(more…)

this was unexpected.

(more…)

Test

my interest in this movie just went up by five billion.

I don’t watch Dr. Who (not in about twenty-five years anyway) but the idea of making the Roddy McDowell character in Fright Night a Las Vegas magician seems like the most awesome idea in the history of horror movie remakes.

Mostly safe for work this time. Some underwear here and there, a little swearing. That’s about it. Bits are technically covered anyway.

(more…)

(more…)

What’s with kids today using the word “random” all the time? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I would lose my shit if my kid did that to his door.

Especially if he/she was such a pussy that they put “f*cked” instead of “fucked”. If you’re going to rebel, at least have some fucking balls about it. And don’t do it on my door.

I’m taking you computer away for at least a month and you’re saving up your own money to pay for replacing that door. And you can FORGET about Six Flags in July. Your name is WHAT?! your name is WHO?! SLIM GROUNDED

(more…)

There’s a theme this time.

I know I said it was only going to be fifty a day but I lied. There’s a hundred today.

(more…)

Eli Roth said that Tarantino told him to write his scripts longhand. He said it’s the best advice about screenwriting he’s ever gotten.

It’s strange to actually see it though.

I bought a notebook and a couple of pens last week.

you may have to follow through to the source, as the user has disabled embedding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3_z0mYXnMc

Someone has taken the original audio of Linda Blair doing her lines, before she was redubbed by Mercedes McCambridge, and edited back into the movie. I find it pretty damned interesting. It really reminds you that a small child played that role. I don’t think Linda gets nearly enough credit for her part in creating that character and really making it scary. I mean, I’d say that she’s is easily in the top five scariest horror movie characters, for me anyway. 

Anyway, I just thought I’d share.

Seeing him with the beard, I’m starting to feel like Joseph Gordon Levitt should play George Carlin in a movie. I mean, he’s certainly a prettier guy that Carlin was, but I dunno… it’s vibe I’ve been getting lately. Something should happen with that.

Not that I think there should necessarily be a movie about George Carlin.  But maybe a movie about Richard Pryor that features scenes with George Carlin. Or maybe a movie about the early days of SNL. Or even that movie in the works about Belushi. I dunno. I’m just thinking out loud.

harmony

are there still doubters?

http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/

I’m frustrated.

You see, when they first showed Voldemort in whichever one he showed up in. Goblet of Fire I guess… he looked like this. He didn’t have a nose and he was all white and bald.

I thought he looked like that because he was still coming together and forming. Like we were seeing uncooked version of Voldemort, and that eventually he’d look like a regular guy, or at least like Ralph Fiennes.

But this is just what he looks like? That’s how he’s going to look for the rest of the series?

That’s goofy as hell. Why doesn’t he have a fucking nose?!

I had reservations about this movie because, as I said at a few different points, it looked like so much hipster bullshit. I think that’s a fair assessment, based on the trailers. I haven’t read the comic books (oh, I’m sorry, I mean “graphic novels”, my bad) so I can’t really comment to the level of hipster-ness that the source material brought to the table. All I can say is that I’ve seen the movie and I’m relatively comfortable with my initial assessment.

But before we get into that, I think we should look at what IS a hipster exactly?

The term has been evolving somewhat over the last few years. The foundation is essentially the same, but it’s managed to incorporate some other influences, as well as shifted it’s focus as hipsters have started becoming more and more a serious problem in the youth of today. Much like drugs, premarital sex and Satanism, hipsterism is ravaging our young people and leading them down a dark path.

My understanding of what a hipster IS has changed as well. For a long time, my definition came from the show Seinfeld. I’d heard the word “hipster” before then, but I only had a very vague understanding of what it was. In one episode of the show, Elaine calls Kramer a “stupid hipster doofus” and it clicked in my head. Kramer is a hipster. He wears retro beatnicky clothes, he’s quirky but gets laid a lot, he doesn’t have a job and he’s an enthusiast for various obscure forms of pop-culture. Kramer never really had the kind of arrogance and superiority that tends to come along with hipsters, but it was close enough.

Kramer, to me, is my idea of what a hipster was before a couple of years ago. If you had asked me, five years ago, to list off a bunch of hipsters, I would have given you David Byrne, Rivers Cuomo, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, Chuck Palahniuk, Janeane Garofalo, John Waters, David Cross, Spike Jonze, Beck… the list could go on and on.

Over these last couple of years hipster culture has somewhat hijacked geek culture and become a kind of amalgam of the two. Somehow hipsters have taken a few key elements of what it is to be a geek and incorporated that into hipsterdom. Now suddenly it’s cool to have glasses, just as long as they’re ironic looking, chunky black Buddy Holly glasses. Now it’s cool to wear mismatched, uncoordinated clothing from Goodwill, just as long as it’s meticulously picked out and paired to be just that. Most of all, suddenly it’s okay, even cool, to embrace geek pop-culture. Comic books and sci-fi and video games and horror movies.

Now, you would think that this would be a good thing for geeks. That it would open doors for them. In some ways it has. I mean, it’s made entertainment more interesting. The recent boom in comic book themed movies is great for geeks. The resurgence of Star Trek and the celebration of zombies and vampires (though let’s not get started on Twilight… that’s a whole other post) and classic video games is great for geeks.

The downside is that none of these things had anything to do with what makes geeks geeks. People tend to define The Geek as a person who is interested, almost to the point of obsession, with a specific faction of popculture. Whether it’s music geeks or movie geeks or comic book geeks or sci-fi geeks or model train geeks or D&D geeks. Geeks are people who focus a large percentage of their attention on some specific form of pop-culture. But that’s just the result. What is rarely discussed is what drives these people to do that. The social awkwardness and the inability to relate to other people and worst of all (but entirely too common) the painfully sad lack of confidence and self respect. These are all things that often make the geek what it is. Geekdom becomes an escape as well as a trap. When you can’t find friends in real life, you turn to fantasy friends and you live vicariously through Captain Kirk and Bruce Wayne and Frodo. Sometimes geeks are able to make that work. Sometimes they even find solace in each other. Sometimes they grow out of it or into something else. And sometimes they become mass murderers and serial killers.

My point though is that it isn’t the subject of the geek’s attention that defines him or her as a geek, it’s what brought them to that subject. So as geek culture has blow up over the last decade or so, geeks themselves have been left behind. Even worse, they don’t even really have that one thing that kept them afloat before. For instance, fifteen years ago, geeks and ONLY geeks gave a shit about Lord of the Rings. That was exclusively a geeky bit of culture. Geeks and only geeks gave a shit about Star Trek. Geeks and only geeks knew who Iron Man was. That was something they shared only with each other. Now these things belong to everyone. Hell, the San Diego Comicon was overrun with Twilight fans last year. It’s become a commercial for TV shows and completely non-comic book or genre related movies. It certainly no longer belongs to geeks. Of course, this wasn’t all done by hipsters. But hipsters are doing it along with everyone else.

Also what hipsters have done is taken this to the next level. They aren’t content to just watch Star Trek and Batman along with the rest of the movie going audience. They have to claim specific things from geek culture and make it their own.

For instance, the glasses. Glasses are generally a nerd thing, but nerds and geeks tend to be the same people. Everything that bugs me about hipsters can be summed up with the following: Hipsters wearing glasses with no lenses. Very few things drive me closer to insanity and psychosis than seeing someone walk around wearing big plastic glasses with no lenses in them.

I’d heard about it before and didn’t believe it. But then a couple of weeks ago I was at work and these two teenage girls came in wearing pretty much exactly those glasses with no lenses. I almost jumped over the counter and choked them both out. A blind, white rage clouded my vision and I thought I was going to have some sort of Altered States style regression into a primitive form of man.

At the time I didn’t even entirely understand why it made me so, so angry. I mean, it wasn’t just that it’s incredibly obnoxious to wear glasses with no lenses. What I came to realize is that I was so angry because there are people out there who HAVE to wear glasses. They have to wear glasses to see, and many of these people were tormented through their childhoods and adolescences, and those glasses were a main focal point for various bullies to grasp onto. For decades geeks and nerds and spazzes have suffered because of glasses. I myself do not wear glasses, but I’m sympathetic. Glasses were almost a kind of uniform for geeks. A geek scarlet letter. It was a way for the hyenas and jackals of the world to spot the weaker, geekier members of the heard and pick them off. And now beautiful people taken that from geeks and are using it to get laid. Beautiful people are using it to be beautiful.

That glasses thing, to me, represents pretty much all of the shit that hipsters have taken from geeks. They’ve taken things that were inherent and necessary and even a burden for geeks and they’ve neutralized any worth these things ever had to geeks. Geeks can still like Star Trek and Lord of the Rings and comic books, but it’s no longer something that’s uniquely theirs. And frankly, how much must it suck to be a geek and to have to watch attractive, successful, happy people wearing glasses with no lenses and talking about comic books but still turning their noses up at you? In a fairly extreme, unfair analogy, I’d say it’d be similar to being a Jew in Europe in 1943 and seeing a bunch of Nazis walking around wearing yamakas and spinning dreidels yelling “Oy Vey!” and giving each other high fives and calling that the new cool.

Because at the end of the day, when you strip away the glasses and the culture and all of the external things we associate with geeks and hipsters, what you’re left with are sad, broken, socially awkward outcasts on one side and attractive, successful, confident people on the other, just like it’s always been. The difference is that now hipsters have stripped geeks of their armor.

It’s THIS distinction that brings us to Scott Pilgrim vs The World.

There seems to be some debate as to whether or not this is a hipster movie or a geek movie. I’d say it’s clearly a post-geek hipster movie, though I think it’s helmed by a geek with geek sensibilities. But it’s a movie that represents these modern hipsters.

Scott Pilgrim centers around a 22 year old man-child played by Michael Cera who is in the oh-so-awful position of having to choose between two sexy chicks. On one side he’s got a seventeen year old Asian schoolgirl named Knives Chau who worships him and on the other he’s got a direct from Hot Topic far too hip for any of us chick with purple hair named Ramona Flowers. Unfortunately for Scott, Ramona comes with a shit ton of baggage in the form of “The League of Seven Evil Exes” who Scott must fight and defeat before he can date her. The movie centers mostly around Scott’s battles with these exes.

Honestly, just looking at the cast alone, from the get go we’re clearing dealing with a hipster movie. Michael Cera may as well be the John Wayne of hipsters and Juno was Rio Bravo. Pretty much the two most defining modern hipster movies of the last five years were Juno and 500 Days of Summer. And while Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel have managed to juggle their hipster cred with their careers and sped off into the night like Batman and Robin, Michael Cera has fallen so far off the deep end that he’s never going to recover. He’s become such a mascot for hipsters that as the world has come to reject them and all they stand for, he was the last one standing and therefore the easy scapegoat… the statue of Saddam Hussein that was symbolically toppled. It doesn’t help his case that he appears completely incapable of playing anyone but the exact same character over and over again.

In addition to Michael Cera, we’ve got Aubrey Plaza (who fucking love with every fiber of my being btw. Just saying) who is almost a cartoon of a hipster. I’m not even entirely sure she actually IS a hipster, but perhaps some sort of living parody of one. A character that she puts on like Andrew Dice Clay or something. Either way, playing disenfranchised, perpetually unimpressed hipsters is what she does for a living.

The big villain of the movie is Jason Schwartzman, who pioneered the modern hipster movement with his portrayal of Max Fischer in the Wes Anderson movie Rushmore, and has been playing variations of that character ever since. Then we’ve got Brandon Routh (who I also quite like, in the limited capacity that I’ve seen him) who has two real noteworthy credits to his name, the first of which was playing the original hipster poser, Clark Kent. His other big credit was in the Kevin Smith movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Now, while Kevin Smith himself is not a hipster (that guy’s a geek if I’ve ever seen one) his movies are a major source of hipster culture. Also in the cast is Kieran Culkin (who, much like Schwartzman, pioneered the hipster movement with his character Igby in the movie Igby Goes Down).

The cast list is enough to very strongly suspect that we’re dealing with a hipster movie. Once we sit down and watch the movie itself, it becomes pretty clear. The problem is that I believe Edgar Wright is simply a geek, not a hipster. The film is incredibly unique in the way it incorporates the aesthetics of video games and comic books. It’s done in a way that I’ve never seen and I found it visually quite impressive.

Here’s the thing though… Edgar Wright is 36 years old. He, like other kids of our generation, remember when the Nintendo Entertainment System came out. We grew up on Atari and Colecovision and these places they used to have called “arcades”. We have a genuine nostalgic love for these games. That was clearly evident in the movie, down to the 8-bit version of the Universal Logo at the beginning. The problem is that, like so many hipster kids today, Scott Pilgrim is 22. He wasn’t alive when the NES came out. There’s no way a 22 year old is nostalgic for 8-bit video games.

Furthermore, the character isn’t a geek. He’s nothing like a geek. There are geeky elements dropped into the movie, but no, Scott Pilgirm and his friends aren’t geeks. Scott Pilgrim is a jobless, kid in his early twenties who has the terrible problem of having to choose between two hot chicks to date, as well as dealing with the hot chicks he used to date. Oh, and he plays bass in an awesome indi-rock band. Not a geek. A hipster. A modern hipster. Scott’s a hipster, his girlfriend is a hipster, his band consists of hipsters and most of the Evil Exes he fights are hipsters. In fact, one of them (a singing, dancing Bollywood style Indian character) summons a group of “hipster demon chicks” (his words, not mine) to support him during his fight with Scott.

I think what we ended up with here was a hipster movie, about hipster characters, directed by a geek. And, unfortunately, the end result was that I didn’t particularly like any of the characters and I didn’t give a shit which hot chick Scott ended up with. I thought that Scott was boring, I thought Knives was annoying and I thought Ramona was a bitch and I didn’t understand why Scott felt like she was so amazing.

That’s not to say it was a bad movie. I didn’t hate it. In fact, I quite enjoyed watching it. The visual rollercoaster Wright takes us on is almost enough to save the movie entirely on it’s own. The style of filmmaking was so unique and new and interesting that I was mesmerized. Also, it is a comedy and there were plenty of funny parts to it. I wouldn’t say that it was hilarious, but it was funny enough.

There was an immense amount of tongue in cheek parody to it as well. It’s hard to tell how much of it was self parodying and how much was a genuine jab at hipster culture. I’m inclined to believe that this self parodying actually made the movie even MORE of a hipster movie, because it dripped of irony. It’s a movie that’s so ironic that it parodies and looks down on itself. For instance, there’s a scene where Scott has to get through two guarded doors and must provide a password for both. The first password was “whatever” and the second was simply a frustrated, bored sigh.

I don’t regret having watched it. Hell, I’d watch it again. But it is most certainly a hipster movie. A modern hipster movie. Geeks may enjoy the video game references and aesthetics, and fans of the original comic might enjoy it (though I have no idea how closely it followed the comic) but otherwise it’s not a geek movie. Like hipster culture as a whole, the movie has cherry picked specific elements from geek culture and claimed them and recycled them.

While I didn’t hate the movie, I am getting frustrated and bored with hipsters. Not the people themselves necessarily, just the attitude and style that comes along with them. I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike these actors or even the average hipster on the street. Not personally. Hell, I think Jason Schwartzman is great. I have no issue with Kieran Culkin or even Michael Cera. And, like I said, I’m pretty much in love with Aubrey Plaza. I just don’t like the baggage. So when I see a movie that seeps hipster funk, it turns me off. I lose interest.

I felt pretty badly burned by 500 Days of Summer. I went into it knowing that it was a hipster movie, and I hated everything about it so much that it made me distrust hipsters and their movies. It’s like… you know how if a person gets raped by a dude with a mustache and blond hair, they’re probably going to be uncomfortable around blond dudes with mustaches for a while? It’s like that. Hipsters as a whole have put me off so bad that I have a knee-jerk negative reaction when I see a bunch of them gathered in a movie.

Apparently I’m not the only one, because Scott Pilgrim vs The World tanked hard this weekend.

I was actually disappointed to learn that. As much as the story and characters bothered me, I did think it was quite an original movie, and I wanted it to do well. I think that Edgar Wright is a very interesting director and I’d like to see what he’s able to do with a more compelling subject matter. I’m hoping that word of mouth will bring more people to this movie as weeks go by. It’s possible.