We Are Experiencing Intellectual Difficulties

My mind is under construction.

My blog has suffered the consequences.

This video is why I love televised sports; guys who get payed shit-loads of money act their class.

In this clip from last night’s Lakers/Mavs game—run time 8 minutes (and you should try to watch it all)—you get a taste of the 4th quarter melee that occurred when Jason Terry shoved Lakers’ cornbread, Steve Blake. Probably Terry was pissed at himself over the shit game he and Dallas played, thus resulting in four simultaneous ejections, one subsequent ejection, and an LA win.

The best part of this brawl, hands down, was Matt Barnes, who did not hesitate to make the fight with Terry his own. As he was muscled to the sidelines by referees and an assistant coach he shoved to the ground, you could see him saying, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine, get the FUCK offa me!”

As he was escorted off the court, there was a shot of him yelling at Terry, “C’mon motherfucker, you wanna go right now? Let’s go right now!” and then he removed his jersey and tossed it into the stands on his way out.

If the shit got any realer, someone woulda called 5-0.

What you don’t see is Kobe Bryant gesturing to the rest of the team to stay out of it. To his credit, he proceeded to cash in this Zen stoicism by playing basketball that could align Chakras, but I have a tough time reconciling how good Kobe is at ball with how big of an asshole he is at life.

So, this is a movie.

In Memorium

“I promise I’ma keep it G,
Rep my south team, hands in the street,
Recognise game and they recognise me.
‘Cause a G like me comes naturally.
Those haters try to hate on me
But they got no choice but to do right by me,
There’s no way a-dividin’ me,
‘Cause my OG’s in the streets gon’ ride for me.
I promise to do ghetto things
‘Cause I’m the closest thing to ghetto in this industry.
That’s why I be chillin’ when it’s 90 degrees.”

—Nate Dogg, Keep It G.A.N.G.S.T.A.

1969-2011

But, God, that Bill is such an asshole

Robert Downey Jr. is so good in Less Than Zero that it excuses all his post-reformation awards show schtick.

Spoiled milk

With all the bare-knuckle honesty I can muster, I would’ve rather split atoms and watched my own public execution than this 2011 Oscar Telecast.

via 4.bp.blogspot.com

Rewind: Movie Reviews

Recently, I saw the documentary AMERICAN: The Bill Hicks Story, and I believe that it’s very possible that Hicks, without question the most important cross-generational comic, had to die.

I don’t mean to sound pretentious, but for those of you who don’t know, Bill Hicks died in 1994 of pancreatic cancer without ever having achieved the sort of mainstream success that frat boy jizz-a-thon icons like Dane Cook stumble witlessly into. The documentary, although detestable at the offset—the filmmakers set the first third of their subject’s life to paper cutout, Pythonesque animation—grew steadily into what I hoped for in the end: a mosaic of the man’s life through the testimony of friends and family and the fabric of his comedy philosophy.

What I gleaned from the narrative (which I occassionally had to close my eyes to listen to) is that he would haaaaaaate to live here, now. Thirty years ago he warned audiences of the dangers of our ad-driven culture, sensationalized art, the “war(s)” in the “middle east(s)” and the Bush Dynasty, anti-intellectualism, the futility of truth, rampant commercialism, and the threat of banality. All things which, to me, sound a lot like April 20th, 2011 at 1:27am in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Having been a long-time Hicks fan, I wondered how an artist like him would “fit in” to the overall cultural landscape of today. At the time of his death the evolution of his art was moving slightly faster than the evolution of his audience, and frankly, if he were to succeed nowdays, he probably would have to eat his own shit.

But instead his untimely death left him a legacy. He is the crux of the performance art bloodline; where entertainment and ethics meet; he is the point at which the quardraped of his artform stood up and walked. If he’d lived, would he simply have been Ray Ramono-ized?

It’s my belief that in order to be immortalized, one must do one of two things.

Either:

A) die before one can live long enough to undo all the things one’s done,

Or:

B) kill oneself before one does anything at all.

I hate to say it, but performers like Hicks, or Lenny Bruce, or even rock Gods like Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison are thought of now as so essential to the arc of their respective crafts because, yes, indeed, they were good at it, but also because they died before they could fuck it up.

I mean, I’m sure we’re all wondering what was next on the slate for Heath Ledger. Hopefully it wasn’t Brokeback Mountain 2: Broke-Backer. Going out with a posthumous Oscar is a nice way to persevere.

And let’s not forget about the celebutant of celebutants: Jesus Christ.

There’s a great quote in High Fidelity, when Barry asks Rob, “is it in fact unfair to criticize a formerly great artist for his latter-day sins? Is it better to burn out than to fade away?”

Part of me wishes Robert DeNiro had fizzled out after Raging Bull. Then I wouldn’t have to be subjected to Little Fockers.

It’s slightly crass of me to say these things, but it’s difficult to quell the crass part of the brain after you’ve listened to Hicks work for 90 minutes. Honesty is crass. Truth is crass. But, perhaps it isn’t even me saying these crass things. Maybe its the crassness that’s manifested in me by hearing Hicks, which makes me easily-influenced and simply a pawn in somebody else’s chess game.

Of course Hicks would hate that too.

Rewind: Movie Reviews (so who’s the sucker?)

SUCKERPUNCH, 2011

Suckerpunch is not on my list of stupidest movies ever. Surprised? You seem surprised.

Let me explain:

Simultaneously the stupidest and most brilliant movie I’ve ever seen is the 1989 Adam Sandler cinematic lobotomy Going Overboard—

—an intentionally comic ‘movie’ within an unintentionally comic and non-comic MOVIE, and during which a grasp on my sanity was lost, because although I consciously deemed the movie unwatchable I couldn’t turn it off.

Suckerpunch does not tread this line; it’s not even good enough to be stupid.

*para-porn

The truth is I could’ve walked out of the theater during Suckerpunch at any time and probably should’ve. But it isn’t true that I stayed to see how it was going to end so I could fulfill some cynical fixation over how bad I knew it really was. Anyway, a movie like Suckerpunch doesn’t end so much as it just has to faaaaade out.

Really I wanted to be armed so I could fully commit to the blog entry you’re reading, here.

In this particular conext, what Suckerpunch suffers from is potential. Adam Sandler playing an uber-Jew comedian aboard a cruise ship benefits from my absolute lack of expectation. So then when Billy Bob Thorton shows up in a non-cameo cameo as a drunken redneck heckler, it has a certain amount of potency.

Zack Snyder prepared us for Suckerpunch in reverse.

Theoretically, this movie is a money shot. Hot girls in short skirts—YES! With guns, swords, and ninja stars—YES! Doing battle with stone, samurai leviathans—YES! And zombie Nazis—YES! And the queen mother of a nest of ancient dragons—YES! And they’re being led into the battle through this parallel reimagining of the World Wars by underappreciated movie badass, Scott Glenn, as a prophetic, all-knowing ringleader—YES! YES! YES!

Who guides the girls through the systematic acquisition of arbitrary characteristic objects so they can somehow ultimately face their hardest battle, the one with themselves—YES!

*SOUND OF NEEDLE SKIPPING*

Wait, what?

But it’s a dream. They’re actually child prostitutes.

And also, that’s a dream, and she—the one that looks made of plastic—is actually in an insane asylum. In Vermont.

Because.

Because her mother died. And her evil stepfather framed her for the murder of her younger sister and had her committed.

So she’s only sometimes a karate superhero dressed like Sailor Moon. The rest of the movie she’s just another drooling pysch patient, but since she’s subjected to one raw deal after another, we’re supposed to perceive her as an unconvetional real-world hero as long as she just keeps being pretty.

And also she’s dressed in a sexless white jumpsuit, and more resembles an inmate in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest than the front cover of an anime DVD.

Oh, and Scott Glenn is really just a bus driver.

*here, Scott! I’ll throw you a vine!

Ultimatley there’s no reason that on the wave of current movie trends a writer/director couldn’t just make a movie about a group of asskicking babes kicking ass all over time and space. There’s no reason to play dress up; an ugly girl in a prom dress is still an ugly girl. In fact, I’d bet a Schindler’s List and Sophie’s Choice that it’s what the majority of moviegoers would rather pay to see.

What Zack Snyder is able to do in this movie, though, is driven a bit more by arrogance than ignorance, I think. Because he has the ability to lay this visual symphony on us—I admit it’s arresting, to say the least—he doesn’t need content. And, OK, that’s been done before, but Snyder takes it a step further by implying content; by suggesting that the something more that we’re seeing is, indeed, something more. When none of it is anything more than merely a single panel of a well-drawn comic that had the audacity to run the whole page.

And to top it off, Snyder sets his jerkoff session to the tune of remixed Queen and breathy Pixies covers. And that’s just sacriligeous, man. Just sacriligeous.

But I bought the fucking soundtrack anyway.

In this riveting play featuring local talent, Ben (Johnny Clark) makes the mistake of opting for a blowjob at the Manhattan apartment of his boss, with whom he’s been carrying on a lengthy extra-marital affair, instead of going into work at The World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001. Unable to summon the courage to ‘unearth’ himself, he and the mistress-in-question, Abby (Michelle Clunie), spend what remains of the 90 minute run-time duking it out, LaBute-style.

This play is produced by VS. Theatre Company, and directed under the keen eye of Ron Klier. It’s presented at the [Inside] the Ford Theater thru April 24th.

Don’t be lame. See this. It’s the BOMB.

Oh shit. Too soon?

The Velocity of Charlie Sheen

This guy.

The fact of the matter is this—and you can disagree if you feel strongly enough about it: in the Age of Immediacy, there is no better way to ride the tip of public consciousness than to stay at least one anti-semitic rant ahead of the average American Twitterer. Coked-out and self-obsessed has to outdo coked-out and self-obsessed, each and every day.

With that said, I think if Charlie Sheen went into this whole mess seeking what he’s getting he couldn’t have handled it any better than he has.

For example, to stay relevant after subjecting radio listeners to a twenty minute tirade about your awesomeness as you bite every hand that feeds you, you must then demand three million dollars per episode. And after that, you strike us where we live: cyberspace, television airwaves, and tabloid journalism.

Perhaps, and particularly, say this about Chuck Lorre:

“I embarrassed him in front of his children and the world by healing at a pace that this un-evolved mind cannot process. I’ve spent, I think, close to the last decade, I don’t know, effortlessly and magically converting your tin can into pure gold.”

Because after that it won’t matter that your deranged self-help-from-hell manifesto sounds like another blazing half-cocked crack anthem—even though you claim to have stopped alcoholism and drug addiction dead in its tracks with nothing more than the power of brainwaves—or that on TV you look like a fifty year-old Charlie Sheen wearing a twenty year-old Charlie Sheen mask. All we care about now is that our Frankenstein’s monster keeps raping brides and burning villages!

The media is the lightning that jump-started that cold, dead heart, Charlie!

It’s ALIVE! ALIVE!

So the next steps are delicate, and thus, I’d like to offer a word or two of warning to you, Mr. Sheen, if you’re out there: don’t let us down. Because we are the era of 160 characters-or-less man, and it will take all the coke you can snort to stay the subject of our blogs. And I hate to tell you, but a million-and-three Twitter followers does not a media god make. Not anymore. Not when every Starbuck’s coffee drinker at a MacBook Pro can get a million-and-three Twitter followers in between unsold screenplay drafts. You’ve been out of the game for a long time, Kimosabe. Sure, at your game you’re a pro. No one will deny that. Mostly because none of this erratic, borderland, Drugstore Cowboy behavior really surprises us. I mean, when it comes to doin’ lines and punchin’ hookers, you’re the fuckin’ MVP. You’re the highest paid [for lack of a more accurate word] actor on network TV, despite the fact that you’re a complete cracked-out lowlife and your track record runs like a season of Cops, in syndication. You’ve shot, stabbed, or choked out more than two unarmed civilian females, which a psychoanalyst might call habitual, but all of whom, no doubt, had it coming. And despite the fact that your bad press should be a red flag to any future Mrs. Sheen out there (I mean, you’ve done all potential Mrs. Sheens a favor by treating the current ones like total shit in full view of the public eye), the goddesses seem to keep lining up for you; gluttons for punishment they are. But I think you’ve been sitting pretty in those cabana shirts, with your smug smirk and your studio audience and your laugh track, wryly delivering crap one-liners through the most formulaic sitcom tune in the Sweeps Week repertoire—setup, setup, punchline! Heeeeere’s Charlie!—for far too long to have any idea how to transcend the scumbag that you are and become the ideal you believe yourself to be. In this day-and-age anyway.

Therefore, please. I implore you. Don’t let us down. I mean, Chuck—can I call you Chuck?—it isn’t like you’re sashaying into this shit storm on the ever-shifting high pressure system of the digital age out of a lauded performance in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. This isn’t on the heels of Wall Street, is it? No. This is the byproduct of a dispute with a very powerful TV producer because you didn’t show up on set to work Two-and-a-Half Men, for fuck’s sake. Because you had to go to rehab. Again. This isn’t exactly an Academy Awards after party. Your times have changed.

So drink your tigerblood while ye may. While you’re winning. We don’t want the F-18 to have to put down its landing gear and empty its weapons caches quite yet. We like you pushing Gs and breaking the sound barrier. Just fly into that wild blue acid flashback, otherwise you’re gonna become Conan’s late night punching bag, if you haven’t already. And oh, so quickly, it will be for all the reasons you won’t realize are the wrong ones because you’ll be too coked out of your gourd. And that’s just pathetic. If, as I said, it isn’t already.

Oh, and please throw Cryer a freakin’ bone, will you? A courtesy text, maybe? Poor guy ain’t got shit.

Charlie Sheen is the Santa Claus—the insane, media whore Santa Claus—of jaundiced, nonsensical, coke binge-inspired, egomaniacal, Twitter-ready quotables.