godthedog

thora birch was our greatest hope for that for a while. but after 'ghost world' she disappeared, got blonde hair, and lost too much weight. then again, that was just a variation of the christina ricci appeal.

normally i'd agree that glasses make a girl more attractive, but i think in ginger's case they threaten to make her fall too much into the spectacled indie 'ghost world' girl look, when her face has a more unique look than that. incidentally, a sea captain's hat has a tendency to make a girl look much more sexy. she should try wearing that out one night, and peek out shyly from under it every once in a while.

what i'm saying is that bay doesn't have any pretensions about what kind of filmmaker he is. he makes shit blow up, and he makes it blow up good. he makes sensationalist movies, and it takes some major effort & a special kind of talent to distinguish yourself that way in a sea of directors who make essentially the same kind of sensationalist movies. stone makes sensationalist movies that deal with big important political issues, and would have you believe that those issues somehow make the movies more important or thought-provoking than they really are. it's a sickening sort of hubris that isn't earned at all. what are you really "saying" about vietnam in 'platoon' when the last 20 minutes are one big action scene? he treats the jfk assassination in the same basic way michael bay would approach it: lots of quick cutting, lots of music, lots of melodrama, lots of twists to keep you wondering what exactly is going on. there's no extra thought or content behind it: it's one big empty dramatic gesture. that's why i walk away from 'transformers' more satisfied than 'jfk' or 'born on the 4th of july'.

jfk feels like it goes by fast because it was all edited in 4 days by an army of small chain-smoking rodents working in shifts. and it kind of sucks. oliver stone is not a very good director. his sensibilities are too exploitative to really be a "great" director (like renoir or altman), and he's too obsessed with making you think he's important to be a good exploitative director (like tony scott, or even michael bay). what you get with a stone movie is essentially michael bay thinking he's orson welles. back to tommy lee jones: i had no problems understanding what he was saying, and he has some really fine acting moments in it. i do have a different problem with the ending, and i'm curious to see what other people think about this:

you have no sense of historical preservation. does this mean that OJ hart's thread title should be changed to "OJ hart did it! :the thread:"?

i like 'exile in guyville' more than anything pj harvey ever did, but harvey's still the better & smarter artist overall. a harvey-penned "hot white cum" would be a lot more interesting than the one phair did. she'd probably spit it back in the dude's face and shit on him while it was burning his eyes. i think the key to everything she does is that it's going to be ridiculously theatrical--even her ideas of things that are "stripped" or "subtle" are something like THIS IS SO FUCKING SUBTLE, IT'LL MELT YOUR FACE RIGHT OFF! BUT SUBTLY! FUCKYEAH! any song she whispers on would be a good example of this. sometimes that bothers me, but usually i can sit back & appreciate it. strangely, 'uh huh her' is the only album of hers i still listen to with any regularity and still get any desire to. i think it's a solid piece of work, in its own disposable kind of way, and she's not trying so hard to be important. it feels more...comfortable i guess, i don't know how else to put it.

this REALLY doesn't make sense though. what kind of artist purposely underachieves on a record they put their name on just to make a point, especially an artist with the amount of self-respect and devotion to craft that you're ascribing to radiohead? is the logic, "we love our art so much that we're going to not work that hard on this next album, just to prove that we can still make a good album when we don't try that hard"?

this is dumb. if ledger died because he got addicted to sleeping pills, then he died because of an addiction to sleeping pills, not because of a role he took on. otherwise, the chain of causation could go on forever.

...<unzips pants>...

i've said it before, i'll say it again on tarantino: tarantino has a very deft sense of pacing when he wants to, and that long slow buildup to the car chase gives you a satisfaction in the car chase that you just don't get with most movies. that alone would've made 'deathproof' a better movie if tarantino hadn't brought it upon himself to show the world that he COULD ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT ABOUT IT write female characters and female dialogue, and failed miserably for 40 minutes trying to do it. those were some of the most painfully awkward and forced scenes i've ever had to endure in my life, and they just would...not...end.

i got a kick out of the fact that lindsay lohan got nominated twice for the "worst actress" razzie in 'i know who killed me'.

that's how i'd do it too. i'd probably feel different about 'juno' if it came out in a thinner year, but there's just too much quality stuff to justify the cunnilingus it's currently getting.

i really like this cover. he clearly worked hard on it. the g-funk synthesizer really clinches it for me.

'michael clayton' is indeed one of the 4 or 5 best movies that came out this year (at least of the ones i saw). it's a lot like 'the conversation', a nice slow-boiling character study and half-artfilm that's masquerading as an espionage thriller story. i don't think it's going to win any of the major categories, so it's getting just about the right amount of love it should be. 'juno' is pretty severely overrated. it's entertaining and easy to watch, but it essentially boils down to some characters who are too smart for their writer to know what to really do with, so the writer throws a bunch of standard melodrama plot twists in it. the dialogue is funny, but only in a sitcom kind of way where the writer feels the need to make every line a one-liner that has nothing to do with anything. you heard it here first, diablo cody is a one-trick pony who is never going to come up with anything worthwhile again. i see through your gimmicks, diablo, to the robert mckee within you that's trying to cover for your lack of real ideas. not that it was a bad movie at all, it was quite good. but next to more full-bodied character studies, it seems pretty underdeveloped and limp the more i think about it. and it was much better than 'little miss sunshine', which got roughly 3 million times the amount of praise it should've gotten.

paul thomas anderson is now officially a better filmmaker than quentin tarantino. i thought 'pulp fiction' would always keep tarantino ahead, but i was wrong. THIS is how you follow up on two great 90s movies: by not making a stale retread of your earlier 90s movies. this doesn't mean it's a better movie than 'pulp fiction'--just that anderson now has a more impressive and varied body of work.

al.

what exactly happened in those 14 minutes?

dear god. when i first saw this picture in what's-his-name's avatar, i seriously thought it was supposed to be a recent picture of chris crocker. i got 'back to black' last week on itunes. i like it a lot. totally retrotastic sound, and for the most part the songs are solid. the title cut has been stuck in my head for 3 days, and i mean that in the best possible way. best of all, the whole thing's only half an hour long (excluding the dumb remixes). i quite like the sound quality of her voice, but she can't control it very well. her garbled diction gets irritating after 3 songs, and she doesn't know how to convey any variety of emotions. whether singing a happy or a sad song, her voice sounds exactly the same. she's sort of like a really good 'american idol' contestant.

my students had to do a timed diagnostic writing exercise for the whole 50 minutes of class today, and i played this album for them while they wrote. they got a chuckle out of it. michael jackson is a good bet in a classroom setting, there's never really anybody that doesn't like michael jackson. same with the beatles.

so unappreciated. edwin macphisto vitamin x ripper milky agent alfdogg incandenza

happy birthday, son. if you chicken out, you can post picture of my cock instead and pretend it's yours. it's very impressive.

i swear by panera because their hazelnut coffee is good, and they let you get free refills. if i hold on to one of their styrofoam cups, i can slip into the place unnoticed and get days' worth of coffee for free. i probably drink between 12 and 16 dollars' worth of panera coffee every week, paying maybe 3 dollars total for it. i also like their baked potato soup.

is that a typed lisp?

i got through 600 pages of 'war and peace' (out of a possible 1500 in my paperback edition). then i stopped having free time for a few weeks and by the time i picked the book back up i'd forgotten who most of the names referred to & there was no point reading anymore. single most frustrating event of my literary life.

i consider "somebody to love" a lot better than "bohemian rhapsody."