plenty to give thanks for

Never before has a Thanksgiving weekend approached the madness that this Thanksgiving weekend provided.

Wednesday: Got out of work early and headed to the grocery store to grab the necessities for my dishes I would bring to Kristi’s for the big meal. Best buys: bottle of Chimay Grande Reserve and some cheap white zin. I had a date with the white zin later on that night as I watched “John & Mary” and “Nights & Weekends.” Really enjoyed both of them even though the first ten minutes of “Nights and Weekends” almost made me turn it off.

Thursday: Headed over to Kristi’s with all of my ingredients and got cooking. Bowie, Kristi’s french bulldog, and I were hard at work in the kitchen making stuffed mushrooms as an appetizer and some potatoes in the stove (mom’s recipe). A few walks, a couple of treats and several beers later, Kristi got to the apartment and she started working on the bird. Some more beer and a bottle of wine later, we were finishing up the meal as Davis, Maddie, and Makda showed up for dinner. Kristi brined the turkey for 24 hours and it was the most succulent, delicious turkey I’ve personally tasted. The night ended after a viewing of “Swingers” which was a timely precursor for events to come.

Friday: Woke up early and decided it was the perfect day for a good old fashioned theater hop. Hit up the AMC Burbank 16 for the first screening of “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Some lady flipped shit for the new “Alvin and the Chipmunks” sequel (I’ll be goddamned if I actually refer to it as a “squeakquel”). Personally loved the movie, thought it was Anderson’s strongest film since “Royal Tenenbaums” and the animation was just so damn endearing. I’m sure it will be in my top ten at the end of the year. One that won’t be however is “Ninja Assassin,” the next film on my hop. It just bored me to tears. In a ninja movie, I want some kickass fight scenes. Unfortunately, James McTeigue decided to shoot everything in extreme close up so I was robbed of what I wanted. Oh yeah and there’s so much ridiculous CGI bloodshed, it made “Kill Bill” look like a documentary. Finally, I went bleak and ended things with John Hillcoat’s adaptation of “The Road.” It’s a fine film with solid acting and directing but I wasn’t really drawn in, having read the book a couple of years ago. It just felt like an unnecessary movie to me. Might have been different if I hadn’t read the novel. Went over to Kristi’s to help clean up the massive mess I made in the kitchen. Day old turkey carcass is not a fun thing to deal with.

Saturday:This is where the weekend made a hard left turn into awesome. After a day of stuff I can’t remember, met up at Kristi’s and she, myself and Makda embarked on our journey to Las Vegas. Fast forward three and a half hours, we were checking into our room at the Luxor, home to Criss Angel and Carrot Top. After a quick meal at T&T’s (Tacos and Tequila, supposedly “great American food”), we got changed and headed for the Palms to see Paul Oakenfold. We waited at a bar for the Vegas Family to meet us there. Luckily, a KISS concert had just let out so there were plenty of leather-clad elderly folks with faces painted to keep us entertained.

Sidenote: The Vegas Family are a group of kids around my age that Kristi had met months before in Vegas. They know everyone. And they party hard.

After the Family talked to the doorman, we made it inside the club, free of charge. Walking into the club was quite the experience. After entering through a red-lit mirrored hallway, we emerged into the club which had intense lighting rigs (that shot fire, fog and foam snow out), trapeze artists and robot dancers. Oakenfold wasn’t on yet so we decided to try a little something. Kristi went up to the doorman for Ghostbar, the bar on the roof of the Palms. This is how it went down.
Kristi: Oh, what’s this?
Doorman: The entrance to Ghostbar. Its the bar up on the roof.
Kristi: Oh, really? Can we go?
Doorman: Uh, are you on the guest list?
Kristi: Hmm, we’re on someone’s guest list, I can’t really remember.
Doorman: Is it just you guys?
Kristi: Yup.
(Doorman looks around)
Doorman: Okay come on in.
In short, Kristi is a magician. So up we go to the 55th floor, again free of charge. The view was epic and the shitty shot above taken with my iPhone does not capture the beauty, wonder and gaudiness that the strip provided. After a few minutes up top, we headed back down to the club to enjoy the sounds of Paul Oakenfold. Right before the show started, it turned into the Flauston Paradise with platinum wigged stewardesses on the tv screens and a whole mess of Leeloos dancing around the club. Oakenfold brought it hard and I emerged three hours later a new man. A little house party and a taxi ride later, I returned to the Luxor in the morning sun to get a few hours sleep before we checked out.

Sunday: Thanks to Thanksgiving traffic, it took eight hours to get back to L.A. It was a long trip but it was definitely worth it.

*This post may seem like I’m bragging but awesome shit happened, so it seemed necessary. If something cool happened to you, I hope you would brag about it.

I gave her my heart, she gave me a ridiculous movie

It’s safe to say that this year in cinema, new lows of stupidity were reached. The greatest offender is Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” That movie hurt me like no movie before has hurt and I’ve seen “License to Wed.” I felt like I had been graciously and willingly paid Bay to inflict the type of torture upon me that only Pasolini could dream up. I can take a dumb movie but “Transformers” was malicious in its idiocy.
So along comes a little film called “2012” and somehow it rivals, maybe even surpasses, Bay’s film with how dumb it is, yet it turned out to be one of my favorite movie going experiences of the year.
After an extremely satisfying and weirdly appropriate meal at Roscoe’s, the girlfriend and I headed over to the Arclight and hunkered down at the bar. After a couple of drinks, it was showtime at the Cinerama Dome. Since I waited so late to buy tickets for the screening, we were stuck in the second row, which led me to feel nervous since the screen is huge and wraps around the auditorium. I wasn’t sure if my eyes would soon be bleeding. The trailers started and the people surrounding me kept talking. At first I was annoyed a bit but once the movie started and the talking continued, it seemed to work with what I was seeing.
See, “2012” isn’t really a film. It’s more of an experience or a video game. You play John Cusack, a failed writer/divorced deadbeat dad/limo driver. After a 30 minute cut-scene that sets up the story, you, as Cusack, must outdrive, outjump and outrun every natural disaster possible. Once you accomplish this mission, you’re treated to another cut-scene where boring shit is put in place so you can once again outmaneuver a natural disaster. This happens over the next two hours, before you beat the game and are treated to an unsatisfying ending that ties things up with a pretty bow. While the ending might not be great, it doesn’t really matter since that’s not the point. Did you have a great time playing the game? Did you experience events that can only be described as “batshit insane?” Did the drunk effeminate gentleman next to you make you laugh your ass off with his play-by-play commentary? Good, then you just survived “2012.”
This might be Roland Emmerich’s masterpiece. I thought we’d only get diminishing returns from the man after Gyllenhaal outran the cold in “Day After Tomorrow” and white people tamed saber tooth tigers in “10,000 B.C.” but that crazy German bastard pulled a fast one on me by making his biggest, loudest and most fun film to date. It seems pretty clear that Emmerich is going for real pull-at-your-heartstrings drama mixed with a whole mess of blow-stuff-up-athon but the film plays as a beautiful parody of all disaster films. There are large monologues that I couldn’t stop laughing at, disaster sequences involving so many faceless people dying horrible deaths (think of the train sequence in “Wanted” but times 100 million) and so many international landmarks destroyed into little bits.
While this movie is aggressively stupid, Emmerich was able to curry my favor by having some solid actors (primarily Oliver Platt who will forever have a place in my heart), fantastic disaster sequences and an old-school approach to filmmaking. No shaky-cam or MTV-editing here, folks. Just some good, dumb-as-bricks, old-fashioned fun.

Adam Lambert and the End of Times

Back in the day, original songs for movie soundtracks were a big deal. Way big deal. Just look at the first four installments of the “Batman” franchise. “Batman” gave us Prince singing “Batdance.” “Returns” gave us the lesser known Siouxsie and the Banshees cut “Face to Face.” “Forever” gave us the unintelligible Seal classic “Kiss From A Rose.” And “Batman & Robin” didn’t give anyone anything good but I’ll go with “Gotham City” by R. Kelly, which happens to be a pretty goddamn awesome R. Kelly song by R. Kelly standards.
But, seriously, the movie would end, cut to credits and the next chart topper would blast over the theater speakers. Everyone who went to high school between 1998 and 2005 ( I can’t speak for anything past that) knows that the “I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing” from the “Armageddon” soundtrack was a school dance staple. The movie soundtracks today that are successful come in the form of “Juno,” full of Kimya Dawson rhymes and riddles or “New Moon,” which happens to feature every hot indie band with pockets stuffed with lots of money.
Where are my big hits? Where is the random pop song that plays over the end credits that harkens to the films of yesteryear? An older time, a simpler time.
Roland Emmerich is here to help. Not only does he provide top notch, soulless disaster porn (which I happen to love the shit out of) but he clearly likes to make those soundtrack choices you and I both miss. The same man who felt that the Diddy/Jimmy Page “Come With Me” worked in a movie about a giant lizard destroying New York now feels that Adam Lambert is well suited to herald the apocalypse.
I wasn’t a fan of Lambert during his run on “American Idol,” but I could see that the dude had some pipes on him. Perhaps it was the bombastic theatrics that Lambert brought to every performance that drew Emmerich to him or maybe it was the leather and eye liner. It’s anyones guess.
The point is that Adam Lambert has the song “Time For Miracles” on the “2012″ soundtrack. The song doesn’t seem to fit well with the film’s disaster motif. I mean, the movie is about the world ending. Not a meteor headed toward earth that a ragtag bunch of roughnecks are going to stop. The end of the world. Los Angeles falls into the ocean. D.C. is destroyed by a tidal wave. Nepal is destroyed by a tidal wave. Yellowstone’s super volcano finally blows its top. Mass hysteria. Cats and dogs living together.
But there’s the Lambert, to show us the way in these dark times. Just watch the video and enjoy that we’ve moved past the point where stars might show up in the actual video, let alone the clips in the music video. Emmerich knows that the star of the movie is each and every one of his disaster set pieces and he doesn’t give a shit about spoiler alerts. Click on that link!

Time For Miracles

Adam Lambert | MySpace Video

Malaise

NOTE: This was supposed to be posted yesterday but I was lazy.

It’s been a week and a half since my last entry. This is what happens. I always start it but never continue cause I get bored or reruns of “Iron Chef America” are on.

I’m a huge film soundtrack geek. Witnessing the perfect combination of the right piece of music set to a scene is one of life’s greatest pleasures, to me. Every year, I latch onto a soundtrack that not only makes me think of the film it belongs to but one that can exist on its own. I certainly have my favorites that I usually latch onto such as the work of Jon Brion or Mark Mothersbaugh. Brion’s work on “Synecdoche, New York” is an album I often put on when I need to get some work done. While I enjoy a good needledrop soundtrack as much as the next guy (that award goes to “Adventureland” for this year thus far), it’s original compositions that really get me pumped.
Today, the soundtrack for Spike Jonze’s “Where The Wild Things Are” hit store shelves and imeem.com has an embed player that allows you to listen to the whole thing for free. So guess what I’ve been doing at work all day. Karen O. along with a whole mess of folks from the indie music world created a fantastic, fun and uplifting set of songs. This is one that I’m going to be listening to for a while. If the track “Lost Fur” is any indication, I’m also going to have to pick up the film score album coming out later on this year by frequent Jonze collaborator Carter Burwell. “Where The Wild Things Are” might be hipster catnip but I’ll be damned if I’m not completely taken with it already.

Conflict of Interest

Okay, so not much happened today. “How I Met Your Mother” returned with a solid and adorable premiere. “Gossip Girl” this week was slightly less meh-tastic than last week’s. And “Curb Your Enthusiam” is now back on television and the first episode was so good, I enjoyed it once again this evening.

Now, let’s get down to business, dear reader. So I have a blog. And I work for a film company. I sense a tension within, cause everything inside of me is telling me not to do this, but what the hell! “Mystery Team” is a very funny film and deserves to be seen by more people. Good comedy deserves to be rewarded, don’t you think? So here’s what you can do. Click on the widget I’m going to install below and demand that Mystery Team comes to your city. Your one vote just might possibly change the fate of this film forever. So give it a try. For me, at least? Thanks! I promise I’ll have something of substance tomorrow.

View all Mystery Team tour dates

Dino DNA!!!

I was working on writing something for the Emmys but an hour in I lost interest. NPH was an all-around badass host and Ricky Gervais was hilarious as usual. Other than that not much happened aside from the stage moving around a lot.

While surfing the internet, I stumbled across an amazing find on CHUD.com. Devin Faraci, fantastic film writer and man about town, visited the L.A. Museum of Natural History this weekend and saw dinosaurs. Not fossils and models, but some living dinosaurs (or, at least, the closest we’ll ever get to seeing them). On the weekends, the Museum has two puppeteers walking around in dinosaur suits and terrorizing small children.

I’m mainly writing this to make you jealous cause I’m going this weekend and I’m gonna hang out with some of nature’s finest creatures. I hope I’m allowed to bring in some NERF guns to hunt the dinosaurs around the museum. “Clever girl.”

Expect lots of pictures.

Weekend B.O. 9/20/09

My friend told me “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” was good. Critics tell me “The Informant!” was good. I know “Inglourious Basterds” was good. So what the hell is the rest of this junk in the Top Ten?

As usual, the animated film won out, with “Cloudy” pulling in just a bit north of $30 million. It should keep playing well because for the next month, there’s pretty much zilch in terms of quality family-friendly entertainment. Soderbergh’s latest pulled in about $10.5 million and will hopefully be carried by good word of mouth. Who can resist a pudgy Matt Damon? I know I can’t! The Eckhart/Aniston weepy “Love Happens” (which is in the running for most indifferent title of the year, competing with this fall’s “Everything’s Fine”) opened with almost $8.5 million, but the per-screen average shows that the film is playing well on its lesser number of screens. “Jennifer’s Body” is almost as dead as Megan Fox’s soul. It opened with $6.8. Clearly the film didn’t connect with the Horror audience nor did it pull in the Fox fanboys. Fox is something of a lightning rod as of late with her strange and annoying pull-quotes from interviews, maybe the Fox backlash has begun.

Other than that, Madea dropped but kept doing bad all by herself at number two. “9″ lost most of its crowd to “Cloudy,” coming in at number 6. “Basterds” (7) came in seventh but this weekend brought the film to a total of nearly $110 million, making it Tarantino’s highest grossing film (“Pulp Fiction” had $107). “All About Steve,” (8) which is probably what the government now uses instead of waterboarding, isn’t dying fast enough. “Sorority Row” (9) flopped, despite a shotgun-wielding Princess Leia and “The Final Destination” (10) is wrapping things up before another inanely titled “Final Destination” film goes into production.

1. Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs      $30,100,000

2. The Informant!                                            $10,545,000

3. Tyler Perry’s New Thing                           $10,060,000

4. Love Happens                                              $8,456,000

5. Jennifer’s Body                                            $6,800,000

Not such a hot “Body”

“Jennifer’s Body” made me feel like an adolescent coming to terms with his sexuality. I felt uncomfortable, a little grimy and, occasionally, downright bad. That’s not to say that the film itself is bad, nor is it really good. It just kind of sits there. It’s not scary enough to be considered a horror film and it isn’t funny enough to be considered a comedy.

I had three paragraphs of set up here but no one really needs any of that. For this film, one sentence is enough: Megan Fox is hot and eats boys. Sold? No? It’s from Karyn Kusama, the director of “Aeon Flux.” Still not doing it for you? It’s from Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar for writing “Juno.” Oh, you’re suffering from the “Juno” backlash still? Me too.

I think Cody is a fine enough writer who clearly loves films and pop culture. While the first ten minutes of “Juno” are tough for me to stomach, overall, I like the film and the actors are able to make Cody’s dialogue work. In “Jennifer’s Body,” Megan Fox is loaded with the largest amount of “Cody-isms,” and while it can be seen as a character tic for Jennifer, it’s pretty painful at points. Amanda Seyfried is able to hold her own well as wallflower best friend Needy as is Johnny Simmons as Needy’s indie-tastic boyfriend (we know this cause he wears vests over his t-shirts). True hero points, however, go to Adam Brody as a Brandon Flowers facsimile and J.K. Simmons as a hook-handed, curly headed teacher. The two of them are able to truly bring the film to life and fill it with a rich comedic energy.

Kusama is clearly a competent director yet her handle on the scarier scenes is not quite adept, telegraphing jump scares from a mile away. I can appreciate what Cody was trying to write with this film which is flipping the horror genre on its ear by making innocent boys the victims for once. I felt bad for the guys though because they weren’t just shells but pretty well drawn characters that you start to have feelings for before Jennifer exercises her social power and sexuality by seducing them and ripping their guts out.

There’s plenty of blood and black bile but not enough to bring the inner gorehound out. There’s a couple of chuckles but nothing close to a belly laugh. There’s one genuinely creepy moment in the entire film’s run time and that’s cause Fox kinda scares me to begin with. Overall, “Jennifer’s Body” is harmless and not that exciting but certainly more worth your time than “Sorority Row” or the upcoming “Saw VI.” Even though it doesn’t work quite as well as everyone involved would hope, “Jennifer’s Body” was at least trying.

4/10

The points I’d add on for Bill Fagerbakke and Amy Sedaris cameos are negated because of three blatant “Evil Dead” references in one shot. The poster on Needy’s wall, the shirt Jennifer’s wearing and Needy pointing out that Jennifer is wearing her “Evil Dead” shirt. I get it Cody, you like your Raimi.