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During the Friday, June 27 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, "WALL-E" is declared a masterpiece (and compared to "Idiocracy"). Elsewhere in the show, the boys discuss "Wanted," which I was sorry to learn was adapted from a loathsome pile of nihilism of a comic book.
Cort and Fatboy (June 27, 2008) [ iTunes ]
From the Friday, June 27 Oregonian....
"Gunnin' for That #1 Spot" is a basketball documentary where the climactic game looks like a Hong Kong wire-fu epic.
Director (and Beastie Boy) Adam Yauch builds his doc around the 2006 Boost Mobile Elite 24 all-star event, in which the best high-school hoopsters in the country compete in Harlem's Rucker Park -- the legendary street-ball playground where Wilt Chamberlain and other legends cut their teeth on an outdoor court.
Yauch follows eight media-anointed "phenom" players to Rucker -- including Lake Oswego's own Kevin Love (who left UCLA this year for the NBA) and Medford, Ore. son Kyle Singler (now rocking the fundamentals at Duke). We meet all eight kids in their respective hometowns, surrounded by varying amounts of love and financial security. We see the players travel to New York and dance uneasily around one another as they're lectured by coaches. We see jaw-dropping home-movie game highlights and clips of Rucker in the '60s and '70s. We learn how mind-warping the expectations on these kids can be -- shoe companies start courting talent at age 12, media coverage starts in the 8th grade, and agents text-message so relentlessly that the teens are actually sick of their cell phones.
By the time Yauch gets to Rucker Park, it's a little suspenseful, because as player Jerryd Bayless puts it, "you can break your reputation or you can help your reputation going there and playing."
The game itself is a staggering set piece. Over trash-talking commentary by the on-site announcers (who give the players nicknames), these megatalented workhorses creatively sink basket after basket after basket. The score gets so high into the three figures, they might as well be playing pinball. Meanwhile, Yauch layers in hip-hop tracks and whooshing martial-arts sound effects and shows you every highlight twice. I found it just a little ironic that the movie touches on the dangers of what happens "when you're treated like a star before you're really a star," because Yauch films and sound-mixes the game so it feels like you're watching Greek gods bat around a lightning ball.
If I have one beef with "Gunnin'" -- and this is one of those lame "he didn't make the movie I wanted to see!" beefs -- it's that Yauch spends most of his time in (understandable) awe of his subjects, and (respectfully) doesn't dig too deeply into the lives of any of the players. (I suspect he could have built a whole doc around the backstory of one of them, a rambunctious, school-switching, trash-talking and ridiculously skilled man-child from Maryland named Michael Beasley.) Rather than actually hearing the players talk to each other, we see music-driven montages of them walking around. And rather than directly witnessing much media/agent/sponsor pressure, we're just told by experts that it exists.
Also, there's no "Where are they now?" postscript that tells you where all the kids are nearly two years later (though you can find this info online at www.GunninMovie.com). After what we see on the court, maybe that's not really necessary; they'll all be in various magazine and TV ads in a few years, anyway.
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B; 90 minutes; rated PG-13; playing in Portland at the Fox Tower.
'Gunnin' for That #1 Spot' (The Oregonian, June 27, 2008)
... are all discussed during the Friday, June 20 broadcast. Several words are said in a monster-truck announcer falsetto. For this, I apologize.
Cort and Fatboy (June 20, 2008) [ iTunes ]
In their latest outing, beloved instructional characters Mr. Do and Mr. Don't teach us how to behave at various June events in Portland, Oregon.
Mr. Do and Mr. Don't celebrate June in Portland (Webcomics Nation)
Complete CulturePulp comic archives at WCN
A new four-page "Serenity Tale" called "Take My Love" -- script by Mark Bourne, art by yours truly -- is now online.
I would describe this particular story as "surprising."
If you'd be willing to color the comic for us (and can make it look at least as lovely as the teaser image at right), by all means drop us a line.
"Take My Love" just went live along with several other "Firefly"/"Serenity" fan comics -- which are all well worth reading if you're into that sort of thing.
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'Take My Love' (Serenity Tales)
Serenity Tales (main page)
From the Friday, June 20 Oregonian....
You could describe "The Love Guru" as a comedy of fetishes. This weirdly specific comedy plays like "Austin Powers" star Mike Myers was given $60 million to unscrew his skull and dump all his remaining obsessions -- which appear to be self-help, hockey, groin jokes, musical numbers and the abuse of Verne Troyer -- into every cineplex in America.
Anyone who's seen commercials for "The Love Guru" might have noticed those ads don't contain any actual jokes. This is probably because studio execs deemed every single joke in "The Love Guru" too scatological, philosophical or, um, Canadian for American audiences. I mean, seriously, check out this plot:
Celebrity guru Pitka (Mike Myers) counts Val Kilmer and Jessica Simpson among his clients. He runs an ashram staffed by hot women, rides an elephant, and loves to play pop songs (including "9 to 5" and Extreme's "More than Words") on his sitar. His mantra is "Mariska Hargitay."
Like the real self-help gurus he spoofs, Pitka has written an ungodly number of books, overuses acronyms in his seminars, and has made millions trademarking his ideas. Like Austin Powers, he is obsessed with jokes involving the male nether regions -- jokes that make him giggle and shake his fists like a little boy. (As Myers approaches 50, these antics get stranger and stranger to watch.)
The story gets cracking when the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Jessica Alba, ickily paired off with Myers the way Anne Hathaway is paired off with Steve Carell in "Get Smart") pays Guru Pitka $2 million to get her star player (Romany Malco) back together with his true love (Meagan Good), who is shacking up with a monumentally endowed rival athlete (Justin Timberlake).
If Pitka succeeds, he'll finally get one up on his rival Deepak Chopra and appear on "Oprah"!
I know. Run-of-the-mill.
The story cycles quickly and repeatedly through the above Myers fetishes, and it has a handful of inspired bits. Troyer is funny and nasty as the Maple Leafs' coach -- he talks in this film, and reveals sharp comic timing -- and Stephen Colbert is terrific as an increasingly unhinged sports commentator.
But several moments -- especially any sitar cover song or out-of-nowhere Bollywood dance number (there are several) -- likely amused Myers more than they'll amuse you. On balance, the movie induced more smirks than laughs. Given that the Venn-diagram intersection of self-help fans, hockey fans and penis-joke fans may be Myers, basically, I'm curious to see if the movie finds an audience.
But I still kind of find myself admiring the actor, and the film. "Love Guru" is insane and self-indulgent but also fully committed, and there's a surprising undercurrent of earnestness to its philosophy portions; I think Myers genuinely wants to impart real wisdom via this character, even if at one point he imparts that wisdom via men fighting with urine-soaked mops. The comedian really climbs out on this particular limb -- a limb so far from the tree, it might have given Peter Sellers pause.
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C-plus; 87 minutes; rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language, some comic violence and drug references.
'The Love Guru' (The Oregonian, June 20, 2008)
From the Friday, June 20 Oregonian....
On this side of the globe, the layman's knowledge of Genghis Khan -- uniter of tribes, master tactician, conqueror of like half the planet by the early 1200s -- doesn't tend to go too far past "ruthless warlord." If you're a certain kind of bad-movie nerd, you might also know The Great Khan as "the worst role of John Wayne's career, filmed near the atomic test site that gave him cancer."
Kazakhstani/Mongolian foreign-language Oscar nominee "Mongol" goes quite a way toward correcting that. (Well, so would a book. But still.) Sergei Bodrov's harshly gorgeous epic is apparently Part One of a planned trilogy recounting Genghis Khan's life in semi-mythic terms.
The story plays a little like "Braveheart on the Steppe": The future Great Khan's young adulthood is full of death, enslavement and endless tribal warfare. His father dies in front of him. Everyone betrays him. He spends an inordinate amount of time in large wooden stocks, which turn out to be surprising useful for bashing in enemy skulls. His young adulthood isn't much better: Fate just keeps piling on with shifting alliances, clashes with royalty and anguish over his stolen wife.
Our grown hero (Tadanobu Asano) is soon convinced that becoming a ruthless warlord is the only way to create a more orderly future -- and the movie makes it seem like the only sane choice.
This is a violent, romantic, beautifully shot and performed film -- with brutal battle scenes and charisma-bomb performances by Asano as the future Khan and Honglei Sun as a rival chieftain and brother-in-arms. If the film has any problem at all, it's simply that it depicts the future Khan as being too perfect in every sense; he sagely picks his perfect wife when he's like 8 years old, for starters, and can stoically absorb superhero levels of punishment from the get-go. Actually, "problem" is really the wrong word: Bodrov has simply created an overwhelmingly awesome Khan who could believably conquer the overwhelmingly awesome landscape over the course of two more films.
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B; 120 minutes; rated R; playing in Portland at Cinema 21.
'Mongol' (The Oregonian, June 20, 2008)
Got the following missive from the PDX Browncoats about this weekend's "Serenity" charity screenings -- which got a nice writeup in this week's Portland Mercury, BTW....
UPDATE: I just learned (on Thursday, June 19) that two cities in last year's nationwide effort (neither of them Portland) apparently failed to deliver their funds to Equality Now. Each city's screenings are separately organized and run, and Portland's effort (the one I'm promoting) has always been (a) the biggest earner nationwide and (b) completely transparent and reliable, to the best of my knowledge. Erik Henricksen of the Merc is reporting on this, too.
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PORTLAND -- The PDX Browncoats -- a local nonprofit group comprising fans of Joss Whedon's "Firefly" -- are gearing up for their 3rd-annual "CAN'T STOP THE SERENITY" charity event, screening Whedon's movie Serenity to benefit human-rights organization Equality Now.
All the excitement will take place on June 20 and 21 at the Hollywood Theatre (4122 NE Sandy Blvd., Portland; 503-281-4215).
Check our Web site (serenitynow.pdxbrowncoats.com) for more information on the screenings. And if you live outside Portland, visit CantStopTheSerenity.com to find a "Serenity" charity screening in your city.
This year's event is going to be bigger and better than ever... (Full details after the jump.)
Continue reading "'Serenity' screens for charity this weekend!" »
From the Friday the 13th Oregonian....
"The Promotion" contains a couple of surprises.
This extremely low-key comedy stars Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly as desperate middle managers vying for a career upgrade in a Chicago grocery-store chain. Surprise #1 is that writer-director Steven Conrad (who wrote "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness") doesn't have even the slightest intention of delivering the farce you might expect with his cast -- which also includes Jenna Fischer, Fred Armisen and Jason Bateman.
(If there's any truth to the argument that so-called "indie" movies are essentially buttressed by the Hollywood star system, this film could serve as Exhibit A.)
Instead, Conrad's humor is largely muted and character-driven -- revolving around the quiet daily humiliation of Scott and Reilly's characters as they make bad choices while trying to draw attention to the other guy's equally bad choices in front of the grocery chain's top brass. (Putting it another way: At no point in "The Promotion" is there a wacky fight in the produce aisle.) Conrad captures a real sense of the fragility of one's position and the way a few bad decisions and comments can make it all go away. And he manages to make it all kind of wryly funny, if rarely laugh-out-loud funny.
Surprise #2 is that Conrad never really chooses a side in this fight. "The Promotion" has no villain. Both Doug (Scott) and Richard (Reilly) are flawed but ultimately decent men with patient spouses (Fischer and Lili Taylor). Both men worry about money and lie to their wives out of shame. Both men are responsible for cringe-inducing gaffes in front of upper management (embodied here by Gil Bellows as the sort of over-polished gatekeeper who speaks in maxims like "You need to bear down!").
And, like the film, both men have modest ambitions. Given its bleak depiction of grocery-store life, the "promotion" both men crave is really just an elevation into a slightly less horrible, slightly more mediocre circle of Hell.
In news that will surprise absolutely no one, Reilly excels at playing a soft-bellied former druggie turned barely-holding-it-together, self-help Christian. (A moment where Richard sadly dances alone in the freezer aisle while listening to a motivational tape really sums up the film.)
The film's tone is a little inconsistent -- there are broad running gags involving Doug's banjo-playing neighbor and an employee who samples grocery-store inventory, and they don't really mesh with the larger small-movie vibe. But Conrad seems to have used whatever clout he got from "The Pursuit of Happyness" to fund something personal and sincere -- a story that’s ultimately about victories of character and suppressing your worst impulses.
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B-minus; 85 minutes; rated R for language including sexual references, and some drug use.
'The Promotion' (The Oregonian, June 13, 2008)
On the Friday, June 6 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, I lambast the absurdist eldersex Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that is "You Don't Mess with the Zohan." But I have very nice things to say about "The Foot Fist Way."
Cort and Fatboy (Friday, June 6, 2008) [ iTunes ]
