My Brother's Meme Challenge

Hey there! I hope you've been following my web misadventures at my Tumblr site (it's the awesomeness).

My older brother tagged me with a meme, so I thought I'd say to myself, "have at it, hoss" and so I'm giving this a whirl.

This particular meme involves historical figures. The rules are simple:
1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

1) My brother Mike tagged me. He assumed that I would pick someone not from the realm of science. He thought right.

I have chosen silent film actor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (1887-1933). Not my favorite historical figure ever, but someone fascinating, definitely.

7 facts about Fatty Arbuckle:

1. Fatty Arbuckle received the first million-dollar contract from a movie studio. In 1918!
2. Charlie Chaplin created the famous "tramp" character after borrowing some of Arbuckle's clothes, which were baggy on him.
3. Fatty Arbuckle gave Buster Keaton his start in films, as well, launching another legendary career.
4. Despite the hoopla around his trial for allegedly killing a woman via a rape, Arbuckle was never found guilty.
5. In fact, history has shown that newspaperman William Randolph Hearst intentionally set out to convict Arbuckle in the press.
6. Another comedian who received his start through Arbuckle? Bob Hope.
7. Arbuckle died of a heart attack the day he signed a contract to return to making feature films under his own name.

Okay. Tagging whoever reads this to give it a shot.

Forthcoming: Five Fall Movies We're Excited About

The Darjeeling Limited
(IMDB page)
This film opens in New York City on September 28, and makes its way to other cities beginning on October 5. It’s scheduled to arrive in Albany on October 19.

Why we’re excited: It’s a Wes Anderson movie. Say what you will about his other movies (“Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou”) but, more than any other directors, Anderson’s established a definitive style with both visual imagery and his use of music. This film promises to be more of the same. If you’ve liked the other films (and I’m admittedly in that category), this looks promising.

Why we’re hesitant: Anderson’s films have been increasingly whimsical; “The Life Aquatic” enough so that his style came perilously close to torpedoing the movie as a whole. Hopefully, he’ll pull himself back from this fantastical precipice. We’re optimistic.

Dan In Real Life
(IMDB page)
This film opens nation-wide on October 26.

Why we’re excited: Steve Carell. If the advertisements are any indication, this film is a romantic comedy; after broadly comic turns in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Anchorman,” and a foray into dramatic comedy in his supporting role in last year’s surprise Oscar contender “Little Miss Sunshine,” this seems to present Carell with his first opportunity to headline a mainstream romantic comedy. It could catapult him to mainstream A-list stardom. The trailer for the film hints at a warmth that I haven’t seen in a romantic comedy since “Love Actually” – this is a very good sign.

Why we’re hesitant: Dane Cook. The sometimes/rarely-funny hyperactive standup apparently plays a supporting part. He’s appealing to some folks; however, not so much for me. We’ll probably see it anyhow.


No Country For Old Men
(IMDB page)
This film opens November 9 in limited release

Why we’re excited: The Coen Brothers are directing this; it’s going to be interesting to see what they’ll do with Cormac McCarthy’s really bleak subject material. Oscar buzz abounds for the Coens and star Javier Bardem.

Why we’re hesitant: Bleak movies, while often interesting from the perspective of actors, designers, and directors, aren’t really appealing to a lot of people, myself included. If I wanted to walk out of a darkened room after two hours in a bummer of a mood, I’d hang a picture of an ex-girlfriend over my bed and nap more often.

Southland Tales
(IMDB page)
Opens November 9 (we think)

Why we’re excited: Richard Kelly’s followup to the darkly brilliant “Donnie Darko” has been in the works for quite some time. It filmed in 2005, and was originally due in 2006. “Southland Tales” has an eclectic cast – the film features Dwayne (“The Rock”) Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seann William Scott (as twins!), Justin Timberlake, Wallace Shawn, and Kevin Smith.

Why we’re hesitant: Premise overload. A postapocalyptic near-future? Tons of quirky, specific characters? Musical numbers? It could be way too many things crammed into one 137-minute flick. Also, the least time we were waiting for a followup film like this, it was Mike Judge’s followup to “Office Space,” which wound up being the overloaded, relatively unfunny “Idiocracy.”


Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
(IMDB page)
Opens November 16 nationwide.

Why we’re excited: Dustin Hoffman’s been making some interesting acting choices lately, with quirky, distinctive parts in films like “I Heart Huckabees” and “Stranger Than Fiction.” This is another quirky part, where Hoffman plays a fantastical, 216-year-old toymaker. Natalie Portman also stars, which is a good thing.

Why we’re hesitant: It sounds awfully derivative of “Willie Wonka,” to be honest. Other than that, we’ve got nothing.

(Overrated) Movies That Provide Iconic Imagery That Define Generations

Have you ever watched one those “decade in review” shows? You know the type: generally found on basic cable, they offer comedians and television personalities of all types sniping at cultural touchstones from years past with the benefit of perspective and a deft comic touch. Anyway, have you noticed that, even within these irreverent shows, there are a few sacred cows – movies that are revered as being super-important signifiers of their time?

Well, those movies suck, and here’s a decade-by-decade breakdown of these so-called “important” films and why they’re actually terrible.

1950s: “Rebel Without A Cause.” Nicolas Ray’s film is emblematic of the explosion in teenage culture that came in the 1950s. “Blackboard Jungle” will forever be known as the movie that introduced rock-n-roll music to a mass audience, but “Rebel Without A Cause” will stand as the zenith of 50s-era teenage iconography because of its introduction of James Dean as a troubled bad-boy. What is overlooked, however, is the fact that Dean simply isn’t all that good in this film – his moment of rage (the famous line “you’re tearing me apart”) is terribly emoted, and Dean’s other setting – that of studied cool – seems to conceal the possibly-blasphemous notion that he’s not that good of an actor. My verdict: this movie is only legendary because of Dean’s infamous car-accident death, which gave more credence to his performance than anything that actually occurred on celluloid.

1960s: “Easy Rider.” In the famous coda of this 1969 film, which has long been held as emblematic of the counterculture and the shift in values that occurred with the continued insurgency of youth culture, Peter Fonda’s Captain America character says, “We blew it.” He couldn’t be more right. Filmmaker/star Dennis Hopper created a film with some magnificent imagery – the famed shot of the lead characters riding their motorcycles through the American West, for example. However, the movie has extreme difficulty in maintaining any type of consistent narrative structure; its use of jump-cuts (especially during the Mardi Gras scenes) may have been revolutionary (and anticipated a legion of faux-artistic music videos in later decades), but subvert the viewer’s best efforts to stay with the film. This may be a film best viewed with, um, chemical interference; without it, it doesn’t really hold up. They blew it.

1970s: “Saturday Night Fever.” This movie is 119 minutes long, and feels like a much longer film. The imagery it presents – that of strutting disco king Tony Manero (John Travolta) – serves as shorthand for the 1970s, largely because it presents a number of dance-oriented scenes centered around the feel-good, gotta-dance “me” decade. The dance scenes are good; however, Norman Wexler’s patented ultra-realistic dialogue (also present in films like “Serpico” and “Joe”) falls flat when whiningly delivered by John Travolta and his cronies, who come off as anti-heroes that simply aren’t worth rooting for. “Saturday Night Fever” was an excellent music video, but it’s a terrible, grating movie.

1980s: “The Breakfast Club.” People of a certain age absolutely worship this film – why, I don’t know. This might be John Hughes’s worst movie (and this is a man who brought the world “Baby’s Day Out.” The heavy-handed grouping of character archetypes – the nerd, the jock, the princess, et al – doesn’t flow particularly well as a movie. It’s a group of dramatic monologues, loosely combined. While some of the actors are capable in this movie (Molly Ringwald looks absolutely at ease here), many of the portrayals in this film suffer from inane overacting (I’m looking at you, Judd Nelson – his Bender may be the worst-acted character of the entire decade, for God’s sake) or are underwhelming, barely-there sketches (Ally Sheedy). To paraphrase William Shakespeare and Robert Downey, Jr, this film is a lot of “sound and fury,” signifying “less than zero.”

1990s: (tie) “Fargo” and “Being John Malkovich.” While I actually really liked both of these movies, and have seen them each several times, they’ve come to emblemize a different kind of filmmaking excess: the overindulgence in character quirkiness in a film. Frances McDormand’s pregnant Midwestern police officer may have been a revolutionary role at the time, but how many films tried to piggyback on this eccentricity without a compensatory amount of plot? (The answer: a lot, with varying degrees of success, from the terrible “Drop Dead Gorgeous”.) “Being John Malkovich” was a movie that suffered from chronic underacting – while I enjoy the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze a great deal, I think that they could have done a lot better with the conceit behind this film, which supposes that there’s a portal into the brain of a prominent character actor. This film introduces several fascinating characters, but doesn’t do a tremendously good job of grounding them in anything resembling reality. As someone who has dabbled in acting in the past, I applaud the effort to create fascinating, distinguished characters – however, they can simply not carry a movie by themselves. These movies are emblematic of that late-90s desire to be grittier and more “real,” but instead serve as reminders of what happens when quirks overcome plot as a dominant feature of a film.

I don’t think that there’s really a definitive film for this decade yet – and there is still a solid ¼ of a decade to determine this. But it bears thinking – what will provide the iconic filmic images of this decade? Will it be one of the “Frat Pack” comedies of the last few years? Will it be “Borat” or something similar? Who knows! That said, I promise this – once this decade is defined, I’ll find something that’s very wrong with the film that defines it.

Forthcoming: "3:10 To Yuma"

From the moment that mankind developed a technique for creating moving images on strips of celluloid, it seems as though there have been actors dressing up in the legendary garb of the cowboys of the Old West in films.

There is no doubt that the era in which the Old West was explored and settled was a compelling time – a lawless age, where justice was questionable (at best) and men relied on their own personal moral compasses to define their character. It’s unquestionably rich – the sheer context of the time serves as a morally ambiguous character in and of itself. When you add the act of mythmaking that comes with creating a motion picture, you add so much more – for actors, it’s a chance to dirty up a little bit, ride horses, and generally play along with a childhood fantasy come to life. I mean, who wouldn’t want to act in a Western – to wear boots with spurs, and kick in the swinging door of a frontier saloon?

As an actor, being in a Western provides one with the chance to follow in the footsteps of iconic cowboy actors like John Wayne (whose turn in, among dozens of other Westerns, “Rio Bravo” cemented his status as a definitively moral voice of law and order in the West) and Clint Eastwood (whose roles in several 1960s “Spaghetti Westerns” – collaborations with the great Sergio Leone – practically single-handedly redefined the genre). Many have jumped at the chance; whether it’s Michael J. Fox as the time-traveling Marty McFly in “Back To The Future Part III,” or Leonardo DiCaprio as a teenaged gunslinger in “The Quick and the Dead,” the annals of movie history are filled with characters who have partaken of the legend of the Old West.

Since the heyday of the aforementioned “Spaghetti Western” in the 1960s, it seems as though every generation of actors has gone back to the well every few years and explored the Old West. In the later 1960s and early 1970s, it was the era of the so-called Acid Western, where counterculture-influenced actors like Dennis Hopper and Robert Redford fused their ideals with Old West sensibilities to create morality plays. In the 1980s, Westerns were essentially laughed at; films like “Silverado” played up the comic sensibilities inherent in the clichés of the genre. 1990s-vintage westerns like “Dead Man,” and most notably, “Unforgiven,” played up the moral ambiguity of the times – the biggest battles in these Westerns often occurred within the hearts of the heroes and anti-heroes that dotted the barren landscapes of the bleak, unsettled territories of the Old West.

Well, it seems like we’re upon another era of Westerns. This fall sees the release of two new Westerns to multiplexes. Later this fall, Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck star in “The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford,” which looks interesting. The Coen brothers, famed for quirky, independent-minded movies like “The Big Lebowski” and “Raising Arizona,” will put their postmodern imprimatur on Cormac McCarthy’s modern-day Western “No Country For Old Men” later in the year. First to screens, though, is the Russell Crowe and Christian Bale-starring “3:10 To Yuma,” based on an Elmore Leonard short story (and a expanded remake of a 1957 Glenn Ford Western). I caught a preview of this movie last night.

With little new ground to explore in the realm of the Western, “3:10 To Yuma” settles for being an amalgam of previous movies; it combines the moral ambiguity and personal dilemmas of more recent films like “Unforgiven” with the thrilling, “shoot-em-up” mentality of John Wayne-era pictures, with a miniscule infusion of humor and the gritty, gory realism of most modern violent films. It’s an interesting combination; unfortunately, it doesn’t particularly succeed.

The movie is headlined by tremendous actors; Russell Crowe and Christian Bale enter the first frame of film in “3:10 To Yuma” with phenomenal pedigrees – I mean, one’s the Gladiator, and the other’s managed to create iconic characters from Batman to (Patrick) Bateman. Unfortunately, they’re playing characters who don’t feel particularly well-formed. Bale is Dan Evans, the “good guy” of the movie, driven to do the right thing. Unfortunately, and I’m not sure whether this is the fault of Bale or director James Mangold, the audience never really comes to understand Evans’s motivations for doing the “right thing.” (There’s a bit towards the end where Evans reveals his hand; by then, though, it’s too little, too late.) As Evans, Bale is asked to be both inherently good and morally ambiguous – it’s ambitious, but never really succeeds. As “bad guy” Ben Wade, Russell Crowe is faced with a similar task – to be inherently bad and morally ambiguous. He comes closer to succeeding than Bale does, due largely to his unfettered charisma – the camera obviously loves Crowe, and he unflinchingly loves it back, which does add an interesting aspect to his murderous, duplicitous Wade. However, because “3:10 To Yuma” is in essence a “traditional” Western – it retains the story from a good-guy versus bad-guy story – it suffers a bit from having the bad guy be a more magnetic presence. Both Bale and Crowe suffer a bit for their character’s voices (both lead actors are foreign-born, and as such, have to obscure their natural accents) – they sound less like distinctive portrayals and more like whispery Clint Eastwood imitators, which is sadly unfortunate.

The supporting characters add an interesting dimension to this film; most notably, Ben Foster (previously known for his teenaged roles, including a part in the disastrously unfunny Dave Barry-scripted “Big Trouble” and a role in the third “X-Men” movie) is an absolute revelation as the psychotically unhinged Charlie Prince. You can’t take your eyes off him when he’s on-screen in this movie. Young Logan Lerman, playing Evans’s conflicted, stubborn 14-year-old son, also scores major points for his unflinching performance. Peter Fonda, Dallas Roberts, Vinessa Shaw, Gretchen Mol, and Alan Tudyk also provide solid, if unspectacular, support.

“3:10 To Yuma” is an interesting attempt at reinvigorating the Western genre for the first decade of the new century, but ultimately, it’s a noble failure because it offers nothing new and instead piggybacks too much on clichés from movies of the past. It will be interesting to see if the remainder of the year’s Westerns continue this trend or breathe new air into this type of film.

[“3:10 To Yuma” arrives in theatres on September 7. It will be showing in sneak previews across the country this weekend; check your local listings.]

Forthcoming: Movies We're Excited About

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, we can point you towards some movie trailers that hint at good things to come...to a theater near you.

Be Kind Rewind (due January 2008)
Stars Jack Black and Mos Def as two video store clerks who inadvertently erase every tape in their store, and make up for it by creating their own versions of the films. Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dave Chappelle's Block Party) directs.

Harold and Kumar 2 (due 2008)
John Cho and Kal Penn revisit their characters from the hilarious Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. This could either be really bad, or really awesome. We're hoping for awesome.

Walk Hard (due December 2007)
John C. Reilly stars as Dewey Cox in this parody of musical biopics like Ray and Walk The Line, co-written by Judd Apatow (see my post on Superbad). Also stars Jenna Fischer (The Office), and features cameos from Jack White (of the White Stripes, as Elvis Presley) and Paul Rudd (from Anchorman and the 40 Year Old Virgin, as John Lennon).

Forthcoming: "I'm Not There"

So, buzz is building for Todd Haynes's upcoming film "I'm Not There."

It's an interesting concept: the life of Bob Dylan with the lead role being played by several different actors - including the unconventional casting of female Cate Blanchett and African-American youth Marcus Carl Franklin, as well as the more conventional (read: male, Caucasian) Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, and Christian Bale.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I've come to understand how compelling a figure Bob Dylan was in the 1960s and early 1970s, through D.A. Pennebaker's contemporaneous documentary film "Don't Look Back" and then through Martin Scorcese's retrospective "No Direction Home," and I'm a pretty big fan of his music.

However, I'm not a big fan of mythmaking - and, if anything, having seven actors play the same, very real person (including Blanchett and Franklin) suggests the propagation of the myth of Dylan as someone who transcends the corporeal. Which I don't think is a good thing, necessary. We're very fortunate to have the music of Dylan, which in and of itself serves to transcend the singer (in the manner of songs, which in being performed by different singers, extend beyond the original composer/singer, as well as in the recordings, which - once committed to tape - become, in a way, immortal). Does Bob Dylan need to become a part of American mythology? Is he already? It's hard to tell.

Related:
The soundtrack tracklisting has been released. I don't know what order the tracks are in. It'd be kind of interesting if the songs are in alphabetic order. That'd be kind of rad, actually.

“All Along The Watchtower” :: Eddie Vedder & The Million Dollar Bashers
“As I Went Out One Morning” :: Mira Billotte
“Ballad Of A Thin Man” :: Stephen Malkmus & The Million Dollar Bashers
“Billy” :: Los Lobos
“Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” :: The Hold Steady
“Can’t Leave Her Behind” :: Stephen Malkmus & Lee Ranaldo
“Cold Irons Bound” :: Tom Verlaine & The Million Dollar Bashers
“Dark Eyes” :: Iron & Wine & Calexico
“Fourth Time Around” :: Yo La Tengo
“Goin’ To Acapulco” :: Jim James & Calexico
“Highway 61 Revisited” :: Karen O & The Million Dollar Bashers
“I Wanna Be Your Lover” :: Yo La Tengo
“I’m Not There” :: Bob Dylan
“I’m Not There” :: Sonic Youth
“Just Like A Woman” :: Charlotte Gainsbourg & Calexico
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” :: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot
“Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” :: Antony & The Johnsons
“The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” :: Mason Jennings
“Maggie’s Farm” :: Stephen Malkmus & The Million Dollar Bashers
“Mama You’ve Been On My Mind” :: Jack Johnson
“The Man In The Long Black Coat” :: Mark Lanegan
“Moonshiner” :: Bob Forrest
“One More Cup Of Coffee” :: Roger McGuinn & Calexico
“Pressing On” :: John Doe
“Ring Them Bells” :: Sufjan Stevens
“Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)” :: Willie Nelson & Calexico
“Simple Twist Of Fate” :: Jeff Tweedy
“Stuck Inside Of Mobile With Memphis Blues Again” :: Cat Power
“The Times They Are A Changin’” :: Mason Jennings
“Tombstone Blues” :: Richie Havens
“When The Ship Comes In” :: Marcus Carl Franklin
“Wicked Messenger” :: The Black Keys
“You Ain’t Goin ‘Nowhere” :: Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova

[The "Million Dollar Bashers" are -
Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), guitars
Tony Garnier (longtime Dylan collaborator), bass
Tom Verlaine (Television), guitars
Nels Cline (Wilco), guitars
Smokey Hormel (Dylan, Beck), guitars
Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth), drums
John Medeski (Medeski, Martin, and Wood), keyboards]

Much respect to The Playlist for the soundtrack info.

"Superbad" - A Review

[Note: Thanks to the munificence of Mr. Javen Bohall and Mr. Paul Hoff, we were fortunate to see an advance screening of “Superbad” in Latham, NY last night. This movie does not enter theaters for another week. This review will not contain any spoilers beyond that which is has been provided for online viewing through YouTube.com; however, if you have not been exposed to this, you might want to stop reading here.]

Way back in the summer of 1999, when the country was gripped with pre-millenium angst and dot-coms ruled Wall Street, writer Adam Herz and directors Chris and Paul Weitz created a movie that reintroduced the concept of the R-rated teen comedy to American audiences. The name of the movie was “American Pie,” of course, and it reminded viewers that modern-era teenagers could be as raunchy and hilarious as their counterparts in films like “Porky’s” and “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” a generation prior. The key to the $100 million-plus success of “American Pie,” however, was its essential sweetness – the characters in this film all had redeeming qualities, even the bullies. In “American Pie,” a character like Seann William Scott’s Stifler could do something completely heinous like dose another character’s mocha-chino with laxative, but wound up being embraced as a friend by his peers (and the audience) by the time his story was completed.

The comedic minds behind two recent entries into the pantheon of rewatchably hilarious movies (that would be “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”) have dipped their pool into the R-rated teen comedy with the new release “Superbad.” The film comes with an impressive pedigree: while it’s the teen-film directing debut of Greg Mottola, he’s worked on cult television series like “Arrested Development” and “Undeclared.” Additionally, the film features behind-the-scenes input from the genius Judd Apatow (who produces) and newly-minted comedy star Seth Rogen (who co-wrote the movie as well as taking on a supporting part). While this is not any of these people’s first efforts at capturing the teenage dynamic (most of the above were involved in television shows like “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared”), this is their first go-around in the realm of the teenage-themed motion picture.

Needless to say, “Superbad” scores on just about every level. The plot is simple: three high-school-senior losers – nervous, brainy Evan (Michael Cera), gregarious, talkative Seth (Jonah Hill), and insanely dweeby Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) hatch a plan to purchase alcohol with a fake identification card. Their hope is that, with this alcohol, they can get some girls drunk enough to want to have sex. That’s the main plot: get drunk, get laid. That’s just about it. It seems simple, but that’s pretty much all that they need for approximately 2 hours of hilarity, spurred on by early encounters in school with girls (led by Emma Stone and Martha McIsaac) and then heightened through interactions with two area policemen (Rogen and “Saturday Night Live” player Bill Hader). The simple plot of the movie succeeds because of the utter originality of Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s script, which avoids a great deal of teen-movie clichés and instead takes viewers on a completely original, absurd journey.

The actors are pitch-perfect in this film. Cera’s Evan character is a logical extension of his previous signature role, that of George-Michael Bluth in the late, lamented “Arrested Development” – he retains that character’s stuttery, low-key delivery but adds an edge that’s pretty much commensurate with any sex-and-booze obsessed teenager. As Seth, Jonah Hill is a revelation; he shouts and throws himself around with an abandon remiscent of the finest hours of the late Chris Farley. This movie marks the acting debut of Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who hits a home run – his Fogell is so hilarious and well-rounded that it’s already hard to see him topping this; it’s the kind of definitive role that may well completely define his entire acting career. Hader and Rogen are funny, but their absurdist antics ultimately take a backseat to the teens, who center this movie completely.

In an interesting touch, director Mottola decided to score the film with funk and soul nuggets (the score is performed by a band led by Bootsy Collins) rather than a more current soundtrack – it adds a quirky element to the film that’s somewhat endearing, although I could see some finding it off-putting. Mottola does generally fine work; this is not an auteur’s movie, and generally avoids subtlety for big laughs. The movie does suffer from a mid-way lapse of energy, but is otherwise fun.

Is this film a new “American Pie?” Ultimately, and thankfully, it is not. “American Pie” is suffused with the optimism and naivete of youth, where “Superbad” is infinitely more cynical – it’s a teen movie for people who have survived their own teenaged years and are ready to look back through an unimpeded, non-smoky lens. It’s very funny and well-done, and I highly recommend it.