from here.
“There are two types of people in the world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.”
Monthly Archives: November 2009
Metal is murder.
from here.
Just a quick note: Dreamworks has picked up the film rights to an unpublished manuscript entitled Robopocalypse which “explores the fate of the human race following a robot uprising,” seemingly in the same vein as Max Brook’s World War Z, which is also being made into a movie itself. The author of the unpublished novel, which is scheduled for a 2011 release, has an interesting pedigree, including a Ph.D in robotics and has written several articles for Popular Mechanics and the novel is supposedly grounded in realism.
from here.
A shame. I feel like Benjamin Light has been slowly groping towards a warning to us fleshy humans about the robots evil plan for world domination and… well, I guess we just didn’t listen. Or get a book/movie deal out of it.
Slipstream.
Before work I stopped at the store to get some much needed ingredients to survive all the bullshit, mostly things filled to the brim with sugar or promising me “energy,” and the store was almost empty. Very few customers, stockers and empty boxes littering the aisles, and the checkout clerks were so bored by the lack of business that they didn’t really want to linger at the checkout stands amidst the gossip magazines and plethora of fruity, sugar free gums. In short, it was nice.
There were a few other customers wandering aimless like myself. I happened to pass one such woman on the liquor aisle. Her eyes darted from cheap bottle of wine to cheap bottle of wine, not really focusing on anything, since she was talking on her cell phone.
All I could hear as I approached her initially was, “Uh huh, got it,” followed by, “Uh huh, got it,” and then again, “Uh huh, got it.”
A normal enough conversation, but then, right as I’m passing her, I hear her say into the phone, “Wait, what?! She said what to you? Oh no. No! You tell her this for me, you tell her, you say… GET IN MAH WORMHOLE!”
The last part didn’t come out of her mouth until I had just passed her, the words hitting the back of my head and my ears and causing a chain reaction of surprised hysterical laughter within me so hard that I dropped whatever few groceries I was carrying. The desire to laugh lingered all day, right up until now as I replay it in my mind while typing this.
Fire Walk With Me.
“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.”
-David Lynch.
Browsing through the internet tonight, same as usual, nothing too sexy or exciting, and I click on one of the hundred thousand links I seem to click on that’s supplied by someone on tumblr: The Top 10 Best David Lynch moments.
I’ll say this for Lynch, he’s made a name for himself. And by that, I mean, he’s made his name a genre onto itself. Weird horror? Weird Americana? Esoterica existentialism? We could spend a decade defining it.
The other day I was actually talking with someone about cinema, about horror and sci fi directors, directors who step outside the norm a tad, and through the course of just bullshitting and casual riffing, I started comparing Lynch with Canada’s David Cronenberg. Another man who’s made his name into a genre all of it’s own. A man who’s every choice seems to be a weird one. And when he plays normal? It’s even weirder.
And I can think of no better example there than when he actually had a two episode acting stint in J. J. Abram’s Alias. Before that, he had several cameo roles in various movies, and weird ones too, of course, like Jason X, and The Fly, and Gus Van Sant’s To Die For.
The difference between these two directors, the difference than I can easily glean for you now, is that they’re both weird, but that with Cronenberg, I think he just lets his interests in body modification or transformation or infections of both the physical and psychological kind just run away with him. I love that wikipedia actually uses the term “venereal horror” to describe his personal brand of cinema.
But then there’s Lynch, who’s a weird guy, has weird tastes, likes to make weird art, and loves to cultivate his own weirdness. A lot of times, I think it’s just a part of his brand, his act, his personal style of show, but more times I get the impression of a man who walked off the reservation years ago, realized that he was leaving a certain kind of reality behind, probably smirked to himself, and kept going. His movies, his short films, his website and stunts are all just little polaroids that he shoots back to us from his journey.
Plus, I’m sure that even Morrissey thinks that David Lynch spends too much time on his hair.
I may be giving him too much credit there, but what’s the difference. Let’s talk about the major totems in his career…
Movies/TV shows of David Lynch’s that I have watched/enjoyed:
-Dune, the adaptation of the Frank Herbert “sci fi classic.”
-Twin Peaks, the TV show.
-Blue Velvet, or, well, most of it when I was a kid.
-Mulholland Drive, the failed TV that was resurrected into a film.
-About an hour and some change from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the movie follow up/prequel/general ephemera to the television show.
Twin Peaks the show was just 85 to 90% brilliant weird fun. A perfect television murder mystery before we were worried about semen stains and making lab work sexy meets the weirdness of small town America, and all of it recycled through David Lynch’s odd brain. There was a lot of elements to the show that were just weird for the sake of weirdness, but for the most part, I excuse it all because it never left the confines of the logic of the show. The logic of the show wasn’t necessarily easy to decipher, but once you get a legitimate idea of what’s going on with things like Bob, the arm, the doorknob, the talking backwards, the Black Lodge, and Laura Palmer in general, you just kind of get it. Also, one of the must frustratingly wonderful endings to a TV show ever.
Its’ the same for Mulholland Drive, which would’ve been murderously frustrating as a television show, but works perfectly as a film. It’s also hard to figure out at first, but give it some time, possibly a second viewing, and if needed, a friend to explain it to you, and you’ll get a tale of lost love and just brutal, puncturing sadness set against the glitz and flashy bizarrness of LA.
Dune is Dune. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If you enjoyed it, you were probably on a lot of drugs or just a really gross person. Or maybe you’re a hardcore Sting fan? I don’t hate the movie by any means, but I’ll happily say that the Sci Fi channel miniseries version of the book was vastly better.
And now we delve into the darker recesses of me with the films of David Lynch that I’ve never seen:
-Eraserhead, his first film.
-Wild At Heart, which I really should’ve seen by now, at least for Nic Cage, if nothing else.
-Lost Highway, which had a soundtrack that I loved, or kinda loved, back in the 90s.
-The Straight Story, a fairly straightforward story of a real life man that just seems that much more creepy because it was done by Lynch.
-Inland Empire.
-And the rest of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Do you remember back when Bravo was a cable network that played real art, really culturally significant stuff? Classic movies and TV shows. Friday nights, I remember, would be foreign cinema and that’s where I’d see things like All About My Mother or Run Lola Run because, I guess I had no social life. I remember they used to play old Poirot movies all the time, mostly the Peter Ustinov ones, which were all pretty good.
Anyway, the point of me asking that is one summer they started playing episodes of Twin Peaks during the weekdays. This is where I first latched onto the show, and I remember that they played something like two episodes back to back starting at 9 AM. Now, if you really consider the weirdness/juicy soap opera factors in that show, then 9 AM is a really insidious time to air the show, leaving you creeped out through the rest of your youthful summertime abandon during the day, but hey, whatever.
But I loved the show. As I said, on one hand you had this bizarre police procedural gone crazy, and then on the other, you had a fantastical soap opera element as the show started to explore the facets of the various characters of the small town of Twin Peaks. And of course I was left hooked by the ending of the last episode. It was the ultimate cliffhanger, when your hero survives the trip to the Black Lodge that is so horrific that you can’t look away, only to discover that he may not be our hero after all…
Some actors that had an early start or appearance in their careers in Twin Peaks:
Madchen Amick.
And David Duchovny, in drag.
Anyway, so Bravo aired the follow up film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me a week or two after the syndicated run of the show ended and I was so excited to watch it, knowing that it’d handle some of what really happened to Laura Palmer, the teen whose murder initiated the show in general along with tackling a lot of the back story and featuring appearances by people like Keifer Sutherland, Chris Isaak, and David Bowie. Of course. These are perfectly Lynch-ian actors, much like Kyle MacLachlan doesn’t seem like a human being himself, just a caricature of a human drawn by David Lynch to snicker at.
Anyway, I’ve seen more bits and pieces of the film here and there since then, but haven’t been able to good and proper finish watching since that night I first sat down to watch it (on TV, no less!) and encountered this scene…
…featuring “my mother’s sister’s girl.” Even as I embed that youtube clip for you, I’m not watching it. I hope it’s the right one. I can’t handle it, man. You may look at it and think it’s tame and laugh at me. You’re probably right to. But watching it back then, something about it creeped me out past my then limits. It crawled inside my skin and started doing things and I had to leave the room and I haven’t come back to that particular metaphorical room since.
Hope you don’t mind me rambling on about David Lynch here but it’s Friday night and if you’re reading this, well, then you’re probably as lost as I am. But I’m someone who has, I’d like to think, watched a lot of movies across the years. My tastes are massively pretentious, and I’ll be the first to admit it, but in dichotomy, they’re also extremely low bro, just barely scraping the floor of what a human can stand to watch. And going along with that, I’m a horror movie fan. Hardcore, for the most part. I don’t really like “gore” movies, but it’s not typically a matter of finding them unsettling, just uninteresting. But one of the few times I ever felt nearly sick to my stomach was during a viewing of the unrated cut of Miike’s Ichi The Killer inflicted upon me by Conrad Noir. That film is deliriously gross and there’s a fun campiness to it. But there’s also a scene where a character very slowly cuts out his own tongue and seems to enjoy doing it and I nearly had to tap out there.
I could compare that scene with a similar one in Oldboy where a character has to do something similar, but unlike Ichi The Killer, it makes sense for the story and it’s not done in a way that attacks the viewer. It’s part of the story, an act of desperation, and kind of makes sense, even though it is an unsettling notion in general. I’ll stop there because I know everytime I bring up the words “Asian” and “cinema” in the same sentence, Benjamin Light falls asleep.
My point is that there’s really gorey stuff that can get to you and there’s psychological horror like, for example, Irreversible. And there’s movies that dance drunkely on the line in between the two, like the entire Saw set. Speaking of which, can you believe they plan to make at least 8 of these movies? Jesus fucking Christ.
And then there’s the special David Lynch touch. There’s moments in his films that are gorey and there’s moments that are flashes of psychological horror. And then there’s something else, something beyond those two. To me, Polanski was a master of the rare art of taking the creepy parts of a film and making it feel like they were in the room with you, crawling up behind you with a sick glint of terror in their eye. Gore (nice first name, buddy) Verbinski’s remake of The Ring had flashes of that same vibe. There was gore there, and existential dread, but with David Lynch, there’s something more there, something scary. I almost want him to throw some tentacles and racism in his movies so that I could say that his film studio lives in Cthulhu’s butt, man.
Another example, from near the beginning of Mulholland Drive:
I had forgotten that Phil from Lost/Jimmy Barret from Mad Men was in that scene. And yet, he’s perfect in it. And the film is shot perfectly, with the camera just hovering around these characters in semi-tight close ups in the diner, lost in the dreamtime as it fluctuates into a nightmare. It’s a brilliant decision to make us feel the character’s shock and fear rather than drift into cliched screams and quick cuts, etc. And sometimes the most horrific part of a terrible thing is being told exactly how it’s going to go down before it does. It’s what makes the ending of The Blair Witch Project work despite itself.
“Every little detail is either feeding the mood or destroying the mood.” I love that quote, from the above discussion on his techniques. Lynch is obsessed with the aesthetics of any scene.
But that scene may not be indicative of how perfect of a David Lynch movie that Mulholland Drive is. The way it lures you in with it’s seemingly straightforward plot of a amnesiac girl on the run meeting up with the good-natured wannabe starlet moving to LA, a world where the real meets with the bizarre fantasies of the real, combined with the slightly amateurish way that Lynch sometimes does his films combined scene to scene with some masterful bits of directing and editing. Maybe the “No Hay Banda”/Club Silencio scenes show all of this a little better…
…which uses the spanish language a cappella version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” perfectly, and beautiful performed by Rebekah del Rio, to give the two characters, Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Elena Harring), something magnificent to take in. In a lot of ways, the whole film plays out here in this scene, as the two women, newly lovers, watch the ridiculous elements on the stage before them, but our overcome by sadness from an event that they’re not aware has ever taken place. They’re oblivous to the fact that they’re merely daydreams of their real selves, whose relationship has ended in a violent tragedy. Just as the song keeps playing long after the performer’s dead body has been dragged from the stage, some dreams stick around long after one has woken and are poisoned by the harsh southern California sunlight and turned into nightmares.
For all his weirdness, and all his attempts at capturing and being the sole conquerer of the American weird film zeitgeist, David Lynch has never been and probably never will be more perfect than he was in Mulholland Drive.
And there’s a reason that this movie, despite it’s weirdness, launched Naomi Watts onto a career that ultimately could be called merely so so. It’s not the “so so” of it that’s important, it’s the launching. It’s not totally shocking to me that she would be the common denominator in this post, having worked with Lynch, Cronenberg, and was in The Ring. But she’s perfect in this Mulholland Drive, at one moment sunny as the weather and bursting with bright eyed optimism and at other times, dark and torn apart, nothing but raw hurting nerves as she cries and masturbates. It reminds me of myself whenever I write one of these diatribes for you people.
That said, I have Inland Empire sitting around on my shelf, just waiting to be watched. Anyone care to join me? Or to hold my hand in an attempt to make it all way through Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me? It’d be much appreciated.
But for now, I leave you in peace, with a final thought from David Lynch himself, about movies and iphones:
Cthulhu Cthursday Miller Time.
from here.
If Obama can bring people together to talk over beers, then why can’t fictional semi-religious horror icons like Cthulhu and Jesus do the same?
Writers.
from The end of Camelot.
It’s amazing how a single bullet, a magic bullet if you will, can change the course of history. It can turn the kids into the adults and vice versa. As Trudy Campbell said, “I don’t care what your politics are, this is America, and you can’t just shoot the President!” If only that were true, Trudy. But adults can say a lot of things when they’re living their lives in front of the TV, either in the office, in the living room at home, or in the hotel room after your nooner, and last night’s episode of Mad Men, “The Grown-Ups” showed that better than anything. So let’s go back, and to the left, as we talk about the birth and death of marriages and the day that the 60s really began…
August Bravo: Dia de los Mad Men! And the whole country’s drinking…
Marco Sparks: I loved the beginning of this episode, the first image there of Pete curled up on his office couch, squeezed tightly into a fetal position, waiting for a woman to bring him warm nourishment. Only that hot cocoa was instant, made with water instead of milk!
August: Watching last night’s episode really made me like Trudy. She’s certainly a trophy wife, yes, but she’s always by Pete’s side.
Marco: On this show, she’s the definition of “devotion.” I mean, she was this close to sleeping with an old paramour to help Pete get a short story published in… what was it? Highlights For Children? Fitting.
August: It’s probably women like her that made that decade what it was, for better and for worse. Am I envious of Pete here, just a little? I sure am.
Marco: I have to say it’s a joy to watch Alison Brie, who plays Trudy, on Community.
August: And now we go back to Pete. We all knew he wouldn’t get that job, right? We all wanted him to not get that job. At least I didn’t want to.
Marco: Because you’re the vice president, treasurer, and refreshments organizer of Team Cosgrove, aren’t you?
August: I think Ken really did deserve it. Maybe.
Marco: We really have no idea since we never actually saw him doing his job. He was mostly just showing up to ask him people to go get a drink with him or riding lawn mowers into the office.
August: He never really stressed about it. He was just Cool Hand Luke about it, like, all of the time.
Marco: Poor Pete. People saw him working, so they assumed he was working. They saw Cosgrove chillaxing with that stupid grin and “that haircut,” they just assumed he had everything under control.
I wonder if this is the last time we’ll see Duck, abandoning his sexual conquest of Peggy temporarily (I love her roommate asking why she was with him if he’s not married) to call his kids.
August: Time to get down to business…
Marco: And Jackie turned to Jack Jack and said, “Mr. President, You can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you…”
August: We all knew it would happen this season…
Marco: Weiner said he wasn’t sure we’d see it this year, or how in depth it’d be covered, and yet, this was the defining moment of this season, and the moment so strongly hinted and foreshadowed this whole year, with Roger’s daughter’s wedding date and the constant references to Dallas.
August: Yeah, we all knew it would happen. Maybe in next week’s episode, I think some of us were thinking, but we knew it was going to happen. Hell, it already did happen. Kennedy is dead.
Marco: I love the constant use of news footage, of the characters literally trapped in those moments, time brought to a standstill as they can hear the beats of their own fucked up, broken hearts. And especially poignant with the deaths of Ted Kennedy and Walter Cronkite in the past few months, too.
August: And Lee Harvey Oswald is dead too.
Marco: Who cares about justice when you can just hand the situation over to the mafia.
August: I love the moment that everyone finds out about it, the way the phone calls are ringing off the hook throughout the entire building, going unanswered, and then, all of a sudden, they stop. Silence everywhere. It’s both what you’d least expect and exactly what you expect.
Marco: And in strolls Don Draper, just a few seconds late to a scene, as he seems to be in every scene in this episode, asking, “What the hell’s going on?”
Actually, the scene with Harry Crane and Pete is what I loved about the actual finding out of what happened in Texas. The TV’s on in the background, broadcasting a special bulletin and they’re whining about their jobs. Pete’s complaining like a sad little kid and Harry’s trying to sound like a mature adult. And then the hilariously ironic line: “I’m going to die at this desk unnoticed.”
August: Man, Roger is just so unhappy. His kid of a wife can’t control herself. And neither can Roger. Calling Joan while his wife number whatever is passed out drunk next to him. That takes guts. And I don’t think Roger even cares anymore.
Marco: What a long, strange journey it’s been since the party in “My Old Kentucky Home,” both of which were thrown by Roger, both of which involved Betty having an encounter of sorts with Henry Francis from the Governor’s office, and both ending with Jane passing out from “not eating enough” with her booze.
Did you notice that Jane constantly reiterates that she’s “a good person?”
Except now this is a world where a President has been killed and Roger can’t find the jokes in the face of this true, uncertain horror. At the end of last season it was the Cuban Missile Crisis and the end of the world. This is worst. This is what happens after. This is the real world and it’s time to be grown ups.
But, man, Joan is the saving grace of this show always. If next season involves the Brits having sold Sterling Cooper to Duck’s company, I can only hope they get Joan back. Also, I think it’s fair to point out that in Roger’s life, to take Pryce’s words as metaphor, Jane is Ken Cosgrove and Joan is Pete Campbell.
August: Oh?
Marco: Don’t start writing Roger/Pete slash fiction just yet. I just mean that Jane made Roger feel young, like he was invincible, and everything was easy and there was no work required to achieve his needs. And it’s because the women he wanted wanted someone else. But Roger would have to work to be worthy of Joan and he knows it. And it means he’d have to acknowledge that there’s something he desires so passionately in this world.
We can only hope for good things when Dr. McRapist gets his legs blown off in ‘Nam, all Born On The Fourth Of July-style.
August: Man, this whole episode. No one cares about their own lives. Not unless they’re on the TV. In fact, for the first time the only person who does care is Don. Everyone’s focused on the President, or lack thereof, the wedding, their promotion/de facto demotion, a certain busty redhead, or a Governor’s aide. Everyone’s mind wanders. Their wants and needs. Everything just means nothing anymore.
Marco: The things you thought were important? Turns out they weren’t, not really.
August: Watching Betty kiss that guy made me die just a little inside. It really did.
Marco: I liked the little bits leading up to that. No, Don, while it may be good for the family, a family drive isn’t going to fix things. Not when they’re determined to be broken.
But the actual shot of Betty’s car joining Henry’s in the middle of the nowhere? Interesting. Added with that music, it felt like a very Hitchcock-ian thing for a few moments there. That said, I don’t know that Betty would be all that great as one of Hitchcock’s famous icy blondes. Well, maybe.
August: I was watching that scene and I kept thinking, “Hey, asshole, that’s Don’s wife!” You can’t do that. And she can’t do that! But the lies are finally starting to get to her.
Marco: Sneaky of them last week to think that maybe she had been won over by Don taking the mask off to reveal the inner Dick Whitman hidden beneath. But now he can never put that mask back on.
I really can only see Henry Francis as a plot device rather than as a character. Mostly because that’s what he is, a shade of something, an element to draw out parts of Betty, to wake her up. But do you think that, by this point in the story now, he and Betty have slept together? I mean, he’s proposing marriage to this not so happily married mother of three, so wouldn’t they have to have? Silly little religious aspects aside, how realistic is entering a marriage/serious relationship with no time in the lab testing sexual chemistry?
August: Ah, I don’t know. Mostly, I don’t think she’ll leave Don. I don’t see it as realistic. I think this goes back to how they toy with our expectations and our grasp on the dramatic tension. We think she will, but she won’t.
And WTF was that faux proposal? Betty could not have taken it seriously. I really hope not. If you’re tired of being shackled by your husbands lies, then another man is not going to necessarily be the answer. I guess that was just the best available 1960s pick up line.
Marco: Also, had to love her response to him asking why the kids were being allowed to watch the Kennedy assassination coverage: “What am I supposed to do, Don? Am I supposed to keep it from them?” It took me a moment to really feel how subtle but powerful Betty’s weapons were in that scene.
But I think she wants to feel something other than helpless, or maybe just something in general. And that moment as she was watching Oswald get shot, it was almost like she herself had been shot. I think people complain about January Jones’ acting ability, like when her ex-boyfriend Ashton Kutcher advises her to give up the craft, but I think she’s perfect as Betty.
August: And then there’s Don, trying to be a better guy? A better husband? Maybe. I think Don’s trying to work it out in a way. And maybe that scares Betty a little? All the staying home, the taking care of baby Gene in the middle of the night, the trying to care.
Marco: If this is Don’s reaction to having to finally lay all his cards out on the table, Betty can only be wondering what he was really up to all those times he was supposed to be working.
August: Is Betty going to become the new Don Draper? After all, if Don Draper can be someone else, why can’t she?
Marco: Ooh, I’d watch that show. Part of me is starting to think that if these two were to actually grow up… well, it may not be together.
And I liked Sally’s continued role as watcher in this episode, first glued to the television as things that she may not yet understand in the country, but then taking the both boiling and freezing cold temperature in the kitchen and living rooms, the atmospheric changes between her parents.
August: “I kissed you yesterday and I didn’t feel a thing.” This has to be affecting someone other than just me. Hearing lines like that, which I have before, just makes one cringe. It cuts into the heart of you. And Don. Just sitting there. In confinement. In the dark. What does he do? What can he do? His own wife doesn’t love him and the words don’t come to him so that he can fix it.
Marco: Again, I think for everyone who’s complained that this season has gone by slowly and just dragged, I would point out A) how much character developments/moments we witnessed within this episode, and not just with a few characters, but spread across the spectrum of the cast. Everyone shined. And B) again, I would use this as a yardstick compared to “My Old Kentucky Home.” Everyone’s changed. Everything’s different now.
August: And there goes Trudy again. Was that a motivational speech? Trying to get him up and go? Who does that? Only trophy wives. Only Trudy.
Marco: Trudy is a trophy prize that Pete has never quite earned. But again, look at the differences and the things that are the same about them from then til now. In “My Old Kentucky Home,” they were the power couple, working together, trying to impress their elders, putting on the dance and show. And now, they’re unified together on that couch, stronger together. The most telling moment is when Trudy, so beautiful in her blue dress, takes off her dancing shoes and sits back on the couch with her husband, the man stuck in the fetal position at the start of the episode and who is now finally starting to sound like an adult.
August: And then there’s the refuge of an empty office. Except for Peggy, the woman hard at work.
Marco: Perhaps because Don and Peggy are essentially the same? And I think they both realize that that Aqua Net ad is just fucked now in the face of Kennedy’s death.
August: I thought this episode would be a lot more. I mean, it was everything it was supposed to be. And so much more. I just envisioned something entirely different.
Marco: And maybe that’s why it was so good?
August: Maybe. And seriously, they can’t give me a good preview for next week’s episode?
Marco: Oh, that preview is genius. Just clips from over the course of this season. Mad Men is a show drifting up the river of history that’s already gone by and sometimes you can only look back at what you’ve already seen and done and just guess what’s next. What happens next could be anything. And whatever you think it is, it’ll be something else, but you’ve got to be prepared. Sitting in the dark while you wait for the dawn to come is just part of being a grown up.
The innocent, seduced.
More on last night’s episode of The Venture Bros. later, I imagine, but I’m still chuckling about last week’s involving the Batman/Superman analogue Captain Sunshine looking for a new teenage sidekick (to replace the one slayed by the Monarch) in the form of Hank Venture.
The results were, predictably, hilarious and odd.
Wertham would’ve probably loved it.
One of the things I always find fascinating about this show is that it rolls pretty hard with the nonstop pedophilia hints and jokes throughout the episode, both with Captain Sunshine (I love that his Justice League-type group was also the action news team, which is brilliant) and Sgt. Hatred, but never really touches on the much darker thing going on: While in a slum, the Monarch killed a kid.
Personally I get tired of the Monarch and his crew easily (except for Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, of course), and found the most interesting and telling moment of his time on the show was way back when when he broke into the Venture compound – for the umpteenth time – and had sex with the robot with Dr. Venture’s face on it. I felt like it gave us a much more solid cause of his never ending hatred of the superscientist.
As for superscience, as per last night’s episode, I knew the secret laid within the prog rock.
In other hot news, which I’m a few days late in joining the party on sharing, I’ve got bad news for you, August: They’re getting closer to ending Heroes. Well, actually, that’s great news, of course. It’s a rumor for now, but a nice one as NBC, suffering from a bad year in television, especially the troubles wrought by the ratings fiasco that has been Jay Leno at 10 PM, have asked the producers of Heroes to start “winding things down.” I guess not everything can be saved by lesbian make outs?
Of course, I don’t really want to believe that, not ever.
A Movie Script Ending
Marco and I were talking the other day about how the Best Screenplay Oscar never seems to fit.
Exhibit A: Juno. Great movie. Feel good without pandering. The kind of movie you want to give an award to. But the academy didn’t really know what to award it for, so Diablo Cody ends up with a statute, even though Ellen Page carried the film on her back.
Exhibit B: Lost in Translation. An instant classic. Surely Sofia Coppola deserved some kind of honor for making this film, but again, the academy doesn’t know what to do, so they give her a screenplay trophy when the script was the least of her accomplishments.
What Marco and I decided was that there needs to be a Best Filmmaker Oscar. For the film with that certain je nais c’est quoi where everything comes together to make a movie you’ll never forget.
Of course, while we’re at it, the Academy could stand to take back the trophies for Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, Return of the King, Crash…
Anyway, apropos of nothing, these are a few of my favorite scenes…
“Baby. You are gonna miss that plane.”
“What’d she whisper to you?” “She called me a dirty word.”
“I never even saw these assholes before!”
“You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength.”
“How am I not myself?”
“The plane has crashed into the goddamn mountain!”
“What happened to Jacqueline? “She didn’t really love me.”
“I’m gonna show you a world without sin.”
“There were Japanese surfers there. And the guy was playing really, really, really great music.”
“It says here on your chart that you’re fucked up. Uh, you talk like a fag and your shit’s all retarded.”
“Beneath this mask, there is an idea, Mr. Crede. And ideas are bulletproof.”
“There aren’t evil guys and, and good guys. It’s just — It’s just… It’s just a bunch of guys!”
