details like spider-crabs crawling in a corner or children's art that adorns multiple walls or dish detergent sitting by the sink as a mother prepares dinner or a rundown of prehistoric fish that pop up for no specified reason. Sometimes the most breath-taking thing about it is how intricate it all is. (And because of the detail, this really is something to see on the big screen. You could easily grab a bootleg, but you're seriously only robbing yourself.)

Ponyo is the type of image smorgasbord you might suspect that you could watch without sound. It's true that it isn't as complicated as other Miyazaki fare like Princess Mononoke or even Spirited Away (which wasn't very complicated in the first place), but what I loved just as much as the visuals was that crazy shit these characters said to each other. A sampling of my favorite quotes:

- Sosuke (the 5-year-old who rescues Ponyo and falls in love with her, I guess?): "Her name's Ponyo! She likes to eat ham! And she's magic!"

- Sosuke: "Ponyo was a fish. Water doesn't make her wet."

- Sosuke: "Look at her feet, they're just like hands!"

- Sosuke: "All she thinks about is ham, Mom."

- Sosuke's mother (upon leaving her child home alone): "You're only 5, but you're very smart. Sometimes we have to take a leap. Be brave."

- Sosuke: "Don't turn into a fish again. I'd miss you."

- Sosuke (shouting to father whose barge is passing by his house): "I'm taking care of everyone, Dad!"
Ponyo (also shouting): "Ham!"

Sometimes, it seems like there's a translation thing going on (I couldn't figure out why the fuck everyone kept saying what a beautiful name "Ponyo" is), but I really think that Miyazaki and his team are just that bonkers. It's all so surreal. One character describes some situation as a hole that's been ripped in the fabric of reality. Yeah, I know the feeling.

Say hello to our little friends

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, a new batch of ANTM girls was posted, so you can't spend your day at the beach because you have to write about these people that you're going to spend much of the fall writing and writing and writing about anyway So much to do, bridging the gap between summer and fall. We're gonna need a bigger crystal thing that looks like an ashtray but is actually a device you use to communicate with your alien father, from whom you inherited the gift of freezing time. Grumble, grumble, that's what I do preseason.

But look, I'm disappointed by this batch of girls because a) none of them have particularly hilarious names, and b) although they are all short (this is the under-5"7' cycle for all two of you who think this show isn't enough of a farce), none of them are actual little people. Hello, Tyra? Wasn't this your chance? Dwarfism would have totally been the thing to beat (out of all the girls-with-the-things like Fatima with her clitoridectomy and Heather with her Aspergers and Isis with her penis and Tahlia with her suckage). Missed opportunity.

I'm so disappointed, in fact, that I'm going to run down these shorties how I choose to see them...