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I am weak. I am so easily creeped out I don’t watch the evening news. I watch a great many movies with my fingers smooched up against my eyes. Hell, I can’t watch most horror movie commercials on TV. As a child, I found certain portions of Sesame Street to be terrifying. It was with great trepidation that I saw the movie Fight Club. I ended up loving it and buying it and watching it numerous times (through my fingers). I recently saw my hands-down favorite film of the year Choke, by the same author as Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk. He’s one hell of an author, and his books translate well to the screen. I would love to tell you all about Choke, but I took a vow to maintain some semblance of tastefulness on this website, so I will do my best to describe the not-too-nawsty bits for you. Main character is a sex addict who works at a Ye Olde American Waye of Lyfe park. Think Williamsburg, churning butter and blacksmithing in authentic garb, that kind of thing. When he’s not getting his groove on with random strangers of describing his role in American history to disinterested schoolchildren, he’s doing one of two things: visiting his mother in a home (she is suffering from dementia) and making himself choke on food in restaurants so the patrons who save him will feel a connection to him and also possibly send him money. Heartwarming tale, isn’t it? Well, it would be totally awful if it wasn’t Sam Rockwell playing the lead. I don’t know how he does it, but Rockwell makes the character into something other than a big bag of pathos and lameness and greed and vile dreck. He’s funny and sweet at times, and you really feel for him. And even though whole pieces of plot are hard to believe (you could say they are “hard to swallow!” Haw! See what I did there?), I let it slide because Sam Rockwell is so great. This is going to become a big cult classic, I’ll bet.

Continuing in this Palahniuk vein, a blog I read called FourFour (I referenced FourFour when describing the cat show) talked about another CP book, called Haunted. If you’d like to read Rich’s entry, here’s the link:

http://fourfour.typepad.com/fourfour/2008/12/threshold-reached.html

If you want a quick summary, here’s the best part: Palahniuk wrote a short story called Guts. It makes people faint. No, really. From Wikipedia:

While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read to his audiences a short story titled “Guts” … which appears in his book Haunted. It was reported that to that point, 40 people had fainted while listening to the readings. Playboy magazine would later publish the story in their March 2004 issue; Palahniuk offered to let them publish another story along with it, but the publishers found the second work too disturbing. On his tour to promote Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories in the summer of 2004, he read the story to audiences again, bringing the total number of fainters up to 53, and later up to 60, while on tour to promote the softcover edition of Diary. In the fall of that year, he began promoting “Haunted”, and continued to read “Guts”. At his October 4, 2004 reading in Boulder, Colorado, Palahniuk noted that, after that day, his number of fainters was up to 68. The last fainting occurred on May 28, 2007, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where 5 people fainted, one of which occurred when a man was trying to leave the auditorium, which resulted in him falling and hitting his head on the door. Palahniuk is apparently not bothered by these incidents, which have not stopped fans from reading “Guts” or his other works. Audio recordings of his readings of the story have since circulated on the Internet. In the afterword of the latest edition of “Haunted”, Palahniuk reports that “Guts” is now responsible for 73 faintings.

Now, when Rich on FourFour described the story, I thought it sounded familiar. See how above it says they published it in Playboy? Cricket has a subscription to Playboy and guess what? When the story first came out in 2004, I READ IT. I READ THE WHOLE STORY. I did not pass out. I did not throw up. It made me walk and sit funny for about a week, but other than that, I made it where others failed. Whoo hoo! I am one tough cookie. Please turn on the night light before you leave.

Here are some links if you want to learn more:

Sorry about the lackadaisical blogging lately. You know, for an economy in crisis, I have had more work than ever. There was the annual meeting on Wednesday, and the CEO wanted pictures of everyone in the agency for a slide show while people were entering the auditorium. Guess who had to go take pictures of everyone, therefore sealing my fate as the most-disliked person in the agency? That would be me. Because I felt so guilty for taking everyone’s picture, I then spent hours and hours photoshopping everyone - taking out zits and red eye and bags under said red eyes, etc. Never mind the regular work I had to do. It was tiring, to say the least. But the meeting went smashingly and that’s what really matters to me. Yay, Team Presentations!

Before the mega-workathon began, I got to see a preview showing of Milk, with Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, James Franco, Allison Pill and Gus Van Sant in a Q-and-A afterward. Let’s start with an overall review: Good film. Not the best film I’ve ever seen (that would be Shawshank Redemption), but damn good. I’m forlorn because now Sean Penn is going to get Best Actor at the Oscars for his stellar performance as Harvey Milk. I really wanted Frank Langella to get Best Actor for Frost/Nixon. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I saw the play that the movie is taken directly from, same title actors, and Frank was KILLER. Super-awesome. And now he’s not going to get it. Sniff, whimper. The plot seems overly dramatic, but I found out later that all the things I thought were smudged by the director to make the story more interesting were true. Like Harvey Milk’s lover killing himself in an elaborate way the night before he was elected to office. And the way (*MAJOR SPOILER that you should know about anyway because this is a historical event that happened thirty years ago, but I’m giving you a heads-up out of courtesy*) Dan White kills Harvey Milk, and then blames it on Twinkies. Twinkies made him kill. For reals, people. Can’t make that stuff up. Also, I thought I had a vague grasp on the homosexual scene in America, and I was wrong. I had no idea that in my lifetime, a law was passed in some states that made it completely acceptable to not hire someone, or to deny someone the right to live in your area because they were gay. And if you were a teacher and openly gay, you could be fired. And if you supported an openly gay teacher, you could be fired. I was shocked. I thought outright prejudice against gays was like, a dusty ancient black-and-white-photos thing, not something that was happening fairly recently. It really threw me. And in San Francisco, a place I thought that was one of the most welcoming cities towards gays. Shocking.
Two interesting side notes: One, Emile Hirsch recently starred in a movie called Into The Wild, produced by Sean Penn, and now he’s starring in a film with Sean Penn as an actor. When asked how that was for him, Emile said, “It’s difficult playing a game with your coach,” which I thought was a cool way of putting it. And James Franco, when asked what it was like to kiss Sean Penn, said, “You get another man’s 1970s mustache in your mouth. And I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘Hey, I’m kissing Spicoli!” I thought that was hysterical.

If you don’t get the Spicoli reference, you should rent Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It is a classic American film, and even if you don’t like the film, it’s referenced all the time in popular culture, so you’ll be more “hip”.

Addendum on December 15th: I was watching Reelz Channel today, and they were saying Mickey Rourke might get Best Actor for a film called The Wrestler. What the hell is this? People just be comin’ out of the woodwork with nominations. FRANK OR SEAN. That’s it.

I saw Religilous this weekend. It was a rough movie to watch. I don’t like movies where simple regular people are made fun of without them knowing it. That’s why I didn’t like Borat. And this movie was just chock full of hurtful mockery of people’s beliefs. It’s sad to watch, regardless of how silly I believe their faith to be. The point of the movie was Bill Maher basically proving how idiotic and irrational religion is, which (surprise!) did not go over well with the devoted religious followers he was interviewing. Here’s the preview.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iUyAppOOU0

I won’t comment on whether I agreed with what he had to say because I try to stay away from inflammatory topics here, but I will say that opposed to the usual “religion is dumb because it’s all fairy tales” argument most atheists take, Bill most eloquently said something along the lines of:

“I am a preacher. I am preaching doubt. We don’t know what happens after we die or if there’s a God. And I’m okay with that. A great deal of people are not. However, now we have the luxury of doubt. When a man is in prison and he says, ‘Jesus is all I got,” that’s fine. When a man is in a foxhole, he needs God. But our society is well-fed and well-taken care of, we have scientific answers for things, the concerns of the black plague are no longer a major concern. Yet people, people who are rational and intelligent in every other aspect of their lives, choose to believe that a man lived in a big fish - I can’t understand that.”

It was nice to hear an smart argument for a change. Religilous is the kind of film that sticks with you for a long time. You go to sleep, you’re thinking about it. You wake up, you’re thinking about it. You see large masses of people (which I do all the time, I work in Herald Square next to Macy’s) and you wonder, “What does that person believe? And that person? And does the first person hate the second person for their religious orientation? And how much is your religion based on what religion you grew up with?” It’s a gristle-y film that you have to chew on for a while.

I saw Religilous on Friday night. On Saturday, I went with my mom to the city and saw the play A Man For All Seasons. Wow, that was a bad idea. Not the play, the play was excellent and Frank Langella was freakin’ awesome as usual. It’s just that when one is still reeling from Religilous, it is a poor idea to see a play about a man getting beheaded for his morals and devotion to the Catholic church. Technically, Sir Thomas More was beheaded for not signing the document that King Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn and sire sons (all this brought about the beginning of the Church of England). I wanted to scream at him, “Sign the damn document! Just sign it! Bless the stupid divorce already! God doesn’t care! He’s busy with other things, like creating a new kind of badger or something! Sign the document!” I probably would have enjoyed it a great deal more if I wasn’t all rankled up the night before. Oh, well.

1. I finally saw No Country For Old Men. I consider myself relatively smart and cultured, and I would like to say I do not get this movie and I do not understand why it won a bunch of Oscars. The main character (a man named Llewelyn played by Josh Brolin) is out a-huntin’ and comes across a bunch of trucks with dead people and their dead pit bulls in the middle of the desert. It’s a drug deal gone awry. Llewelyn finds two million dollars and takes it. We are supposed to feel a connection with this Llewelyn character. I had a great deal of difficulty doing this because, and stick with me here, if I find a festive pile of human and animal corpses all shot to hell with piles of drugs on a truck and a suitcase of money, I don’t care if the damn holy grail is in one of those trucks, I’m vacating the premises and I’m not taking any tokens of the experience. Nothing. Just leaving slowly, backing out of there and sprinting to sign up for witness protection. OF COURSE an angry and insane man (Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, being his awesomely sexy self) comes looking for his money. It’s two million dollars. You think he would write it off as a contribution to the greater good of society? Come now, Coen Brothers, I expect better of you. And then the movie continues with Llewelyn hiding the money and Anton coming looking for it and killing people en route as angry and insane drug kingpins tend to do. And then, two hours of this later, the movie ends. It just ends. I like some kind of resolution in my films. I want someone to die or kill someone or have an epiphany or get the girl or something, anything. And I get naught. So I do not like No Country For Old Men. I think it should be called “No Country For Dumbasses Who Come Across Dead Guys And Loads Of Money And Think They Can Just Take Said Money And Everything Will Be Fine.” That would be more applicable.

2. Last night I went to a premiere showing of The Duchess with Ralph Fiennes and Kiera Knightley. If you like movies like Mrs. Brown and Dangerous Liaisons, then you’re gonna LOVE this film. Kiera changes outfits in every scene. Really. No two outfits or hairstyles are on screen for more than five minutes. Since the film hasn’t even come out, I don’t really want to delve too deep into the plot, but perhaps I will talk about it more in the future. And it’s based on a true story, which is always interesting. It’s like learning history without even trying.

Thank God the Olympics are over. At last, I can get to sleep before 1:00 in the morning. It sure was fascinating and engrossing. I got sucked in like a dust bunny to a Dyson, I tells ya. Now I can return to my normal schedule of obsessively watching Forensic Files as I fall asleep. I am lulled into dreamland by “…and this thread from John’s blue sweater found in the vehicle led investigators to conclude he was Debbie’s killer…” Ah, unsolved murders are so soothing.

Okay, returning briefly to The Batman Movie of Recent Recentness, something occurred to me. If you live in Gotham, and the bridges and ferries are blowing up regularly, and people are getting held hostage left and right, and people are shooting each other in the street, MAYBE YOU SHOULD MOVE. I’m just saying. I was watching a program on the Son of Sam (while waiting for Forensic Files to come on). He killed six people. Just six - and all of New York flipped the freak out. People wouldn’t go out at night, women dyed their hair blond (SOS tended to kill brunettes), there were 300 cops on the case, etc. The Joker kills, I don’t know, like, 100 people in this movie, and not one “Moving” sign in the whole film. Not one character says, “Hey, screw this whole thing, let’s go to Montana. I’ll homeschool the kids, we’ll grow some vegetables and milk some goats. Enough of this already.” My empathy well for the inhabitants of Gotham is pretty much dry.

So I gave my mom the purse tonight and she looooved it, which was great. I’m so pleased that she was so pleased. Hooray on that front. I must now paint a onesie for my co-worker. She’s having a little girl and I’m making her a black onesie with a skull and crossbones on it. Because that’s the kind of people we are. And little pirate girls are so precious! I’ll keep you posted on that.

Ugh, what a week. It was one of those weeks, the ones where the work just keeps on a’comin’. You think you’re done, and you’re wrong, oh so wrong. One of the things I had to do for one of the projects was get screengrabs of all the times the Nancy Botwin character drinks a coffee beverage on the hit show Weeds. What I learned was that that woman drinks an insane amount of fluid. Every time we see her, she’s either drinking coffee, or soda, or wine. I’ve renamed the show Pees.

So I finally saw The Dark Knight. Do you know why the word “dark” is in the title? Because it’s the darkest movie ever. Not plot-wise, no, more like someone forgot to turn on the lights. There’s Batman and he’s wearing all black, and he’s fighting some bad guy in an abandoned warehouse with one scrawny little bulb and the camera keeps changing position… I tell you, more often than not I had no damn idea what was going on. I told Cricket afterwards I wish everyone in the film wore those orange jackets deer hunters wear with their names written on them in big black letters so I could keep track. BATMAN. MOBSTER #1. MOBSTER #2. That kind of thing. Here are a few things that stuck out for me in the movie, and don’t worry, they won’t ruin the film for you.

1. Is the mayor wearing black eyeliner on his lower lids? God, that’s distracting, especially in Imax. I’m supposed to be taking him all seriously, and I can think is, “Aww, emo mayor.”

2. Does Batman need to speak in that ridiculous gravelly voice when he’s Batman? Stop that.

3. Is his name “Batman” or “The Batman”? Because there’s a whole chunk in there where they call him “The Batman” and it sounds odd.

4. That magic trick The Joker does in the meeting with the mob? Best magic trick EVAR. After The Joker did it, a smattering of applause broke out in the Imax theater I was in. That’s how good it was.

If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it, it’s very good. But remember, it’s 2 1/2 hours long and very plot-heavy, so don’t be thinking you can take a tinkle or get popcorn in the middle, because you’ll miss the thread and then you’ll be very confused for the rest of it. And trust me, you don’t want to miss a moment of Heath Ledger’s performance. He’s just terrific.

1. Penelope. It’s a teeny little film with Christina Ricci, Reese Witherspoon and James McAvoy (who, even though he looks like he needs a good shampooin’, is still super-yummy). There’s a curse on her family, she’s born with a pig snout instead of a nose, only a blue blood male who marries her can break the curse, etc. I don’t understand why it wasn’t a bigger hit. It’s cute and sweet and while it’s a fairy tale it doesn’t feel childish or simple. The only thing that irks me is that everyone is like, “She’s a hideous monster! She’s a pigface! The horror!” People flinging themselves through plate glass windows, for God’s sake. And she looks like this:

I think she looks kinda sweet. It really hurts one’s self-esteem when someone who looks like Christina Ricci (hot) with a pig snout (cute) is treated like a leper whose critical parts have fallen off. It made me not want to go outside for fear people would hurl themselves in front of buses. But other than that, good film, you should rent it.

2. Hellboy II. Yeah, there’s a plot. It’s not good. And the dialogue, that’s not good either. But the costumes and special effects are phenomenal. Guillermo del Toro is very similiar to Julie Taymor (the woman who came up with the costumes and sets for Lion King on Broadway). I recommended afterwards that one should rent Hellboy II, turn the volume off and play Nine Inch Nail’s “The Downward Spiral” while watching the film. That would be perfect. One thing I thought was a bad design decision was this: there are elves, and when they die, they turn into stone sculptures. The problem is the stone sculptures are cream/yellow-colored, so they look identical to a butter sculpture of Garth Brooks from the Iowa State Fair. So one of them dies and we the audience are supposed to be moved, and I’m sitting there trying not to think about smearing these elves on toast. But the troll market sequence is gorgeously designed and very textural and visually stimulating, so that’s terrific.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t see Batman, it’s because it was sold out until 1:00 a.m. and the lines were out the door. The IMAX is sold out for another two weeks, so eventually I’ll get around to seeing the damn thing. Then I’ll comment on whether it is worth all the hoopla.

1. I saw The Happening, the new M. Night Shamalamadingdong film. (Side note: who here cannot stop thinking of “The Bloodening”, the fictional Simpsons horror film, every time they hear that title? Just me? Okay.) For anyone living without the benefit of the internet, newspapers, television or semaphore, The Happening is what happens when plants have had enough of humans and their crappy destructive ways. They release a pollen/spore/icky airborne that causes people to kill themselves (in super-creative ways, a guy runs over his own head with a combine). I know I’m supposed to be rooting for the humans, but I was, well, not. If I was a plant, I would be testy about humans as well. While this was not M. Night’s best film, he sure does know how to increase tension with creaking branches and rustling leaves. I came home and said to my houseplants, “If you don’t start nuthin’, there won’t be nuthin’, k?” Gotta keep an eye on those houseplants.

2. I was at Target the other day and they were all kinds of hawking back-to-school supplies. I realized at that moment how blissful it was to not care about going back to school. I went to school for seventeen years of my life (kindergarten, 1 through 6, middle school, high school, college) and I do not miss it one bit. If I want to read the collected works of Bloom County and Foxtrot all summer, I can. I don’t gotta write no paper at the end either. Oh, and when I was a kid my mom would make me go to summer camp, so I would have to get up early every day anyway. Now, I get paid to do that. Oh yeah. Being an adult rocks.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still take classes periodically in various programs so I can be a better designer. But it immediately causes me to make more money, which I can then spend on books which contain pictures of Opus the penguin wearing a sun hat. Kids? Stay in school. So that you can earn a decent living so you can buy a computer and only read blogs if you want to.

3. Every time I think I’m a crazy wacky artist coming up with crazy wacky ideas, something comes and knocks me off my crazy wacky pedestal. National Geographic ran an article on nudibranchs. What’s a nudibranch, you ask? Here’s a description:

A nudibranch is a member of one suborder of soft-bodied, shell-less marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusks, which are noted for their often extraordinary colors and striking forms. The suborder Nudibranchia is the largest suborder of heterobranchs, with more than 3,000 described species. The word “nudibranch” comes from the Latin nudus, naked, and the Greek brankhia, gills. Nudibranchs are often casually called “sea slugs”, a non-scientific term which has led some people to assume that every sea slug is a nudibranch. However, while it is true that nudibranchs are very numerous in terms of species, and are often very attractive, there are numerous other kinds of sea slugs belonging to several taxonomic groups that are not very closely related to nudibranchs. A fair number of these other sea slugs are colorful and thus are even more easily confused with nudibranchs.

Nudibranchs that are toxic often have rather festive coloring and horns and feathery things and a variety of other components to convince you that they taste like reheated poop and may also kill you. Here are a few of my favorites from the NatGeo article:

I don’t care how creative you think you are, you cannot top this. I will never make anything that interesting or fascinating to look at. And I’m alright with that. And you should be too. Let’s all hug.

Quick summary of WALL•E: I started weeping ten minutes in. At one point I turned to my sister and said, “Schindler’s List was less depressing than this.” The pathos, the pathos is thick, my friend. You’ll empathize your heart right out of your chest. Go at your own risk.

There are a few shots from Israel that I forgot to share in the previous posts. Please to enjoy uncategorized pictures.

It’s a bird in a nest made from mud and poop! The birdie’s looking right at us! Isn’t that cute? The bird wasn’t more than six feet from my head. I was very happy.

There was stunning flower arrangement in the hotel foyer. The florist incorporated these big poofy pods filled with air covered in hairy hooks. I was staring at them when my mom chimed in, “Oh, those are called ‘Old Man’s Balls’”.

That’s great. Thanks, Ma. From then on every time I walked into the hotel I averted my eyes. Couldn’t they call them “Septuagenarian’s Nards” or something not quite so… blunt?

Check out this cool piece of graffiti. Ignore the super-kawaii ninja-girl for a second. See that tree in the upper left-hand corner?

Apparently someone came at night when the streetlight was behind the tree and traced the shadow for a hour or so. How cool is that? That’s one of the few wonderful things about stucco and cement: you can apply terrific graffiti with ease. If I wasn’t so afraid of getting in trouble with the po-po, I would put nifty illegal outdoor art up in places.

First of all, I am back from Israel with many a tale to tell, but Cricket has the camera with all the photos on it, and I hope to get a DVD of all the pictures this weekend so I can share a few select ones with you all. Get prepared for that.

So yeah, the season finale of House this season, what a weeper, huh? There was one thing that bugged me out. Amber is a lovely-looking girl played by Anne Dudek, and she normally looks like this:

But in the last episode she gets hit by a bus and all her internal organs are ruined and she’s gonna die. So they wake her up and to gently break it to her that she’s gonna die. She tries to recollect what happened:

But then she realizes she’s gonna die and she gets the most terrifying facial expression for five whole seconds:

Tell me that’s not the creepiest face ever. And she does it for a really long time. I recoiled from the television, I thought her mouth would fall open and bats and spiders would come flying out. I think it’s because Anne’s irises have no color. You can watch the episode on Fox’s House website. See for yourself. Bring tissues.

Alright, pictures of Israel, coming soon.