This cracks me up
I don’t know. Maybe you have to live here. But I can totally see the monster pausing his rampage for a refreshing cup of tea and a slice of toast (from a Daily Mail feature on horror movies on break).
Christmas is a week from today. Feel free to be unserious!
Or, you know, feel free to continue being serious, if you’d rather. And if the unserious comments and the serious comments bump up against each other in an awkward, embarrassing way, we can deal with that. Together.
December 18, 2012 — 10:47 pm
Comments: 49
The Butler’s Song
‘Nother YouTube. This is The Butler’s Song. The performance (happily caught on phone cam, looks like) was in 2010, singer is nonagenarian actor George S. Irving (he was also the narrator for Underdog — there’s trivia for you!). The song is from the short-lived Broadway play So Long, 174th Street, which was an adaptation of the long-lived play Enter Laughing, based on Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiography.
Dolores del Río, by the way, was a Mexican actress, one of the lucky ones who successfully made the transition from Silents to Talkies. She was also the One Great Love of Orson Welles’ life.
And you’re a better man than I if you don’t get at least that first line badly stuck in your head. Which — am I wrong? — more or less shares its tune with I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy and She Was an Acrobat’s Daughter (at 4:23, but give yourself a treat and watch the whole damn thing).
And that there is a metric buttload of ancient pop culture references. If you got them all without following the links, you a) are old, b) American and c) wasted your youth sat open-mouthed in front of a television set. Like me.
November 27, 2012 — 11:43 pm
Comments: 17
Gooble-gabble, gooble-gabble. One of us, one of us.
Hey, remember Daniel Knauf? He’s the Hollywood writer/producer who reacted to the death of Andrew Breitbart with a spectacular fuck-you-leftards I-am-Breitbart Twitter meltdownapaloozala last week. It was neat-o.
Well, he’s got this idea for a movie format. He calls it a box narrative. He’s written a complete script and hired actors and filmed the whole thing. In a house. Full of cameras.
And you — you internet-addicted short-attention-span ADD chipmunk, you — you can watch the story any way you like, by hopping around from camera to camera.
I don’t know if you can pause and rewind, or what. They haven’t released the thing yet and I’m hazy on details.
The first one is a horror movie about a paranormal investigation that goes horribly wrong. It’s by invitation only. Only the first 5,000 people to sign up can watch (at first, anyway). But they won’t release it until 5,000 people have signed up.
I’m in. Join me?
Be a part of…well, I won’t say history. These experimental narrative thingies never work, but heaven help me I love ’em anyway.
And we want Mr Knauf to feel the love, don’t we?
March 13, 2012 — 11:02 pm
Comments: 31
That ain’t right
Okay, so this is Johnny Depp’s “Jack Sparrow” tattoo, in honor his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and his own son Jack, born the year before.
Problem is? That’s not a sparrow. It’s a swallow.
“Jack Swallow” may not be the most prepossessing moniker, but at least the swallow has a long history starring in nautical tattoos. Supposedly, you were entitled to a swallow for every 5,000 nautical miles traveled.
No sniggering in the back there.
Only, Prof. Keith Simpson‘s Forensic Medicine says a swallow tattoo was once used as a discreet signal of homosexuality.
You don’t need to think about that one too hard. The lesson is, don’t let people doodle permanent pictures on your skin, ‘K?
Tomorrow – 6pm WBT – new Dead Pool. Be here.
January 26, 2012 — 11:24 pm
Comments: 28
Homeless movie star fetches up in East Sussex
Available for adoption: um, this dog.
Starred in The Prisoner of Azkaban (a film I saw but totally do not recall) as Gary Oldman’s fursona. He also did some TV shows in the UK. Now he’s too old to work and his stuntman owner travels too much to take care of him.
Personally, I think that’s pretty shitty. If you take on a dog — working dog or pet — you have a life-long obligation.
On the other hand, maybe he comes with a nice little nest-egg from his Hollywood days and they’re afraid to say so for fear of drawing the wrong kind of applicants.
Anyhow, free dog!
What? Oh, not us. We’re confirmed cat people.
In the Sylvester’s Granny sense, not the Nastassia Kinski sense.
September 28, 2011 — 9:59 pm
Comments: 13
Gumby and Clokey
How did I miss this? Art Clokey died a year ago.
Yeah, you know — the man who gave us Gumby and Pokey. Among other psychedelic horrors.
After undergraduate work in geology and a stint in WWII, Clokey studied film under surreal filmmaker and master of the montage Slavko Vorkapich.
Cokey’s USC graduate project was a short clay animation called Gumbasia — a play on Fantasia. Watch it; it’s worth three minutes of your time.
The president of the Motion Pictures Producers Association saw Gumbasia and funded Clokey’s next project, which turned out to be Gumby.
Oh, and lest we forget, Art and his wife Gloria created the doll-based animations Davey and Goliath (admit it, the words, “oh, Davey” just went through your head in Goliath’s goofy-ass voice). Yeah. That’s weird, because Clokey was a Buddhist or some shit, and D&G was a product of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
I read that Davey appeared in a late Gumby cartoon acting like a dick, but I can’t find a copy of it online.
Gumby’s wonk-head was inspired by this picture of Clokey’s dad, who died in a car accident when Art was nine. As tributes go, that’s a weirdy.
I’m fascinated by Clokey’s work in particular and clay animation in general (the term “claymation” was trademarked by Will Vinton in 1978), mostly because it skeeves the hell out of me. In 1975, I sat through the Fantastic Animation Festival, like, seven times, mostly to see the short Closed Mondays over and over.
I tried my hand at stop-motion animation in my teens, but all I had available was a video camera. That’s no good at all — you get a little jump and snow whenever the heads start and stop, which is every frame. I soon gave up, so you’re spared that horror.
Anyhow, RIP Art Clokey. Here are some links:
The intro to Gumby Dharma, a documentary about Art Clokey. Mandala, another Clokey film for adults (really, really stoned ones). Clokey’s animated credits for Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965). A print interview of Art and Gloria from Omni. Part one of a six-part interview with Clokey. And finally, Marv Newland’s famous 1967 student animation Bambi Meets Godzilla — just because.
January 14, 2011 — 9:37 pm
Comments: 30
Nan in the Pan
Most people probably know this movie from the MST3K version. It was the first episode hosted by Mike Nelson, and featured a cameo at the end featuring Mary Jo Pehl as The Head (or “Jan in the Pan” as they called her).
But me, I first saw this movie on the afternoon Creature Feature when I was a kid and it scared the hell out of me. I totally empathized with Jan in the Pan. What did all that stuff sound like splooshing around in the tubes? What if her nose itched?
The Ick Factor was enhanced by a very convincing imitation severed-head-in-a-pan at the state fair the next year, done using a variation of the Pepper’s ghost illusion.
Anyhow, at first I thought it was high-larious that Nancy wouldn’t step down and the remaining Dem caucus was all, like, “oh no — we weren’t liberal enough.” But my LULs are giving way to a pervading uneasiness. They either psychotically missed the world’s most obvious message, or they heard us loud and clear and just don’t give a shit. Not good, either way.
In a two-party system, it’s dangerously bad mojo if either party gets too crazy.
November 18, 2010 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 10
Camacho’s teleprompter is more persuasive than Obama’s
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho utters those inspiring words in Idiocracy. But when the camera panned down to show them scrolling across a teleprompter, I ’bout died.
What the heck — I’ve done Mary Poppins and bad cartoons this week.
I remembered Idiocracy as being a mildly funny, one-joke movie. But I rewatched it with Uncle B last night, and…I dunno. Maybe I was just in the mood for it. Or maybe it seems a lot truer four years later.
Idiocracy is a 2006 film from Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-Head, Office Space) and it’s a real blunt instrument of a comedy.
A dude and a hooker are locked into high tech pods and put into chemical hibernation in an Army experiment that is supposed to last a year. Instead, they lie forgotten until the pods are accidentally opened five hundred years later. For five centuries, dumb people have been breeding like bunnies, until dumb people are all that’s left.
That’s the joke, and he manages to spin a whole movie out of it. But it’s a better movie than I remembered. I didn’t realize until second time through how many clever sight gags are going on in the background.
There’s some mystery surrounding its release. Fox owned it, and didn’t advertise it at all. Didn’t release a trailer. Didn’t pre-screen it for the critics. Released it in a fraction of the usual number of theaters. Basically sat on it until the DVD. Nobody’s quite sure why.
It is savagely nasty about several actual corporations, including Fox itself (the most popular program of 2505 is a Fox offering called “Ow, My Balls!”), Starbucks (which vends handjobs instead of coffee) and Carl’s Jr. (whose new motto is “Fuck You! I’m Eating!”). But Fox has certainly allowed many of its programs to poke fun of it in the past, so I dunno what the deal is.
The scary part? We watched it on a commercial channel and the ads seamlessly blended into the movie, so dumb were they.
July 14, 2010 — 10:48 pm
Comments: 20
Mary Poppins was a commie
I was four when Mary Poppins was released, and I was obsessed with it. I made my mother take me to see it, like, five times — and I might have gotten a sixth out of her, if I hadn’t made the grandmama of all mother/daughter faux pas.
“Mother,” I asked dreamily, “if you died, what are the chances Papa would marry Julie Andrews?”
Ow.
Oh, don’t worry. I paid. Yes, I did.
Anyhow.
I watched Mary Poppins again last week, and it…really, really doesn’t hold up. The special effects are horrible, the dream sequence in the middle is long and boring and…I didn’t remember it as an anti-capitalist message movie. Three years before the Summer of Love, while the Beatles were singing I Wanna Hold Your Hand, the movie gives off a definite whiff of “fuck this Victorian work ethic shit — let’s get high and fly kites.”
Take the tuppence sequence, where Michael’s father and Mary P offer competing visions of what a little boy could do with two pennies.
Mister Banks the banker advises him to put it in the bank (ooooh…subtle):
You see, Michael, you’ll be part of
Railways through Africa
Dams across the Nile
Fleets of ocean greyhounds
Majestic, self-amortizing canals
Plantations of ripening tea
Mary Poppins offers him a bag of crumbs.
See…even at four, I wasn’t sure Michael chose well.
Many years later, I lived the tuppence-a-bag experience, sitting in London’s Victoria Station flipping bits of my sandwich to the pigeons. “Technically,” Uncle B told me, “those are vermin. You could get arrested if anybody sees you doing that.”
Everything looks sparklier in the movies.
Anyhow, the point is, bad ideas are like bad diseases — you usually have to go WAY back further in time than you think to find Patient Zero.
July 12, 2010 — 10:37 pm
Comments: 65
What, this again?
You know, it just figures that my childhood was haunted by scenes from this distasteful lump of schlock. I don’t have any memory of seeing it, but somebody must’ve propped infant me in front of the tube one day for the afternoon creature feature. A couple of images got stuck way down in the deep tissues, right next to the amydgala. Or whatever that brainal thing is we inherited from reptiles.
I had no idea where those visions came from until I was in my twenties and tuned in this camp Vincent Price thing for a laugh.
Yeah, if “laugh” is the sound you make when somebody sticks your frontal lobes in a light socket.
So it was a sure thing Uncle B would buy it for me, wasn’t it? He had no idea I’d even heard of this flick. I just asked him to pick out any Rifftrax film at random, and this is what he came up with.
Rifftrax is what the MST3K guys decided to do when they grew up. Which is basically the same thing they were doing before, but with recent blockbuster movies.
They get away with it because you buy a legit copy of the movie, then you download their MP3 riffing on it and play them both at once. Unfortunately, there are synch issues outside the US, so Uncle B had to buy one of their DVD’s with the riffing and the movie together. Hence it had to be an old movie.
This one.
Of course.
I’ll get my revenge. I’m ‘onna make him watch it, if I can get it to play on the Limeybox.
May 6, 2010 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 23