On November 4th

Don't forget to go....

To your local bookstore!

The proprietor of this site invites you to experience his majesty as if it were your own (which it most surely is not -Ed.)



Triage of hookers has never been explained more lucidly - Annie Potts

I read the first chapter - George Takei

A colossus among goatfuckers - Julie Andrews

I disagree with everything Plummer says in this book, but I absolutely think all actors should read it. - Alec Baldwin

Where Do I Start?

This piece deserves a Nobel Prize for Bullshit-Calling.

Bless the South

As a corollary to this.

Great is Great is Great

After this most luminous summer movie season, could Hollywood be blamed for pushing their big winners? The NYTimes has it here.

Before a volley of message-board lightweights and cineastes denigrate an Oscar season bound to be swept by a hit or two, I will guide my celluloid-based heart toward my end of summer endorsement for that very result.

I think The Dark Knight might be the best picture of 2008. And then I think maybe it's Wall*E.

I do not believe small film equals better film. I've seen small budget films that were far and away better than big budget contenders, and I've seen big budget contenders stamp the small-minded-ness right out of indie films. It's a merit-based game, not a budget-based game.

We had giants walking the earth last year, powered by small budgets, and we have giants walking the earth this year, fueled by lavish ones. As film lovers, we should be excited when the movies are this amazingly good. All other considerations are cant.

For Ad #3

Your Shit, Re: Security of

I can't top this. As hard as I've tried, searches to my site are never quite so, umm, variegated. Go on now, check out Holly's recent list of search hits from a woebegone and sexually confused world.

I can still enjoy the consistency of the searches that get you all here. Be it a search for "Chateau Neuf du Pap" or "You call your music minimal", I get hits from Iran to Estonia to Wichita (Hey, Sis! Hey, Niece!).

Many of you, including a reader from the service provider for the L.A. Times, have read my little bit on Burn After Reading, by doing a search for "Security of your shit". It's the only search from which I've ever managed a number one hit on the Google.

I love it. I love that I wrote the sentence "Brad Pitt is so great". That really sums up this whole enterprise, readers.

As for the usual fishing:

This man fucked the scopes monkey and called him Brian Dennehy:

That's Where the Broken Glass Comes In

David Sedaris's Barack Obama endorsement.

Fervor

Fervor heard by few, barely expressed by the campaign, and undoubtedly shot unheard overmuch into the echoing stretches of the internet, but cooling my spleen all the same:

Can we put to rest this newly picayune crying of "executive experience"? At long last? A governorship does not a mind make, much less does it inherently make a leader. Nothing can adequately prepare you for the most difficult job that exists.

It calls to a select few their greatest, most unexpected powers to shoot up to the surface and make the world known of them.

This last two term yahoo of a an R.K. Maroon cartoon President didn't know shit from shinola as governor of Texas and doesn't know much more at all after eight years of sitting in a room beyond his measure.

That's why it ain't workin' on the campaign trail, you hacks.

My apologies, but sometimes the obvious has to go somewhere so I don't mow down the fishy section in Wal-Mart or something.

Why 30 Rock Is Mandatory

Oh Me Oh Oh My Oh Oh Cleveland...

I wish I could ignore how dangerous they're going to be over the next four to eight years, if Obama wins (and if he doesn't), but I can say for sure that if he does, the right wing is going to be HILARIOUS. Their true, stupid colors were on clear, bright display for the past thirty years. This will kinda be fun.

But perhaps not.

Enough Sarah Palin

This is what SNL should get back to doing, full-time:



Everything unrelated to Sarah Palin in last night's episode was the usual Meh.

Addendum: Except for Mark Wahlberg

Is It Right Where You Are?

This piece addresses the marketing concerns for Zack Snyder's Watchmen, set for release this March.

It prompted me to go to Ain't It Cool News for the first time in awhile and do a search for any updates on the status of the studio war that's underway now, and any new clips or reports on the nature of the film itself. I've read Watchmen, so I'm not concerned with plot-spoilers.

I found this breathless response to twenty-five minutes shown late last month. This is heartening news, because the material deserves great attention to detail and a propensity for balancing two very serious aspects of the story, and we may be getting that.

The visual aspect of Watchmen, with its expansive locations and intricate designs (as well as interdimensional beings!) has been a concern for anyone attempting to tell the story (other than Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, of course). It hasn't taken off as a project until now simply because certain aspects may have been close to unfilmable. The trailer we saw before The Dark Knight put those worries to rest, assuring us that, visually, Zack Snyder is indeed the man for the job. It looks picture-perfect to what we read on the page.

We also have to contend with the more pedestrian interior scenes and self-reflective depression of many of the characters in Moore's story. That alone could be more unpalatable (if not unfilmable) to modern audiences, than anything else going on.

Having said that, the Aint It Cool report, and the trailer, have given me pause. I can't really call myself a fan of the revamped Dawn of the Dead, though I admit to having a marginal affection for 300. If Dawn of the Dead isn't entirely successful, it does have maybe the most audacious first twenty minutes of any zombie movie, and 300 was visually striking enough to indicate an incipient, boldly visual filmmaker, perhaps on the edge of a purged adolescence. To get Watchmen right is not the job of an adolescent, but Snyder has showed a very careful adherence to source material. I'm optimistic. He could be a great director.

Yessir

Done and done, Mr. Keillor.

...

From The Onion

Play Your Part

The Girl Talk set in Knoxville last night was a repudiation of the death of club culture here in the states. Hands down (and way up). It's alive and kickin', covered in confetti, toilet paper and incandescence.

The stage presence of this long haired shirtless twenty-something leaning over a lap-top was more enlivening than some rock concerts I've seen (I'm looking at you, Deathcab For Cutie).

I lost count of the number of youngins in the place. It was a wild, celebratory show, obviously fueled by underground sales of GT's albums and frenzied word of mouth. Having said that, I circled the crowd, getting the full scope of the show and the field of sound GT was using, and I realized 1)The sound could be a lot better, except 2)there are at least 100 people on stage surrounding our DJ, and, as a result, they're muffling the sound by standing in front of the speaker stacks. Everybody's hollering and singing.

It's not just that they're singing along because they're hearing familiar pop songs, classic songs and hip hop songs, because this group is unmistakably aware, in large numbers, the order in which these songs are supposed to go, what snippets GT uses, what samples he uses as intermediaries between tracks, and what versions of mash-ups he's going to play, before he even plays 'em.

And GT mixed it up a lot last night (obviously, but it felt improvised). Word's been spread. What an experience.


(This is not the Knoxville show, but the best one I could find while scouring for a comparable example)

Grown/Up '08

I'm watching this debate and just choking on it. I'm fatigued, and I can stay angry for days at a time, lurching forth to every debate finding new variations on the theme of Evil People Failing.

To you conservatives bemoaning "redistribution of wealth": Do you have any idea the actual planet you live on? The economy we're saddled with? If the next President doesn't raise taxes, we're well and truly fucked, and all that wealth the top percentile has accrued will dry up before it has a chance to never trickle down under the purview of your regimes.

Also, taxes are not inherently more "socialist" just because they're higher rather than lower. Taxes are taxes. They're your ticket to living in this country. Deal. There are legitimate class warfare concerns to be contended with when considering raising taxes on the super-rich, but the relative "wealth" of Joe the Plumber (those millionaire plumbers!) is redistributed into spending on tanks, or programs to encourage our kids to get successfully knocked up, that is, of course, under your regimes.

Again, any political or economic policy not considered in relief against the actual circumstances is bound to fail, just as any version of spirituality that doesn't teach you to find value in people isn't really spirituality at all.

Christ, Republicans. You may be right that government should be small, that taxes should be low, and that states should have the right to their own sovereignty, mostly undeterred by the Federal Government. Certainly, I don't believe in the latter, on some very specific issues. On social issues, on science, on education, on a whole horror-house of perpetually urgent issues, you are the party of Destruction, with a very big D.

Either way, if the above enumerated values are yours, you ought to be disgusted by W. and terrified of McCain/End Times.

Because I Need to Think About Anything Else

But somehow still politics:

Oh. Yeah.

If there's an Olbermensch video of scathing accuracy out there slamming Sarah Failin's Russia-Seein' Hellbeast Bill Kristol-Fuckfest Witch Doctor candidacy, what were the odds I wouldn't post it?

Go Green Yourself

Nader, you do not live in the real world. You're an overgrown, exceptionally bright college sophomore. Furthermore, unequivocally, you can lay a great deal of blame on yourself for the past eight years. Stay the fuck out of professional politics. You're the butt-end of liberal jokes, and you give progressives a bad name (people take Michael Moore more seriously). I've dated your kind. You're insufferable, and do not have people's best interests at heart. Sell your books and stay out of political races. Crackpot.



Addendum: Maher's still got it, though.

SUUURRRRGGGGE!!!!

Just what is the surge, and what is it a cover for? I don't feel comfortable lugging a fifty-cent word around and then not even bothering to define what it means, so it goes without saying that I'm even less comfortable with our leaders doing the same.

A Review I Can't Refuse (To Repudiate)

Finally.

But, seriously, you should atone for this, Ebes. Come on. Three stars for Godfather 2 and three and a half for Part 3?

You include it in your great movies section because it's a cultural watershed. Yes. That's because it was a great movie to begin with, at least an equal to its great and nearly peerless original.

I've never agreed with your dismissal of its "separate" narratives. They're not separate. We see the violent, yet somehow idealistic beginnings of a crime family as it heads towards the events of the first film, even as we jump to the present and deal with that first film's consequences. To quote Pauline Kael:

The second film shows the consequences of the actions in the first; it's all one movie, in two great pieces, and it comes together in your head while you watch.

The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film.

I mean, you know I'm all for you, Roger, in possession of over a decade's worth of heartfelt, often tendentious loyalty, but I simply have never followed your reasoning on this one at all.

The Godfather Part II is one of the greatest films by one of the truly great American directors. If ever you had cause to retroactively update a star-rating, it is for this film, and perhaps this film only.

.

OOoooh Look at Me, Readin' the NYORKER!!

Cllassssy.

But I haven't yet found a reasoned defense of McCain's candidacy, and this article has many, many salient points.


For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

God Bless You, Internets

Finally. Finally. An internet search for FUCKING THE PLUMMER (all caps present in search).

Thank you. Thank you. General Chang fucked a muskrat.



And this man shtupped animals along the entire range of the Alps.