is a blog by Brendan
Almost exactly three years after I started Sad and Happy Movie Day, Jon and Amanda finally maneuvered me into actually watching Hotel Rwanda. We didn’t even have a happy movie to chase it with, but a couple episodes of Arrested Development made do.
I could have sworn that was Julia Sawalha playing the Red Cross worker, but IMDB says I am wrong. Dang. Oh, also the world is going to burn and we all deserve it.
Can you believe Sam Elliott’s IMDB photo shows him without a moustache? I mean, it doesn’t even look like him!
Ian and I typed almost simultaneously today that his only real job in Tombstone (which I finally saw, and did anyone else realize that Ben Foster was doing a Val Kilmer imitation throughout 3:10 to Yuma?) was to grow a moustache, which is also what he did in The Big Lebowski and (apparently) Ghost Rider. Looks like he’ll be reprising that role in The Golden Compass. You can’t argue with success.
I guess it’s like they say: some are born to moustache, some achieve moustache, and some have moustache thrust upon them.
I’m willing to bet that anyone who meets Sam Elliott quickly becomes the latter.
Sneakers, my favorite heist movie, features some plot elements that involve the NSA. It came out in 1992, when that agency wasn’t particularly well-known–o halcyon days!–and so it has this little exchange between Robert Redford (“Martin Bishop”) and Timothy Busfield (“Dick Gordon”) to introduce it to the audience.
Bishop: Sorry to waste your time, gentlemen. I don’t work for the government.
Gordon: We know. (Flashes ID) National Security Agency.
Bishop: Oh, you’re the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
Gordon: No, that’s the FBI. We’re not chartered for domestic surveillance.
Ah ha ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ah ha ha ha ha. Heh.
Bishop: Oh, so you just overthrow governments–set up friendly dictators.
Gordon: (chuckling) No, that’s the CIA. We protect our government’s communications–try and break the other fellas’ codes. We’re the good guys, Marty.
Bishop: Gee, I can’t tell you what a relief that is. Dick.
I’m running the first (theoretically) paid ads ever on xorph.com, now. I don’t have any particular moral objection to ads; it just never seemed worth the trouble before. Until Clockers got boingboinged.
As Holly pointed out, I wrote 991 extremely short stories and she wrote 41 stories that interlock in a crossword, and yet the fanfic we did for a bad movie is what starts eating into our fifteen minutes. Internet is really weird.
I am listening, right now, to the live stream from a Canadian university radio station that is rebroadcasting our giggly high-noise recording of Clockers. At least the DJ (one “Jordie Sparkle”) asked our permission first. Wait, no, I meant “forgiveness, after they started, in the hopes that Clockers was CC-licensed because NFD is.”
Okay! Let’s go to the phones!
So some of you may remember that I like Hackers. I like it a lot. I realized some time ago that while I am not into Rocky Horror, if Rocky Horror was Hackers, I would be a full on costume-wearing hot-dog-throwing line-reciting fanboy. GET A JOB, I would shriek. YOU ARE IN THE BUTTER ZONE.
I recently moved to London and into a house where the function of the residents is, essentially, to egg each other on about goofy ideas. Catriona provided the idea of doing read-throughs of plays or movie scripts as a form of participatory recreation, and Holly asked if there was anything I’d like to toss in the prospective-script pile. Could it be really bad, I asked? Because there was one that could be funny.
Later, we were passing around emails about said read-throughs and a possible visit to a museum full of automata. Somehow Holly came up with the joke of steampunk “hackers” as “clockers,” constructing automata instead of programs. I laughed at it. Then I said “clock the Bigben!” Then I said “oh no,” because I really had more important things to do.
Instead, Holly and I spent a few weeks interpolating the movie script into 1860s London, replacing the absurd computer-feats with absurd clockwork and technobabble with Victorian slang. Then we revised and got it printed and got some friends to come over and wear funny hats, and this was the result: Clockers.
Of the people who did the read-through, only Holly and I had read the script or indeed seen the original movie beforehand, and they all did a fantastic job picking up multiple parts and figuring out what was going on. And putting up with my Matthew Lillard impression. Thanks again, guys, and let me know if you want a link under your name on that page.
Is there anybody pretending to be in love with Scarlett Johansson who is not, in point of fact, still in love with Charlotte from Lost in Translation? With the girl in the white jacket with the clear umbrella? In love with Sofia Coppola’s vulnerable little other-self in the pink wig with her head on your shoulder who is maybe going to get a zit under the corner of her mouth? Because if so: you’re doing it wrong.
Or with the Air song, or with this song “Too Young” by Phoenix that’s only in it for like five seconds.
Quick fanboy bit here, just for the benefit of Google.
There are three significant fonts in Brick, and I accidentally discovered all three of them in separate places. The block title on the posters is in Font Bureau’s Giza. The title that zooms away after the cold open is Todd Bushman’s Cipher. The front of the party invitation is MillaN’s Sand.
I finally watched Primer, with the expected result.
I guess I’m going to read the plot breakdown before I watch it again (yes, of course it’s on Internet; no, I’m not going to link to it). Mom claims that catch-what-you-can plots are the only kind I like, which is not quite true: I also like plots where good people do their best to destroy each other for perfectly good reasons. And romantic comedies.
Everybody compared Primer to Memento, but I think Primer is superior–both by its refusal to spell things out and by the fact that it doesn’t rely on a weird structure to screw with you. Rethinking a lot of things about structure, lately.
Dumber than Gladiator; much dumber than Braveheart. Still less dumb than Sin City.
Also, really loud.