I Believe in Werner Herzog

"[W]hy is it that a sophisticated animal like a chimp does not utilize inferior creatures? He could straddle a goat and ride off into the sunset."
- Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World

I'm really starting to think that, if Werner Herzog isn't God Himself, then he's like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey: the catalyst that points the way for the human race to evolve.

Feedback on the Radio

So, what did everyone think?

Please, pick as many nits as you like. It's all in aid of giving you a better show next time.

Radio Head

Alright, so this may not be a big deal in the grand scheme of things but it's a pretty damn big deal to me so bear with me.

Unless I'm the butt of a very elaborate April Fool's joke started days ago only to be revealed to me later today, I will be co-hosting a radio show on the recently revived Hunter College radio station, WHCS, starting tomorrow!

I will be doing a show called (until further notice) All Things to All People with my buddy Adam Robbins (oh that's right, ladies... THAT Adam Robbins). The show is going to air from 12pm-1pm EDT Thursdays, streaming live through Live365.com.

As the name of the show might suggest, we'll be playing a lot of different stuff, from Miles Davis to Crystal Castles to MC Paul Barman to Pimpcore and everything in between (with the exception of 99% of top selling singles on the iTunes charts... just what in the blue hell is a Flo Rida anyway?). The idea is that there will be something for everyone in there. Oh and we'll be doing some talking in between as well. I'd like to think that Adam and I are amicable guys and, if the pressure to fill air time doesn't make us go into the fetal position naked on the floor, we ought to be able to keep you entertained. If nothing else, check out the show to listen to us fail miserably.

Once again, that's All Things to All People, Thursdays from 12-1pm EDT on WHCS Hunter College Radio. Just click this link or better yet, come back here and listen on the widget found at the right. In fact, click on it right now and keep it on until tomorrow afternoon just so you don't forget.

Also, tweet me and Adam on that fancy Twitter nonsense to let us know how we're doing: what you think works, what doesn't, if you think we suck, or if you love us just the way we are. We appreciate your support in any event.

Where the Wild Things Are

I'm not sure about this one. Now, I have no reason to doubt the potential for this film, as everything works well here, in my opinion. It's based on a children's book that you would have to work hard not to like. Spike Jonze's first two films, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, are two of my favorites from the last ten years. Dave Eggers, who co-wrote the script with Jonze, is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which, if I'm not mistaken, is almost okay to declare in public that you like again without being branded some sort of poseur. And the cinematography by Jonze's longtime DP, Lance Acord, looks incredible.

So why am I somewhat skeptical about the film version of Where the Wild Things Are?

I think it might be a case of too clever by half. From the expansion of the book's story to be gleaned from this trailer (and bear in mind, it's been easily 25 years since I've read it) down to the Arcade Fire song playing in the trailer, all of it screams "HIPSTER!" to me. In big bold letters. In Helvetica font. Or maybe some cute animated, hand-drawn font that keeps squiggling.

Watching the trailer, it doesn't look like a film for kids, and this is what worries me. This looks like a film for adults who desperately want to relive their childhood and who want their own kids to be kid versions of them as adults. Knowing that Warner Bros. has had some trouble getting this film out, what with reshoots and the fact that it was pushed back from 2007 to last October to finally this October, I think the suits there might be thinking the same thing. Honestly, I can't imagine a single soul being interested in this trailer without owning any or all of the above-mentioned albums, books and films.

I have to stress, I think this looks great (if that makes me a hipster, then so be it) and I'm thankful that someone - namely someone of Jonze's caliber - is making a children's film that doesn't pander. But will it be successful with the source material's intended demographic? Will it draw the kids in? The rest of us can all go to hell; as long as the kids are interested, then everything is cool. Or even the average parents? This trailer might play well in Brooklyn, Morningside Heights, Austin and certain sections of California, but there's a lot of space in between and I can't see most parents or kids being sold. Kids don't give a shit about indie rock or Charlie Kaufman films, and most parents don't either. I mean, as far as sophistication goes, WALL-E was already riding the line. I keep hearing stories that the kids weren't digging it as much as their parents. With the stakes being so high, if it's as solid as the trailer suggests, it can't risk leaving anyone out in the cold and needs to get as many people interested as possible in the next six months.

But maybe I'm being too cynical. Maybe good kids' films should be saying, "Parents, take your kids to see this!" instead of "Kids, get your parents to take you to see this!" Maybe this is how it's supposed to be. Maybe this is the exact film I wish for whenever I'm subjected to a trailer for whatever CGI talking-animal film that Hollywood craps out on a semi-annual basis.

I don't know. You be the judge. I'll be there but will you? And why or why not?

Itchy Boston Terrier

OK, so anyone who's been on the site for any amount of time knows that I'm borderline obsessed with the Boston Terrier. I think it goes back to watching Lilo & Stitch with Benjamin Birdie and we rewound (though is it really rewinding if it's On Demand? Nothing's winding! And why don't they make the WHOLE PLANE outta the BLACK BOX? IDUNNOOOOOOOO!) and paused one shot of a group of dogs in a shelter that included this one cockeyed BT. Much like Rick Moranis as Louis Tully as Vinz Clortho, Keymaster of Gozer in the basement of the Ghostbusters' firehouse, that Boston Terrier stole the entire scene away from whatever the hell was happening in the foreground.

But I digress.

I was in a major cell phone store today (I'm not proud of myself, as I know I should be patronizing mom-and-pop service providers as opposed to ones run by major corporations but what can you do?) and, while waiting for assistance to get one simple battery, a blind woman walks in with an old looking Boston Terrier. To my knowledge, Bostons don't make ideal seeing-eye dogs, and the way this one was carrying on, it had to be just a plain old, run-of-the-mill pet. If inappropriate behavior from an animal can be qualified in terms of genius, this dog was Albert Einstein, Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven wrapped up like a douche into one giant itchy ball of brilliance.

What follows is 26 seconds of the best 3 minutes of my day today.

Magic, Pure and Simple

I'm going to be short and to the point.

This is not only pure comedic genius but this is also, on a big damn platter, everything that is missing from most comedy today: ingenuity. As I twatted earlier today, the gag with the dress in the window, that starts at about 31:45 on the video embedded below and pays off at about 34 and change, is one of the greatest escapes put on film. Jim Carrey on his best day could never have pulled off what Buster Keaton does so effortlessly here. And no amount of shitty pop culture references intended to be their own punchlines (I'm looking at you and the hell you have wrought upon us, Wayans Brothers!) can hold up against something so simple (and cliched by then) as Keaton slipping on his own banana peel.

85 years after it was made, it still holds up; my media studies classmates were laughing pretty hard today, which did my soul some good. But funny is funny and will always be funny.

I can't sing the praises of this film enough. Do yourselves a favor, take 45 minutes out and watch this.

From 1924, here is Sherlock Jr.

Battlestar Galactica: The Frakkin' End

[Warning: if you're not in the least interested in Battlestar Galactica, don't bother reading this.  Seriously.  It won't make you want to watch the show and won't make any sense regardless.  Sorry for being so exclusionary but this is also fair warning for the future: you have 14 months to catch up on Lost before my series finale post for that. Get crackin'.]

It's over.

Finally.

And it was good.

Mostly.

Battlestar Galactica, arguably the finest science fiction show produced to date, has ended its run.  After a mostly solid three and a half seasons (I'm looking at you, "Scar" and "Black Market"), the final half-season has polarized its audience, right up to and including last night's finale, "Daybreak, Part 2."  Truth be told, season 4.5 was a little rough around the edges but after the game-changer in the season 4.0 finale, the discovery of Earth (more on that later), the show had to be a little shaky to complement the characters' damaged faith and hope.  Great stuff.  As for the finale, I'm not going to say it was the best ever - Six Feet Under holds that title, now and maybe forever - but it was damn great and was better than a lot of movies. 

Still, it wasn't perfect.  There was one thing that left me a little unsettled.  I'm not talking about the ambiguities, such as Starbuck's sudden disappearance or whose bones were discovered in present day (Hera?), I'm talking about a genuine plot hole.  But I'll get to that.


THE GOOD

- The action.  The show hasn't been so riveting since season 1.  The two-minute jag in which Tyrol kills Tory for killing Cally, Cavil kills himself, a poorly timed asteroid bumps the wrong raptor, causing the dead pilot's hand to fire on and blow up the Cylon baseship and Starbuck uses "All Along the Watchtower" as coordinates to earth had me slackjawed, gripping my head in baffled delight.  There was no room to breathe (save for that Lee/Kara flashback).  Just magnificent.

- The attention given the characters.  One thing I kept thinking about last night was The Matrix Revolutions.  In the depiction of the final standoff between man and machine, this was the way to do it.  Don't make it entirely about the action.  We care about the characters and what happens to them, not just simply that we want to see the good guys beat the bad guys.  Give everyone something important to do; don't just relegate Morpheus to the role of Lando's co-pilot at the end of Jedi (too... much... geek... can't... go... on...).  They got this very very right.

- Sam Anders.  As Liz put it last night, we thought he was just some minor dude and he turns out to be a major character in the end.  He, jacked into Galactica, is basically the leader written in the Book of Kobol that will bring them to earth but not live to see it.  As Sam remote pilots the fleet into the sun, I got a little misty-eyed.

- The realization of the opera hose dream from season 1.  "Holy shit!" is all I can say.  Holy shit!

- Roslin's death.  First off, I was glad she got to dig on Earth for a while before she kicked it.  Secondly, I'm glad there wasn't a big maudlin death speech.  I've said that Roslin is one of the best-drawn characters on TV (and excluding Six Feet Under's Ruth Fisher, the best-drawn female character ever put on TV).  That Mary McDonnell has not received any love from the Emmys just because she's not a sassy Southern lawyer/single mom/psychic is a crime.

- The "when" of the arrival on earth.  Given that Galactica 1980 is universally regarded as a bad idea, I knew they wouldn't land in present day.  And given that we were tricked into believing that their arrival on the 13th colony of Earth (which was nuked) was the future of our Earth (more on this later), I knew they wouldn't do that again.  My guess was ancient Greece.  I was off by about 147,000 years.  And that's cool with me.  I just wanted to know.  And to know that they essentially became a presumably more industrious version of the Golgafrinchans from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe... that just puts a smile on my face (google Battlestar Galactica telephone sanitizer if you don't know what I mean).



THE BAD

Not much, as far as I'm concerned.  Just, did we have to see Adama puke?  Really?  Give the man his dignity.

And I would have liked to see them land in a time where they would have come into contact with homo sapiens.  It would have been cool to see what language the fleet speaks.  My guess was either Greek or Latin.  Though Esperanto would have been cool too.  Missed opportunity there.

And I guess the "be kind to your titanium-footed friends" message at the end was a little too... well... you know... we've seen Terminator and Blade Runner already... you know what I mean?  I just... I get it but... whatever.  Moving on.



THE UGLY

OK, here it is.  I've twatted about this a LOT and finally got an answer that satisfies me (thanks Adam and Teresa!), even though it's not all that satisfying if you think about it.  Furthermore, I've tried to explain it to others, which is damn near impossible to do with 140 characters at a time (XPhile1908, this is to help your head from hurting).

Earth and Earth.  From here on in, the nuked Earth that the fleet landed on and Starbuck's corpse was found on will be herein referred to as CYLON EARTH.  The earth that the fleet landed on in the series finale will be herein referred to as OUR EARTH.  Got it?  Good.

So...

At first, I had a hard time understanding how two separate planets had identical landmass formations.  But then my friends clarified it for me:

At the end of the season 3 finale, Starbuck, presumed to be dead, comes back and tells Lee, "I've seen Earth and I'm going to take us to it."  The shot pulls back from their ships, goes across space and stops on a shot of OUR EARTH.  We know this because we can see North America; the Baja Peninsula, Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico, and Florida are very clearly seen.

I'll say it again.  This is a shot of OUR EARTH.  Not the CYLON EARTH that Starbuck is talking about. 

Starbuck initially leads the fleet to CYLON EARTH, which they find has been destroyed by weapons of mass destruction thousands of years before.  We never get a clear shot (to my knowledge) of CYLON EARTH as the fleet lands; we can't make out any familiar continents on the face of the planet.  So this is not necessarily the same earth as we had already seen; we're just meant to think it is.

CYLON EARTH and OUR EARTH are two different planets, according to executive producer Ronald Moore.  So if the CYLON EARTH has the same landmasses as OUR EARTH, then they've completely lost me but if this means that they bullshitted us 2 seasons ago, I can live with that.  But it's a minor bullshit as Starbuck was true to her word.  She eventually took them to Earth... OUR EARTH.

So it's a very tricky, dishonest sleight of hand that went on here but, if it's not the same planet, just at different points in time, this is the only satisfactory explanation.  Otherwise, we're talking about two identical planets that are capable of sustaining carbon-based life in the universe and that is one suspension of disbelief too many. 

However, if it comes out that there is a shot of CYLON EARTH that had OUR EARTH landmasses, then I'll be very disappointed. 

And that's as well as I can explain it.



So overall, great finale (above issue pending).  If we're lucky, Battlestar Galactica has set a new standard for science fiction.  Actually, it has set a new standard for science fiction.  I just hope that it has resonated enough that it makes a difference.  I hope studios are out there looking for sci-fi shows that have a comparable quality of writing and story, attention to character as well as universe.  But I can hope in one hand and crap in the other and see which hand has something in it.  Battlestar Galactica isn't an easy show to digest in an hour (or even after four seasons) and that makes it indispensible.  It exemplifies the best of the genre in that it holds a mirror up to our greatest hopes, fears, and concerns, making us contemplate our own existence as we watch theirs unfold. 

And there were a lot of awesome scenes of android sex and things blowing up in space too.

So say we all.

End of line.

Adventures in Twitter, or: Why I Haven't Been Posting

I have a serious conflict of principles here. I'm not proud of myself, it has to be said. When Twitter was first explained to me, I said two things: 1) This is George Orwell's worst nightmare; and 2) There is no way that it will ever be anything but a gigantic timesuck.

You only get 140 characters per "tweet" (though I refer to it as "twatting" in private company... apparently Stephen Colbert does too), which I personally think is a little fascist. Aside from sending links to other sites with complete and multiple sentences or a short burst of information, like a phone number or address for something particularly important, it's completely and utterly useless.

So why can I not stop dictating every idle thought I have in my head out into the cosmos?

I thought that, by the time I got around to typing out that question, I would have an answer. I don't. And I keep checking my TweetDeck in between writing this post. Partly because I'm searching for valuable content and partly because I'm typing out my thoughts on the latest episodes of Lost and South Park. It's misery. And what's worse is that I'm the last one to show up... well, me and a whole lot of others. I just heard that Twitter's usage has increased about 1000% in the last month alone! Malcolm Gladwell, man... dude knows what he's talking about.

Being on Twitter is like hosting a party. The first couple of people to arrive, you get to sit with them, talk in a relaxed manner, they even help you finish setting up, help pick the music, all that stuff. You really get great face time with them. Then a couple of more people show up and it's cool, you're all getting along nicely. But by 9:00, about 20 people have rolled up and they all want two things: your attention and to relieve you of booze as quickly as possible. You keep answering the door and more people pile in, all wanting to talk to you and get trashed. By 10:15, there's dudes pulling their pants down and they have to get ejected because your one friend who's a seminary student is getting offended. A few people keep trying to monopolize your time by following you around all night. Another friend tries to sit you down to pitch you some pyramid scheme that he thinks is going to work. Only about three of the people you invited has anything of interest to say to you and, unfortunately, you have everyone else yapping in your ear the whole time about bullshit and you only accidentally find the people you like in your attempts to avoid all the others. The room is spinning like you're Karen Hill meeting all the Peters and Pauls at the wedding. By the time 12:30 rolls around, you're overwhelmed, trying to circle back to a couple of folks with whom you've started conversations but never got a chance to finish. You're exhausted, overstimulated, plunging vomit out of the kitchen sink and you wish you had never thrown the fucking party in the first place, even though your friends would think you're an asshole if you hadn't. And nobody ever goes home.

That's what it's been like for me on Twitter. This is also why I don't have parties that often.

My Media Studies professor just mentioned Twitter in a recent lecture as the antithesis of one of Benjamin Franklin's 13 Virtues to achieve moral perfection, namely Silence. This only meant that one should say things of value to someone and leave "trifling conversation" aside. This is what freaks me out about Twitter, as its virtues have yet to be discovered by anyone. As a news source, it's unreliable unless you follow only news sources that twat their headlines as they come in. And even then, that's what RSS feeds are for. With its limited characters, 99.9% of Twitter is good for nothing except the idle conversation that Benjamin Franklin warned us against making. And bear in mind, he helped start THE FUCKING COUNTRY, so he might have some wisdom to impart. I have no doubt that the industriousness of Americans will kick in and someone will find a positive and highly efficient use for Twitter. But until then, we're stuck with 10,000 posts a second about Project Runway.

I say all of this knowing full well that I am part of the problem. But as I always say when I'm part of the problem, at least I'm aware that I'm part of the problem and that (I think) is a start. I try to edify folks every day, posting links to a few good songs here and there, as well as posting links to things my friends and family are doing. But most of my tweets are relegated to proclamations that I will commit suicide in front of my in-laws at dinner or my latest guess as to why Starbuck found her own corpse on Battlestar Galactica.

Still and all, my TweetDeck remains on even as I finish up writing here. And I've learned nothing from it today, nor have I contributed anything important today. I remain, in the eyes of one of our founding fathers, morally imperfect. And I'm not sure that that's going to change anytime soon. My only hope is that I saturate myself so completely with Twitter that I end up getting bored with it as I have myspace and facebook. Time will tell.

Also, if I don't post for a while, please come find me at http://www.twitter.com/achance42 and get me the fuck out of there!

Changes of the Weasel Sort

New content coming very soon and a font change effective now. I realized that it's kind of a pain in the ass to read the posts here so why fight it? Might as well change it back to the original font until I can find one that might suit me better. Hope you all enjoy and hopefully stick around to read.






Can't wait to see how many hits I get from these labels.

Damn right - live from the Lower East Side

Rapture in Queens - live from Flushing (2 days ago)

Someone apparently hid an Electro Bolt plasmid from Bioshock in front of my future apartment. And no gatherer's garden in sight.