30 November 2009 | 1:41 PM
As a consultant, I am always being approached by friends and acquaintances who are looking for me to do them a solid, often with promises of big payouts or even an ownership stake if/when things materialize. I’m generally inclined to say yes to most of these requests, either because I genuinely like helping people or, in some cases, the person asking for the favor is unattainably hot. However, there are some of these “opportunities” which I can’t say “no” to fast enough. Usually these are pitched to me as requiring little (if any) effort and accompanied by outrageous claims of wealth potential. The truth is, as soon as someone tells me something won’t take much of my time to do, it’s a signal to me that they either have no idea how I do what I do or, worse, think think they do, and thus will be all up in my shit while I’m trying to help them out.
Look, I understand that in order to make some serious scratch these days, you need to be able to a little giving with your taking, so I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t be asking for favors – who knows if today’s pro-bono website might not be tomorrow’s Fail Blog, right? But having a good bullshit detector is key. Now, any fool with an internet connection knows that nobody’s bullshit detector is greater than the one that David Thorne – he of the hilariously infamous seven-legged spider – sports. Come to think of it, his bullshit-slinger is pretty top-notch, too. Just give a look at how he deftly rejects an overture for unpaid work.
*sigh* I hope I am not too old to engage in hero worship, because this guy is dreamy!
Posted by Andy in Nerdapalooza |
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28 November 2009 | 11:35 PM
Typically, I steer clear of the comedy black whole that is Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, which historically has been out-sucked only by Leno (the physical personification of a funny vacuum). However, even I can recognize that Fallon’s can occasionally display some truly mad impersonation skills from time to time. Last week saw just such an occasion, as Fallon somehow managed to get his Neil Young and Will Smith on simultaneously. Observe:
This stuff is so completely bonkers and funny that it almost makes me want to forgive him for Taxi. Easy, tiger: I said almost.
[Via Waxy]
Posted by Andy in Awesome (To Me, Anyway) |
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26 November 2009 | 10:47 PM
It’s Thanksgiving, and while I’m most thankful that I have my family and the people I love in my life, the awesomeness that is the inter-webs runs a very close second. More to the point, the fact that the Internet exists not just as a means for disseminating the truly awful things that the world has to offer, but also as a means to disseminate the truly wondrous reactions to said abhorrent stuff, makes me feel like there is clearly a higher power at work, and that power deserves my undying gratitude. As evidence, I give you this particular response – to my mind, one of the greatest ever recorded – to the dreaded “2 Girls, One Cup” (and no, I didn’t link to it – what do you take me for, a sicko?) meme:
As reaction shots go, it’s easily up there with Ron Jeremy’s first Goatse. Incidentally, this one comes to us via British vagabond Simon Michaels (clearly an Irvine Welsh fan) and his wife, who you may remember as the duo behind the of the adorable, torturous “Human Buckaroo” experiment I mentioned earlier.
How can I not be thankful after seeing that? Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Tryptophanatic out.
Posted by Andy in Comedy = Tragedy + Time |
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25 November 2009 | 8:57 PM
Now that I’ve had an hour or two to process seeing Wes Anderson’s version of Roald Dahl’s classic, Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m still not all that sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it was a rich, entertaining hour and a half of cinema; on the other, I feel like I should get to charge Anderson an hourly rate for therapy if he’s going to work through his issues via great works of fiction.
Let me state at the outset that I’m a big Wes Anderson fan, and on a purely objective level, his Fox is a superlative bit of film-making: the script is smart; the animation is nuanced and lively without feeling precious (an achievement for the director, given that his live-action movies often tend to be sprinkled with an odd concoction of fairy dust, kitsch and treacle); the casting is first-rate, and the actors do a bang-up job (this might be one of the most subtle Bill Murray roles ever). In fact, on all aesthetic and cinematic fronts, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a rousing success.
Except on a much deeper, more elemental level, it’s a maddening film. It’s hard not to feel like Anderson has misappropriated a classic bit of storytelling to work through his daddy issues. These themes are hardly new for him: an arc of childhood inadequacy in the face of a distant, uncaring father figure runs through all of his movies, and it often makes for a thoughtful and entertaining narrative. In this case, though, Anderson has injected this subtext into somewhere it doesn’t belong. Rather than being an offbeat, quirky riff on Dahl’s beloved original, Anderson has chosen to make Mr. Fox, well, kind of a dick.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a firm believer in the sanctity of conflicted, imperfect characters in cinema. Nothing infuriates me more than the one-dimensional, saccharine Dudley Do-Right types featured in the likes of Forrest Gump, Away We Go and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’ve long believed that the shit-heel anti-heroes in Pulp Fiction, The Sweet Hereafter and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape are far more compelling, explicitly because of their imperfections. Conflict, in the cinema, is king. That said, what Anderson has done with Fox feels so cavalierly artificial that the thematic intent of the original story gets bent out of shape entirely.
This isn’t like Spike Jonze’s (in my mind, amazing) conceptualization of Where The Wild Things Are from earlier this fall: in that film, Jonze had fifteen pages of single sentences to start with, and the crazy, sideways scaffolding he built to hang that zygote of a story upon only served to enhance the meaning and themes of Maurice Sendak’s book, even while turning it on its ear. In this case, Anderson’s just draped everyday issues like hubris, entitlement and class warfare over his characters and then stood back as if to say, “Voilà, check out Mr. Fox: he has problems just like you and me!”
I should also mention that mine isn’t the rabid fanboy reaction to someone tampering with the precious storytelling of his long lost youth. When Peter Jackson chose to cut out whole subplots and scenes from his Lord Of The Rings trilogy, I cared not a whit, and when Gurinder Chadha recast a Jane Austen classic as a Bollywood musical in Bride and Prejudice, I applauded it. A work of art doesn’t “belong” to its consumers: if J.J, Abrams wants to turn his Star Trek into a vehicle for the schmuck from Heroes or George Lucas wants to drop what amounts to an amphibious Cajun Tourette syndrome sufferer into one of his prequels, that’s their right and I’ve got no beef. But what Anderson’s done with Fox seems oilier, as if he’s using the Foxes to tell a completely different story. Never mind that the story he’s telling is compelling and fun – it still feels wrong.
Perhaps my judgment of the film is clouded by the fact that I was viewing the film wondering what my kids would take away from it. Or maybe the fact that I’d just recently read the original story to my son and daughter has given me a hysterical sense of ownership of the source material that’s way out of bounds. I realize that I’m in the minority about this – the film is getting rave reviews. And perhaps it should, as I said it’s a great movie in many respects. Whatever it is, I’ve never liked and disliked a movie simultaneously so much in my life.
(And that’s saying something – I have, after all, seen everything that Lars von Trier has directed.)
Posted by Andy in Push-Button Punditry |
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25 November 2009 | 10:45 AM
I love the environment as much as the next guy, and generally I’m all in favor of using the power of provocative imagery to mobilize people. I like to think that that I’m pretty open-minded about how environmentalists get their message across, but as it turns out, even I have limits. One of those limits, apparently, is graphic video of polar bears falling from the sky. To wit:
Ugh. I suddenly want to become a fundraiser for the very airport this campaign is trying to stop.
Posted by Andy in Words Fail Me |
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23 November 2009 | 3:37 PM
In this day and age, I think we’ve all become slightly jaded about advertising. Whereas in times gone by (read, the 50’s) commercials gave us consumers an honest, un-embellished view of well-made, utilitarian products, these days it’s all blustering pantaloons, hawking useless, two-bit crap in their slick, sixty-second blather-fests. Case in point, I give you one “Amazin’ Blaze”, clearly a Madison Avenue huckster if there ever was one:
I mean, of all the nerve! This guy thinks he can use his silver tongue and polished, big-city mannerisms to simply charm us into submission. Well I for one am not going to stand for it!
Posted by Andy in Awesome (To Me, Anyway) |
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