Famous Mysterious Actor quote of the week

"If you lined him up against a row of other entertainers, he'd be like a machine gun murdering their freedom forever."

Crash and Burn! The return of Mr. Chair's Comic Book Pick of the Week!

Sorry for the lapse. This week's MCCBPoTW is "Seven Soldiers of Victory," by Grant Morrison. I'm not sure where Morrison's going with this, but I like the cut of its jib so far. This Zero issue is the launch of four mini-series by Morrison and various artists. Each story will involve a new character, somehow in the current DC Universe but never before mentioned. Weird. The first issue is very cool, and not surprisingly, confusing. This guy's writing a lot lately, and it's all been pretty good. The Losers is also great this week.

Notable books of past weeks include: New Stray Bullets, Lapham's Batman, cool new Gotham Central storyline.

By the way, the OC was excellent last week, with a running Spider-man theme. Don't know if anyone caught it. I gotta say, while I love the amount of 90s music, I'm a little thrown, since the characters are way too young for it. Boyz II Men played a big part in the last episode, as did Blind Melon, and a cover of Champagne Supernova. So good. I also watched "The Pink Panther," for the first time all the way through. Peter Sellers is so funny. Inspector Clousseau has become kind of a cliche, but there are a few scenes of slapstick brilliance. He's not in the film nearly enough. I've been a blogging fiend lately. Someone step in here and break up my nonsense.

The Buzzz Sheet

Wow. It's been over a year and a half since I did my
last Buzzz Sheet, something that was originally a
weekly thing. I'm making no promises for the future,
but I thought it was about time to clear out some of
the stuff that I had absentmindedly collected over the
last couple of months. Maybe it will inspire me to
get back to doing this more regularly. Maybe.

Here it is:

THE BUZZZ SHEET

What People Are REALLY Talking About

[as overheard... well... the months leading up to
6/27/05]

1. CREDITS

Elderly Woman Talking To Another Elderly Woman During
the Closing Credits of "Faranheit 9/11": I'm glad you
slept through that.

2. REAL STUFF

Teenage Boy 1: Have you noticed we never talk about
real stuff?

Teenage Boy 2: Of course, we're skating friends.

3. REPHRASING

Man: Let me rephrase that shit.

4. SEQUELS/PREQUELS

Man1: A new before the Excorcist movie is coming out.

Man2: Really? They always do that. They always go
before or after.

Man3: Star Wars.

Man2: They went every which way with Star Wars. Why
did they have to do earlier movies with Star Wars?

Man1: The first one was Chapter 4.

Man2: Yeah, Chapeter 4, so they say.

5. 18

Teenage Boy: I got my liscense suspended until I'm
18. Twice.

6. THE DAVINCI CODE

Man1: This is pretty good.

Man2: What?

Man1: The Davinci Code.

Man2: What's it about?

Man1: Uh... a bunch of codes.

7. BITTER

Man: I was married to Satan's Daughter. I used to be
bitter about it, but not anymore.

8. SWEDEN

Teenage Boy1: Let's go to Sweden, bitch.

Teenage Boy2: Sweden is gay.

9. HEIGHT

Woman1: I've always wondered how tall he was.

Woman2: Jesus?

Woman1: Yeah.

Woman2: I think he was average height.

Woman1: What do you consider average height?

10. LEFT-OVERS

Teenage Girl: I have some left over birth control
pills. Does anybody want one?

It cures what ails you

Read/watch every single one of these, but especially the most recent at the request of Catfish: "Rock Opera."

STRONGBAD

STOLEN FROM OPTIC NERVE P.1

I Propose a New Religion p.2 or The Pod People

I was talking to Dr. Chase while we were waiting for the Spongebob movie to start, and he was saying, "I actually thought the other day about which of my friends or family I would sacrifice to keep my iPod. I ultimately decided that I wouldn't do it, but just the fact that I thought about it says a lot."

And then we were at a barbecue last weekend where there were four iPod owners, and when talking about the pros and cons of the iPod, I blurted out, "There are no drawbacks, and if anyone disagrees, I'll fight them right now." There was some shock, but I think they all felt that way deep down.

Today I was at the bookstore drinking coffee, and little white wires dangling from my ears gave me away like a Star of David or a Crucifix. This old guy was outside the store and saw me through the window. He held up his iPod Shuffle, which hung around his neck, mouthed "Shuffle," and grinned. I nodded and grinned and kissed my little iPod friend and he rode off on his bike. I got a little bit embarrased because there were people all around. They must have thought, "God he thinks he's so high and mighty, like he's better than everyone else." That's when I realized that I finally know what it's like to have religion. But instead of sharing faith in a god, we share heaven on earth, with our entire music collections dangling under our clothes near our hearts. Blessed be. And blessed be the Robot Jox too.

Self-induced Hallucinations

My favorite film this year has been "Finding Neverland". It inspired me to try and stretch my imagination. This has been especially important as I've been working on lots of creative projects. I want to use more imagination and Paris in the winter just kills my imagination. It can be very pretty in spring and summer, but in winter it feels so dull and it gets dark so early and it doesn't have much of the night-stimuli that keep an imagination going, like Tucson's trains or the rusting mills of small towns or the grinding subways of large cities. Paris in the winter is like a white crinoline veil that will lift in spring to reveal all kinds of colors. But right now, everything feels vanilla.

So I tried to induce inspiration and imagination on myself. I tried this morning as I was waking up. I was still in bed and I told myself to dreamily follow my imagination--to not say no to anything that might come along and whisk me somewhere. I didn't quite know what was going on, but while still awake, I heard music in my head, something that went along with a scene from my movie. I thought it was really cool. I was controlling the music. I could just think of what mood I wanted and the right accompanying music would appear, just like that. I could hear it so vividly I could have hummed along. At one point the imagination dwindled and I realized that I wasn't as clever as I thought. Stupid me didn't realize that I'd had my headphones on and was just listening to music, claiming authorship for myself. But then I did a doubletake because I wondered how could the music possibly be coming through the headphones when I WASN'T WEARING ANY HEADPHONES!!!

A cool way to freak yourself out in the morning. I recommend it. And since I did such a good job convincing myself of music that wasn't there, and then headphones that weren't there, I thought really, anything could happen today. It made me feel that despite the fact that I had nothing planned for the day, even in a vacuum of activity, I would find something interesting about the day. I looked out the window and there was at least three inches of snow.

I will try later to concentrate hard enough to see and hear things that aren't there. It's a really cool idea. Have you ever tried to provoke hallucinations in yourself? It's obviously easier when you're waking up or falling asleep, but I think that when I was a kid, the imagination was so strong that if I really believed that the sand under the playground was lava, I could momentarily see it red and smoke rising. I really thought that Finding Neverland was a reminder of that power. We forget we have it as adults. It doesn't serve us like it did as kids. But we should use it. Especially if you are an actor or writer. I think it's possible to rope imagination more forcefully into our dimension of reality. It doesn't have to be just thought and abstraction.

If your imagination becomes too real and you start talking to people (or dragons) that aren't there, people will call you crazy. And I guess that is why people avoid imagination. But I've seen a 2 year old boy pick up a toy and talk to it. That's what we call playing, but to him, it's probably just talking. He doesn't just think it can talk back. He hears it talk back.

Yesterday, I went to a funeral of the sister of a friend. I only met her once. She was the director of an art gallery and probably was no more than thirty. She died accidentally in Brazil. I don't even know how. After the funeral mass we exited the church and among her hundreds of friends that came, a few had musical instruments and played music. They led a procession from the church to the art gallery. It was so unbelievable to me that there was this happy trombone, tuba, percussion, and trumpet music playing in the middle of the gray Paris avenues. People didn't know what to think as they looked out from restaurant windows and walked along slimy sidewalks holding umbrellas to keep their heads out of the snow. A brass orchestra followed by two hundred mourners is not something you see in workaday Paris all the time. But I thought it was the perfect tribute to this girl who dedicated her life to art and beauty. It was unexpected and it was beautiful and it is what life should be about. We shouldn't save parades for holidays and funerals. I'd like to put up a parade right fucking now. Why not? Every day that I don't see a spontaneous parade, I feel sad. I should try harder to do things like that. I don't know what imaginative things I've done outside of my own head lately. It's either too cold or I don't have enough money or I'm worried I'll go to jail. The police hate imagination. I thought about doing something stupid in front of tourists at Notre Dame to earn money, but it's too cold and the police would probably stop me. But I'm going to think of something. I'll do something imaginative.

And if you do something imaginative, please report back to us on the Time and Space Lounge.

You Fucking Sentimental Sissies

"Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself."
-Philip Larkin

Hunter S. Thompson was a liar and a cheat, the worst kind of low-life scoundrel and I’m glad the poor, sad bastard is dead. I’m half-surprised he had the brass to do it in the first place. Probably a goddam accident. Sure as hell wouldn’t have been the first time he shot something by mistake. If he had any class at all he would have ended his hallucinated, glory-driven life long before this shit-storm of a millennium ever began. No class. No class at all. But what can you expect from a cracker-ass country boy from Kentucky who spent all his time shooting off his shit into the great abyss. Firearms, stolen motorcycles, careless rants and tirades blazing tirelessly, ceaselessly into the ether. And for what? Just another angry voice from the most commercialized generation. The saddest kind of old-man bastard, most wretched of the wretched, yearning to be free, scratching and clawing at it with every drug-soaked fiber of his being. Well you’re free now you depraved sonofabitch. I’ll drink grain alcohol and piss fire on your grave if it’s the last thing I do.

Savage Journey

"That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it...It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying."
--About Ernest Hemingway, from "What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?"

"When I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into The Fountain, 28 stories below ... but Jesus, it would be a wonderful way to go out ... and if I do you bastards are going to owe me a king-hell 44-gun salutr (that word is "salute," goddamnit- and I guess I can't work this elegant typewriter as well as I thought I could) ... But you know I could, if I had just a little more time. Right? Yes."
--From "Author's Note," The Great Shark Hunt, 1977.

I guess we probably should have seen it coming. But for those who admired Hunter Thompson, we loved to believe that he could survive on the humor he used to mask a deep outrage and sadness and passion that fueled his life. That would be the greatest shame of his suicide, if people trivialized him, somehow considered it "Gonzo Writer's Wild Story Ends," as AOL has labeled it. Or my co-worker, who sort of shrugged it off as one last act of macho bravado from a living joke. He's more than the cliche we turned him into, and you just have to read his thousands of pages of superb magazine work to realize that he's much more than the "fear and loathing" guy.

Hemingway said, "We do not have great writers ... something happens to our good writers at a certain age ... You see we make our writers into something very strange ... We destroy them in many ways." We made Thompson into a wild cartoon of himself (literally, if you're a Doonesbury or Transmetropolitan reader), and it's not like he didn't create that image. But it'd be too bad if he's not remembered as the writer of volume after volume in which he churned out the god's honest truth as he saw it, without fail. Or the journalist who annihilated the inverted pyramid for his very own structure and technique that is poorly imitated on a daily basis. Or the tender idealist who wrote this passage about the death of the 1960s:

"There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Or another favorite that used to decorate our basement college newsroom before it was turned to rubble:

"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

To cut to the chase, Hunter Thompson is my hero. It's very sad to see him go, and I'll always think of him as riding the crest of that beautiful wave, creating a high-water mark for all of us filthy swine who dare attempt to follow his example.

By the way, the best coverage I've seen so far is at the Guardian.

SAMURAI!!!

I just finished reading the phenomenal, twenty-eight volume series of graphic novels entitled "Lone Wolf and Cub." I was granted this luxury by: a.) Carrying all of them at my place of employment, and b.) Having an hour-long lunch break. I had originally planned to post this on my own personal page, but mainly find myself singing my most esteemed praises here, simply to spite a certain EWF and his nerdy and slightly homoerotic obsession with sweaty young men running and leaping about, a big round ball in one hand and the other on firm pair of quadriceps. We all have our geek, geek.
Ha ha. Ha ha ha.
If you ever decide to read an entire collection of Japanese graphic novels, make sure it is "Lone Wolf and Cub," created, written and illustrated by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima. They have truly created a masterpiece.
Even if you don’t feel like committing to the entire story – it is quite long and at 10 bucks a copy, not cheap – pick up any volume and you’ll walk away with something. Each book has a series of stories in them, like any collection of short fiction. Some pertain strictly to the overall storyline of the series, a samurai father and his small boy setting out alone to set something right, but some are just small vignettes that tell the story of one of the many characters they meet on their journey. Always interesting and always a window into a different person’s way of life. Peasants, fishermen, prostitutes, merchants, local rulers, (ninjas), and the list goes on. Every aspect of life is covered, carefully researched, it is a window into the way life and society worked in 18th century Japan.
It is more cinematic, more cinematographic, than a lot of comics I see on the shelves. I think this is more common in Japanese works, a comic industry that has survived and thrived for as long as the one we have, the two evolving before they met. They are typically thicker volumes than what we have here. But, with over 7000 pages in the whole series, I wouldn’t be surprised if half of them were just art, no words at all. I think most American comic fans become disgruntled with that because we want some damn story in our 24-page weeklies so we don’t start to feel ripped off. But there is the sense of more time taken in these Japanese works. “Slow down,” they seem to say. Help to achieve Mu while viewing the work. Find the story in the pictures. And the art is amazing. Entirely painted, it’s all black and white and yet so full of life and motion, emotion.
But as incredible as the art is, the storytelling makes it great. It is a simple plotline, like so many of our westerns, a man on a quest for justice, a quest for anything really. But like any story, it’s all about the character. His beliefs, his wants and his needs. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the Samurai way of life (and sword fighting), but I also like to see perseverance and tenacity in the face of great adversity no matter how it is revealed to me.
And let’s not forget about the kid. His character is as important as his father’s if not more so. A three-year-old boy who bears witness to slaughter after slaughter, oft times going into battle holding on to his father’s back, and trying to make sense of it all in the Way of the Samurai - life in death - and always confronted with the choice of the life of a warrior and the life of a child. It is truly beautiful.
I have shed a tear or two in more than one copy. Granted, I have a tendency to cry more in episodes of honor and heroics than sadness and misfortune – though I’m not entirely immune to the latter – this series has it all.
Read them.

Totally self-serving

Hey, my longform improv group, The Secret Show, is performing this Tuesday night (the 22nd) at Club Congress at 9 (although, it being a bar and all, we probably won't actually start until closer to 9:30). It's only $3, and there will be drink specials, and it'll be funny.

And if we get a good crowd, I'll actually be better about posting stuff here. Eh? Eh?

I propose a new religion!

One that is based on Robot Jox. When I watched it for the first time recently, it immediately struck me as one of those movies that becomes far more than it actually is, as the passage of time ages it like fine bathtub gin. Then I watched it again the next day. How this 1990 stop-motion opus isn't a cult icon amazes me.

For those who haven't been indoctrinated, the plot is perfection: In a vision of jarringly bad prognostication, post-nuclear holocaust Earth is so wiped out and turned off of traditional gun and missle warfare that all of its quarrels are settled with a one-on-one fight. But not just any fight. A Robot Jox fight! Men are strapped into 1960s astronaut suits and placed on a treadmill, all mounted in the head of a giant robot suit. But one man can't win a fight, as the cowboy hat-wearing American coach reminds us. It's a patriotic team effort, and one following massive preparation. They battle in Death Valley, California, where spectators ("bleacher bums") watch their countries compete for ownership of the planet's remaining land. There are many rules and procedures (short vs. long range attack, the use of rocket-feet, limited use of secret weapons, and varying models of robot), but I won't get into all of the details. It is the details, however, that make this movie shine.

Details and the horrible execution. See, if this movie were made recently, it would simply be mediocre, flooded with boring CGI and B-list actors a la that Reign of Fire dragon movie. Hardly worth a religion. But Robot Jox was made right in the hinterlands between 80s jerky model work and the infancy of computer FX. The production clearly centered on the construction of the robots, which by themselves are actually pretty cool Voltron-ish creations. But all of their movements are a combination of stop-motion and Godzilla-style pyrotechnics. That and the set design, acting and dialogue are all seemingly the creation of eighth-graders.

I think the spirit of the film is what really excited me though. Stuck in limbo between the 80s and 90s, it has a blend of patriotic rah-rah themes like Top Gun, ultra-violent anti-war themes like Red Dawn, and technology obsession like that of Jurassic Park, Terminator or Robocop. It's confusing, and unlike any setting anyone has ever seen in serious film, much less real life.

And this is where science fiction shines as the heart of a popular culture. It taps a little bit of culture's substance and keeps it in a tiny vial. It doesn't attempt to carbon-copy that culture like serious drama, but it makes a caricature of it, which is far more useful than a realistic recreation. Sort of how Hunter Thompson's cartoonish interpretations of an event can depict it better than a newspaper's reproduction of the exact occurence. Or how those who watched Buffy maintain it's the most realistic show on TV, despite the inclusion of vampires and magic. Fantasy copes with reality better than reality does.

There are certain works, like Robot Jox, that encapsulate a time that never really existed, but nonetheless exist in a society's ether. Some examples off the top of my head are Pulp Fiction, Bond movies, Elvis movies, Frankie and Annette movies, Swingers, They Live, Go, The Big Lebowski, Johnny Mnemonic, New Jack City. Stuff like that. We've never been there, but we're still nostalgic when it's on screen. William Gibson nailed what I'm trying to describe with his short story, "The Gernsback Continuum," about a guy for whom 1930s pulp and propaganda images materialize into his daily life. Another one I'm obsessed with (although Shanara Chase has suggested I'm actually obsessed with a budding Angelina Jolie) is Hackers. To me, this is the ultimate 90s movie. It presents the perfect mirage of 90s technoculture that never really came to fruition. The radio techno soundtrack, the computer obsession, the not-quite-futuristic fashion all reflect the time when we looked at the Internet with giddy anticipation and not yet as a tool of daily life. And whenever I see a movie like this, it owns me, regardless of how good or staggeringly bad it is.

And so, Robot Jox, you own me. I recommend anyone watch this fine fine film, and then join me for, if not a religion, a devoted club. I'm going to call it "The Robot Jox," for lack of any better title that does or could ever exist.

Has anybody else in here ...

accidentally typed in our domain name, were we not affiliated with blogger? The result is something that never occurred to me, although quite funny.

http://www.tslounge.com/

It's True

I just saw a commercial for barbecue sauce that you're supposed to put on your dog's food. They're calling it Savory Sauce. Do dogs know savory?

You bastards. You really did it.

I just drove a couple hundred miles from Canada to Oregon, drank one glass of wine and watched an episode of The O.C., so I'm teetering on the brink of going into a magical roofie-like sleep. But with one eye open I'm reaching up to the keyboard to punch these last few words of the night, for fear that if I don't convey this feeling I'll wake up in the morning and the world will have changed forever and I'll have not recorded my fleeting thoughts as it's just about to happen. I'm like Anne Frank right before she was caught by the Nazis. I just watched an advertisement for Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. Cherry, Vanilla, Saccharin, and the base flavor for Dr. Pepper - prune (that's right, look it up). I am Charleton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes.

The Buzzz Sheet

I was digging through some old emails and I found The Buzzz Sheet One Year Anniversary Special Edition. So here's a snippet to enjoy!

1. POINTING

Man yelling into cell phone and pointing down the street: I'm pointing at you dammit! Don't talk to me like that!

2. HEAD

Little boy: I'm gonna take off my head. I can't.

3. DIRECTION

Waitress: Where's this going? Think, think, think.

4. PENS

Woman 1: Hows come I don't have a purple pen?
Woman 2: I brought this over from Vedder.
Woman 1: Vedder has purple pens? And you left?

5. HELP

Little boy: I help him. He lifts it and I stab him.

6. BIG TOM

Woman: Yeah! Big Tom! [pause] Well I gotta piss.

7. SURPRISE

Man: That's what was great about Mary shooting Nick from her vagina. It surprised us and we loved it.

8. RUMORS

Man: There's a rumor going around the office that I suck.

9. REASON

Man 1: I heard dipshit tasered himself in the nuts.
Man 2: Yeah. It was funny.
Man 1: How'd he do it?
Man 2: He just put the taser to his nuts and pulled the trigger...ZAP!
Man 1: Was there any particular reason?
Man 2: No; well actually tequila was the reason.

10. BLOODY

Woman: The doctor was like, "who's next?" and I was like, "How about bloody?"

Rock

Gotta love the redneck liberals, the hick lefties, the folks who grew up poor on the wrong side of the tracks and still managed to have an educated, realistic view of the world, the folks who know war is ugly because it’s their family and friends who are bleeding for the oil, the folks who don’t need macho posturing, who rise above without losing their roots, the folks who know when to shout loud and when to march.
Woody Guthrie was one. So were Townes Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. I’m one. And Steve Earle is one too.
Last night was a show I wouldn’t miss, in a venue that I’d endure for Steve Earle and precious few others.
Fittingly, he opened with The Revolution Starts Now (strangely enough a song he played again, after the Beatles Revolution).
The last two albums dominated the night, but what’s a Steve Earle show without Guitar Town, Copperhead Road, Transcendental Blues, Christmas in Washington and You’re Still Standin’ There?
It was rock ‘n’ roll and country twang all wrapped up in a righteous anger that I’m all too willing to share.
This is a guy who dedicated his last year to removing the warmongers from the White House and lost, painfully. How does he handle it?
Well, as he said during the encore, the way to survive the election that ensured four more years (of imperial capitalist aggression, runaway debt in the way of the continued economic war on the middle- and lower classes) the way to get through it all is simple: Travel out of the country, fall in love and play one kick-ass Rolling Stones cover a night (this one was Sweet Virginia, though I’d have preferred his sharp-edged version of Dead Flowers).

Good to see the Lounge is buzzin’. Let’s keep it up everybody.

Impunctual! It's Mr. Chair's Comic Book Pick of the Week!

So late. My boss broke her shoulder last week and I got called into work late right after I went to the comic store. It took me days to get around to reading them all. How come all the bad stuff happens to me?

But seriously, the MCCBPotW was pretty easy. The Losers, by Andy Diggle and Jock, was great. Rough sex scene with two major characters, two other major characters taken out or close to it. And a sweet cover of the Losers walking over the Union Jack. Diggle's British, and took the American characters to the UK for the first time since their creation. I can't remember if I wrote about the Losers yet, so here's a rundown of why it's so cool. Diggle writes these great conspiracy action thriller plotlines, and Jock illustrates them so they really move on the page. His pacing and cartoony characters make for action sequences on the same caliber as Scud: The Disposable Assassin, the greatest comic of its time during the late 90s. It's basically about this team of gung ho army guys who get set up for a fall by a mysterious CIA underboss who is somehow related to every bad thing America does. They fake their deaths and regroup as this phantom team of renegade soldiers. A la the A-Team, they each have their own specialties and back stories, and they're all really cool. So read it. It's fun. It's better than any shootemup action movie Hollywood has put out in the last, um, ever. (Was Face Off good? I want to say yes, but I'm having a hard time deciding.)

Chomberson in Canada

Following in Mr. Chair's footsteps, I will attempt to post entries from my continuing adventure up in the land of Canucks. I cannot promise frequent updates, but hopefully I'll be able to add new stuff every now and then. Chomberson.

DECEMBER 11, 2004

I relocated to Canada.

I wish I could say I did it for political reasons, like I threatened to do so many months ago. But I'm actually up north for a different and much better reason -- at least personally. I am working on a real motion picture -- the sequel to a fairly popular movie released late last year. It could loosely be described as what happens when two cliched Shakespearean characters live in a world with "Angel"s and "Oz"es. (Anyone who doesn't know the movie, email George for more details).

So far, no star sightings. But lots of entertainment. I work for two extremely nice guys, one a family man, the other a ladies' man. Both were instantly welcoming to me, despite my status as a "must hire" (meaning the producers hired me, not them). I honestly couldn't have asked for better people to work for. We spend hours planning trips to bars (even though we always end up at the same place), comparing apartments and pretending that they're gay lovers (hooray, Canada is supporting gay marriage. Woo Hoo!) We're all from America and, therefore, also get endless enjoyment out of Canadian-speak, "right?"

The person I feel sorry for is our other co-worker, a Canuck with major gas problems. He's very sweet, despite the foul odors, and is a good tour guide to the sights and sounds of Vancouver. But he gets more than his fair share of good ol' American arrogance each day. We make him say "God Bless America" before he enters his office in the morning. He is constantly berated with jokes about curling (shuffleboard on iceskates) which is the major national sport until hockey returns. And we recently placed a map of the USA above his desk -- quizzes on the state capitals will begin soon.

He's a good sport but when we go too far, the comeback is a killer -- "George W. Bush". Our president's reelection is an impossible thing to defend, something I feel even more now that I'm in a country without a twangy, rapture-fearing, redneck middle. But to my surprise, when I crossed the border this past weekend to have dinner with my folks and finish my X-Mas shopping I was struck by an odd sense of patriotism, something I haven't felt since 2001 (when the Diamondbacks won the World Series, obviously). It was a true American homecoming -- returning, literally and figuratively, to my "mother/land" while relishing in the low-priced commercialism that makes the USA the ticking time bomb that it is. Although I do try to occasionally slip a "soory" in here and there to disguise my (correct) American pronunciation, I'm slowly realizing that I am much like Lee Greenwood. I'm not about to join the war or support it in the slightest, don't get me wrong. But I am kind of proud to be an American, Bush or no Bush.

Catfish at the cinema

For such a good movie, there was absolutely nothing creative about Sideways.
Imagine a buddy flick pairing, get this, polar opposites who despite some serious disagreements emerge as better friends.
Imagine a road-trip movie when, get this, an introvert breaks out of his shell a bit.
Imagine a wine metaphor that, get this, reveals so much more about the characters.
Imagine a bittersweet ending that, get this, brings salvation for the audience and the protagonist.
Imagine conventional cinematography, standard character-driven drama, and just the right amount of sappy music.
And imagine it all being damn good, good enough to earn the Oscars it was nominated for, if not all the praise. As DiGiovani put it, it’s the fourth best film of the year but also the most overrated. I kinda think I’d have enjoyed it more, with far less cynicism, if I were 40.
I guess my tastes swing more to the films that are just plain weird. Something that’s new and different, or at least has some cool gimmick. Check out my 2004 favorites. All sorts of slightly wacky pictures, and very little on the critically acclaimed drama. Maybe I’m not too big on the art of acting in general - film is a medium that can bring so damn much that you don’t necessarily need it that much. Combining music, photography, literature and all, I think film is best when it’s all swirling imagery and thought-provoking statements.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was so amazingly creative, both in the story and the visual presentation. Sure the acting is phenomenal as well, but it doesn’t just stop there. Hero was conventional in a sense, but it kicked so much ass in terms of color and action that it just blew me away. Shaun of the Dead was the funniest, strangest movie of the year. Both halves of Kill Bill were absolute playgrounds of cinema.
I saw the Life Aquatic last week and while it may have been a half step shy of Wes Anderson’s best, it still fit right in. Taking the chance of peppering the soundtrack with Portugese Bowie covers for no apparent reason just makes a better movie than some orchestral score. I thought the missteps in Life Aquatic were either having not enough of a story, or too much of one (it’s hard to tell with Anderson). The characters were weird and the premise contrived, but his strength is turning out fascinating movies in the face of those things.
And fascinating movies are what I prefer. I need to turn my netflix up a notch.