wow.  simply wow.

click here to watch three films….. each in one minute and one take.  fucking awesome. 

i especially liked the squirting blood in the Kill Bill version here.

the creativity of other people will always amaze me. 

reading the news lately i can’t help but wonder if this country is headed for civil war.  and it’s all because of the internet. 

before, when someone voted against their side, people might have just accepted it as part of the process of democracy.  walked away until the next election.  but now that we have the internet and we can see exactly how fucking batshit insane the other side, whichever side that may be, can be, it makes us defensive and angry and protective of our side that much more.  “if the other side thinks that, well, shit, they’re just fucking crazy and i have to shout as loud as i can to convince the rest of the world of it.”  human nature being what it is, this scenario of group think gone wrong only ends in a mutual settling to the lowest common denominator.  the group as a whole takes on the characteristics of the lowest of its members.  i.e. the collective, or you and me, becomes as batshit insane and ignorantly stupid as that jackass on tv whose extreme opinions and attitude offend us so.

and in the end, the other side seems so un-understandable, so un-relatably extreme, so foreign, and so nuts, that, even though we have the same passports, we inhabit different countries.  an extension of this is what has plagued US politics for the last several decades where the other side doesn’t acknowledge the ruling party as their government.  conservatives don’t think of Obama as their president.  liberals didn’t think of Bush as their president. 

all because the internet gave a voice to the fucking crazies and immediately let them drive the direction of the discussion.  this is all just an over-reaction to crazy people!  it’s all a big fucking joke! 

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) – bow down to the grand-daddy godfather of all buddy pics.  i think i first developed a man-crush on Robert Redford when i first saw this, but that has since disappeared along with my respect for him as an actor lately.  i have, though, developed a healthy man-crush for Paul Newman to fill that empty void in my heart.  the chemistry these two have together can’t be scripted. 

The Shawshank Redemption (1994) – “Say-watanayo”

Midnight Run (1988) – when Deniro could actually do comedy. 

A Better Tomorrow (1986) / The Killer (1989) – these John Woo classics from the 80s have aged like a fine banana in the damp tropical heat.  they’re almost laughable to watch now, but so are flourescent pants and poofy hair.  they’re a product of their times, and, at the time, they were the coolest gun fights anyone ever filmed, while being, at heart, stories about deep friendship. 

Swingers (1996) – i was going to list The Outsiders in this spot, but wondered if its focus on a group of buddies rather than the conventional two buddies disqualified it.  no matter.  Swingers is a capable sub-in. 

Honorable Mentions:
Beautiful Girls (1996) – again, a group of buddies
In Bruges (2008) – i loved this.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) – this too.
The Outsiders (1983) – and this too.

here’s a strange thing.  i’ve realized that i don’t like it when singers smile too much.  i went to this show a few years ago that was a farewell, last show for a popular local band.  the singer came out and everyone cheered, and he was smiling, getting into the crowd.  but he kept fucking smiling.  he was smiling while he was singing, in-between songs, when he was talking to the crowd.  to me, it looked like he was totally loving the good will the crowd was laying on him.  he was loving it a little too much, the cocky bastard. 

i went to a show last night and the girl was doing the same thing.  she was totally hot, btw, and everyone loved her.  the rest of the band was set up on stage while the singer was nowhere to be found.  the band did a short song without the singer, then the singer traipsed out on stage to an uproar.  they loved her.  she was smiling her ass off.  she came to the edge of the stage and did one of those “say what?” things where she leans to the crowd and cups her ear.  the crowd cheers louder.  man, they fucking loved her. 

so she did her whole show, smiling the whole time, raising her arms in the air, sometimes in an effort to make people cheer louder when it was already really cheery in there, but also sometimes in an “i am the master” type pose.  both of which i found incredibly annoying.  she was so overtly loving the fact that people were cheering her on and encouraging them to do it more.  at the end of the show she gives a little “give it up for [her own band's name]!  let’s hear it for [her own band's name]!”  now i’ve been to a lot of shows and i have never ever seen a band ask you to cheer for them like that.  it’s usually a shout out to the opening bands, or to the crowd, or to the bartenders, or ANYONE but themselves.  so i was a little appalled at her demand that i cheer for her band.  but not nearly as appalled as when she immediately followed that up with “give it up for ME!”  i’m not sure if i imagined it or not but i could have sworn she said “give it up for ME!  (lower voice) you love me.”  amazingly everyone cheered louder. 

i totally get that all artists are a bit egomaniac like that, and i would so love it if people cheered for me like that.  but hopefully, if i were in that position, i’d have at least the little thinnest sliver of class required to be thankful and gracious about it.  i suspect people want to punch me in the face enough without me going out and getting all cocky, rock-star, douchebaggy on top of my usual assholery. 

you naughty, dirty bastards like the porn, do ya?  do ya???  ya you do, you nasty little freaks, you. 

those food porn shots i posted yesterday do it for me too, honestly.  i could state at pics like that for days in a full blown fantasy stupor.  all that buttery, drippy hollandaise…

i’m having mad food coma right now or something like it.  what is it about taking a massive dump that puts me right to sleep?  i can feel it creep up from my belly, my belly that buzzes with comfort after dropping a fatty in the pool.  they say the buildup of feces and gases in your intestines restricts blood flow.  maybe evacuating my bowels causes a welcome rush of blood that causes a mild euphoria.  kind of like the first huge gulp of air you might swallow after suffocating for a while. 

man, what the hell am i talking about right now… 

whatever.  here’s a good song i’ve been listening to:

Death by White Lies

-  Kimchi Jjigae – korean kimchi soup with pork, possibly Spam, if i’m lucky.  which is always, since, as a rule, i always have at least two cans of Spam in the cupboard.  (Spam Lite!)  look at that pic, man.  i just want to jump in and breathe.  kimchi jjigae is food for the korean soul. 

-  Bacon, Egg and Cheese on a roll with salt, pepper and ketchup – i used to eat this all the time when my parents had a dry cleaner in manhattan.  now, i always think of nyc when i eat this, so it’s good for nostalgia.  but when shit is bad in your brain, and the little people are trying to eat their way out of your skull, nothing placates them better than this antidote to all alcoholic ills.  they just used sliced bread in this pic, but you get the idea.  nom nom nom. 

-  Eggs Benedict – i was thinking of including this with the bacon, egg and cheese, but that would be cheating the individual fatty goodness that is the eggs benedict.  seriously.  hollandaise, which is pretty much all that is artery-clogging and good about life, makes all the difference.  i could pretty much spend an entire evening mopping up puddles of hollandaise with white toast.

-  Pho/Ramen – noodles in a hot meat broth.  that’s just straight up sexy.

-  Corned Beef Hash and Eggs.  i might even like the canned kind of corned beef better than the fresh made kind.  it’s so saltily awesome.  i love to wipe the runny egg yolk with the toast and crack through the top layer of browned and crispy home fries. 

the documentary Supersize Me’s effect on modern food culture was nothing short of seismic, imo.  it seemed to confirm every terrible fear that people had about fast food and its ill effects on human health.  just this week, brazil made a pretty controversial judgment against mcd’s using the film as motivation.  filmmaker morgan spurlock ate nothing but mcdonald’s for thirty days, got fat as a house, saw his health decline rapidly, and it was all on camera.  when i was watching it though, i couldn’t ignore several red flags raised by his filmmaking that made me wonder exactly how much of that film is true.

here is what i believe to be true:
-  he really ate mcdonald’s three times a day for thirty days, opting for the SuperSized option whenever it was offered to him.
-  all physical effects that we saw on camera are real.  he got fat.  he got unhealthy.
-  during the “jar test”, where he dropped different items of mcdonalds food into separate glass jars and observed them for a period of time, the foods that disintegrated into a black moldy mass were behaving normally.  the french fries were really intact with no real visible decomposition noted.

here is what i am skeptical of:
-  what he chose to eat at mcdonalds was a fair representation of the mcdonalds menu.
-  the gagging and puking scene.
-  the sentiment behind french fries in the jar test.

1.  his meal selection.  while eating mcd’s three times a day, he had to follow two rules:  he had to go supersized whenever it was offered and he had to try everything on the menu at least once.  i haven’t crunched the numbers, but i feel that leaves some room for spurlock choosing unhealthy items when he wasn’t necessarily required to.  and if that’s so then how much of his poor health is his own fault and how much is it the fault of the menu? 

2.  there was a scene later on in his experiment when spurlock is eating a burger in his car and he just can’t continue because the thought is grossing him out.  he literally can’t eat anymore, then he vomits.  there are several implications here, most including some elements of the basic notion that he got so unhealthy that his body is acting in self-defense against ingesting more toxins.  this also drew a visceral reaction from me, as i tried to imagine what it would be like to eat mcd’s everyday to the point of nausea. 

so did he puke because mcdonald’s is so bad or because he embarked on the very unnatural experiment of eating the same thing everyday.  might he also have the same reaction if he ate salad three times a day?  fruits and veggies?  i say probably.  this ambiguous implication isn’t even the big thing that annoys me here.  it’s the film editing.  there’s a scene where he’s gagging a little, then it cuts away and all of a sudden he’s puking.  i am not sure that he didn’t stick his finger down his throat to induce vomiting during that cut-away.  as a matter of fact, since he clearly edited this film with an agenda in mind, i think it’s as likely a possibility as anything else.  yes, i think he faked it for the camera. 

3.  the jar test.  this is a segment at the end of the film where he puts different mcd’s items into separate jars and puts a time lapse camera on all of them.  everything molds up and decays, except the french fries which look like they are brand new.  disgust ensues.  the indisputable implication here is that the items that molded up and decayed visibly behaved normally while the french fries looked like alien unnatural beings.  that’s what food should do right?  decay?  but the film also implies that the french fries are somehow made to resist this, and we should feel disgusted by the fries because they clearly contain something unnatural, probably a preservative, that we shouldn’t be eating. 

i call bullshit on this too.  have you ever bought a block of cheese and not finished it?  let it hang out in the fridge for a few days?  did it get spots of mold?  did it mold up in the exact place where you touched it with your fingers?  our hands are dirty and they make everything they touch dirty.  spurlock touched every item in the jar test with his bare hands when he was placing them in the jar.  even before spurlock touched those things, the employees at mcd’s touched them while assembling them.  all those items in the jar test were touched by human hands except… the french fries!  the fries go straight from the sizzling hot fryer to the french fry bin where it is tossed and poured into the fry carton with a metal funnel.  spurlock pours the fries into the jar straight from the carton without a single human cootie to be had.  also, what’s in most mcd’s sandwiches?  raw ingredients!  raw, uncooked, germy ingredients!   lettuce, tomatoes, mayonaise-based sauces, all dirty as fuck.  the fries were sterile or close to it while the sandwiches were dirty and contained many contaminants.  if anything, the fries were the only “clean” items of food in this jar test.  this experiment is complete bullshit.  video here.

if he can bullshit using cut-aways and faulty “scientific” experiments, can’t he pretty much bullshit most everything?  besides.  who ever said it was a good idea to eat like a jackass for thirty days? 

*** UPDATE – while re-watching the video, i am now reminded that spurlock included regular, non-mcd’s, french fries in this experiment as well and they molded up like the sandwiches.  why?  possibly because the restaurant used their hands or dirty tongs to plate the fries (what i consider the most likely explanation), or possibly because the frying oil wasn’t as hot as the mcd’s oil, or possibly because the regular fries are thicker cut, leaving a higher moisture content after frying (also likely).  all possible explanations. 

my old friend, rf, posted on her girly blog about her current favorite things.  she makes lots of crafty stuff and generally very cute girly stuff.  check it out.  she’s cool.  so anyway i thought i’d brighten up your day with a few of my favorite things.  in other words, i could really give a shit what i type on this keyboard today.  minimum effort.  that’s the goal for today. 

Snyder’s of Hanover Jalapeno Pretzel Pieces – remember, Pretzel Pieces, not Pretzel Nuggets.  the Pieces are way crunchier and have a far more favorable all-important “flavorings to pretzel dough” ratio.  the jalapeno flavor in particular is especially salty and spicy — intensely so.  so this is now my current favorite, just barely edging out the original favorite, honey-mustard.  i love crunchy things and these are like break-yo-teeth crunchy.  remember.  Pieces, not Nuggets, you piece. 

Belgian Beers – my beer of choice until very recently was the India Pale Ale (IPA).  the robust, in-yo-face, fragrance and flavors of IPAs were always so refreshing.  plus, i like hoppy beers and IPAs are the hoppiest, i think.  try the Stone IPA for hoppiness that might melt your face off.  anyway, so i’ve been drinking intense beers like that for years, and have only recently mellowed out to appreciate subtler things like the Belgian Blondes.  Blonde Belgian beers are pretty good too.  nyuk.  beers like Leffe and Duvel are pretty widely available.  Affligem, the best of the three pictured beers, imo, is not and that makes me sad.  anyway, i just like these very well balanced, only slightly bitter, slightly wheaty beers that are pleasant like sunday afternoons are pleasant.  like slow riverboat pleasant.  like chilling out on the lawn pleasant.  like yo mama pleasant.

Summer 2009 Movies – i’ve written about these before so i won’t repeat myself other than to say that this batch has been incredibly fun to watch and i haven’t even seen District 9 and Inglorious Basterds yet. 

Fools’ Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe -  with titles like that, who needs book summaries?  i’m sure there will be no end of books on the current economic crisis and actually i’m usually partial to waiting a long while for the dust to settle before picking up a book on a topic, but this was recommend as a “read” by Time magazine.  i also find this topic extremely interesting and was just too curious about it to pass this one up.  i’m about halfway through and so far it’s been a great read.  somehow this talk about financial instruments and credit and all that numbers stuff is exciting in this book.  well it is to me anyway.  it’s been mostly history so far, back story about how credit default swaps (CDS) were created at J.P. Morgan like fifteen years ago and how those gave rise to the fucked upness that nearly killed the world.  so far it’s been very light on accusatory condemnation like the title might suggest though.  if anything, like many other financial books i’ve read, the author is so far having trouble letting go of her infatuation with the very people she set out to accuse with that inflammatory title.  oh wait…..  i just got it now.  “the bold dream” was corrupted, not J.P. Morgan.  hahaha.  this whole time i thought she meant to say she was accusing J.P. Morgan of corrupt greed.  *sigh*  i’m an idiot.  anyways, i’m having a great time reading this so far. 

HBO’s Hard Knocks – fantastic fantastic fantastic documentary mini-series about an NFL training camp.  this year they picked the Cincinatti Bengals and i hope they stay there next year.  or follow Chad Ochocinco around to his next team if he switches.  that motherfucker is hilarious.  but that’s just fluff.  the show itself is just a sterling example of great documentary tv/filmmaking.  they get into the technical stuff of football, properly expose the players and coaches involved but they always manage to attach the human story without getting too shmaltzy.  even with bona fide football superstars to train the camera on, HBO always spends a great deal of effort highlighting the position battles as these no-name players fight their fucking guts out for their professional lives.  just watching the games on tv every sunday can be detached.  this brings it all home in a real way.  AND somehow they write, edit and produce each episode in just one week.  it’s amazing.  i bet most filmmakers couldn’t produce this level of quality if you gave them a year.  but HBO goes out there shooting hundreds of hours of footage every week and somehow compresses that into this great tv show.  my only regret is that it’s so short and this short season of Hard Knocks is over.  (btw look at that picture.  doesn’t that look a little inappropriate?  haha)

(this was originally going to be called Top (Bottom) 5 Worst Movies, but i changed it.  here is how it happened.)

Top (Bottom) 5 Worst Movies  again.  i thought this would be easy, but this is some hard shit.  in a world of crap, it should be a simple thing to pick out the most egregious offenses against humanity, right?  but how far do i take it?  by regular film standards, 99.9999% of all porn should automatically qualify as worst film ever.  so leave out the porn, but what do i do with B movies?  leave those out too?  the line between B-movie and terrible A-movie is so inconsistent and hard to define.  and what about the straight-to-video films? 

another practical problem is that since these movies are so shitty, i never really spent any amount of time thinking about them afterwards, so i am having trouble remembering why i hate certain titles.  so i can’t tell if i hate it just because it’s dated or because it was just a terrible movie.  these things matter!

ok, screw this noise, i’m getting agita over here.  this will no longer be called Top (Bottom) 5 Worst Movies.  i am now re-naming this to be the Top 5 Films That Sucked So Bad I Got Angry

Snake Eyes – Brian Depalma is a fucking hack.  he made one legendary movie (Scarface), that, itself, isn’t really standing the test of time very well, and one notoriously shitty movie (The Bonfire of the Vanities), and somehow that wasn’t even nearly as bad as this piece of shit Snake Eyes.  hey whaddya know.  it starred Nicholas Cage.  maybe this is why i fucking hate him so much?  Depalma’s other movie Femme Fatale might be as bad or worse, but honestly, i couldn’t finish it for the life of me, so we’ll never know.  the man is a hack!  how the hell is he one of the most well regarded filmmakers of the early 80s?!  he was supposedly the king shit of the scene back when spielberg, lucas, scorsese and coppola were starting out.  how?! 

Crash – big fucking surprise.  making a bad movie is one thing — shit, there are plenty of shitty movies like Dude Where’s My Car for example that don’t offend me –  but making a bad movie while taking yourself wayyyyyyyyy too seriously is more offensive by an order of magnitude.  every second of this preachy piece of shit movie i love to hate drips with Paul Haggis’ earnest intention to teach the world about its racial ills and perceptions, taking itself extremely seriously indeed.  oh well done, racially sensitive Paul.  my kind thanks you.  i mean, holy mary, would you look at that self-important poster?  feel that?  that’s hate.  mine.  it flows.  yet somehow people liked it enough to give it $55M in receipts and a fucking Best Picture Oscar.  i’m not sure a movie made me want to walk around the city randomly slapping people in the head with a phone book before.  i thought only political news could do that to me. 

Battlefield Earth – see what i said about bad movies taking themselves seriously?  extra ditto here.  this might be the single worst commercial film i’ve ever seen.  starring john travolta, forrest whitaker and barry pepper.  that’s a film icon (travolta) and an oscar winner (whitaker) there.  sci-fi craptastic film about bullshit heaped upon bullshit.  john travolta wanted to convert the world to Scientology with this film.  so much so that he funded it out of his own pocket, and his wife locked out the screenwriter and did her own re-writes.  the result?  yay!  i’m a scientologist!  not.  well done, john! 

Swordfish – starring… hey another surprise!  it’s john travolta!  why he can’t make a bad movie, can he?  and hugh jackman who was also pretty terrible.  actually this movie had one very strong redeeming factor.  Halle Berry does a glorious nude scene for no reason whatsoever.  (she’s stacked)  maybe they paid her more money, but i mean it made zero sense in the film, which is actually one instance of this film’s sloppiness that i can happily ignore.  too bad that wasn’t enough to lift the film from its oh-so-badness.  an idiotic plot twist, laughable acting, etc. 

Independence Day (ID4) – here is another film whose surrounding hype has unrepairably damaged my perception of it.  this is what my friend says to me the weekend before i see this heap of swamp ass.  “it’s worth all the hype and then some!  awesome!”  he was dead fucking serious.  are you fucking kidding me, man?  our lasting friendship is proof positive of my superhuman ability to look deep into someone’s soul and appreciate their inner light while overlooking their gigantor shortcomings.  it’s ok if you want to call me “munificent”.  go ahead. 

-  the ads for this film “9″ have been out for a while, but i only recently started paying attention.  this looks pretty damn fucking cool and gorgeous.  trailers here.  i liked Trailer 2.  opens tomorrow, Sept 9. (9-9-09, get it?) 

-  Cormac McCarthy’s pulitzer prize-winning book, The Road, has a pretty huge fan base.  they might be happy to hear that the film adaptation starring Viggo Mortenson and Charlize Theron is coming out in October.  trailer here.  see it for the actors.  see it because you like the book.  see it because you liked No Country For Old Men, another mccarthy book.  here’s another reason: it’s directed by John Hillcoat, the same guy that directed The Proposition, an art house Australian western, that’s slowly turning into one of my favorite under-the-radar films.