godthedog

"volcano girls"? it was more of a reference than a reprise. and that's a great fucking song. aside from nirvana's "you know you're right," that's the only song post-1994 i've ever heard that made me feel exactly like it was 1994 again. and not in a stuck-up "oh that's SO 1994" way. but in an "i'm excited about this new song enough that i feel twelve years old again" way.

That's obviously not what it is. There was no discussion or planning of it in that regard. Maybe there should have been instead of throwing it open to everyone for nominations. Kinetic, you want to take a mulligan on this? Just think: it's only gonna get worse from here. We can dust ourselves off and try again. wasn't cheech in charge of the 60s bracket that everybody started bitching about? if so, i doubt the convictions of his remarks. i think you're doing a great job, kinetic. i'm only posting in this thing because of you.

czech, why have you read so much of klosterman's stuff if you hate him so much? i've probably already mentioned this somewhere, but i think nick hornby's 'songbook' is pretty much the ideal model for music criticism. he's good at inserting his personal experience into each piece without making the piece just about him. insightful without really being too "deep" and sincere without being heavy-handed. i love his "thunder road" piece. on a similar note: does anybody else read film criticism for pleasure? some days i'll go into the library and crack open a pauline kael book. she did a 'raiders of the lost ark' review that's old and cranky in the most brilliant ways.

twice. once in 4th grade, once in 6th grade. the first time, the guy only hit my dick and it wasn't all that bad. much, much worse when there's testes involved.

i gave up on this one yesterday, with 80 or so pages to go. i also didn't LOL once. mad kudos to DFW for being able to churn out 400+ pages of very readable content in his early 20s, but he needed a max perkins-type editor who could ask him hard questions about his own work and rein in his talents. also feels forced in a strange way. not at all like his nonfiction stuff i love so much, which is like breathing. i've taken up virginia woolf's 'to the lighthouse' instead, which i'm already enjoying considerably more. but i am sort of wishing that she wouldn't go to the "display of character's rich interior life explored deeply while character stares into space" so often.

they got my interest when they said something like, "we are all/everything is a producing-machine." then they lost me when they said something like, "this is not just a metaphor." deleuze on his own is difficult enough but at least earnest. d & g together are insufferable. not just opaque, but dickish about how opaque they are.

tell me you're not reading 'anti-oedipus' by choice.

that has nothing to do with the rule, since the judges have no power to vote someone off the show. matt g doing "human nature" was great. it's clear by now that anoop doesn't know what he's doing and has no ambitions or identity as a musical talent, and he should've been gone last night. jorge wanted it more, and he was a lot more talented.

gravel i don't think is bad enough. steel wool shavings maybe.

i read huxley's 'the doors of perception', and he struck me as kind of a tool. like somebody who wants to be a really literate social critic in the vein of george orwell, but without that special something.

Excuse me while I shed a tear. Probably about half the people on this thread are just making lists of percieved differences between the book and the movie. There's no denying this. My opinion was that the quality of the movie and its faithfullness to the book are two separate issues that people are confusing. A movie doesn't need to be 100% to a book in order to be good. If this thread got sidetracked at all, it was by people who couldn't shut up about the book. Get off the "I hate SuperJerk" bandwagon for a minute and you'll realize I've got a point. Also, for all of you who said I didn't use irony correctly in my joke, fuck off. I was right. An actor playing Nixon wearing too much make-up is ironic because it goes against the expectation people have (at least educated people who actually know something about history) about Nixon. What really happened was NOBODY GOT THE REFERENCE until I explained it, but nobody wanted to look dumb so I got incorrectly attacked by 4 different people (and you think I'm obsessed?) for a mistake I made that wasn't really a mistake. I'm sure if four people in a row told you that grass was purple, you'd be a little annoyed too. 'watchmen' is the 'campaign 2008' of 2009. let's see how long we can keep this rolling. i'll do my part: first, your dumbass inflated rhetoric and predilection for going off on attack-and-defend tangents having nothing to do with the topic at hand is horribly out of place. it's the damn movies folder. second, rather than respond to the content edwin posted in answering your question, you decided to say, to no one in particular, "you're overanalyzing the movie." who was this directed to? VX? me? cabbageboy? it looks like you're talking to everybody that's been posting so far, since you made no effort to specify. third, you're taking shortcuts by arguing with straw men instead of arguing with people. it's much easier, and much less correct, to argue with an amorphous "i hate superjerk" bandwagon. this is connected with the first point as well. fourth, i dropped a load of my creamy sperm into your mom's mouth last night. she likes mine best and calls it the "phlegm of the gods." the way her pupils get big and her lips get blushed when she says it is pretty sexy. apparently she's allergic to shellfish though, cause i'd eaten lobster earlier and her mouth started to get puffy and her eyes were watering. she started wailing and just would not shut the fuck up. so i decided to give her something to cry about and smacked her in the face with my cock so hard i broke her jaw.

reminding me: 'demonic toys', in its own special way, is balldroppingly awesome. i saw it when i was eleven, and shortly afterward hit puberty. not a coincidence.

FAIL

were that the actual president richard nixon wearing all that prosthetic makeup, there would be something to that irony. EDIT: hey, 3-man chain responding to that comment.

mom is okay. don't talk to her as much as i'd like. my dad forgot to call me on my birthday, which was sunday, didn't call until the next night after i was in bed. i called him back the next day, he wasn't there, i left a message. he has yet to call me back. i don't expect him to.

way to back up those opinions. good work.

re: the bloodless doomsday: i'd chalk it up to post-9/11 anxiety. you just can't show destroyed buildings and dead bodies all over the place in new york city without making your audience really uncomfortable. there's no real good way of handling that. looks like they were trying to make it as cratered and lifeless as the surface of mars--which is a good enough idea, but the execution was bad. my favorite part about that segment in the book is that long empty beat of dead scenery. it's a solid six pages of "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit." i was really hoping for a couple moments of empty silence so that the carnage would hit home, but i don't think we saw more than 20 or 30 seconds of the landscape.

SPOILERS AHEAD... all of the pacing problems and awkward dialogue i figured would happen, happened. also: aging or face-altering makeup and imax DO NOT MIX EVER. it looked like nixon and carla gugino were playing dress-up. the costumes in general had this really weird fake sheen to them, like the people weren't comfortable in them. A.O. scott of new york times fame had huge problems with the way violence was handled, and while i think scott wasn't reading the comic very well, i think he's right on-point for this movie. snyder is totally incapable of handling violence in any kind of ironic, thoughtful, or interesting way that has any kind of subtext. to snyder, all violence onscreen is to be treated in the same way and must be made to look as cool as possible. not only did his attitude destroy 2 of the most powerful moments in the story (showing us only the aftermath of the NYC stuff and rorschach's death), but it shows that he isn't interested in what the comic was really about. i got nothing of the stench of death or decay or nihilism from the movie. not once did snyder try to make me think about this story's world, "wow...this is the kind of world where people do THAT to each other?" it's pretty clear that snyder wanted to make a superhero movie, with action scenes & excitement that could rival those of other superhero movies. the prison break was treated basically as a set-piece, as was the comedian's death. and whenever he did that i just started tuning out, because i don't identify with nite owl and the comedian in the way that i identify with batman and i don't really care if i see them kick someone's ass--i identify with them as characters, and i want to see character development. rorschach was the absolute worst for this. deep down he's a fascist piece of shit, and that's really important for the comic because it's the whole root of his convictions and his take-no-prisoners uberviolent attitude. aside from 2 quick references to his distaste for homosexuality and women, snyder didn't explore any of that dimension at all. he just wanted to make rorschach look like a bad-ass and get all his good one-liners in. part of what makes the comic so great, i think, is that it has the balls to suggest that the very idea of a superhero is inescapably fascist, and that no one actually has the moral authority to assert himself as a "superhero." 'the dark knight' plays with this in a not very satisfying way, but this movie goes nowhere near any of that. all the complexity is taken out of adrian's egotism, and he becomes a cartoon villain. all the moral terror is sucked out of the decision to let adrian get away with it, and he tries to play the world-united aftermath straight, with swirling hopeful music, as if this was really an okay thing to do. there's no sick irony underlining the happy faces like there was in the last 5-10 pages of the comic. i feel like if someone asked alan moore what 'watchmen' is really about, he'd say something like, "well, it's about the idea of superheroes and the moral implications of why people want to believe in superheroes or want to be superheroes, and the political consequences of that." if someone asked snyder what 'watchmen' is really about, he'd say, "it's about this team of superheroes and one of them gets murdered, he's a hero with a sick sense of humor, and one of the heroes wears a cool trenchcoat and one of them is an atomic man who can bend matter to his will, and one of them is a really hot girl that you get to see naked..." maybe snyder needed to sell it as a superhero blockbuster to get it made, i don't know.

tatianna = kate winslet at the golden globes, without the charm or grace or hot body. she would be GREAT on a vh1 reality show, where the object of the whole game is for the producers to make fun of how dramatic and vacuous the people are, but she doesn't belong anywhere near a show like this, instead of people with actual (albeit marginal) talent & likability and who actually NEED THE MONEY. like ju'not. scott will make the top 5-6 despite being bland as a mormon family night and not making very good song choices. Dead Wife Danny might take it all. what really sucks about the format this year is that it's kicking out the niche singers who give the show variety and can usually stick around a while. at this point, it looks like pretty much everybody has the same range of musical taste and play-it-safe mentality, which is going to allow for NO surprises whatsoever. no rock version of "billie jean," no bluegrass version of "i've just seen a face." just recycled top 40 shit. speaking of which, the band is atrocious this year. almost everybody's songs sounded more like each other than usual, and their default mode seems to be "what would richard carpenter make this sound like?" and none of these contestants have the balls to tell the band to change it up.

true dat. i never thought shakespeare was special until i read a bunch of other playwrights, then went back to him & read him for pleasure.

this is more difficult than it would seem at first. unless you have some kind of definite plan when the time comes to re-enlist, the choice ends up being "keep doing this for more money" or "i have no idea." leaving just for the sake of leaving will lead you to ask, "wait...so what do i do then?" this happened to my best friend. he enlisted just because he'd hit bottom & needed some temporary direction, and he's stayed in for a while only because it's easy to stay. he wants to do other things, but doesn't have ambitions for anything in particular.

'brighton rock' the movie is pretty great. can't speak for the book. all i've read by greene is 'the power and the glory', and that one fell kinda flat for me. like, pulpy and readable in an HP lovecraft kind of way, but without the cool provocative ideas behind it that make you keep thinking about it.

wait...you have to drive twenty whole minutes just to get to a bookstore? not even a fake twenty minutes, but a legitimate twenty minutes? in a legitimate car? how do you survive that? no wonder you're asking us if it's worth the trip, even though you have to read it for class anyway.

i stand by my cutoff point.