Now live at the Oregonian's Web site and on Webcomics Nation:
Beloved instructional characters Mr. Do and Mr. Don't teach Portlanders how to behave during Independence Day -- in this full-color, longer version of the comic that saw print in Friday's A&E.
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Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Celebrate the Fourth of July (Oregonlive.com)
Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Celebrate the Fourth of July (Webcomics Nation)
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I turn up about 20 minutes into Part 2 of the Thursday, July 2 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast. Discussed:
Hope to see you at "Empire"! It's for charity!
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Cort and Fatboy (Thursday, July 2, 2009, Part 2) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]
During the Friday, June 26, "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast:
I turn up somewhere around 49:30. As always, the whole show is well worth a listen.
Cort and Fatboy (Friday, June 26, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]
Re-posting this release for my favorite local charity event....
PDX Browncoats present:
Saturday, June 27, 2009
616 NW 21st Ave
Portland, Oregon
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The PDX Browncoats -- a local nonprofit group comprising fans of Joss Whedon’s "Firefly" -- are gearing up for their 4th-annual "Can’t Stop the Serenity" charity screening of "Serenity" to benefit Equality Now.
Equality Now works to end violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world through the mobilization of public pressure.
Over the last three years, the Portland screening effort alone has raised over $28,000 for Equality Now. The screenings started in Portland, and have since become a global phenomenon -- raising more than $250,000 for Equality Now since the first round of screenings in 2006.
For the 4th-annual CSTS, we're returning to Cinema 21 with two screenings:
1. Afternoon screening
(all-ages)
Saturday, June 27
Doors open at 3 p.m., movie starts around 4 p.m.
Tickets: $10 advance, $12 day-of-show [ purchase online ]
2. Late-night "Special Hell" screening
(21 and older, with beer and wine for sale)
Saturday, June 27
Doors open at 10:30 p.m., movie starts around 11:30 p.m.
Tickets: $12 advance, $14 day-of-show [ purchase online ]
Details: Have you ever wanted to shout your favorite lines at the screen? Tell the actors to watch out? Warn Wash before that crucial moment when he meets his fate? This is your chance! The "Special Hell" screening allows fans to poke a little fun at their favorite Joss Whedon film.
That's not all. We're also teaming with the Gypsy Restaurant & Velvet Lounge across the street to bring you a pub quiz, costume contest, and "Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog Karaoke"!
Come to the early screening, stay for the fun at the Gypsy, and come back to have your say at the second show!
Tickets are on sale now at the Cinema 21 Web site. For more information, contact Anna Snyder at 503-593-5300 or pr@pdxbrowncoats.com.
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Can't Stop The Serenity 2009 (pdxbrowncoats.com)
The Oregonian posted this much, much longer "director's cut" of my not-very-nice "Transformers 2" review on their Web site (A shorter version sees print on Friday, June 26)....
Trying to warn a Michael Bay fan ahead of time that "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is noisy, stupid and pointless is going to be difficult. The average Bay fan will invariably retort along the lines of, "What a shocker! You critics always rip on Bay! What I love about Michael Bay movies is their awesomely pumped-up high-octane idiot Americana! He's critic-proof, bro!"
So before I get into exactly how noisy, stupid and pointless (and racist) "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is, I want to point out that I've defended Mr. Bay's high-octane idiot-Americana in these very pages, more than once. In 2005, I wrote this:
I'll
even shred any remaining film-snob cred by admitting I'm a fan of Bay's
first "Transformers" flick. Yeah, it was a shameless Hasbro tie-in in
which characters said things like "Is it fear or courage that compels
you, fleshling?" and "I'm never giving you this AllSpark!" and "NoNoNoNoNoNo!" But it was also a summer blockbuster that emotionally connected almost in spite
of its gleeful stupidity. This was in part because the special effects
were the best we'd ever seen at the time, but also because the movie
had a linear storyline that escalated nicely -- boy gets car, car turns
out to be giant robot, giant robot drags boy on quest full of insanely
well-staged giant-robot battles. The movie wouldn't be out of place
among the better '80s B-pictures that went after the Spielberg/Lucas
dollar (e.g. "The Last Starfighter"). And for anyone who grew up
wanting to see photorealistic footage of giant robots fighting each
other and the latest in lovingly photographed military hardware, it was
practically fetish porn. (I even thought the twist that America had
reverse-engineered automotive technology from a frozen Decepticon was
kind of clever.)
Anyway. I'm establishing my Bay/"Transformers"-liking cred here because I want Bay/"Transformers" fans to take my full meaning:
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a disaster. A shrill disaster.
The story was apparently outlined in extreme haste so Mr. Bay could start prepping the movie before the 2008 WGA writer's strike; the actual screenplay was written almost as quickly several months later, while pre-production was well underway. As a result, that screenplay is pretty much straight-up nonsense -- a barely strung-together collection of visual ideas and set pieces, with some of the most hilariously stupid and generic dialogue ever financed by hundreds of millions of dollars. (In his hilarious pan of the movie, Roger Ebert quotes this gem, spoken by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!") Even worse, Bay tries to compensate for the nonsense by making everything much, much noisier and more hyperactive than anything he's ever made before (and yes, that includes "Bad Boys II").
The end result is relentlessly unfunny and wreck-your-brain exhausting -- like listening to a crazy person yell conspiracy theories in your ear for two-and-a-half hours (which is, unfortunately, the actual running time of "Transformers 2").
The story, such as it is: It's two years after "Transformers 1." The heroic Autobots are running around the planet with a special human black-ops unit, killing evil Decepticons still hiding around the globe. The Decepticons now talk in their death-throes about the return of something called "The Fallen." Meanwhile, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is heading off to college and leaving his hot, car-loving girlfriend (Megan Fox) and giant-robot/Camaro bodyguard behind, because good Lord what teenage boy would want either of those in his life.
Suddenly, Sam Witwicky finds a piece of the last movie's MacGuffin, the AllSpark. For no particular reason, this now gives him magic Dreyfuss-in-"Close Encounters" visions of ancient Autobot hieroglyphs. These hieroglyphs will lead Sam (and the Decepticons chasing him) to a propeller-shaped key called "The Matrix." The Matrix can disintegrate and re-integrate and power a sun-destroying weapon hidden in an Egyptian pyramid and bring dead Autobots to life and also (I'm pretty sure) puts Sam Witwicky in touch with the ghosts of Autobot ancestors who were on earth tens of thousands of years ago, or something.
Oh, and "The Fallen" ends up being a Decepticon with a face like an African mask who's been hiding out on one of Saturn's moons (I think) trying to birth robot babies in goopy amniotic sacs and who can only be defeated by a "Prime," as in Autobot leader Optimus Prime, who is apparently the last of the "Primes," which pretty much look like every other giant robot and don't seem to have any special powers.
If you put a gun to my head and ask me to remember all of this a week from now, you'd better bring someone along to notarize my will.
The fact that this movie's MacGuffin (The Matrix) does about 15 different things should start to give you an idea of how all-over-the-place this sequel is. The story piles on fights and chases and country-hops and new characters until it feels like "The Mummy Returns" on a coke binge. Aircraft carriers sink! There's a long sequence where our heroes break into the National Air and Space Museum to wake up an ancient Transformer who also happens to be decommissioned SR-71 Blackbird who uses one of his landing gear as a cane! There's a hot-chick Transformer with a really long tongue! There's a little Decepticon with a Jersey accent who humps Megan Fox's leg for no reason! Sam Witwicky's mom eats a pot brownie and starts tackling people! Sam Witwicky's parents go to France for a while just so Michael Bay can blow it up (again!). The disgraced John Turturro character turns up working in a Jewish deli, where he secretly runs a Web site that competes with the one run by Sam Witwicky's hysteria-prone college roommate (Ramon Rodriguez)!
The giant-robot battles are still impressive, but there's just so damn much of it -- and so little geography to orient you -- that you glaze over after a while. I've never seen more explosions and epic battles in a single movie, but I've also never seen more explosions and epic battles glanced at by a camera with so little consequence. Imagine all the spectacle of Peter Jackson's "Return of the King" without any of the dramatic context and shakier camera work, and you're starting to get the idea.
Even that might be less of a problem if Bay's direction of actors on this outing had more than two gears: (1) dead stops for paragraph-long exposition and (2) hysterical, sweaty, unfunny shouting that fills up (quite literally) every single non-expository minute of this two-and-a-half hour movie. Watching "Revenge of the Fallen," I got the overpowering sense that Michael Bay has been reined in over the years and given some semblance of storytelling discipline by his longtime producer Jerry Bruckheimer and "Transformers 1" producer Steven Spielberg, but that on this movie (maybe because of the WGA strike, maybe because of the success of the last movie) Bay was finally let off the leash, as it were -- with results that might be Bay's purest auteurist statement, but which are also frankly kind of ugly.
How ugly? How about "elderly robot fart jokes" ugly? How about
"dangling robot testes jokes" ugly? How about "cutting to dogs having
sex more than once to add a little extra comedy to an already frenetic
scene" ugly? Worst of all: How about "Jar-Jar Binks" ugly? Film writers
everywhere have been dropping their jaws
over the two new comic-relief Transformers who turn up in the movie.
Their names are "Mudflap" and "Skids." They speak fluent trash-talk
ebonics (as offensively voiced by the very white Tom Kenny), have big
ears and buck teeth (one of them gold), get in pointless and
distracting fights at crucial moments, and at one point say they "don't
do much readin'." (Be sure to read Devin Faraci's account
of trying to grill the filmmakers about Mudflap and Skids, only to have
each filmmaker pass the responsibility to someone else.)
To sum up: The movie's a frenetic, offensive mess that leaves you more numb than entertained. Even my 12-year-old nephew -- who certainly dug the movie more than I did, being part of its target audience and all -- said afterward that "the first movie had the story" and that "the part where Sam was talking to robot ghosts was where I kind of got less interested."
In the parking lot afterward, I was chatting with Dan Clark, who covers the toy biz for GeekInTheCity.com, and he told me the following: In the movie, there's a Transformer called "Devastator" who's made up of several different construction vehicles (evidently they're called "Constructicons") that all clump together Voltron-style to form a single giant monster. Dan tells me that you can buy each of Devastator's component parts separately, as individual toys, at great expense -- but then you can't fit those parts together to make the actual larger character from the movie. I smell a metaphor.
"Revenge of the Fallen" almost feels like it's signaling an end-game for blockbuster
movies: all sensation, no content, catastrophic expense. My thoughts
turned to "Idiocracy," in which the hit comedy of the future is a man
getting kicked repeatedly in the nads, and to "THX 1138," in which the
only holographic TV stations are a sex channel, a violence channel, and
a gibberish channel. Bay's almost taken us there with this movie.
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'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' (The Oregonian, Wednesday, June 24, 2009)
During the Friday, June 19 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, we talk about the depressing failure of "Year One."
This segues into a long, rambling discussion of Harold Ramis and my problem with on-the-nose "message movies" -- including mentions of Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, "Groundhog Day," "Observe & Report," and "Drag Me to Hell."
Picking up on last week's "Up" discussion, I also name more movies I think turn into fantasies in the heads of their main characters.
(My segment starts somewhere around 51:30. As always, the whole show is well worth a listen.)
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Cort and Fatboy (Friday, June 19, 2009) [ mp3 ] [ stream ] [ iTunes ]
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On Monday, June 15, I posted the following on Twitter: "In a waiting-room situation for an unspecified period. Sketchbook in lap. Requests welcome (but not expected)." Seemed like it might be a fun drawing exercise.
I was pleasantly surprised to get several requests. I'm posting the resulting drawings below the jump -- most of which I would never have thought to draw myself (especially the one of Robert Loggia as Chewbacca). Click on each drawing to get an ultra-high-rez version you can put on a t-shirt or print out and burn or whatever.
From today's Oregonian....
My problems with "The Proposal" began almost immediately: We meet workaholic New York editrix Margaret Tate (Sandra Bullock) as she exercises, eats right, negotiates a tough deal before breakfast with a difficult writer and discreetly fires a lazy, pretentious chump who's bad for her company after giving him several chances to succeed.
In other words, if she were a male executive in a movie, this would be held up as exemplary behavior. But because it's Sandra Bullock, all her co-workers (and we the audience) are asked to think of her as a "bitch." And then we're supposed to delight in her humiliation after her long-suffering but equally workaholic assistant (Ryan Reynolds) gets the upper hand when he agrees to marry Margaret (a Canadian!) so she can stay in New York.
(This includes Reynolds grabbing Bullock's ass several times and forcing her to get down on her knees in public, complete with a two-shot of a kneeling Bullock and Reynolds' crotch; I was frankly surprised when I found out "The Proposal" was directed by a woman.)
Reynolds is an absolute master at being funny in terrible movies, and he gets in a few decent one-liners, but even he can't surf the tsunami of weaksauce that is "The Proposal." The movie's lazy, formulaic story -- written by male Hollywood exec Peter Chiarelli under a female pseudonym -- quickly becomes an excruciating waste of talent; you can see story developments coming like semi trucks on a New Mexico highway. The film is flat and false in the exact same way that director Anne Fletcher's last rom-com "27 Dresses" was flat and false.
If you want to see a romantic comedy starring Ryan Reynolds that's actually sort of funny and well-made, skip this and rent "Definitely, Maybe."
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C-minus; 107 minutes; rated PG-13 for sexual content, nudity and language.
'The Proposal' (The Oregonian, Friday, June 19, 2009)
From today's Oregonian....
"The Merry Gentleman" seems to be suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder. The movie -- the directorial debut of Michael Keaton -- is a depressed little character study about a domestic-violence victim (Kelly Macdonald) who flees to Chicago to set up a new life, where she bonds with a suicidal hit man (Keaton) suffering from pneumonia. Macdonald's abuser is a cop (Bobby Cannavale), and the hit man ends up being Macdonald's only nurturer in a universe full of predatory males.
It's a workable idea for a dramatic potboiler (which this muted piece isn't), and Keaton and Macdonald give calm, solid performances that wring way more out of their flat dialogue than anyone could reasonably expect. (Keaton strikes me as a gifted actor who would absolutely kill if someone ever wrote him the sort of late-career roles that Wes Anderson writes for Bill Murray.)
Unfortunately, beyond the performances, the movie just doesn't build to much of anything. It's so locked into its sad monotone that it doesn't develop its inarticulate relationships, and the resulting lack of tension means the movie never rouses much interest -- even when it's trafficking in morally gray murder and police rule-bending.
Keaton offers glimpses of a directorial gift -- he's good with actors -- but this odd little piece feels like a warm-up for something more compelling.
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C; 110 minutes; rated R for for language and some violence. Playing in Portland at the Fox Tower.
'The Merry Gentleman' (The Oregonian, Friday, June 19, 2009)
During the latest "Cort and Fatboy" podcast (I turn up around 20:00):
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Cort and Fatboy (Thursday, June 11 -- Part II) [ mp3 ] [ streaming ] [ iTunes ]
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