I’m thinking of starting a new feature here on Counterforce. It will be called “Haha! You’re Dead!” and consist of making mean jokes about the recently deceased. Here, I’ll start:
Looks like Country Strong is still no match for a gun! lulz!ROFLcopter!
Fun fact: Steve McNair had a career quarterback rating of 82.8.
But please, a moment of silence for Molly Ringwald.
Apple Jacks
I would like to take Paul McCartney in the deadpool. I’ve been saying for years that Ringo would outlast ‘em all. Plus, Paul’s always seemed like the biggest douche of the band. As long as we’re on this subject, I have to tell Marco’s favorite Beatles joke.
Q: What were John Lennon’s last words?
A: That’s not a real fucking gun!
So I’ve returned to the grid. Near as I can tell, the only interesting thing that happened in my absence was… … yeah. Still, there’s this feeling that I missed some tidbit that got lost in the news cycle. 3 years from now, someone’s gonna tell me that Martin Sheen is dead and I’ll be all “when the fuck did that happen? Oh, right.”
Time to give poor Kat a little love
Seriously, how the fuck is Ted Kennedy still alive?
Sometimes we’re just as low brow here as we are attempting to be high brow. No joke, I watched this today:
JCVD, also released as Van Dammage in some parts of the world, ha ha. I watch a lot of good, classy films, I’m not going to lie, but I also watch a lot of popcorn shit and, well, strange oddities, like this film. But it wasn’t bad.
It’s like if Lost In Translation punched The Wrestler in the balls and then high kicked Being John Malkovich in the face and then had sex on top of Jean Luc Godard.
This movie is frighteningly aware, dangerously meta. For example, in the picture above, they’re talking about John Wood, whom Van Damme brought over from Hong Kong to do Hard Target, and then who dropped him. After that, they talk a little shit about Steven Seagal. It not only takes the cinema of the broken man of action into a new level, but actually elevate Van Damme, which is a sentence that I never thought I’d have to type anywhere ever.
Van Damme plays himself, coming back to Brussels, broke and tired, having just lost his daughter in a nasty custody battle and looking back on a faded career. He goes into a bank to withdraw what little cash he has left, but it’s being held up. There’s a hostage situation and he’s framed as the bad guy. Then, of course, he has to take matters into his own hand to catch the real bad guys and clear his good, ridiculous name. Cllllasssic, right?
Man, remember back to those halcyon days of the 90s when Van Damme guest starred on that post-Superbowl episode of Friends? And it was kind of an exciting thing, too? He played himself back then, as well (perhaps he’s a better actor when he’s playing himself?) starring in a fictional movie – brilliantly, it was Outbreak 2 – and was trying to make a threesome happen between himself, Courtney Cox, and Jennifer Aniston. Oh, Muscles from Brussels, you silly dog you.
I remember that Van Damme kind of updated my previously held notion of what a Belgian person was like, the only real previous contender being Hercule Poirot. And, obviously there’s a huge difference between those two…
But now, thanks to Van Damme, my impression of Belgian guys – sadly, I know no Belgian girls, though I’d obviously like to – is pretty much the same as French guys. Rather than the whole “Yes, I smell funny” and “Yes, I would love to paint you in the nude, then have dirty sexy,” it’s more of a “Let’s have some waffles, make work out a little, and then have dirty sex!” Take that, Europe.
I’ve been inspired by Woody Allen week to revisit a lot of old Ingmar Bergman stuff. I’d seen the classics – Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal and Persona, of course – years ago, but there’s a lot I still haven’t seen. I have Cries And Whispers on VHS somewhere in my bunker and I really need to find that. And August Bravo gave me one of the versions of Fanny And Alexander a few years ago. Also, you know which of his movies I’ve always wanted to see? The Silence. For real.
Bergman and Ingrid Thulin during the making of The Silence, 1963.
“Film as a dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames in a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster — a movement.”
-Ingmar Bergman
A sterling example of how film lovers are smarter than non film lovers: one of the first things we’ve learned is that you don’t play chess with Death!
Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman, part 2:
“During a career that spans some four decades, he has made about 50 movies, and in those movies he has created an immediately recognizable world. Whether it is the distant allegorical realm of The Seventh Seal or the banal domestic one of Scenes From a Marriage, this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory at best. God is either silent (as in Winter Light) or malevolent (as in The Silence), and Bergman’s characters find themselves ruled, instead, by the capricious ghosts and demons of the unconscious. More persuasively than any other director, Bergman has mapped out the geography of the individual psyche — its secret yearnings and its susceptibility to memory and desire.”
“Among today’s directors I’m of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh — they all have something to say, they’re passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh’s Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.
The nice thing about going to see a Sacha Baron Cohen film, like Brüno or Borat, is that it feels like watching live theatre. But live theatre where something has gone horribly wrong, then horribly right in that wrongness, the train is off the track and it’s wonderful.
And that’s what Brüno is, absolutely wonderful. Is it offensive and foul and mean-spirited at times? Yes, but wonderfully so. Horribly beautifully so in a crudely justifiable way.
The film, which was also known by the fake working title of Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt, should have perhaps stuck with that longer fake title. It sums up the film perfectly.
Cohen’s ability to expose and skewer religious intolerance, the desire for fame, and homophobia is genius. And in this film, he ratchets up the gay energy to an almost nuclear level. Not in an offensive way, I don’t think, and I hope others don’t either, but in an almost celebratory way’s. He’s not simply playing a gay character here, he’s playing what some would consider the ultimate stereotype of gay characters.
He’s then throwing those stereotypes into the faces of unwitting victims on camera, pulling out the true responses of these people, usually blazing homophobia and he’s putting it on the wall of the cinema for us all to see, like a glimpse through the cultural looking glass of the funhouse mirror. He’s saying, “look at their reactions. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
To share individual moments with this film to anyone reading who hasn’t seen the movie (and wishes to, or will hopefully someday be forced to) would be criminal. But if you’ve seen the trailer to the film, or seen Borat or Da Ali G show before, you’ve got an idea. And, you have no idea at all.
Put vaguely, here’s just a tasty taste of what to expect: Austria, the ultimate advice from a nutritionist, a pygmy lover named Diesel, possibly the greated lovemaking scene to ever grace the cinema since Team America, a lot of people being held hostage by their shock at seeing such outrageous things, how to defend yourself against a man with two dildos, pure guerilla cinema, what it looks like to attempt to make a sex tape with Ron Paul, the happy accidents of fashion, Paula Abdul, Mexican furniture, people who “cure” homosexuality, a great interview with Harrison Ford, a lot of nudity, a sex act performed on a spirit, the hunt for a new cause célèbre (Clooney’s got Darfur, so Brüno wants Darfive), the Dallas area talk show that left a lot of people beautifully upset, a swinger party, parents who want their kids to be stars, and the Sex And The City-esque foursome of good ol’ boy shitkicker hunter types. And maybe, just maybe, some love among the cultural ruins that is MMA gatherings.
Sadly, what you won’t see is the LaToya Jackson scene that was recently cut in lieu of her brother’s death, and Brüno taking on Prop 8 in California. Or whatever happened at the senior bingo game that has one woman suing Cohen because she says the prank left her disabled. I know that at certain points while watching the film, I certainly felt disabled with laughter.
A friend texted me earlier, responding to a text from me saying that I was seeing the film this afternoon, and asked if it was less funny, as funny, or more funny than Borat? About the same, but in a different way, I’d say. And much tighter, packing a lot in a very economic runtime. Walking out of the theatre, Conrad Noir said to me, “Come Monday, a lot of the people who were in that film are going to be suing?” He was specifically referring to parents of aspiring baby actors, but he could’ve been referring to just about anyone. Recalling an account I had read of the trials and tribulations of getting Borat off the ground, I’m glad that Sacha Baron Cohen and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld‘s Larry Charles found each other. I’m not entirely sure what their working style is, but I can only imagine that it’s a lot of mutual enabling and a lot of crossing their fingers. Too many of their stunts and pranks require a lot of set up and could’ve only illicted one take, one shot to hit or miss.
Hours after seeing the film now I’m still chuckling at some of the moments from it. The perfectly created awkwardness of some of the scenes and the confusion and intolerance of people that’s so ridiculous that you can’t help but laugh at it. But it makes you want to examine yourself for a moment. You’re laughing at the silliness of others, but you’re almost uncomfortable, worried what you’d do if you were trapped in a similar situation. Chances are good that within every one of this there lays some kind of prejudice or ignorance. Let’s just hope that Sacha Baron Cohen keeps making films until he exposes all of them.
Originally born Laura Hollins, but changed her name name at the suggestion of a numerologist to something more “fortuitous.”
She’s an English model and singer, 26 years old, and what some will claim will be the return of the supermodel.
“Agyness Deyn always looks like she was just hit with a snowball,” said Molly Young here.
She is, apparently, the girl “of the moment.” Her every move just sweats out zeitgeist, I guess. From this NYT article about her:
Once or twice a decade, it will befall a young lady of supreme good looks to accidentally embody her moment in time. She becomes the visual articulation of our culture’s unspoken hopes and latent desires: a now-ness that contains the hint of a tantalizing future — to wit: we don’t know what’s next, but whatever it is, it looks like her.
The fashion prophetess? Interesting. In classic supermodel style, she’s thinking of branching out, possibly doing some acting. I’ve been hearing her name, and seeing her pictures for a while now, though I never new who she was, for a while now. But I had no idea I was looking at the future. Or that the future dates guys from the Strokes.
The future is cute, with short bleached blonde hair, and looks like an adorably twee riff on 80s new wave and punk but spiked with a very colorful post-art style that seems to be pulled off better in London hipster venues than it does here in the streets of America. The future, as embodied in Agyness Deyn is not terribly shocking, kind of familiar, but refreshingly so, I guess.
“The future never goes out of fashion. It’s just that the culture is sometimes hijacked by deeply unfashionable people.”
I’m fascinated by people who make futurecasts, who study things that will happen before they even happen, which actually seems easier to me than to really put a fully accurate spin on what’s going on now. I admire the hell out of those with a really sharp sense of haecceity or thisness. Most moments need to be seen from more than one angle, but sometimes one of the best angles is in the rear view mirror? Eh, perhaps not. Don’t want to spend all my time looking back. I should spent it more in the here and now, strutting in the present, living in and of the moment, maybe not not as well as Agyness Deyn, but looking good in my own way whenever possible.
Like we said yesterday, we’re alive and Michael Jackson is dead. Still dead, despite the continued almost predatory media coverage, the necrophiliac-themed news, the morbid attempts to turn him into… what? Elvis? Hey, nobody wants to die on a toilet (JFK must hate that he had to).
CNN may as well be renamed MJNN. Though I’m not going to spend too much time decrying the sensationalistic nature of the media. In too many ways, it’s just a reflection of ourselves.
All of the fanfare about Michael Jackson – mostly positive looking back on his life, but a lot of it not so much – makes me think: Is this really just practice for Patrick Swayze?
Also, as i was touching the very touching memorial to Michael Jackson the other day, the morbid side of me did have to wonder who would be the next celebrity death that would raise the bar of mourning and passing on? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Paul McCartney.
Conrad Noir tells me that Michael Jackson is – in death – black again. The reclaiming started at the BET awards last week and concluded at the memorial. It’s the opposite of Obama coming into office, he tells me, but just as cathartic.
Part of me hopes not. Let’s face it, this girl will never have what we all call “an ordinary life,” because she comes too extraordinary of circumstances. Hopefully history will give her a breather, let her and her siblings have some peace and grow up in private. We already have enough daughters of dead rock stars. Let’s get back to talking about Iran and the economy and important things, like looking at pictures of Lindsay Lohan getting out of cars.
And let’s the good and the bad of Michael Jackson’s legacy be swept away into it’s place in history, another song on the radio, one last memory of something gone by set to music, but with a good beat that you can dance to.
Bergman and Ingrid Thulin during the making of The Silence, 1963.
A sterling example of how film lovers are smarter than non film lovers: one of the first things we’ve learned is that you don’t play chess with Death!
“Among today’s directors I’m of course impressed by 
“Agyness Deyn always looks like she was just hit with a snowball,” said Molly Young 
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