Grey Tuesday
Oh yeah, why was the site grey today? See here and more here.
Apocalypse Now: The Ride
It would totally work: Hop on a mechanized army riverboat as it takes you up the river to Cambodia. You’ll pass crazy army surfers! Then Playboy bunnies® dance for you! Then it’s on to Pan Trangh, “The asshole of the world!” Then your tailgunner gets shot, and finally you’re in a room with a bald, fat warlord who recites poetry until you kill him! It’s literally a high octane thrill ride!!!
Fog
Its combination of scratch and indie rock aesthetics could have been dreamed up in an ad agency, but nonetheless it’s great music so who cares? There’s the phrase “world’s greatest loser,” too, which you’ve got to love, in an adequatastic sort of way.
If I’m not posting much it’s ‘cause I’m off making a movie – some kind o’ crazy movie. It’s a blast, but takes a lot of time. Instead of reading here, you could go off and found that orphanage you’ve been meaning to found! Or eat that cheeseburger you’ve been meaning to eat!
Torontopia
I followed a comment from ÿ to the excellent Zoilus site and notice he’s using the word “Torontopia”. I know I’ve used it myself recently, but now I’m thinking it must mean more than I know. So I do a search and whaddaya know, an I King page is the first result, on account of a Discourse comment that spells out the entire thing (more here). Short version: Toronto is the best city, fuck Canadian identity insecurities; Toronto should secede; 905ers will be allowed to visit once a month. I’m down. Bring back the city-state!
Microsoft Office Gangbang Edition
Does anyone have copies of the unrated versions of those Microsoft Office ads? In which the jubilant office workers get carried away and fuck?
Insult Comic Dog Insults People. Outrage!
Come on, Canada. Get your shit together. Who the cock would get offended by Triumph? What’s he gonna do, come up here and complement everyone? The whole point of the gag is that he’s like, a dog puppet, who insults people. It’s a “scandal” only slightly stupider than that about Don Cherry calling Europeans and Quebeckers “wimps” or whatever it was he said. Frankly, I’m offended by anybody who takes Don Cherry seriously. He’s the only person in the world who’s racist against “Europeans”! It’s sorta cute! It’s not like he went off about the Seven Jew Bankers who control hockey or something.
Hero
If you a complete master kung fu swordfighter, you must never look at your opponents. Or face them, unless you are spinning sideways like an airborne top, with swords flying everywhere. But be careful, you shouldn’t barely ever use your sword. In fact, if you are a real, like hardcore real swordfighter, you should avoid fighting in general. If necessary, fight your opponents in your mind. Because the pinnacle of swordfighting is not using a sword at all, don’t you see? Absolute next-level type sheer sword geniuses like myself have never even picked up a sword. And if you challenge me to a sword fight I will face away and down like a heartbroken android and inform you with only the slightest hint of superiority that I have already won.
See? Watch Hero, you might learn something. It’s Zhang Yimou’s attempt at tiger crouching Rashomon, with kung fu champs Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung and the beautiful Zhang Ziyi. It’s very good. Beautiful with frequent wire-fight ass-kickings, just like life.
Conan
He’s in Toronto right now shooting weird Toronto-based episodes of his show, a ploy cooked up during the SARS crisis that I guess only came to fruition now. (A fruiting ploy? Mixmaster Metaphor!) Nonetheless he’s getting so much attention from press and mobs of fans alike that his amazed publicist said it appeared he was bigger than J-Lo.
I love this town.
The man-on-the-street interviews reveal a populace that is perfectly aware he wrote for SNL and the Simpsons, and they love him for it. Contrast that with J.Lo, whose artistic peak was stealing the Beatnuts’ “Watch Out Now”. Fucking A T-dot! That, coupled with the news that only 15% of Canadians would vote for Bush, makes me happy despite the asshole-in-sheep’s-clothing behaviour of the province’s new government right now.
Charlie White
I love this guy’s photos. If only he had a more Googlable name, like say Purposes L. Xylophonist, I might be able to dredge up more sites than this this this this this this.
Improv Everywhere
I posted their latest mission over on the linx thing there, but y’all should really have a look at some of Improv Everywhere’s other missions. Hours of entertainment! The “Megastore” and “Moebius” ones are especially good. So who wants to start a Torontopia chapter?
All the Real Girls
On y‘s reccomendation I gave this film a good watching. It’s very, very, very, very, very, very good, and if I believed in “truth” I would call it a very true film. I especially love how quickly and obliquely the film establishes its premise – it does in 5 minutes what most films do in 30. Then, one is carried by acting so naturalistic it manages to make a densely poetic script sound realistic. It features one of the best ‘heartbroken drunk’ scenes ever, in which the lead actor asks “Did you ever see that? An animal make a mistake?” as a tear courses down his face. Almost everyone should watch this film.
Cabin Fever
This was shot for under half a mil and premiered at the Toronto Film Fest’s Midnight Madness program. Apparently the bidding war began before the film was halfway done. It was given a 2,000 screen release, and grabbed a gross domestic haul of $21-million.
There is no question that this film is bad. The question: is it bad intentionally or un-?
Is it a passable horror spoof or a really shitty, amateurish waste of time? To me, this revolves around the old man and the gun scene that happens maybe 15 minutes in. As it stands in the final cut, it’s one of those creepy, these-guys-could-get-scary-later inbred hick sort of scenes – until the end of the film, when the punchline is revealed, and you see it’s a joke. So the fraction of the scene in the first act gives no cue that the rest of the film should be taken as a comedy, quite the opposite. However, it’s easy to imagine an alternate cut in which the scene played out in full, cuing us to see the film as a spoof.
The only thing that matters is what’s on screen, however, so we must treat this thing as an unintentionally bad film, a film with so many basic comprehension problems it was basically unintelligible. Why is she canoeing away alone? Why is he shooting his own truck? Why do those hicks want to kill them? What’s the point of the surfer dude? Why are they cradling the infected friend whom they were shunning moments ago? Humans just don’t act like that, ever. But I must say I laughed ‘till I cried at the most specialest line ever, delivered straight: “He asked us for help. We set him on fire.”
Caligula
Whoa. This is definitely worth checking out, if only to marvel at how a film like it got made – oh for the days of mainstream art porn, when Sir John Gielgud and a cumshot could be in the same film! (not his, thank god). McDowell-as-Caligula’s fancy thumbs up dance is a wonder to behold. As scandalous as it all seems, it’s mostly true, if we can trust the ancients’ testimony. Gore Vidal did a good job with the script, although watching a crazy guy fuck and/or stab people inevitably becomes tiresome past the two hour mark.
Wise Words from the Whaleman
Apparently Brian Eno said this: “there isn’t a problem in the world that can’t be fixed by backing vocals or oyster sauce.”