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From the Archives: Video Camera Instructions

Ryan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:55:30 GMT

Here's another thing I wrote when I was 10 or 11 years old. If I had to describe it using an alliterative two-word phrase, I would say "silly satire." I must have been trying to emulate something I had just read or heard. Dave Barry, maybe? Mikko Cobhead, by the way, is a character from some of the short stories I was writing around the time.

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Mikko Cobhead had purchased a new video camera. He took it home and opened the box. There was a smaller box inside of it. There was a smaller box inside of that. There was a smaller box inside of that. There was a smaller box inside of that. Somewhere in there was the camera, in its case, and the owner’s booklet.

YERKO VIDEO CAMERA INSTRUCTIONS
VOL.1
(VOLS. 2, 3, AND 4 CAN BE PURCHASED FOR $20.00 EACH.)
PLUS $5.00 SHIPPING AND HANDLING.

He read the first page.

WARNING: THOSE WITH PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS SHOULD NOT OPERATE THIS CAMERA.

THIS CAMERA IS OF THE BEST QUALITY. IT COMES WITH THOSE LITTLE PLASTIC HOLES YOU LOVE TO POP. POP POP POP! HA HA! IF YOU DO NOT LIKE POPPING THOSE LITTLE PLASTIC HOLES, GIVE THEM TO YOUR KIDS. WARNING: DO NOT MISTAKE THE LITTLE STYROFOAM PACKING PIECES FOR FOOD. THEY ARE TOXIC! IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY EAT ONE OF THEM, WRITE US AND WE WILL SEND YOU A REPLACEMENT PEANUT.

THE CAMERA BATTERIES TAKE 24 HOURS TO RECHARGE, AND THEY WILL THEN WORK FOR 30 MINUTES, UNLESS IT IS LEAP YEAR, AND THEN THEY WILL WORK FOR 2 HOURS. WARNING: THIS CAMERA IS THE LATEST STEP IN TECHNOLOGY, BUT IN ABOUT A YEAR THEY'LL THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE AND YOU WILL HAVE TO BUY THE NEW THING. IF YOU ARE NOT COMPLETELY SATISFIED WITH YOUR CAMERA, CALL US AT 1-900-555-9023,($1.00 FOR EACH MINUTE) AND WE, AS A CUSTOMER SERVICE, WILL CHEERFULLY REDIRECT YOU TO HUNDREDS OF DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS AND OPERATORS WITHOUT ACTUALLY EVER GETTING ANYBODY TO TALK TO YOU.

REMEMBER, IF IT DOESN'T SAY YERKO, IT'S PROBABLY BETTER.

Mikko put the booklet away and started trying to decide who to give the camera to for Christmas.

Welcome to Oscarville, Population: ACADEMY AWARDS!

Ryan — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:22:36 GMT

I like movies. Do you like movies? I like movies. I like movies so much that I’m planning on watching a television show tonight in which awards will be presented to various movies in various categories. Perhaps you’ve heard of it: THE OSCARS! You’ve probably heard of it.

Anyway. This is the year the Academy changed the rules, expanding the Best Picture category to include 10 nominees. Next year there will be 20 nominees, and 30 the following year, and so on, until every film released every year will be a nominee and Academy voters will have to rank their favorites from 1 to 542. I’ve seen 9 of the 10 Best Picture nominees (all but The Blind Side, which I think is about Sandra Bullock playing football), and I have some thoughts on who I think will win… which, of course, is not always the same as who I think should win.

The televised ceremony will be hosted this year by Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, who of course hold the #1 and #2 spots for most times hosting Saturday Night Live. I hope John Goodman and Buck Henry host it next year!

Best Actor: I haven’t seen Crazy Heart, but Jeff Bridges has been getting a lot of love for his performance. Jeremy Renner and George Clooney were both quite good in their movies, but I bet Bridges will have it… and it’ll probably be the only award for Crazy Heart.

Best Supporting Actor: Well, Entertainment Weekly thinks it’ll be Christoph Waltz from Inglourious Basterds, and yeah, that sounds pretty likely to me. I believe it was Mr. Joe Hennes who asked me, just after I saw the movie, who I thought the “main character” was. It wasn’t easy to answer, because the film doesn’t stick with one protagonist throughout the story… but Waltz’s character was definitely the most interesting.

Best Beard: Christopher Plummer in The Last Station. Although I should note, I think we’re getting close to that breakthrough year when a woman wins Best Beard.

Best Actress: Okay, so I haven’t seen The Blind Side, but is it really possible that Sandra Bullock’s performance was award-worthy? She’s a perfectly capable actress, but none of the trailers or clips I’ve seen have been very convincing. On the other hand, pretty much everyone who saw Julie & Julia said they couldn’t wait to get past the Julie parts to see the Julia parts, so I’m going to go with Meryl Streep here. Her version of Julia Child captured the funny things about the lady, and yet it was never difficult to sympathize with her completely. Plus, she managed to get away with boning a duck in a movie that was rated PG-13. (I am hilarious.)

This seems like a tough category for the voters. Carey Mulligan’s Jennifer in An Education was both adorable and sophisticated, Gabourey Sibide came out of nowhere to impress everyone in Precious, and I’ll just assume Helen Mirren rocked the house in The Last Station because when does Helen Mirren ever not rock the house?

Best Supporting Actress: Could it be anyone other than Mo’Nique in Precious? I knew she was destined for great things, ever since I saw her in that one episode of that TV show Thank God You’re Here. So will Mo’Nique be the first single-named person to win an acting Oscar? I can’t remember whether Charo has ever won...

Best Chili in a Supporting Bowl: Hormel Chili Master Roasted Tomato. That’s what this magazine ad says, anyway, so I’m not going to trust its expertise.

Best Animated Feature: This was a great year for animated features… So great that Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, which was a shoo-in (Or is that shoe-in? I was never sure. The title character doesn’t wear shoes…) for a nomination, didn’t even make it. Coraline was lovely and imaginative, Fantastic Mr. Fox was like no other movie I’ve ever seen, animated or otherwise, The Princess and the Frog was a return to form for Disney, and The Secret of Kells has been getting all kinds of buzz… but I’m pretty sure Academy voters will be down with Up. Although… now that I think about it, if I were voting, I might just go with Mr. Fox, just because it was so very, very unusual.

Most Unfortunate Protagonist: Larry Gropnik from A Serious Man is a strong contender, but Precious from Precious is the clear favorite here. I wonder what would happen if those two ever met. Would they become friends, bonding over their respective unpleasant lives? Or would they just spend all their time comparing the fashions of their eras?

Best Art Direction: It’ll be Avatar, and deservingly, I suppose, but Sherlock Holmes looked pretty good, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was appropriately dingy and colorful.

Best Blue Naked Guy: If Avatar had gone for an R rating, it probably would have taken this award, but I think it’s pretty obvious that Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan will win.

Best Cinematography: I think The Hurt Locker will take this one over Avatar, which it seems weird that it would be nominated because so much of it is basically a video game.

Best Costume Design: In the past, my strategy of picking the film that takes place the farthest in the past has often paid off, so my prediction here is Bright Star.

Film Most Effective at Making Ryan Fall Asleep: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I’m sure I missed some very important character development and profound symbolism.

Best Documentary Feature: The Cove. It seems weird that Fisher Stevens is involved in that movie.

Best Documentary Short: The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant. It sounds depressing, but it’s timely in this economy.

Most Accurate Title: Hotel for Dogs and The Haunting in Connecticut are both really strong nominees, but I predict Fighting, which is possibly the most ruthlessly accurate movie title ever.

Most Convoluted Title: The full title of Precious is Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Too bad it’s not the kind of film that gets novelized… I’d like to see Precious: The Book Based on the Movie Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire Which Was Later Made Into the Movie Precious Upon Which This Very Book That You Now Hold in Your Hands Was Based.

Best Foreign Language Film: A Prophet is in three different languages – French, Coriscan, Arabic, and Ubbi-Dubbi . That’s gotta be an edge, right?

Best Makeup: Star Trek. It has to win something… maybe. And it had, like, naked green women in it. Unless that actress was actually green, in which case the Oscar will go to Young Victoria.

Most Profound Use of Pizza Boxes: The Invention of Lying

Best Score: James Horner’s score for Avatar best fits my criteria of making me aware of the score without overpowering the movie, so that’s my prediction. Sherlock Holmes was a pretty good one too, though.

Best Song: Is it me, or is this category not very exciting this year? As much as I liked The Princess and the Frog I thought Randy Newman’s songs (two of which are nominated) were among its weakest elements. I’ll go with “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart.

Best Animated Short: I actually saw all these this year, all packaged together at a movie theater. I’ll be pretty surprised if the Wallace and Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death doesn’t win, and it would get my vote, if I were a voter voting who voted for things. I kind of hope Logorama doesn’t win… It was an idea with great potential squandered on a violent, lowbrow story.

Best Live Action Short: I don’t know. Let’s say Kavi.

Outstanding Achievement in Bandit Hats: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best Editing: The Hurt Locker was one of the most suspenseful movies I’ve ever seen, and that was helped a lot by the editing.

Most Lovable Talking Animal: Dug in Up. Yeah, that’s right. Take that, Alvin, the chipmunks, and the gerbils from G-Force!

Best Sound Editing: Inglourious Basterds

Best Sound Mixing: Inglourious Basterds

It’s weird to keep deliberately spelling those words wrong when talking about the movie.

Best Visual Effects: In the Loop, for sure! No, wait – the other one. Avatar.

Oldest Dogs: Old Dogs

Best Original Screenplay: Hmmmmmm…. These were all pretty original screenplays. But Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was pretty far out, so… yeah.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Up in the Air. I hope it wins, anyway, just so it wins something. It was a good movie.

Worst Adaptation of Deadpool From Marvel Comics I Mean Come On He’s Not Supposed to Look Like Some Kind of Frankenstein Monster Thing and Where Was His Red Costume and WTF guyz that’s totaly not even deadpool you ruined a great charactr whyyyyy: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow!

Best Picture: The Hurt Locker! I’m actually kind of baffled that folks are even considering Avatar to be such a front-runner. It was a very entertaining movie, but I just think a Best Picture winner should be more original, and should connect with the viewer in a way that’s more genuine than “Whoa, that spear totally just looked like it was FLYING AT MY FACE!” So I really hope The Hurt Locker gets it, but I wouldn’t be offended if any of the other non-giant-blue-alien-thing movies win it. Well, except The Blind Side.

Also, Evangeline Lilly has a small role in The Hurt Locker, and from what I’ve read, she plans to retire from acting after Lost ends, which means that this is her only chance to ever appear in a movie that wins Best Picture. If for no other reason, I think it’s clear that a win for The Hurt Locker is the only just outcome.

Oh, but by the way: How cool is it that one of the Best Picture nominees has a title consisting of one word that is also the first word of another nominee? Has THAT ever happened before? Somebody ask Ken Jennings.

Wow, it took me a long time to post this. The ceremony will be on in no time at all. I can’t wait to see how wrong I am about everything!

The Nutty Director: Six Hours with Jerry Lewis

Ryan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:14:07 GMT

My boss called me on Sunday with a work-related question just as I was about to walk into the Anthology Film Archives to attend part of their week-long Jerry Lewis retrospective. When he asked what I was up to, and I told him, "I'm about to see two Jerry Lewis movies," he responded, "Wow... I don't know if I could sit through more than one."

That's probably not an uncommon response. Most people who haven't forgotten that Lewis ever did anything besides Labor Day telethons probably think of his career as consisting only of making funny faces and yelled "Hey, LAAA-dy!" (Although I've never actually seen a movie where he says that. Where did it come from, anyway?)

But I like Jerry Lewis movies. Would that still be true if I had discovered them as an adult? I don't know, but I do know that I first saw The Nutty Professor when I was around six years old, and I liked it then and I like it now. Since then, I've seen several of his writer/director/star films, as well as several of the pictures he just acted in. I first saw The Family Jewels (in which Lewis plays 7 characters) when I was about 14, and I loved it then but now I realize it's pretty stupid. I ended up seeing four Lewis-directed movies at the Archives last week, and they were all films I'd never seen before, at least not in their entirety. Were they good or stupid?

First was a movie that's sometimes called Smorgasbord and sometimes Cracking Up. It was released in 1983, and it was the last film Lewis directed. Some browsing of IMDb revealed that it was pretty universally hated, and has never been released on DVD. Of course, rather than deterring me, this knowledge just made me more determined to see it.

Boy, was it terrible. There's no story to speak of -- I get the feeling Lewis and his co-writer Bill Richmond just took a bunch of gag ideas they'd scribbled on napkins, then came up with a premise to hang them on. Lewis plays a schmuck in therapy who tells his therapist about all the ways he screws things up all the time, and then we get to see said screw-ups.

The thing is, Lewis used a very similar format in earlier movies like The Bellboy (a bunch of unrelated incidents in the life of a hotel employee) and The Errand Boy (a bunch of incidents in the life of a movie studio employee), and in those movies it worked. So what's different? Well, the major difference is that The Bellboy's gags were funny and clever, while Smorgasbord/Cracking Up's are stale and lifeless. Speaking of which, Jerry Lewis was 57 years old in 1983, and it's just kind of sad to see him doing the same shtick so many years after his heyday. It's like if Mike Myers made a new Austin Powers movie in the year 2027 (and he probably will). Cracking Up/Smorgasbord is not a good Jerry Lewis movie.

Next I saw The Ladies Man from 1961, and that was more like it. It's full of the kind of stuff that inspired the French to declare Lewis a genius. The set is a remarkable, fully-built 4-story ladies' boarding house, and occasionally the camera pulls back to let us see where it ends, as actors move through spaces where there would traditionally be imaginary walls. It's a brisk 95 minutes, full of clever gags, and surreal touches like the scene inside the forbidden room of the mysterious Miss Cartilage. The Ladies Man is a good Jerry Lewis movie.

I went back for The Big Mouth from 1967, which I knew nothing about. I was disappointed to find that in this one, Jerry just wasn't even trying. He plays a version of his usual befuddled nice guy -- on the run from mobsters who think he's someone else -- but his performance is half-hearted and low-energy. I can't remember a single gag that made me laugh, and a few (Lewis disguises himself as a Japanese kabuku dancer and yells gibberish syllables) just made me shake my head. Hey, Jerry Lewis! Just because you show a bunch of people chasing you, that doesn't make it a comedy chase scene. Something funny has to happen! Not even a superfluous appearance by the nutty professor character or a random, pointless cameo by Colonel Sanders could save the film. It's not a good sign that the most interesting thing about it is the opportunity to see what SeaWorld used to look like. (Children's tickets were 75 cents!) The Big Mouth is not a good Jerry Lewis movie.

Finally, I saw The Patsy, in which Lewis is a bellboy (the same one?) who is groomed by a team of Hollywood managers to be their next big comedy/acting/rock music star. This was my favorite of the four movies I saw, largely due to the presence of a real story to frame the gags, as Lewis is made over, trained, and unleashed upon the showbiz world, only to flop, at which point he's forced to prove himself. This was also the only one of the four with a sympathetic lead character. We laugh at him, but we really do want him to succeed.

So here's what I figured out: The Jerry Lewis character needs nervous energy to be funny, and in The Patsy he has all the energy that was missing in The Big Mouth. His performance of the made-up hit song "I Lost My Heart at the Drive-in Movie" is pleasantly frantic, and the scene where he bombs at a club made me laugh audibly. ("I have an aunt-- I mean, the aunt, that I have... Very absent-minded... She had an itch, so she poured syrup down her back and scratched her waffle...") And the ending, in which Lewis falls off a hotel balcony, only to pop up and noncholantly remind his co-star that they're on a movie set, is quite striking. This film also featured the strange sight of an old, fat Peter Lorre, as well as the funniest Ed Sullivan impression I've ever seen... performed by Ed Sullivan! Good gags, good supporting cast, good times. The Patsy is a good Jerry Lewis movie.

So my conclusion is that Jerry Lewis was in fact very funny and clever, and skilled at directing for several years in the 60s, and then at some point he just ran out of steam and ideas, and never quite got his mojo back. Oh well. At least we'll always have "Hey, LAAA-dy!"

Ryan on TV: Fall 2009

Ryan — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:10:23 GMT

Well, it looks like fall... The weather's getting cooler, and televisions are starting to turn brown and fall off the trees and come crashing down to earth, seriously injuring hapless pedestrians and waking up the innocent sparrows who make those trees their homes. Yes, the new fall TV season is getting started, as the networks all try desperately to get us to watch their shows. I had an NBC executive knock on my door yesterday and offer to shine my silverware. I politely declined, but I did invite him in for a few rousing rounds of Rock'em Sock'em Robots.

What the heck am I talking about? How about I talk about TV? As usual, I've read Entertainment Weekly's Fall TV Preview issue from cover to cover, I've watched some new shows, and I've formulated some humble opinions. Traditionally, I bestow upon four debuting series the prediction/dubious "award" of New Shows Most Likely to Get Cancelled, and usually I'm right about half the time. I'd like to point out, though, that last year all four of the shows that I predicted would get cancelled within the season (Do Not Disturb, Kath and Kim, Easy Money, and The Ex List) did, in fact, get the axe. I was four-for-four! Isn't that exciting?

Well, I guess it's not very exciting for all the people who worked on those shows and lost their jobs. I guess I'm pretty much a jerk. But I'm going to go ahead and try again anyway, and just hope nobody who's reading this is in the cast or crew of the following shows: Accidentally on Purpose, The Good Wife, Melrose Place, and Brothers. Accidentally on Purpose stars Jenna Elfman as a woman who unexpectedly gets pregnant after a one-night stand. Unless I'm remembering wrong, Elfman was appealing and amusing during her Dharma and Greg heyday, but somehow I just can't picture her recapturing sitcom glory. The Good Wife stars Julianna Margulies as the wife of a disgraced politician. It sounds like a pretty good book, or even a TV movie... but a series? My suggestion to the producers: To make things interesting, give the main character a mischievous double, like Serena to Samantha on Bewitched, and call her "The Bad Wife."

Melrose Place is, of course, a reheated leftovers version of the series of the same name from the 90s. When I was in junior high, the local Fox affiliate provided schools with book covers to put on our textbooks, and the Melrose Place book cover with a sultry-looking Heather Locklear made a lot of 13-year-old boys pay unusually close attention to their Earth Science books. I predict the new Melrose Place series will be just about as interesting as an Earth Science textbook, but ultimately less popular than those book covers.

As for Brothers: At first, I assumed the cast of ABC's Brothers and Sisters had had some contract disputes, resulting in NFL star Michael Strahan replacing Calista Flockhart, but apparently it's actually a completely new sitcom on Fox. And it sounds pretty bland, so I predict that not only will it not score a touchdown, it won't even get a first down. (That's a football thing, right? Right?) Of course, I could be wrong... NFL guy Alex Karras starred on Webster, and nobody ever questioned his comedy skills. Did they?

But as long as I'm insulting it, I'm also going to give Brothers my "award" for Worst New Show Title. It's just so boring... I mean, it's a show about brothers and it's called Brothers. Come on! If you had a show about a group of friends, you wouldn't just call it Friends, would you? No, of course you wouldn't. That would be ridiculous.

So what's the New Show I'm Most Excited About? I'm going to go with Glee here. Of course I say this having already seen the first four episodes, but I was already looking forward to it and I'm eager to see how the rest of the season plays out. It's funny and clever and satirical, but most of the characters are believable without being too broad or silly. Plus Jane Lynch is a hoot.

And the Returning Show I'm Most Looking Forward To? Boy, do I wish Pushing Daisies hadn't gotten cancelled so I could name it here. Once again, Lost doesn't return until the midseason, so once again I'm going to go with 30 Rock. You know what else I'm really looking forward to, though? How I Met Your Mother. At some point last season it became must-see TV for me. The cast is extremely likable (with the lead actor being the only weak link), and the show has a lot of fun with its own format and continuity, without ever making an episode that would be impenetrable to a first-time viewer. Of course, I'm starting to get pretty darn impatient for Ted to finally Meet My Mother already.

Other thoughts:

-Lots of people are excited about Fringe coming back. I started out watching it last year, only to eventually lose interest. But I've heard it got really good in the last couple episodes of the first season, so I think I'll give it a try this season and maybe I'll like it enough to stick with it.

-I saw the premiere of Flash Forward, in which everyone in the world blacks out simultaneously and sees their future, and it while it's really obviously a Lost wannabe, I'm intrigued enough to keep watching. Whoa, what if I had a flash-forward of my own right now, and I saw myself six months from now watching Flash Forward? That would be CRAZY! I've heard the writers have a five-year plan for the show, but I just want to know what they're going to do once they pass the point in the future that everyone saw in their flash-forwards. Does everyone flash forward again?

-NCIS: Los Angeles is on right after NCIS on CBS. Are people really that hungry for crime shows that they'll watch two NCISes in a row? Speaking of crime shows, the Christian Slater-starring The Forgotten may look like just another procedural crime drama, but it's not! There's one very important element that sets it apart... and that is... well, it's... um, I don't remember.

-Gary Unmarried and 'Til Death are both returning. I would like to meet one person who watches either of these shows. I'd be even more excited to meet one person who watches both shows... If I ever do, I'll probably capture them and sell them to the zoo! But don't worry; I'd make sure their cage had a TV so they could continue to watch terrible shows nobody likes.

-Remember the Fox sitcom Back to You from two years ago, which starred Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton and which was cancelled after a single season? ABC seems to have figured out what was wrong with it: the two leads should be on separate shows! And so Grammer's new show Hank airs on the same night as Heaton's new show The Middle, but never the twain shall meet..

-You know what new show is pretty good? Community. You know what returning show has gotten a lot better than it was last year? Parks and Recreation. I guess I'll be watching NBC for two hours every Thursday night. And I'll have the Parks theme song stuck in my head on a weekly basis.

-Oh, but you know what new show is really bad? Cougar Town. The first episode was pretty awful, anyway. I don't think there was a single joke in the entire show that was not about Courtney Cox wanting to get some action. I expected much more from creator Bill Lawrence, who also created Scrubs. But apparently, just because a guy's good at writing for Dr. Cox doesn't mean he's good at writing for Courtney Cox.

-For some reason, I always like to keep track of how many new shows have one-word titles: Trauma, V, Glee, Mercy, Hank, Eastwick, Community, and Brothers drop in this season to join returning one-worders like House and Heroes.

So... what do YOU think of the new TV season? Do you agree or disagree with anything I've said? Are you just itching to complain about The Jay Leno Show? Go nuts in the comment section below!

From the Archives: STAR EKK 2

Ryan — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:22:59 GMT

I got some positive feedback from yesterday's post of the Star Trek parody I wrote when I was 10 or 11, so here's the second installment, which I wrote some months later. SPOILER: It's pretty much the same as the first one.

Space. The final frontier. Scarier than income taxes. The Starship Enterkey's mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before (At least until the show is canceled.) I'm Captain Derk.

STAR EKK 2

DERK: Sock, what's that beeping wildly on the radar?
SOCK: OH, MY VULCAN! IT'S HORRIBLE!
DERK: What is, Sock?
SOCK: Oh, it's from the Federation bank. You have overdue bills to pay!
DERK: Oh. Wait! The Federation leader is trying to contact us! What is your order for us, leader?
LEADER: Plain pepperoni, hold the anchovies.
DERK: Sorry, we don't deliver.
LEADER: Darn! Anyway, we have good news.
DERK: Oh, I'm getting a raise, right?
LEADER: You wish. Well, the Cringons have declared peace!
DERK: Piece of what?
LEADER:: Piece of mind. Which you don't have.
DERK: OH! Peace! Well, will they sign a treaty with us?
LEADER: Wait, that's not all! They want to join the Federation!
DERK: Do you know what this means? Pretty soon they'll want their own TV show! Action Figures! Movies like “The Search For Grojkz!” Even kid's underwear!
LEADER: Oh, yeah. Well, talk to you later. By the way, for this call, you owe the Federation $1.50 first minute, 25 cent each additional. Have a nice day!
DERK: Sock, make a note of Lt. Hurrah and tell that phone call to be ready. I mean--
SOCK: I know, I know.
SOOTY: Captain, a Who-put-the-rum-in-the-rum-rum-rum-rum-Rumulan ship is coming!
DERK: Are they attacking?
SOOTY: Looks like they might.
SOLO: No they're not! They're just looking for a McDonald's!
DERK: They like Big Macs and Happy Meals too!
HURRAH: Ready for commands.
DERK: Stand by for hyper speed!
HURRAH: Standing by!
SOOTY: Captain! Captain! It's a crisis!
DERK: What? We're losing altitude?
SOOTY: No! Worse! The TV set is broken!
DERK: OH, NO!!! Do you know how much intergalactic repair men cost?!
CHECKMATE: That's not all! We don't have enough dilithium crystals!
DERK: Sock! Pull over! There's a dilithium refill station ahead.
(They pull over.)
DERK: Fill ‘er up!
MAN: Regular or unleaded?
DERK: Regular.
(The dilithium man fills up the tank.)
SOCK: The Federation leader's called back.
DERK: What is it?
LEADER: I just need to tell you You've wasted so much time, the episode is over.
DERK: Oh. Well, see you next week! I hope.

THE END

From the Archives: STAR EKK

Ryan — Tue, 12 May 2009 02:39:21 GMT

With Star Trek-mania currently gripping the nation, I got to thinking about some parodies I wrote when I was about 10 years old. When I wrote them, I had seen no more than an episode or two of the original show and one of the movies, but I had seen so many other parodies that I assumed I was qualified to create my own spoof. So here's the first one, and maybe I'll post the others later this week.

Space. The final frontier. Harder to get out of than the closet. The Starship Enterkey's mission is to boldly go where no man has gone before (and to get in the Top Ten ratings). I'm Capt. Derk.
STAR EKK

CAPT: Sock, anything good on the radar?
SOCK: No, Captain, only old Star Ekk reruns.
CAPT: Wait! What's that on the computer screen?
SOCK: It's a message!
CAPT: From the Dingons, declaring war?
SOCK: No, from Ed McMahon. "You may have won $25,000.....
LT. HURRAH: Captain, I'm getting a reading!
CAPT: Finally, something happens. What is it?
HURRAH: There's a Yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-Rumulan ship coming.
CAPT: Make contact with them.
RUMULAN: Hello.
CAPT: This is Captain Derk from the Federation. What do you want?
RUMULAN: A Big Mac, Coke, and a side order of fries.
CAPT: Huh?
RUMULAN: Never mind. I want to warn you, the Dingons have a new weapon.
CAPT: What?
RUMULAN: It's a Super Sonic Blower-Upper.
CAPT: Wow. Thanks. Goodbye.
MOANS: Who was that?
CAPT: The Dingons are coming! Get engaged to LT. Hurrah and tell hyper speed to stand by. I mean....
MOANS: Engage to hyper speed and tell Lt. Hurrah to stand by?
CAPT: Yeah. There's the Dingons! Solo! Get ready to turn on the cloaking device.
SOLO: Okay, Captain! Cloaking device!
CAPT: Also, warm up rockets.
SOLO: Okay! Rockets!
CAPT: Warm my coffee!
SOLO: Okay! Microwave!
SOOTY: Captain, the Dingons are trying to communicate.
CAPT: Okay. What are they saying?
SOOTY: They're asking for directions to the nearest planet.
CAPT: Is that all?
SOOTY: No, the captain wants to speak with you.
CAPT: Okay. I'll talk to him using the Force.
SOOTY: Uh... Wrong space franchise.
CAPT: Oh. Um- beam me up- Down- On board!
SOOTY: Aye, aye!
(Derk is beamed on board the Dingon ship.)
DINGON: Hello. If you think you know what I want, raise your hand.
CAPT: Sorry, but I'm not wearing deodorant.
DINGON: How's your Sock?
CAPT: My sock? Huh? Oh, Sock! He's fine.
DINGON: Well, I-- A.........AAAAH! (Runs away screaming)
CAPT: What's that!? It's a space monster! No! Dingon, come back! Don't run away!
MONSTER: AAAAAAARRRRRR!!
CAPT: What do you want?!!!
MONSTER: Uh-- do you have change for a dollar?

THE END?

Hey, check it out -- I posted STAR EKK 2, the very-similar follow-up! Click here to read it!

Does Alfred E. Neuman Deserve to Live? Part 2

Ryan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:53:33 GMT

As I mentioned on Monday, I’m taking a look at a recent issue of MAD magazine to determine whether or not it sucks now. Starting with…

THE COVER
The cover of the February 2009 issue is “Obama: The First 100 Minutes,” and the first thing I noticed was that the magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, was not immediately visible. I remember back when they did an NYPD Blue spoof cover, which did not feature Neuman…

… and when I saw it on the newsstand at the time I thought it was an outrage and a travesty. Now, though, I realize that it would probably be okay to do the occasional Neuman-free cover. It’s pretty much the same joke every time, anyway: Here’s a familiar celebrity or character, but with Alfred E. Neuman’s face instead of their normal face! Ha!

On further inspection, Neuman does appear on this Obama cover; in fact, there are three of him, doing a “see no evil/hear no evil/speak no evil” gag on the cover of a newspaper on Obama’s desk. So all is right with the world. And we can move on to the next thing, which is…

DEPARTMENTS
The table of contents looks approximately the same as ever, with all the punny “department” headings for each article, including “Barack Around the Clock” for the aforementioned Obama article. They even included a fake one: “LITTLE BLOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE DEPARTMENT: MAD Examines Cross-Dressing in the Old West” is said to be on page 36, but in fact does not exist. Yay.

LETTERS AND TOMATOES DEPARTMENT
I turn the page, and there’s the letters page, and the replies to reader letters are satisfyingly jerky. A couple writes in about their “Fold-in”-themed wedding announcement, and the reply is “We can’t wait to see your Spy vs. Spy-themed divorce announcement!” That seems about right.

THE FUNDALINI PAGES
This feature has been around for a few years, but it still feels new to me… It’s three pages of mini-articles and cartoons by different writers and artists, and it’s predictably uneven. (Who’s “Fundalini,” anyway?)
It includes “Celebrity Cause-of-Death Betting Odds,” which used to be on the last page of every issue in the late 90s. I didn’t find it very funny then, and I don’t find it very funny now: Odds are 8:1 of Tyra Banks dying from “fatal dehydration from all the crocodile tears shed for guests.” Meh.

The best things here are “Ways to Make Sure You Don’t Lose Your Job in These Tough Times” and “Covers We Didn’t Use,” although I wonder if those are actual unused covers or just funny make-‘em-ups. There are 14 contributors listed here, and I don’t know who did what, but it’s good to see the name of MAD old-timer Dick DeBartolo included.

LAME ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL VOTE
MAD EXPOSES WHO’S THINKING WHAT AT THE OBAMA INAUGURATION
THE FIRST 100 MINUTES OF THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY
These are all topical, political pieces, with “Lame Attempts to Explain” appearing earliest in the issue. Many of the jokes are fairly obvious (“Among people who voted against Obama/Biden, 5% [were] traditionalists who questioned Obama’s judgement for not stepping aside in favor of someone closer to core Democratic principles, like John ‘I can’t keep it in my pants’ Edwards or Hillary ‘My husband can’t keep it in his pants’ Clinton”), but just as many are amusing enough (“Among people who voted for McCain/Palin, 13% [were] homeless people who hoped that once McCain was in the White House they could move into one of the multitude of houses he forgot he owns.”)

This stuff seems close to the MAD content I remember not quite grasping as a kid. I don’t remember any specific articles about Reagan or Bush, Sr., but I know there was always some material that I realized was funny without having any clue as to why. Approaching this new issue, I was prepared to accuse the current team of pandering, but while some of these jokes are just above Jay Leno-level cleverness, at least they’re willing to fill two pages with mostly text, about politicians.

The “Who’s Thinking What” piece, on the other hand, is largely unfunny. The illustration by Tom Richmond is great, with a huge crowd of dead-on caricatures attending Obama’s swearing-in and expressing themselves via thought bubbles. But most of the jokes are hackneyed: Bill Clinton’s lusting after Michelle! Dick Cheney is angry! And the inclusion of jokes about Monica Lewinski and Harriet Miers are embarrassing. Still, I did chuckle audibly at the inclusion of the ghost of FDR in his wheelchair (“I just hope that putz Biden doesn’t ask me to stand up!”)

By the way, did anyone else ever find the use of bold type to be fairly arbitrary in MAD? I always especially noticed it in the parodies. Sometimes it’s logically used for emphasis, but in several of these thought bubbles the bolding seems random: John Kerry thinks, “Wow, who knew all you had to do to get elected was have presence, charisma and a personality?”

The “First 100 Minutes” piece is pretty good. “[Minute] 3: Remove stupid flag pin from lapel” and “[Minute] 25: Go on Facebook; put out a friend request to Ahmadinejad (with no preconditions)” made me snicker. And there’s even a reference I’m too dumb to get: “Send mash note to Doris Kearns Goodwin.” Who’s that?

A MAD LOOK AT SNOW
I have nothing but positive things to say about Sergio Aragones. I hope he keeps drawing cartoons until the end of time. But man, it’s weird to see “A MAD Look At…” in color.
Speaking of Aragones, his “Drawn-out Dramas” still adorn the margins of each issue, though I suspect there may be some recycling going on there.

12 SUREFIRE TIPS FOR STAND-UP COMICS
TELL-TALE SIGNS THAT YOU’VE GOT A REALLY BAD PSYCHIC
This is pretty typical MAD stuff. If I were grading these features, I would give both of these a passing grade.

MAD’S SUCKY TWILIGHT OUTTAKES
This is kind of unfortunate. It’s just speech bubbles pasted onto publicity stills from the movie Twilight. In one, the hunky vampire guy says, “Man, every time I drink deer blood it always gives me the runs!” Can all of us over the age of 12 agree that’s not funny?

THE 2009 AL JAFFEE CALENDAR
I had high hopes for this, but it’s not a calendar with original, month-appropriate artwork by veteran MAD contributor Jaffee, it’s just a bunch of drawings cut and pasted from various Jaffee features. It feels like filler.

SPY VS SPY
I think “Spy vs. Spy” creator Antonio Prohias had retired by the time I was reading MAD in the late 80s, but I’m not quite sure. Anyway, it was always one of my favorite parts of the magazine, although I remember feeling like it was unfair that the black spy seemed to win more often. I was also a big fan of the Spy vs Spy game for the NES… It was really simple and repetitive and often frustrating, but man was it fun to plant a bomb behind a bookcase and watch it blow up my brother’s unsuspecting spy.

Peter Kuper has been the regular artist and writer of the strip since the late 90s, and he does a good job, albeit with a much different art style than the originals. I guess it would be hard to corrupt “Spy vs Spy”… As long as you have two spies trying to kill each other in convoluted ways, you got it down.

WHEN ADULTS SAY… REMIND THEM…
Who is MAD written for? As I said, this issue contains three different articles of political humor, which seem unlikely to appeal to kids, but then there’s this article, which is nothing but a bunch of “parents are SO lame” bits straight out of a Saturday morning commercial.

The thing is, MAD has been pretty much the only readily available humor magazine since Cracked disappeared, so maybe they’re just trying to reach as many readers as possible by appealing to all age groups in a single publication. And maybe that’s why their circulation is drying up, in this increasingly specific-demographic-targeted universe. But then, Cracked’s last gasp in magazine form was a relaunch designed to hit young adult males, and that didn’t work. I guess it’s most likely that MAD’s decline is just part of the death of magazines in general.

Anyway, this article isn’t very good, although the art by Peter Bagge is reliably funky.

THE MAD WORLD OF… PETS
Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side of…” features always seemed a little out of place to me. They tended to be like the comic strips found in newspapers: three or four panels in a setup/punchline format, usually focusing on the foibles of middle-class life. They just had less bite than the rest of the magazine. But they were always there, in every issue, as much a part of MAD as Alfred E. Neuman. And “Roger Kaputnik” is a great Funny Name.

Berg died in 2002, but this “Mad World of…” feature (written by Stan Sinberg) seems to be an attempt to carry on a similar format, and it’s good enough. I can see myself liking this stuff as a kid… A dude shows his friend his new totally automated self-cleaning, self-deodorizing kitty toilet, which works great: “[T]he fact that I don’t own a cat helps too! I just love gadgets!”

MONROE AND… THE PLANE TRIP
Ugh. The Monroe strips started at the time of that revamp I mentioned, and to me they were the first sign that things had not changed for the better. The first strip, as I recall, was about Monroe’s embarrassment at buying a tampon for his mother, and the second one was about Monroe walking in on his parents having sex. I realize that MAD’s job is to stand juuust across the threshold of bad taste, but there’s a difference between funny tastelessness and grossness for grossness’s’s sake.

Here, Monroe (who’s kind of like a miserable, tortured Doug Funny) wins a trip to Hawaii, and his parents decide to come along, and his mom talks about wearing a thong, and they embarrass him on the plane, and talk about his “backne,” and this goes on for four whole pages.

Ugh. This crap brings down the quality of the whole issue. I actually can’t believe they’re still running these things. Do people like this? Do people write in and say how funny they think it is when Monroe’s mom fondles a teenage boy while adjusting his seatbelt? I don’t get it.

WHAT THE HECK IS THE DIFFERENCE?
Seriously?

This is a “spot the differences” puzzle like you’d see in Comics for Kids in the Sunday newspaper, and it’s disappointingly straightforward. Again, this seems like the kind of stuff they should be spoofing, not doing with a straight face. This feels even more like filler than the calendar.

MAD’S ALL-INCLUSIVE DO-IT YOURSELF CELEBRITY SCANDAL BLOG POSTING
Co-written and illustrated by MAD veterans Frank Jacobs and Mort Drucker, respectively, this is the kind of thing I remember seeing in the late 80s. Heck, the celebrity caricatures are even in black and white.

MAD FOLD-IN
The fold-in is, of course, an American institution. How many newsstand copies have been rendered unsellable because kids folded their back pages? Thousands, I reckon. I always try to figure out the answer before I fold, of course, and this time I was right: “What transition of power are many Americans still feeling uneasy about?” The answer (SPOILER ALERT!) is “LENO TO CONAN.” And the Obama family disappears in the crease as two paintings and two busts become Jay and O’Brien.

Al Jaffee has done the fold-in for decades now. I wonder if they have any plans, or if he’s given his blessing, to have another artist continue it should Jaffee retire, or, God forbid, shuffle off this mortal coil.

OTHER COMMENTS AND STUFF I NOTICED
-This issue doesn’t have any movie or TV show parodies. Back in my day, I don’t think a single issue went by without at least one. Maybe there just aren’t any bad movies these days.

-There’s an ad in this issue for a tattoo removal balm. I thought it was a gag at first, but further inspection reveals it’s for real. I was going to say “legitimate,” but that doesn’t quite seem accurate.

-The color didn’t bother me, really. It was weird seeing some of this stuff in color after years of black and white, but I think it was an acceptable change.

-So, what did I think of it overall? It’s all right. The stuff I liked the most was by the longtime contributors, which probably indicates nothing other than the fact that I’m an old curmudgeon who hates anything new. I think the problems with it are related to the stuff I mentioned earlier… Trying to appeal to both dumb people/kids and slightly less-dumb people at the same time. As the magazine industry itself continues its slow, gradual death, maybe it would make sense to focus on one demographic or the other. But as I said, that didn’t work for Cracked, so who knows?

But I’ll tell you this: If I became the editor of MAD, the first thing I would do is cancel “Monroe.”

In conclusion, I don’t think the magazine is as good as it used to be. How could it? Many of its early creative geniuses are no longer with us, and it would be impossible for the new generation to live up to their standards. So it probably hasn’t ever recovered from the dip in quality that followed the death of publisher Bill Gaines in 1992.
But there are still some redeeming qualities, and I think it serves a purpose as pretty much the only widely available humor magazine left. So I’ll go ahead and say that MAD deserves to live, and hopefully fewer issues a year will mean less dreck and more good stuff.

Join me next time when I’ll spend 15 paragraphs trying to figure out the meaning of the “IND” in between the M and the A in the MAD logo!

Does Alfred E. Neuman Deserve to Live? Part 1

Ryan — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 03:45:05 GMT

Like most people who at some point in their lives were males between the ages of 8 and 18, I was once a regular reader of MAD magazine. So it caught my attention a few weeks ago, when the announcement was made that MAD would be cutting back its publication from monthly to quarterly.

I first discovered the magazine around 2nd grade, having learned of its greatness from two people: my friend Tim, and my dad. Tim told me there existed a magazine that was way cooler than joke books, and as Tim was a couple years older than I was, and thus an expert on what was cool, I was intrigued. My dad, who I considered the ultimate judge of whether a thing was funny or not, had fond memories of reading MAD in his youth, and bought me a paperback compilation called The MAD Sampler. I didn’t get all the cultural references from the older pieces (“Who’s Bert Convy?”), but I thought it was fantastic, and for years afterward I would buy issues of the magazine whenever my weekly allowance would… well, allow.

My friend Molly once explained the reason she read MAD by describing it as a form of “legal rebellion,” and I guess that has a lot to do with why I read it too. Occasionally it contained words that I wasn’t allowed to use, which I pretended not to approve of but which was secretly exciting. I think it even made me seem hipper among my peers… I distinctly remember a classmate being shocked to see me reading a parody of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Twins in which Schwarzenegger and a woman are in bed, and she confesses that she’s jealous of him… not because of his looks or stamina, but because he has bigger breasts than she does. “Ryan?! YOU’RE reading THAT?!” Yep, I was, because I was an edgy dude. As a kid who almost never broke the rules, it was liberating to read a magazine that I knew my grandmother wouldn't approve of.

As with anything I consumed at that age, I attempted to imitate what I saw in MAD with my own creations, with less than successful results. Have you ever tried to do a fold-in? It’s hard! And it’s not as easy coming up with snappy answers to stupid questions as you might think.

I lost track of it for a while, but when I was in high school, there was a much-publicized revamp to the magazine, which was enough to get me to actually subscribe. They hired new writers and artists, added new regular features, and slanted the logo to represent their “new slant on humor” or something stupid like that.

Soon enough, though, I realized that the “new” MAD was actually not as good as the old MAD. I let the subscription lapse, and pretty much forgot about it, except for shaking my head when I noticed things like the magazine going to an all-color format, the addition of advertising, and participation in real ad campaigns. I mean, okay, I can understand that any magazine that wants to sell these days has to be in color, and ads help pay the bills, but having the artists and writers of the “Usual Gang of Idiots” do variations on their classic features to sell hot dogs just seems wrong somehow. MAD should be making fun of stupid ads, not creating them.

Judging by internet reaction to the story of the cutback, it seems like most fans expect MAD to end within a few years. I don’t know if that’ll happen or not, but it did get me thinking: Does MAD deserve to live? Is it as bad now as I think it is, or has it improved in recent years?

So I bought the most recent issue available at a local drugstore (#498, February 2009), and gave it a read. On Wednesday I’ll go over it and tell you what I thought.

The 2008 Oscars are over!

Ryan — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 03:33:44 GMT

My inbox was flooded with millions of e-mails last week: Where were my Oscar predictions this year? The scandalous truth is that I didn't write an Oscar prediction post, because I found myself without a working computer of my own in the week leading up to the ceremony. By now, the awards have been handed out, and every legitimate media outlet has already published their report.

Good thing I'm nowhere near legitimate! I marked a ballot before the show, so I can still give you a report of how good I was at forecasting. I'll list the winners, and if I guessed wrong I'll put my wrong prediction in parentheses. And as a special bonus to you the reader, I haven't bothered to put anything in bold or italics, because I've been spoiled by WYSIWYG editors on other journalling websites.

Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona
I correctly predicted this one, though I didn't really think her performance was spectacular. Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall were both equally good in the film. Hey, did you happen to see Vicky Cristina? Cruz got more attention than any of the other actors in the film, yet her character was neither Vicky nor Cristina nor Barcelona, and she's onscreen for considerably less time that the other three main characters. Also, doesn't it seem weird how everyone in Woody Allen movies always says "make love" instead of "have sex?" Who talks like that?

Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight
There were a few sure things this year, and this one was probably the surest. The acceptance speeches given by Ledger's family were nice. I know this question has been asked 10 million times, so let me be the 10 million and first: Why didn't The Dark Knight get nominated for best picture? It was everyone's favorite movie of the year, while nominee The Reader was everyone's Movie They've Never Heard Of of the year.

Dreamiest Lead Actor: zac efron in high schol musical 3 omg hes sooooooo hott!!!!!

Best Animated Feature: Wall-E
What a great movie. I know this question has been asked 2 million times, so let me be the 2 million and first: Why didn't Wall-E get nominated for Best Picture? It was an instant classic, and certainly the finest film Jeff Garlin has ever acted in.

Best Animated Short: Le Maison en Petits Cubes (I predicted Presto)
Presto was the short that screened with Wall-E, about a magician and his neglected rabbit. It was fantastic, but not having seen Le Maison, I'm willing to concede that it might have been better.

Stupidest Gratuitous Use of Computer-Animated Monkeys: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Art Direction: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (I predicted The Dark Knight)
Really? The Dark Knight created a Gotham City that was completely believable as a real city, but with a noirish, comic book tone. Benjamin Button did not do that.

Cinematography: Slumdog Millionaire (I predicted The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
On the other hand, I thought the cinematography was the best thing about Button. Better than its 12-hour running time, its bizarre decision to have Cate Blanchett dub the voice of the young actress playing her character as a little girl, and its failure to address why the backward-aging protagonist starts out as a tiny, elderly baby and ends up as a tiny, infant baby, when most normal humans start out as a baby, grow to adult size, and then die without shrinking. Think about it. Anyway... the movie at least looked good, but apparently the Academy thought Slumdog looked better.

Costume Design: The Duchess
I decided to base my prediction on which of these period pieces took place the furthest in the past. Victory! (And by this reasoning, if 10,000 BC had been nominated, it would have been a shoe-in.)

Documentary Feature: Man on Wire
I haven't seen any of the others, but Man on Wire is a very good movie. And check out Phillipe Petit balancing that Oscar on his chin! I wondered if he was the first person in history to do that, but as it turns out, George Cukor used to carry his Oscar around on his chin everywhere he went back in '64.

Documentary Short: Smile Pinki (I predicted The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306)
I picked the one about the Martin Luther King assassination, because stuff like that always wins awards. I don't know what Smile Pinki is about.

Film Editing: Slumdog Millionaire
Sure, why not?

Foreign Language Film: Departures (I predicted The Class)
I'd still like to see The Class.

Best Film Inspired by Rambo: Son of Rambow

Worst Film Inspired by Rambo: Rambo

Makeup: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
This was an easy one. Although there was some great makeup stuff in Hellboy II. What category would the animatronic creatures from Hellboy fall under? Visual effects, I suppose, but it didn't even get nominated. Which is too bad, as I'll take a bunch of monster suits over fake-looking CGI any day. Because I'm a curmudgeonly old man.

Sound Editing: The Dark Knight (I predicted Wall-E)

Sound Mixing: Slumdog Millionaire (I predicted Wall-E)
These are two categories where nobody knows what they are. Sound was so essential to Wall-E that I thought it had a good chance of winning, but whatever.

Visual Effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (I predicted The Dark Knight)
I guess they did a pretty good job making Brad Pitt look like a little old seven-year-old man.

Adapted Screenplay: Slumdog Millionaire (I predicted Frost/Nixon)

Angriest John Malkovich: Burn After Reading

Original Screenplay: Milk
I should get around to seeing Milk. The screenwriter's acceptance speech for this award was the best of the night, I thought. Speaking of which, did they really get through the whole ceremony without having to cut anybody off? That's gotta be a first.

Original Score: Slumdog Millionaire
None of these scores really stuck out as being particularly memorable to me, but Slumdog's Indian influences gave it a more interesting sound than the others.

Original Song: "Jai Ho"
Fair enough. It was certainly the best train station closing credits dance song ever. So... They kind of did a half-hearted job of presenting the Original Song nominees this year, didn't they? Just smooshing them all together like that.

Best Actress: Kate Winslet in The Reader
I'm glad she won. I like her.

Best Actor: Sean Penn in Milk (I predicted Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler)
I think most people predicted Mickey Rourke for this one. I felt kinda bad for him, but maybe he can keep his comeback momentum going and get nomiated again soon.

Director: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire

Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
I knew it would win, but I still say that, although it's a good movie, it's just not Best Picture-worthy. The three movies that I thought were the best of 2008 were not even nominated -- the aforementioned Dark Knight and Wall-E, and Rachel Getting Married. I should be in the Academy. Maybe if I change my name to Oscar?

In the end, I correctly guessed 14 out of 24 awards. That's not too terrible, but I'm glad I wasn't making any wagers.

Other thoughts:
-On the red carpet, some reporter asked Amy Adams this question: "You're nominated for playing a nun, covered up from head to toe, while Marisa Tomei is nominated for playing a stripper. Now, is that fair?" How the heck do you answer a question like that?

-The opening number was highly entertaining. How long before Anne Hathaway gets cast in a musical?

-Speaking of musicals, that musical montage thing was a mess. It felt like they added it at the last minute, and when Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Hudgens and Beyoncé asked, "Which songs should we sing?" the producers just said, "It doesn't matter, just sing whatever you feel like singing, whenever you feel like singing it."

-Every year during the death montage, I see people that I forgot had died, and then I get sad all over again. But Queen Latifah's rendition of "I'll Be Seeing You" was pretty perfect.

-The producers hyped this year's ceremony as being different from previous years in that they would be "telling a story," referring to the order of the awards mirroring the production process. It was an interesting idea, and I think it worked, largely because giving out two or three awards in a row made the whole thing move a bit quicker. But I don't know if the same gimmick would work if they tried it again.

-I've probably mentioned this in years past, but have you ever noticed that the host of the untelevised technical awards ceremony is always an attractive actress? This year it was Jessica Biel. It's like they're saying, "Sorry you don't get to give your acceptance speech on TV, but please accept your award from a hot chick." I guess that's not so exciting for winners who aren't into ladies, but I have to think it's not a coincidence.

-When was the last time they had an animated character present the awards for animated feature and short? I miss that.

Comments, complaints, rants? Feel free to post in the comment thingy below!

weight(t)

John — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:16:17 GMT

Wedding Photos

Matthew — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:01:07 GMT

I’m almost done tagging and organizing the photographs. If you have not done so yet, add me as a Flickr contact so you can see all of my photographs. Also, don’t forget to join the Muujware group.

The Hyatt Regency (Update)

Matthew — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:06:47 GMT

This is an update to an earlier post

I'll be true to my word. The Hyatt Regency doesn't suck. (Maybe I should wait until after this weekend to make the final determination).

They refunded my money earlier this week, but I remained persistent and filed a complaint through their website asking what had caused the problem. Today I received a call checking to make sure I got the refund and apologizing for what they admitted was a mistake, although they still do not know the underlying cause. Anyway, they have supposedly upgraded the room to one with a better view, so I consider this a victory. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

Beauty and the Looming Deadline and the Beast

Ryan — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:06:48 GMT

I realize now that I first felt the pressures of adult responsibility while watching a candlestick sing in a phony French accent.

I was in 5th grade when Disney's animated musical Beauty and the Beast was released, and one weekend my dad took my siblings and me to see it. This was near the end of the "third six weeks" period at school (the school year was divided into six six-week sections), which meant that I had a project that was due the following week.

I don't remember what the project was exactly -- I think it involved writing a report and making an accompanying poster, possibly about an inventor or a civil rights leader or a brand of bubble gum -- but I do know that it was the most daunting project I had been asked to do in my school career up to that point.

Kindergarten through fourth grade? Kid stuff. When it came to assignments like cutting out shapes, memorizing names of states, or even basic multiplication problems, I could earn a passing grade as easily as I could comb my hair. (Although to be honest, at that age I almost never actually combed my hair.) But now, here was an assignment that would require me to spend time and effort doing actual research, and even to analyze my findings. What was going on here?

As I sat in that theatre watching cups and plates sing and dance, and a monster ballroom dancing with a cute chick, I was having a good time... but I wasn't able to fully lose myself in the movie. I had less than a week to finish my project, I had a lot of work left to do, and I just couldn't forget about it.

That was the first time I ever found that deadlines from the "real world" affected my abillity to be entertained or distracted, but it would not be the last. Throughout high school and college I had numerous weekends where my enjoyment of a new movie, a video game, a theme park visit or what-have-you was hampered by the knowledge that there was work to be done, and a limited amount of time to do it.

(Yeah, yeah, I know. Why didn't I do the work before the entertainment? My thoughtful, logical reply: Phooey.)

These days I think I strike a pretty good balance. I try not to let worries about work gnaw away at my capacity to enjoy this week's 30 Rock. On the other hand, work has never once required me to make a poster based on information I found in the encyclopedia.

What about you? Do you remember the first time that nagging feeling of impeding accountability latched onto your brain like a parasite? Did it happen while you were watching Hercules or Mulan maybe? Tell me about it the comments thingy below!

The Hyatt Regency

Matthew — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:39:50 GMT

~~I will not retract this statement until I get my money back and receive a formal apology from Hyatt Regency. A defense to libel is the truth, which is certainly on my side.~~

Here’s the story:

I reserved a room at their hotel in downtown San Antonio, paying in advance to secure the rate, and was overcharged by $800. Due to the large amount of spending due to Christmas and my upcoming wedding, this could cause several important checks to bounce. Thank you so much, Hyatt, for inconveniencing me. I should have kept the reservation I had made earlier at the Omni nearby. It may have cost an extra $200, but that's still one quarter of what your hotel overcharged me.

So until I receive a refund and an apology, I will continue to speak out vocally against the Hyatt.

You think I forgot about the time you couldn't find my prepaid reservation and included Flashback Prom event tickets at your Austin Town Lake location? Remember how you wanted me to sign the receipt before I received what I had paid for?

In addition to my initial phone call about the matter, in which I was assured the problem would be rectified (excuse me if I have no confidence in their abilities right now), here is the only response I received on the matter:

I appreciate the time that you have taken to contact us regarding your stay. You may rest assured that we are looking into these matters and will contact you as soon as we are able.

If you should have any questions, additional concerns, or if this requires immediate attention, please do not hesitate to contact Hyatt Hotels Guest Relations at 1-800-323-7249. Our office is open every day, 6:00am - 2:00am central time.

Best regards,

Hyatt Hotels Guest Relations

Check back later for more updates.

UPDATE: December 12, 2008

The Great 2000 Flushes Experiment: Follow-up!

Ryan — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:17:27 GMT

What the heck is wrong with me? It's been months now since this post, in which I told you about the Great 2000 Flushes Experiment, wherein my roommate Joe and I kept tabs on our toilet, tallying up every flush in attempt to determine whether the 2000 Flushes toilet cleaner tablet was really good for two thousand flushes.

Here, finally, is your update: A few weeks after that post, it became clear that the water was, well, clear. No longer was our toilet bowl water possessed of an achingly beautiful blue deep blue hue. Now it was just the color of water, so it was time to officially call an end to our potty journey.

The final tally: 1,268 flushes. Is that greater than or equal to 2,000? Well, no. But I think it's still pretty darn impressive. We haven't gotten a new tablet... I think we're still in mourning. But it did take several days to shake off the urge to make a tally mark with every flush.

Once the experiment was over, we had to figure out something else to do with the dry erase board in our bathroom, so we've been using it to play Hangman. Here you can see how Joe guessed the solution without even hanging a single body part. (You can also see months' worth of accumulated vandalism and piled-on inside jokes.) Well done, Joe! That's some expert-level bathroom Hangman.

Ryan on TV: Fall 2008

Ryan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 01:52:38 GMT

Well, the subways are full of pictures of Peter Krause, and that can only mean one thing: It's new TV time. Actually, I suppose it means one of two things: 1. It's new TV time, or 2. Peter Krause really wants you to come to his dermatology clinic. But it is, in fact, TV time. The writer's strike shook things up like a can of shaving cream last year, but now TV is coming back for real. Before I go on, I want to introduce a new award to my annual fall TV write-up, an award I've never presented before and which I may never present again: The Most Astonishingly Amazing New Show. And it goes to... Fox's new game show Hole in the Wall!

Have you seen this thing? It premiered last week, I think... The game goes like this: Contestants stand at the end of a long platform, a big foam wall with a shape cut out of it zooms toward them, and they have to move their bodies in such a way that they fit in the hole to avoid getting knocked into a pool of water. That's it! That's the entire game! That's the whole bowl of fruit and the whole salad! And this is an hour-long show every week! Isn't that astonishing? It's so stupid, and yet when I came across it I could not stop watching. Pure television entertainment, as it turns out, is watching some big dude try to stand on his head to fit in a handstand-shaped hole.

Moving on, it's time to talk about the new shows Most Likely to Get Cancelled. Unless I'm wrong (which is probable), the writer's strike meant the pilot season was shorter than usual, and a lot of shows whose ratings weren't spectacular last year were spared because the networks had nothing new to replace them with. So it seems like there aren't that many new shows, but of the freshman shows that do exist, I'm expecting that these four shows will be gone by the end of the season: Do Not Disturb, Kath and Kim, Easy Money, and The Ex List.

Do Not Disturb stars Jerry O'Connell of last year's quickly-cancelled Carpoolers as a hotel manager. It looks pretty bad... I wouldn't watch it even if it came with a free continental breakfast. Kath and Kim is based on a British sitcom about a dumb mom and her dumb daughter, and it could conceivably survive, given its NBC Thursday-night timeslot, but I'm going to go ahead and predict that it's not long for this world. Did you know that Molly Shannon, who plays Selma Blair's mother on the show, is only 8 years older than Blair? Weird!

Easy Money is a show about... um... actually, in the time since I read Entertainment Weekly's fall TV preview and made notes for this post, I've forgotten what the show's about. I'm pretty sure, but not completely sure, that it's not the same show as Dirty Sexy Money.

The Ex List is about a woman who finds out from a fortune teller that she's already dated and broken up with the man she's destined to be with, so she tracks down all her ex-boyfriends in search of the one. So every episode is about her finding a former beau, then figuring out why he's not the right guy? How can that possibly sustain a series?

You know what would make interesting? If they combined the premise of this show with that of Samantha Who? Then, not only would she have to go see all her old boyfriends, her amnesia would mean that she had no idea who any of them were! So she might have to try to get some guy to like her, despite the fact that she once smashed a pie in his face in public, and although he never forgave her for it, she has no memory of it! Now THAT's a TV show!

Now for the award for Worst New Show Title. I have to say, there aren't any really terrible titles that leap out at me and beg to be snarked at this time around. I'm going to go with Worst Week, not just because it has the word "Worst" in the title, but because it makes it sound like the show will only cover seven days in the lives of its characters. Also, when I first saw it advertised I thought it had something to do with VH1's Best Week Ever.

Let's see, now... the award for Returning Show I'm Most Looking Forward To. I'm looking forward to Pushing Daisies, and the teaser trailer for the new season has successfully ramped up my anticipation and stimulated my salivation. I hope they manage to make it just good and colorful and clever and odd as last season, and I hope they don't wait too long before letting Kristen Chenoweth sing again.

But even more than the adventures of Ned, a guy who makes lemon-meringue pies, I'm looking forward to a new year of Liz Lemon and her supporting weirdoes on 30 Rock. I'm happy and relieved that it's returning, and I can't wait to see what kind of strange, laughter-based noises I produce while watching this season.

How about the New Show I'm Most Looking Forward To? I really can't say there's one show that has me jumping up and down on the coffee table in anticipation, but I do have high hopes for Fringe. It was co-created by J.J. Abrams of Lost and Alias, and while the pilot didn't quite grab me by the collar and refuse to let go the way I thought it might, there seems to be a lot of potential for some exciting X-Files-style sci-fi mystery. Also there was a cow.

Other thoughts:

• Another new TV season means another crop of shows with one-word titles: Valentine, Priveleged, Fringe, Stylista, Crusoe and over on Starz! there's Crash.

• The 2008 midseason show Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles returns. I watched the first few weeks of it back in the spring, but ultimately it failed to keep me coming back. Sorry, Summer Glau. Please don't crush me with your cyborg-strength.

• I still haven't decided if I'll watch Heroes. Season 2 was pretty hard to get through. Chances are I'll listen to the buzz to see if folks are liking it, then wander back in its general direction.

• Life on Mars is not a Veronica Mars spin-off about tiny creatures living on Kristen Bell's skin. It's based on a British drama about a cop who gets hit by a car and wakes up in the 1970s. On Earth, actually, not on Mars. And not on a Mars bar. I'm always a sucker for that kind of premise... and all too often I end up feeling like an all-day sucker when I dig the show and it gets cancelled way before its time. Like, for example, last year's Journeyman, about a journalist who kept involuntarily jumping back in time. I'll watch Life on Mars and keep my fingers crossed. Unless it stinks. Then I won't care, and I'll leave my digits uncrossed.

• My Own Worst Enemy (another show with the word "Worst" in the title! Isn't that amazing?) is also intriguing. The show stars Christian Slater as... well, as two different people in the same body, essentially. One is an average joe and one is like super-secret-agent-action-hero guy, and they have to figure out how they can both exist. How long before they introduce a villainous character who also has two personalities?

• The new show Crusoe seems like it's from a different decade. As far as I can tell, it's a straightforward adventure series about Robinson Crusoe. It could be pretty cool if the budget allows for jungle chases and far-flung adventure, and dinosaurs. Actually, I haven't read the Daniel Defoe book, but I'm pretty sure it has dinosaurs. Also, Crusoe's assistant is named Friday... and this show is on Friday! I can only assume this was a deliberate choice on NBC's part, or Daniel Defoe's. Oh, and I hope the show has a theme song that refers to the fact that the lead character has no phone, no lights, and no motor cars.

• ER returns for its 14th and final season. Man, ER has been on TV forever... Heck, it's been on so long that when it first started, The Simpsons was only in its 6th season!

• Bob Saget is in a new comedy on the CW called Surviving Suburbia. It sounds like a pretty typical crappy sitcom, only sleazier... which means it might just be right up Saget's alley. He's lately found some success by presenting a foul-mouthed version of himself that's striking in its complete lack of resemblance to his Full House dad persona. He had a show on the WB a couple years ago called Raising Dad that seemed like more of the same sitcom drivel, but maybe this new show will be more suited to his talents. Not that it will be any good. Sorry, Bob Saget. Please don't crush me with your cyborg-strength.

• Speaking of the CW, rumor has it that the network's third season may be its last unless it learns to shape up. Will 90210 rescue it? Who's supposed to watch 90210, anyway -- young folks, or 30-somethings who watched the original show when they were young folks?

• Just so you all know, because I'm sure you've been wondering: I did watch the first episode of The Return of Jezebel James last spring, as I said I would. That was the Parkey Posey/Lauren Ambrose sitcom created by Gilmore Girls' Amy Sherman-Palladino. And it was one of the worst, most obnoxious half hours of television I've ever seen. If any of you know where I can find the guy in charge of the laugh track for that show, please tell me; I should like very much to punch him in the nose.

Aren't we, as 21st century, media-savvy TV viewers, too smart for such obvious (and LOUD!) canned laughter? If the jokes are that terrible, no volume of fake guffaws is going to make them any funnier... You can take a hamburger made with spoiled meat, moldy bread, and poisoned ketchup, and stick a sign on it that says, "This hamburger is DELICIOUS!"... but it really won't help.

• I didn't get around to writing about it here (I'm pretty busy these days, what with the Very Important business of writing for ToughPigs.com and Ryan Watches 50 Movies), but this summer I faithfully watched Swingtown on CBS, a series whose characters occasionally engaged in some sexually adventurous pursuits with multiple partners.

I'm aware that this means I'm contributing to the decline of civilized society, but I thought it was a pretty good show with a likable cast. It was not renewed for another season, and I'm quite happy with that. The 13-episode season aired during one summer, and followed its characters through another summer, back in 1976. There were a few loose ends in the final episode, but nothing heartbreaking. I'd like to see more shows like this in summers to come.

I'm sure I could talk and talk and talk about TV, but that'll do it for now. But by all means, YOU should talk and talk and talk about TV in the comments below. What are you watching?

Brain Teaser

Matthew — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 06:44:11 GMT

Here’s something for everybody to think about for a while. Maybe I need some sleep, but here it is anyway.

What is significant about the following sentence? “Arms rack carnage.”

Best of luck to all. I haven’t thought of a prize for the first person to post the answer. I guess that depends on exactly how much effort it actually takes to figure it out the correct answer. Note: In case you were thinking about using Google, until their crawler gets around to indexing this post, you won't find any results for "arms rack carnage".

Free Movies! Outside!

Ryan — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:45:08 GMT

This summer, I've been watching movies outside. Throughout New York City, a number of parks hold free screenings during the hottest months, and the experience is hard to beat. Sitting in the grass in the summer air, surrounded by tall buildings and New Yorkers eager to be entertained... It's really a great way to see a motion picture.

Because I'm a nerd, I started thinking about what kind of movies I would schedule, were I in charge of one of these things. I've come up with a list of eight -- that's two months of free movies -- which I'm calling the Outdoor Free Film Festival, or OFFF for short. I think it's a good selection of films that would be fun to watch with a crowd of movie-lovers eager to be entertained.

Week 1: The Great Muppet Caper
We'll kick things off with my favorite Muppet film, a grand homage to classic musicals that's fun for the whole family. Folks can cheer for Miss Piggy's daring motorcycle stunts, boo for villain Charles Grodin, and turn to each other to ask "How did they DO that?" during the every-Muppet-riding-a-bike sequence.

Week 2: Strangers on a Train
This is a good, solid Hitchcock movie, and a less obvious choice than Psycho or North by Northwest. Besides, everyone already knows the "twist" in Psycho anyway. Strangers, a tale of murder, guilt, and tennis, is suspenseful enough that audience members will be gripping their blankets, barely able to stand the tension.

Week 3: A Fish Called Wanda
What's better than a hilarious farce? Watching a hilarious farce with a park full of people laughing their heads off. By the end of the film, I would except people to applaud every time Kevin Kline appears on screen.

Week 4: The Conversation
Having gone from thriller to comedy, we next bring in some more thrills. This intense 1970s classic starring Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who overhears the wrong exchange at the wrong time is actually more accessible than The French Connection, which is the Hackman movie people talk about more often. Plus it'll be fun when folks recognize a pre-Laverne & Shirley Cindy Williams.

Week 5: Safety Last!
Most people in the audience will have never seen a silent film, and this funny, exciting Harold Lloyd picture (the one where he hangs off the big clock hands) would be a perfect introduction to the era. It's not very long, so perhaps it could be paired with a short starring Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. A live pianist or organist providing musical accompaniment would enhance the evening even further.

Week 6: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
This genre-defying crowd-pleaser is just an excellent movie.

Week 7: The Music Man
This musical is highly entertaining, and nearly every song is instantly memorable... but we'd have to start it pretty early in the evening because it's really long, and folks have to get home by bedtime. I would encourage people to sing along, but only if they really know the words.

Week 8: either The Rocketeer or Dick Tracy
I can't decide. Both are underrated early 90s comics-inspired adventures with brave heroes and scary villains. I think the gathered throng would dig either one.

What do you think of my choices? What would YOUR free outdoor movie festival look like? Please let me know in the comments down below.

(Also, just for the record, if I could do nine weeks of movies, my choice for the extra week would be A Hard Day's Night, one of the funnest movies ever made.)

Ethical Quandary of Applesauce

Ryan — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:53:07 GMT

The other day I was faced with a moral dilemma that rocked me to my core.

I was at my local grocery store, Food Bazaar (a much better store than Food Bizarre), and I went to the canned/packaged fruit aisle to get some applesauce. I buy the 6-packs of single serving applesauce cups and include them when I pack my lunch on weekdays. Now that I say that, I guess that sounds kind of fruity, but I'm not here to debate the masculinity or lack thereof of my lunch.

As I reached for the package I wanted, my big fat clumsy hand bumped another package of applesauce, which fell of the shelf and plummeted to the unforgiving tile floor. Two of the cups instantly burst open, splattering applesauce at my feet like intestines.

First, I just stared at it, hoping perhaps to undo it with the power of my mind. After a moment it became clear that I lacked the ability to send it to another dimension, so I realized I had two options: I could just walk away, abandoning my responsibility for what had happened... or I could inform an employee of the store and offer to pay for it. I mean, I didn't do it on purpose, but still... I did it.

Of course I didn't want to pay for it. It wasn't even the same as the applesauce I buy... This was the organic stuff, the stuff hippies buy, and also the stuff that costs about $2 more, because hippies are very, very rich. And if I paid for it, I would get to keep what was left, but that would still mean paying full price for only four out of six cups of applesauce.

So what do you think I did?

Well, I'll tell you. I made sure nobody had seen me, then I walked away.

But by the time I got to the beans aisle, my conscience was nagging me. So I went back, put the applebustedsauce in my cart, and explained the situation to the cashier when I went to pay. She put it in a bag and told me I didn't need to pay for it.

So I'm glad I did what I did. If I had just left it, I would have known for sure that I didn't have to pay for it, but I probably would have been troubled by the idea that I hadn't done right by Mott's. This way, both my debit card and my conscience were free and clear.

What would you have done?

Marvin Funtimes

Ryan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:55:30 GMT

by Ryan Roe

"Hello."

"Whoa! How did you get in here?"

"You let me in. About ten seconds ago."

"I did? I don't remember that. Are you sure it was ten seconds ago?"

"Well, it's more like fifteen now."

"Oh! Now I remember. Why didn't you say so in the first place? Anyway, why are you here?"

"My name is Marvin Funtimes. You called me because you're seeking an entertainer for a birthday party."

"Oh, that's right! And you'd like to hire me? Well, would you like to see me bake a cake?"

"No, see, you called me. I'm a birthday party entertainer."

"Oh! Well, that's a relief. I don't think I could bake a cake anyway. I don't even have a screwdriver. So... you're a birthday party entertainer?"

"I sure am. With a name like 'Marvin Funtimes' my options for employment were somewhat limited. So, let me ask you this – what kind of entertainment are you looking for for this birthday party?"

"Well, it's a party for my six-year-old son Nick. So what can you do?"

"Oh, just about anything, really. I can sing, dance, make balloon animals, do magic tricks…"

"Wow! That's terrific!"

"So you'd like me to do some magic, then."

"No, I meant it's terrific that your name is Marvin."

"Ah. Well, how about I do a little demonstration of my magic?"

"Okay. What are you going to do?"

"I think I'll saw you in half."

"That sounds great!"

"Okay, I'm sawing you in half!"

"Wow, look at that. You are sawing me in half!"

"There you go, I'm all finished. Now you're in two pieces."

"That's really amazing. But I have a confession to make."

"What's that?"

"I'm not really throwing a birthday party for my six-year-old son Nick. Nick is my pet iguana, and his birthday's not for another two years. In reality, I wanted to trick you into sawing me in half."

"Why ever would you want to do that?"

"You see, I normally get up early every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning to do the crossword puzzle in the morning paper. Then, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I get up early to go jogging. There's just not time to do both. But now that you've cut me in half—"

"I get it! You can do both at the same time! Your bottom half can go jogging, while your top half can do the crossword puzzle! I gotta say, even though I'm a little upset that you lured me here under false pretenses, I admire your creativity. But I'm afraid I will need compensation for doing the trick. Sir? Sir? Why aren't you answering me?"

"Because I'm bleeding to death."

"Oh. Maybe this wasn't such a great idea after all."

"No… I still think it would have worked."

"Since you're slowly dying right in front of me, you can't really pay me, can you?"

"I would get my checkbook, but it's in the other room and my bottom half would probably get lost on the way. But I have an idea!"

"Great! You're good at ideas."

"Thank you. When I'm dead, you can take one of the halves of me and keep it as your payment. You can do whatever you want with it."

"That sounds very fair. I accept."

"Okay then. Now, which half do you think you'll want?"

"I can tell you right now that I'd prefer the top half."

"An excellent choice. Nice doing business with you."

"Yes. I'd love to cut you in half again sometime."

"But that's impossible."

"Why?"

"Because I'm already cut in half! You'd have to cut me into quarters!"

"You're right! You're so smart."

"Whoops, I'm dead now. Bye"

"Bye."

THE END

©2008 Ryan Roe

The Great 2000 Flushes Experiment

Ryan — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:20:47 GMT

Right now, a very important scientific experiment is coming to an end.

In my bathroom.

You may or may not be familiar with a product called 2000 Flushes. It's a blue tablet, made of some kind of magical chemicals. You put it in your toilet tank, and it keeps your toilet clean. It also turns the water a lovely shade of blue -- a blue so pure and deep it makes me want to strip naked and dive in for a cool, refreshing potty swim.

I've used several 2000 Flushes tablets, and I've been satisfied with their performance, but I've always wondered: Are they really good for two THOUSAND flushes? That's a whole lot of flushes. It's almost as many flushes as there have been years A.D., and one-fifth as many flushes as there were maniacs in Natalie Merchant's old band. Honestly, I'd be surprised if the thing even lasted for one thousand flushes. A while back, I bought a 2000 Flushes tablet, and I mentioned my curiosity to my roommate Joe. Well, the patron saint of commodes must have been with us, because Joe just happened to have a dry-erase board which was not currently in use.

So we put it on the wall in the bathroom along with a baggie containing a rainbow of dry-erase markers, and at the top of the board Joe wrote this message: "We are conducting a scientific experiment with our 2000 FLUSHES tablet. Please make a tally mark for every flush. Don't do it for us, do it for science!

And so the great experiment began. Each time we flushed, we made a mark, and we insisted that our guests do the same. The idea of "flush = mark" became so ingrained in me that I started feeling the impulse to to make a red, green, blue or black mark on the wall when I flushed other people's toilets. We were mightily impressed when we reached the sum of 500 flushes... and then came the disaster that threatened to derail the whole project.

During a routine bathroom visit, a screw, worn down by years of loyal service, fell out of the bottom of the tank. It was bad enough that the entire contents of the tank came gushing out to flood the bathroom, but it was worse that the remainder of the 2000 Flushes tablet caused everything to be coated with inky blueness. The worst part, though, was that all our progress thus far had suddenly been rendered moot. There was simply nothing left of the tablet, and the future looked bleak.

Crestfallen, we considered giving up the whole thing. The idea of counting 500 more flushes and then some was daunting indeed. But then we asked ourselves: Would we ever be satisfied knowing how close we had come, but never knowing how much closer we could have gotten? The answer was a resounding no, and in a show of resolve that would make the Tidy Bowl man proud, Joe bought another 2000 Flushes tablet and we began anew.

Once again we watched in awe as the tally marks accumulated there in the can: 250! 500! 750! And then, on one glorious day, with all our friends and family and the local news media present, we reached 1000! Months after we started, we're now well past 1,000 flushes, which is more than I ever expected.

But I can tell the little guy is on his last legs. The water's just not as beautifully, heartbreakingly blue as it used to be, and it won't be long before it goes back to being water-colored and our dry erase markers will fall silent. It's not quite going to reach 2,000, but it's going to come admirably close. I'm not sure what we'll do when it's all over... Do they have tablets that turn your toilet water green or purple? Or maybe we'll just count the number of licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Roll Pop.

I'll post an update when the experiment is officially over, but right now I want to ask YOU, the readers of this journal, to exercise your predictive skills. What do you think our grand total will be? Make your guess in the comments below.

Note: The art adorning the board began as Joe's drawing of Cookie Monster saying, "Cookies are OK," but months of additional doodling and defacing by Joe, my ladyfriend Michal and myself have resulted in the crazy, inside-joke-filled mess you see here.

Ryan on TV: Peter and Stewie and Brian and Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:38:39 GMT

I hesitated to post this, because like anyone I hate being wrong. And yet... I'm man (and geek) enough to admit it.

You know how in the past I've often said disparaging things about Family Guy, the primetime animated sitcom on Fox? For example, calling it one of the worst shows in the history of TV? Well, I've been watching some Family Guy clips on YouTube, and some more Family Guy clips on YouTube, and some full episodes on TV, and well, guess what? Family Guy is... good.

For one thing, it's not the Simpsons ripoff so many critics claim it is. What, just because it's a TV show about a suburban family? Heck, The Donna Reed Show did that back in the 1960s, which means that The Simpsons is actually a ripoff of Donna Reed!

And Peter Griffin? He's not that much like Homer Simpson. I mean, okay, he's a dumb dad. But so is George W. Bush, and nobody accuses him of being a Homer clone. Of course what really matters is the comedy, and Peter is so funny he makes me have to belch because my stomach is so full of funny.

Finally, the pop culture references... or should I say, the brilliant pop culture parodies. They're not, as I previously thought, cheap attempts at laughter based only on the viewer's recognition of TV and movie characters and B-list celebrities from the 1970s, 80s and 90s. They go much further than that.

Comedy is all about the unexpected, and I certainly didn't expect to see the narrative of an episode interrupted by a scene featuring the characters from the 1980s fantasy adventure cartoon Thundercats on a sitcom about a modern American family! And when it turns out that the scene is about Lion-O using his magic sword to watch Cheetara using the toilet... well, the whole thing just goes from merely "hilarious" to all-out hi-freakin'-larious! See, they took a thing that wasn't naughty... and made it so that it was naughty! And I've heard of Thundercats before, so it seems like the writers have seen the same TV shows I've seen, which proves that they are geniuses! The best part? Every episode is full of these jokes!

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make -- and I'm pretty sure you've already figured this out by now -- is that this whole post is an April Fool's Day goof. Family Guy is one of the worst shows in the history of TV, and it should lick the bottom of my shoe.

The Story

Ryan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:31:26 GMT

by Ryan Roe

“Hey, I want to tell you a funny story!”

“Yeah, sure.”

“So I went to this restaurant when I was out of town last week…”

“What was it called?”

“Um… Mr. Charlie’s. And they had this sign out front that said, ‘The best food Charlie’s mama ever tasted!’”

“HA HA HA HA HAHA –”

“That’s not the funny part.”

“Oh.”

“So I asked the waitress if the cheeseburger was good, and she said, ‘You bet your sweet little patoot it is!”

“HA HA HAHA – oh.”

“No, that’s not it either. So I said, ‘How will that be cooked?’ and she’s like, ‘Uh… on a grill?’”

“Aaah! HA… Ha… ahem.”

“Yeah. So I said, ‘Can you just make sure the cheeseburger is well done?’ and she said, ‘Of course it’ll be well-done. I told you we got good cheeseburgers!”

“Oh! Ha ha ha? Ha? No. Not yet. Okay.”

“And then she brought it, and it was well done, but the bun was all soggy… and they forgot the cheese!”

“Uh-huh…”

“So I said, ‘Charlie’s mama doesn’t get out much, does she?”

“Uh-huh.”

(Silence…)

“Because of the sign. That was the funny part. I said, ‘His mom must not get out much.’”

“Oh. Yeah! She must not get out much! HA HA HAHA HAHA HA HA HA! HA HA HA!”

“That’s the end.”

“Yeah, I know.”

©2008 Ryan Roe

Oscar Days Is Here! Follow-up

Ryan — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:12:24 GMT

The Oscars happened! I watched the whole thing, with Golden Oreos and peanut-flavored Israeli snack food close at hand. I hope you did the same. Was it me, or did the show seem shorter and more streamlined this year? That may have been because they only had eight days to write everything, but the brisker pace was not a bad thing.

I did a heck of a lot better with my predictions this year than last year. Joe and Michal and I marked our Academy-approved ballots before the show, and it was quite gratifying to end up with so many check marks. In case you forgot, here are the winners, and in those cases where I predicted incorrectly I'll put my guess in parentheses.

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis. He seems like a classy guy. I'm glad he won... and I should see more of his work, like My Left Foot. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to catch up on his ouevre, as he seems to come out of hiding only once every few years to give a spectacular performance before retreating back to his secret treehouse.

Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem. He gave a good acceptance speech, and I was proud of myself for understanding much of the Spanish part.

Best Actress: Marion Cotilliard (I predicted Julie Christie)

Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton. (I predicted Cate Blanchett) I'm not too disappointed about being wrong because Swinton's speech was one of the night's most memorable, as she devoted many of her precious seconds to accusing George Clooney of wearing his old Batman suit everywhere he goes. Well done, Tilda. Poor Cate Blanchett went 0 for 2... but hey, it's two honors just to be nominated twice.

Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille. Justice was served, and it was pretty tasty. I was surprised that they didn't show us the animated characters from the nominated films sitting in the audience as they have in years past... but it may have been too weird for the lead from Persepolis to be sharing auditorium space with a surfing penguin.

Best Art Direction: Sweeney Todd I just saw Sweeney Todd the other night. It deserved this award, as it created a grimy London that was just removed enough from reality. It also deserves an award for Most Blood Flying All Over the Place.

Best Cinematography: There Will Be Blood (I predicted Atonement.)

Best Costume Design: Elizabeth: The Golden Age (I predicted Sweeney Todd.) So big, colorful dresses and giant collars beat gray, dirty peasant clothes. I guess that's okay.

Best Documentary Feature: Taxi to the Dark Side (I predicted No End in Sight)

Best Documentary Short: Freeheld

Best Editing: whoever edited The Bourne Ultimatum (I predicted Roderick Jaynes for No Country For Old Men) I was pretty disappointed that Jaynes (a pseudonym for Joel & Ethan Coen) didn't win. According to Entertainment Weekly, the photograph seen of Jaynes when the nominees were announced was that of a Dust Bowl farmer the Coens found in a book, and they had no intention of accepting the award on his behalf if he won.

Best Foreign Language Film: The Counterfeiters. If I had infinity of money and infinity of time, I would see this movie. Heck, if I had infinity of time I could learn Austrian and I could see the movie without subtitles.

Best Makeup: La Vie en Rose. I wonder what kind of makeup this movie has that's better than Norbit and Pirates' prosthetics.

Best Score: Atonement. This brings legitimacy to the role of the typewriter as an orchestral instrument. I'm going to try out for First Chair Typewriter in the high school band.

Best Song: Well, this is weird... In my earlier journal post, I called this one for "Falling Slowly" from Once, but I was really hoping that "That's How You Know" from Enchanted would get it, and that's the one I marked my Oscar ballot for at home. "Falling Slowly" won, which means I got it wrong in my living room, but correct on my journal. Fortunately there was no money at stake in said living room, so... yay for me?

Also, I have to say that "Falling Slowly" didn't do much for me, but then, I haven't heard it in the context of the movie.

Most Surprising Nudity: Raphael in TMNT ( I predicted Bart Simpson in The Simpsons Movie.) What?! Are you kidding me?!? Turtles are always naked!

Best Animated Short: Peter and the Wolf (I predicted Madame Tutli-Putli.) I dismissed Peter and the Wolf because I couldn't imagine how anyone could bring something new and exciting to the telling of that story. Now I want to see it for myself.

Best Short: The Mozart of Pickpockets (I predicted At Night.) I guess I'm not too shocked on this one... I hear The Mozart of Pickpockets is the Beethoven of short films.

Best Sound Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum

Best Sound Mixing: The Bourne Ultimatum. I wasn't especially confident about either of these sound award predictions, but I was right. The sound you hear now is my whoop of victory.

Best Visual Effects: The Golden Compass (I predicted Transformers.) When it comes to visual effects, talking polar bears > warring car-robots. But who would win in a fight? Yeah, that's what I thought. Hey, did you hear about that guy who's now something like 0 for 19 in visual effects nominations? Poor guy. My advice to him: Next year, work on a movie about the making of The Golden Compass.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men. I don't know much about the book, but it struck me while watching the movie that the script was very efficient.

Best Original Screenplay: Diablo Cody for Juno. She's an inspiration to former strippers everywhere, and I'm only slightly joking when I say that.

Best Director: Joel & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men. Great job, guys! Now if only I could ever remember which of you was which.

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men.

Also:

This year the televised Academy Awards show earned its lowest ratings ever of all time in the history of the universe. I fully expect that next year will be the first year that the Oscars rank 2nd in the ratings for the week, perhaps behind American Idol. The way I see it, there are really only two options available to the academy: They can make drastic changes to overhaul the way the show is presented, or they can just accept the fact that the ceremony is more prestige event than Super Bowl of movies. The latter choice seems appropriate given the fact that most of the movies that get nominated these days aren't hugely popular moneymakers anyway.

By now everyone has seen the pre-show clip of Gary Busey descending on Jennifer Garner like a ravenous wolf on a fat antelope and kissing her neck. If I were a programmer, I would devise a simple computer game in which the player takes the role of Garner, navigating her way across the red carpet through a dangerous maze of photographers, reporters, and less-pretty stars, all the while avoiding the deadly kiss of the pursuing Busey.

By the way, where was Affleck?

Jack Nicholson should receive a lifetime achievement award, not for his acting career, but for his role as Oscars audience member. Every year there are oodles of cuts to the audience for Jack reaction shots, and he always makes it into at least one punchline from the host or a presenter.

It was oddly entertaining to see Colin Ferrel, Miley Cyrus and John Travolta get tripped up by the slippery spot on the way to the lectern. Here's one suggestion to make the show more interesting: require the stars to run an obstacle course to reach the mic. Wouldn't you love to see Meryl Streep bounding her way across a moon bounce?

It was great for Best Song co-winner Marketa Irglova that she got to come back on stage to finish her acceptance speech after the orchestra cut her off, but I felt bad for the other people who also got cut off but didn't get to retake the stage.

I really liked the gag of Jon Stewart and the girl from the August Rush song playing Wii Sports on the giant screen. Is it really possible to play on a screen that big?

It was inevitable that the biggest round of applause during the death montage went to Heath Ledger. But I agree with the people who are complaining at Brad Renfro's absence from the montage. They couldn't have added another three seconds to the thing?

Speaking of montages, I loved the "good thing we have writers so we don't have to show you stuff like this" bit that included montages of "binoculars and periscopes in film" and "people waking up from bad dreams." I would much prefer to see full-fledged montages like those than the boring ones they really throw at us year after year. The possibilities are endless: "eating cereal in film," "gorilla suits in film," "parodies of the Psycho shower sequence in film," "people scratching their noses in film," etc.

In the end, I correctly predicted 15 out 24 awards. Not bad, I'd say. How'd you do?

Oscar Days Is Here!

Ryan — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 05:16:19 GMT

It's almost time for the 300th Annual Academy Awards! And it's a good thing too, because I had already decided that I was going to stay up way too late past my bedtime on Sunday, Feb. 24, and now I have something to watch. Otherwise I would have been forced to spend the entire evening trying on different shades of lipstick.

The most exciting thing about the ceremony this year, of course, is that there will be a ceremony. The writers' strike has ended, our national nightmare is over, and I for one can't wait to see who introduces the death montage. Jon Stewart will be picking up the hosting reins from last year's Ellen DeGeneres, in keeping with the academy's tradition of choosing clever TV personalities who are attracted to women.

As always, I've made my predictions on who I think will win, including some I think are sure things and some I'm choosing just because they're not sure things and I'm hoping to feel really smart if they win in an upset. Also, I think I've seen more of the nominated films this year than last year, so I'm perhaps more likely to throw Fritos at the TV if the voting doesn't go the way I expect it to. So here we go:

Best Actor: Nobody is expecting Daniel Day-Lewis not to win for There Will Be Blood. On the other hand, nobody is not expecting him not to not win. Either way, his performance was riveting throughout every second of this very long movie, so he deserves it. Heck, he even created a bizarre catch phrase, in the form of "I drink your milkshake!" (That's right, I spell "milkshake" as one word. Tell me I'm wrong, Entertainment Weekly. Tell me I'm wrong.)

Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem. After he wins, expect the Anton Chigurh haircut fad to sweep the nation, and for the Cow-Killing Air Gun to become the must-have toy for this St. Patrick's Day. I've heard great things about Hal Holbrook's performance in Into the Wild, so there's a chance he could win, especially because he's old, but I’m still going with Bardem.

Dumbest Movie With the Word “Chuck” in the Title: It’s a tie! I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Good Luck Chuck

Best Actress: I predict that when Academy voters see Julie Christie's performance, they won't be able to stay Away From Her!

This category also includes Ellen Page, for a performance considerably quirkier than you might expect to find in this category. (I don't think Julie Christie's character ever wears a Slinky t-shirt in her movie.) Elizabeth: The Golden Age's Cate Blanchett is now the first woman ever to be nominated twice for playing the same character, which is almost as cool for her as it is for movie trivia nerds. It would be swell if she could make it a hat trick for the upcoming 2010 film Queen Elizabeth vs. Predator.

Laura Linney's in this category too. I never got around to seeing The Savages, but I sure do like Laura Linney, and I hope she wins an Oscar someday.

Best Supporting Actress: It'll be Cate Blanchett for playing a variation on Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. Blanchett is the 11th performer to be nominated in two acting categories in the same year, which is almost as cool for her as it is for movie trivia nerds. You know what would be cool? If Bob Dylan shows up, dressed as Blanchett, to accept the award.

American Gangster's Ruby Dee has the whole age thing on her side, but I hear she didn't have much screen time -- she appears in only a few more scenes in the film than, say, Monty Barton. Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone) and Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton) both seem like strong contenders, so if either of them win I guess I won't scream and fall down and jump out the window.

Least Pronounceable Actress: Saoirse Ronan, although she has some pretty serious competition from Bratz: The Movie star Zyrlnxya Q#+-}{znson-Jones.

Delightfullest Actress: Enchanted's Amy Adams. By a landslide. She sang a song about scrubbing the toilet!

Best Animated Feature: It's not hard to make Paris seem romantic or food seem wonderful, but Ratatouille also made me root for rats in the kitchen, and it deserves to win and it will win. (It also features the best performance of Janeane Garofalo's career, and probably Patton Oswalt's too.)

Did anyone see Surf's Up? Does it stand a chance? The academy foolishly awarded Happy Feet last year so one can never underestimate their love of penguins, but I feel pretty confident about giving this one to the rats.

Best Pirate: I know Johnny Depp is by far the favorite for Pirates of the Caribbean: At Wit’s End. But – and I know this is quite a long shot – I’m going to go with Robert DeNiro in Stardust. Call me a fool if you must!

Best Art Direction: Sweeney Todd

Best Cinematography: Atonement

Filthiest Love Note: Atonement. I hear Jane Fonda was the creative consultant. Haw haw haw.

Best Costume Design: Sweeney Todd

Best Documentary Feature: No End in Sight. There wasn’t a big sleeper hit documentary this year… The closest thing was the highly enjoyable The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and that’s not nominated. Even Michael Moore's Sicko came and went without attracting many hollers.

Best Documentary Short: Freeheld

Most Adventurous Old Folks: Of course Harrison Ford will be collecting this award a year from now, but this time around it’s gotta be Jon Voigt and Helen Mirren in National Treasure: Book of Matches.

Best Editing: Roderick Jaynes for No Country For Old Men. One thing that's interesting about Jaynes is that he doesn't actually exist: he's a pseudonym for directors Joel and Ethan Coen. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do about accepting the Oscar. Will they get an actor to portray Jaynes, as they once did on a DVD commentary for Blood Simple? Will both Coens go up together in a "two-headed editor" costume? Or will they get Bob Dylan dressed as Cate Blanchett to accept?

Either way, it won't be the first time an imaginary person has won an Oscar. The 1982 winner for Best Makeup was actually a family of squirrels inhabiting a large trenchcoat.

Best Foreign Language Film: The Counterfeiters

Hottest Fuzz: Hot Fuzz

Best Makeup: It's a shame Norbit has already been released on video, because I would love to see DVD covers exclaiming "ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATED!" But while I don't doubt that it took great artistry and skill to turn Eddie Murphy into a repulsive, morbidly obese woman so that he could sit on himself, I think this award will go to La Vie en Rose.

Best Score: Does a good score draw attention to itself or not? I think the best ones ensure you notice and respond them without overpowering the rest of the film, and in this case Atonement looks to be the most worthy of a statuette, with its recurring typewriter rhythms. Clickety clackety clackety clackety.

Best Song: This is one of those categories where I'm not sure whether I should trust my instincts or... not. Three different songs from the delightful movie Enchanted are nominated, and it seems to me that "That's How You Know" is in fact the Best (movie) Song of the year. It's the winner of the Most Played on Ryan's iTunes award, anyway. But there's been some speculation that the three Enchanted songs will split the vote and "Falling Slowly" from Once will win. So even though I think "That's How You Know" should win, I'm calling this one for "Falling Slowly."

Most Surprising Nudity: Although Viggo Mortensen gave it a good try in Eastern Promises and Alan Tudyk did his best in Death at a Funeral, this one will go to Bart Simpson in The Simpsons Movie.

Best Animated Short: I'd like to see the Beatles-inspired I Met the Walrus. But I'm going with Madame Tutli-Putli here.

Strangest Cameo: Salma Hayek as a bunch of two-dimensional dancing sexy nurses in a scene in Across the Universe that may have been a dream, or a hallucination, or imaginary, or… you know what, I just didn’t get that movie.

Best Short: It's plain as day that At Night will win.

Best Sound Editing: The Bourne Ultimatum

Best Sound Mixing: The Bourne Ultimatum

Most Boring Title: Michael Clayton. Although I suppose there have been other well-regarding “First Name, Last Name” films, like Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich.

Best Visual Effects: Transformers. I hear there was some pretty good CGI, although it would have been much cooler if they have actually built real cars that transformed into real, sentient robots.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men. I don't know much about the book, but it struck me while watching the movie that the script was very efficient.

Best Original Screenplay: "Diablo Cody" sounds like a high school metal band, but she's actually the writer of this year's only nominated script to incorporate a hamburger phone. Although her characters didn't talk much like real people, they were endearing and the story played out naturally but not predictably. She will win, or my name's not Axis Mephistopheles.

Outstanding Achievement in Making Children of the 1980s Cry: Alvin and the Chipmunks

Best Director: Joel & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men. I bet it’ll be a close finish between those guys and There Will Be Blood’s Paul Thomas Anderson, but in the end, the guys who once put pantyhose on Nicholas Cage’s head will take the prize.

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men. It seems to me that this film and There Will Be Blood were similar, in that they’re both unconventional period pieces that spend a lot of time on characters who aren’t very heroic. But No Country is probably just a little bit closer to most people’s idea of an Oscar-winning movie. That said, I would be just as happy if Juno won. It’s offbeat like last year’s nominee Little Miss Sunshine, but it’s considerably more focused.

Who will win? Who will lose? Will Barbara Walters get Miley Cyrus to cry in her pre-Oscars interview special? I’ll be back here to comment on two out of three of those next week!

Now that I’ve shown you my predictions, you show me yours!