Guys. . .

We did it.

(via.)

Friends that have more talent than I do Part LXVII of MMLVIII

My friend Anthony directed this. You should watch it. For your own good, I mean.

Watch this, I'll tell you in a second

Watch it all.



Okay. Is it just me or does he look and sound like a Nick Kroll character without any of the punchlines?

Let's Rap About Fast Five

Thanks to my friend Rachel (and about a dozen other caring people) I was made aware of one of Criterion's 50 Percent Off Sales. After deliberation that's probably lasted a year or so, I decided to purchase one of Stanley Kubrick's lesser known masterpieces Paths of Glory. It arrived this week so, naturally come Saturday night I watched Fast Five.

And let me tell you that Fast Five is quite a movie.
 

"PROTECT PRESIDENT CAR! HE'S THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS THE CODES!"

There has been a lot dedicated to this particular moving picture, from How Did This Get Made to Jordan, Jesse Go! to Giant Bomb as well as quite a few others (like my friend who shall remain anonymous who works in the JET program who showed it in his class to, I don't know, teach kids about American euphemisms). Knowing that I am not going to waste your time blathering on just how good or bad it is. It is. It's pretty bad and it's pretty good and in the end it has some of the craziest car sequences that you will ever damn see.

So, anyways, Fast Five, what is it? Who is it? What make car go? Who is rock? Why make crime? These are all good questions and I hope to answer them in turn.

This movie stars a bunch of people, only one of them is Vin Diesel (Boiler Room, Saving Private Ryan) and only another one of them is The Rock (The Rundown, DOOM), but most of them are pretty and at least one of them is Paul Walker (Flags of Our Fathers, That Movie Where the Guy Gets Shot With a Shotgun in the Trailer and Flies like a Million Feet).

Nothing about what this movie is makes sense to me and that's sort of the magic. This all starts with the cast. You've got one of the leads,Vin Diesel, who was once known for being something of an indy breakout actor in the late ninties and early two-thousands who then ended up in the Riddick films-- excuse me-- the Riddick Saga and then finally scoring his much sought after yacht fund with the Fast-cum-Furious flicks.

In Fast Five he play a fat guy who everyone in this world is too polite to call "chubby and kind of old and sad," which naturally means that he's a deadly criminal who is really good at cars and, like everyone else, really good at showing up or having people show up at the exact right moment to save the day. Also, he's really good at cars.

Then there's Sir Paul Walker. In this movie he plays a white guy with a t-shirt with a hot girlfriend/baby-mamma (SPOILER!!!). Despite common belief Paul Walker is not the same person Stephen Dorf. In this movie he plays the white guy that doesn't seem to offend anybody by appearing on screen. He's also important because he's the one guy in this movie that we're 100% sure is full-blooded honky.

Then there's the Asian Guy (Better Luck Tomorrow, Fast and Furious 6). His purpose is to bone Tall Natalie Portman. His job in the crew is supposed to be to blend in and be an everyman, which he proves by being Asian man in Fast Five that drives a car super well and is inserted into this film with the specific purpose of boning Tall Natalie Portman. You know, a real everyman. He also, like, looks at a thing once and maybe understands what they are once, which I guess makes him a super-valuable heist team member or a guy with Asperger's. Not exactly justifying his placement on the crew, but then again he does get up in Tall Queen Amadala, so I can see why one would fly two thousand miles on such short notice.

Tall Natalie Portman is their "muscle," whatever the fuck that means. I mean a good half of their crew is yoked to the point of being a poster on the wall of a confused male teenager's wall, but she's their muscle, because I guess they said so. She is notable for not providing muscle at any point in the entire picture. But she does manage to pull the palm print of a criminal off of her ass. Like Asian Guy, she is just kind of there. And that's well enough because the men are just sort of there, as well. Everyone is just sort of there. Black. White. Asian. Latino. Miscellaneous. We are the United Colors of Pointlessness.

Because someone has to make those cars go.

Two dudes just chilling straightly.

The LGBT community is completely unrepresented in this movie except in subtext-- but I'll get to that in a second here-- because gay people require a level of complexity that is simply beyond this movie. The proof of this is that straight people are barely even there. Unless you can do something with a car in this movie (getting married, passing, or whatever else), it doesn't appear as anything more complex than something that could fit on a Post-it.

Then again, I complain a lot about how movies go out of their way to say what's going on. It's why I think Downton Abbey is such a big hit, because nobody ever says what they want or what they're thinking and that simple technique is drama. So, with that said I don't know that we need to establish any homosexual characters when one of the big draws of this film is two sweaty, bald men grappling with each other.

GET IT!?

The Fastiverse is a sexless, hateless universe that exists to drive machines with no feelings about your hormone treatment, the president's birth certificate, police brutality, or anything else. In many ways it's as old fashioned of a movie as there is, yet it is rife with Hispanics, the ethnically ambiguous, black people, the casually bilingual, and Asians and dead people and everyone else and none of that matters because they're all here to drive cars real quick like.

To me that is amazing. Fast Five, like the guy in Shine, has somehow managed to allow both some of the most secretly progressive ideas into the film and, yet, manages to make none of them an issue by making their ability to make cars go fast more important. Can you make a car drift? Go get married. Can you make this car jump this ramp? You qualify for a tax deduction. Can you make this car go real, real, real fast? Good. Because I'd be proud to have you as my neighbor.

It works because the film has no idea what it's doing. Hell, for that matter, it isn't just post-racial, it's post-human.

Don't worry they're fine. They landed on some poor people.

It's a thing that is everywhere. It's what society is built around. It's what we got in our hearts. It's what pirates hide and children giggle about. What I'm talking about is butts.

We like butts. We love butts. Some people-- often boring people-- want to look at butts. We were bred to do this.

More than that, it's what we want to see in movies right next to nice beaches, gothic manors, gothic manners, space, and sweet rides. As much as that is what we want to see and as much as that can go south, Fast Five is rather demur. Like James Bond movies, though, this movie can be shocking just how quaint it can be about the human body.

While it does have the obligitory ass shots and bikini clad babes that come from shooting a movie Rio de Janero it is a movie that is, importantly, shot in Rio de Janero. That's how people dress over there. It's a beach town in a hot and humid location and it's Brazil, I'm pretty sure even the president wears a bikini. There's a certain amount of casual half-nudity that comes with the territory.

So, in a movie in which Riddick and Paul Walker swing a bank vault into roughly a thousand cops and where Americans can storm into a former colony and shoot everyone that can be shot, this movie still has some sense of semblance of decency about showing a woman's breasts. Or, yeah that ass. Or, God help us, front cleavage.

Is it there, yeah? It's kind of weird when you see it, yet it doesn't ever treat any of the female characters as a nice ass except in the case of one very silly plot point. Women in this film are mothers, sisters, wives baby mommas, drag racers, cops, commandos, and, yes, damnit, career women. There is a franchise in which women are having it all and it isn't directed by Tina Faye.

As bad or as good as it is it could have been so much worse and it isn't and when you consider pornographic bilge like Transfomers 3, you should realize that this is a pretty good case that our society might not completely and utterly hate women. It might be that we like them and we want them to hang out with us and help us, and, yeah, it isn't exactly Waitress, but, then again, what is?

It is meathead cinema at its pinnacle and it still doesn't treat women like pieces of meat. Sure, they're still hot and super capable "professionals" with nothing to do in their lives but rob banks, but they aren't these objects of desire or points of leverage for the plot. They're women. They get shit done. In that sense they're just like the men. There's no equivocation, there's no discussion, there's just chicks in cars moving the plot along.

And they make the cars go vroom real good, so what other qualifications do you want?

In 2011 you will believe man can walk. . . real slow while looking into the middle distance.

People in this movie are cogs to movie the plot along to the next bit of fetishism. I was trying to describe this feeling to my friend Kevin and the best parallel I could come up with was a body builder talking about his hobbies. He says he's into French cooking or gardening or going to the movies, but we all know what his real passion is: It's body building. We all know where the heart of Fast Five is and it isn't in what people feel about fatherhood.

Because as much as Transformers is about selling toys to people or Pirates of the Caribbean is about selling illeteracy, this movie is just about cars. These cars do things.They get results. More importantly cars are really kind of rad.



Fast 6 has come and gone and it's basically a preconceived notion that this series will go on, hopefully, forever. I just want to put my foot in the door now with what I think Fast 8 (AKA Hard Eight With Cars This Time) should be--

VIN DIESEL
Looks like we've got to bring in another driver, the best there is. One I've been trying to forget about. . . UNTIL NOW.

PAUL WALKER
Who's that?

VIN RIDDICK
A ghost.

A SHELBY VIPER drives TOWARD THE CAMERA and drifts a few inches from the camera. A driver emerges from the driver's side door. He is wearing a helmet. He removes his helmet to reveal:

CGI STEVE MCQUEEN (as played by Army Hammer).

STEVE MCQUEEN
I heard you guys needed a driver.

BOOM.

FAST EIGHT.

BOOM.

IN 3D IMAX.

BOOM.

DUBSTEP.

WUB.

SUMMER.

BOOM.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

Come on! You know you want it!

I could apologize forever about this dumb, dumb, DUMB piece of cinema (and I do that a lot), but you know what? I don't care.

For once I'm free of all of the shame and irony and anything else you could make me feel about liking something this colossally stupid. I could talk about how cars are in America's DNA as deep as guns or unsolicited flag waving (I saw several American flags waving during a report of the announcement of the new Pope, so there you go), but in the end the reason I am talking about this movie is simple: I had fun.

You should have fun, too. That's why we watch movies. Maybe that fun is different sometimes and maybe we all have different ideas of fun, but we movies don't move us because we hate them. That's fun sometimes, yeah, I'll admit. That isn't what keeps us coming back. Sometimes it's a great piece of storytelling, something emotionally effecting, or great acting or all three. Sometimes its dumb people driving cars. Sometimes that is all that it has to be.

Fast Five did what it wanted to do. It made me have fun watching cars go over, under, and around things that cars should try their hardest to avoid for insurance reasons. It's why I watched Bullitt, it's one of the primary reasons why I love Ronin, it's why French Connection is burned to brightly in my mind, it's a dozen other films that made me remember them. It's the fact that Fast Five, for all of its many blindingly obvious faults, is a movie that uses machinery in novel ways to make something worth seeing.

You don't need me to tell you that that is a pretty good movie.

Social D was Right

I was wrong about The New Frontier. I was wrong and I'm sorry about that. So very, very sorry.

My main problems were that the beginning of the story struck me as dirivative of Watchmen which I think is a fair assumption considering how much of the landscape of comics is dirivative of Moore and Gibbons' work. (Also Cooke wrote and drew a Before Watchmen story and wrote another so, in hindsight, I am not all that far off base. But let's not waste any more calories than we already have). Where it becomes a stupid opinion is that it's much, much more than that, which is something most Watchmen rip-offs do not manage.

There's also a few more nebulous problems like the lack of Batman (and the Trinity in general), the appropriateness of the Centre as a villain (and it's inexplicable and hateful British spelling), and the fact that it's both too sprawling and too small.

Yet, now I feel the flaws less acutely and those few niggling doubts are overcome by the quality of the art and the quality of the storytelling. They're just mars on the piece, they aren't the piece itself. Darwyn Cooke might not be the literary heavy weight that Alan Moore is (which I mention because, rightly or wrongly, he weighs heavily in my outlook on comic books. . . mostly wrongly the more time goes on) or as prolific as a Jason Aaron or as clever as Jonathan Hickman, but he delivers something that none of these men can, which is that he can draw the stories that he writes.

He delivers something that is inherently part of the whole. There is no invisioning, there's no collaboration or compromises, there's just the finished work. Not every comic written and drawn by the same guy have that cohesion, though. Darwyn Cooke is just the guy who can fuse those things together, through style, though design, and through story. As a guy who piddles about with pens and pencils sometimes and has a back catalog full of genre bullshit that is inspiring. It means that someone can do it and do it well.

I think a lot of my esteem for Cooke comes from the work he did after The New Frontier (ie: the work I read after I read The New Frontier). Books like The Spirit and his odd story in Jonah Hex (a Canadian western? Okay. I guess that's not too weird) and especially his work on the Parker graphic novels have opened my eyes to the talented writer and artist that he always was. It wasn't that he got better it was that I was just too full of shit to see what was in front of me. The guy who forged that epic run on The Spirit is the same guy who spun out this wonderful not-quite Elseworlds tale.

Cooke loves good old fashioned fun and The New Frontier is chock full of that feeling-- that feeling that some things were better back then and if they weren't, at least they were simpler, more pure, more black and white. It's nostalgia done well. It doesn't shy away from the ugliness of the past, either. That's just another layer that he uses.

Another thing I find myself saying a lot and writing a lot is that this feels like storytelling judo. Cooke isn't screwing with things or skewering them or anything, instead he's it's using the momentum of nostalgia and the weight of the past to move into something else, bigger, and more impactful. And, again: It's great to see that someone can actually manage that.

I'm know I'm not breaking any news, I just wanted to make a correction. At least to increase the power of my other opinions, I'll say it again: I was wrong about The New Frontier.

That cartoon is still unlistenable, though. You'll bury me with that opinion.

And here's a Social Distortion song--


SIDE NOTE: The New Frontier was also a Las Vegas hotel. Like most of Las Vegas, it is thankfully long gone. What remains, though, are a few precious shards of history. I was going through an auction catalouge on my road trip with my dad and I found, coincidentally, some New Frontier chips for sale. They were estimated to sell for at least a thousand dollars. We are all obviously in the wrong racket.

Grave of the Fireflies: A Review

Released in 1988, Grave of the Fireflies is the. . . I. . . Released in 1988, Grave of the. . . Grave of. . . nope. Nope. Can't do it. I can't. . . I just can't do it.

Fuck.

I just want to go home, guys.

What a face!

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

Read GK Chesterton. It'll only take up so much of your time and you'll be a slightly better person for the wear.

Dance, Dance, Dance: A Review of Dancer

Can I say that I'm a espionage thriller connesuer without sounding like an asshole?

What's that? Other people can, but not me? I gotcha. That's fair.

Who is Jake Ellis? is a fantastic book. It feels like the hybrid of a 1970's spy movie with the kind of USA TV show you would watch because you're too drunk to get off of the couch. It's pure entertainment wrapped in a high concept that manages to work. Instead of feeling like a gimick, it feels like a new kind of spy thriller. Dancer is what happens when that high concept fails.

In a way it should be a slam dunk. The doppleganger is a class film noir trope. Considering that this story takes place in Europe, that sort of connection with German expressionism and France's post-war fascination with the American genre films they missed out on, you have a very smart set of texts to play around with. Then you layer on something like Metal Gear Solid, which includes the same kind of plot device to get moving, Dancer should be an excellent. You look at all this and you think "Hey, this should be good, this should work."

And then it doesn't.

It doesn't work because I don't care. I won't go into what the concept is supposed to be as removing the surprise might smother what little life this story has in it. But it doesn't work because it's a silly idea, the reason this story doesn't work is that the plot and the characters are paper thin. So, while all of this action is going down and then there's the silly high concept waving to you in the background, reminding you of just how silly this entire story is. It's a refrain that I've been hearing a lot lately. In a way it's good to see that comic book

Oh, no, wait, it's the opposite of that.

Speaking of characters, though  the villain doesn't work and if the villain doesn't work in a story like this, then it's bad news for the reader. Bad news indeed.

Bond had Goldfinger and Jaws. Bourne had Chris Cooper and Brian Cox. What you got here? Some kind of half-assed Khan Noom Singh (or is this a half-assed Hannibal Lector)? Come now, really? It doesn't work in the same way that the rest of the book doesn't work. It never quite comes together, never quite gets out of first gear.

Then there's the ending, which without sounding like a smartass, is the best thing in the book, but it's exactly the same as every single one of the Bourne movies and, it's 2013, do we really need to be biting Bourne's style? Why would you ever want to draw comparison to those movies?

Dancer simply shows how great of a book Who is Jake Ellis? was and what a nice surprise that was. While the art works quite well, the story drags it down. It also reminds us that the best way to bite Jason Bourne's style is to make a fantastic movie. But not every story can be Casino Royale, can it?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I want to post this because it uses the word "dance" in it--

This, I Love

 Which of the Seven are you?

If it wasn't for the fact that I don't have room or frames for the pictures I currently have, I'd snag one of these up right quick.

WHAT'S STOPPING YOU THEN?

Bum's Rush: Road Trip Journal Part X

After driving through the mountains of Montana and the plains of Wyoming and coming over the Rockies into Colorado we finally arrived in Denver.

And then the scum came out of the wood works. Instead of sad, abadoned buildings and ruined turn-of-the-century archicture, we have buildings full of cheap souveniers and ugly, modern buildings. Instead of wild antelope, we have guys barely playing guitar. Instead of a running stream we have sizzling summer heat and smoke. It's an uneven trade. What's more if that I wanted to see an ugly city, I'd just stay home. At least then I'd have my own pillow.

The worst of it came walking back from the Ship Tavern in the Brown Palace. There's a long promenade that runs all along 16th Street (or is it Avenue? I know Denver has both for some reason*). If you've ever seen the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, it's a bit like that, except lower rent. And it has two Corner Bakeries. It's also lousy with people who don't seem to have anything better to do than to stand in place, smoke, and spit, which is crazy because the public library isn't that far from where we are and outside it is hot.

Idaho didn't have a lot of people that were just standing around. Neither did Montana. I don't even think Wyoming had those people. I assume that they just freeze to death in that part of the country. Or they own property and just do that shit on their own time. Here in Denver it's a part of the local color.

As my dad and I were walking back to the hotel, we were paralleled by a group of, I don't know, vagrants? Not bums. Not hobos. Just people who, let's say, took less care in their

And we did what everyone on earth would do, which is ignore them and walk on by. What are we going to do, start a conversaiton with them? Ask about their musical influences? I know my dad isn't, that's for sure.

Then the guy takes it upon himself to be a smart-ass. He's going to right this wrong, apparently. "Excuse me, sir, could you please just ignore us?" he said in the tone that I imagine someone who believes they are owed something.

Dear Moocher: Being a passive-aggressive and rude to people who don't want to give you money for no reason makes you into an asshole.That sort of thing has also got to make the stationary beggars unhappy. Or at least feel a bit chagrined. Here comes some out of towner, pissing off possible donations and not even doing it right.

Not to say that we didn't run into people of all kinds on the trip. Most everyone was decent and helpful and accommodating. The jerks are the exceptions. The crappy things tend to shade everything else more than they should.

So, don't try to ruin my vacation, please. That's our job.

High Point of the Day: I don't remember. This whole entry is three or four days late. Let's just assume it was that massive seafood chowder I had at the Ship Tavern. Oh and the seafood pasta thing. My God that place was good.

Low Point of the Day: That bum.

*In Idaho I heard the line "I think it's on the corner of First and Second" and he wasn't a guy huffing glue.

So Long Stink State: Road Trip Journal IX

Yesterday we finally got the fuck out of Wyoming

We're now in northern Colorado and it's almost as though we're back in a civilized part of the world. There are people with teeth and there isn't nine bars open at breakfast and it doesn't look like a place that's just looking for a bomb.

Even my dad, in his obliviousness to Wyoming's hicks and horrors said that Colorado is a great state. Apparently it's his favorite state to travel to outside of Ohio (and telling from his constant, unsolicited editorials, it might even be nicer than California, which he apparently hates passionately. He says this almost like we're not going back there). Colorado is a pretty nice place. I have some pretty decent memories of this place and, at the very least, it isn't Wyoming.

Hey, why does Wyoming have so much wind? Because Nebraska blows.

Here's proof that I'm no longer on the frontier: This coffee shop that I'm at sells kombucha.

Part of the trip's appeal is to see things and places that I don't normally see in California. Things like indigenous trees. Things like open country. Things like fresh air. Things that LA normally doesn't care about or can't be bothered to have. Though, Colorado has the same kind of appeal that a lot of Los Angeles has, which that it doesn't make me immediately and palaply feel the specter of death.

I mean, they smoke weed and make kombucha up here. This is God's country. Clearly.

I guess I should draw more. Or just do more of something. Listening to podcasts and twiddling away on a “travelogue” is hardly actual work. I'm supposed to get stuff down out here. In a way I sort of have. I started and finished Ledfeather, a book my friend gave me. It's. . . incomprehensible, but I finished it. Since it's by an Indian and Indians, I'm just going to assume that it's a cultural thing so I don't have to live with the thought that the only Native American author I've ever read (besides, like, one Sherman Alexie short story). The idea of that makes me sad. Guilty sad. White guilty sad mess.

I am writing, though. That's nice. I also started up Jo Nesbo's Headhunters, so that should be fun. I can imagine Jamie Lannister pulling a Chigurh.

Anyways, I'm at a coffee shop. There's a flat screen TV on the wall (because what doesn't have a screen nowadays?) and the news is playing. The story is about Paris Jackson testifying in a civil trial. And now I kind want to go back to the country. I know the news over there is going to be the same. It's just that I get the sense that up there people might not watch it. The kombucha is nice, at least.

High Light of the Day: We saw a bear.

Low Light of the Day: It was a baby bear separated from it's ma. Shit suuuuucks.

The Show Men the Way Out State Part VIII

Every time I dislike something this far away from home, I get this feeling n the back of my head that I'm just that way because I'm a snooty, delicate Los Angeles douchebag.

But fuck Wyoming. It's a sea of nothing.

None of this is helped by the fact that I started my day watching Dick Cheney talk about how the NSA domestic spying program isn't being sold well because the executive branch has lost some of its respect and prestiege. Dick Cheney said that. I don't think he was being ironic.The rest of the day went kind of like that.

Being stuck in a car with my dad for the eighth day in the row is start to wear on me. I hate this state. I hate going through it. There's nothing here worth looking at any longer. I know I'll be better with it behind me. I have to be.

Alright. I'm going to finish this coffee and meet the day.

High Point of the Day: Sleep. Because Wyoming can't hurt you in your sleep.

Low Point of the Day: All of it. It just kept on going and going and then there's the tears.

Waldoism of the Day: “Just close down the border!” – His solution to our current immigration problem (note that border isn't the Canadian border for some dang reason).