CulturePulp.

Twitter Sketches: Jan 15-26, 2011.

After the jump: Recent quick sketches posted to my Twitter feed. Click on any image to enlarge.

CORT AND FATBOY: 'The Mechanic' and a 'Movie B.S.' crossover

During the Friday, Jan. 28 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we did a postmortem on the "Dirty Dancing" commentary we'd recorded the night before (in advance of the Feb. 4 Midnight Movie).

We then discussed Chris Farley, Marc Maron, movie news, and the difference between "larfs" and "laughs" -- all before I reviewed "The Mechanic" and dropped knowledge about a million cool little movie-related things happening in Portland this week.

I then stuck around for 15 extra minutes to make a crossover appearance on the next Cascadia.fm show, "Movie B.S. with Bayer and Snider." I re-reviewed "The Mechanic" a bit more coherently on their show and politely disagreed with Jeff Bayer while Eric D. Snider listened on the phone from Sundance.
________

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Jan. 28, 2011)

Movie B.S. with Bayer and Snider (Episode 44)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Mechanic'

Movie review in the Friday, Jan. 28 Oregonian....

 

The remake of Charles Bronson's loopy 1972 B-grade thriller "The Mechanic" improves on the original in at least one key way: Its lead characters appear to have souls.

The original (which I enjoy in that nostalgic, Sunday-afternoon-TV way) is a borderline-surreal international thriller that takes place in its own insular universe where the police don't seem to exist. Bronson plays an amoral hit man who finds himself training the even more amoral son of the mentor Bronson recently killed.

But stone-faced Bronson never seemed to struggle with the emotional complications of that weird, Shakespearean apprenticeship. In the remake -- which is directed by Simon West ("Con Air") and retains only to the barest basics of the '72 plot -- Jason Statham and Ben Foster play the assassin and his apprentice, and tinge the amoral stone-cold stuff with a just bit of regret. It's a subtle but significant improvement, and quite a bit more than the material demands, frankly.

But of course, the movie's still mostly the amoral stone-cold stuff -- and if well-staged, hard-R ultraviolence is your thing, you'll probably find a lot to like in "The Mechanic." The action scenes -- particularly a rooftop gunfight and two close-quarters melees -- are shot so tight and ruthless, you nearly fail to notice they're ridiculous. (Though nothing in the new film made me gasp like this insane motorcycle stunt in the '72 version.) The new film doesn't break a centimeter of new ground, but its stripped-down mayhem and more-nuanced-than-necessary performances are a modest surprise.

 

(92 min., rated R for strong brutal violence throughout, language, some sexual content and nudity) Grade: B-minus

'The Mechanic' (The Oregonian, Friday, Jan. 28, 2011)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Vengeance' and 'Dirty Dancing,' Becky and boys

Above: Cort and Fatboy as Lion-O and Snarf (left), drawn by @The GrumpyTurtle; and Cort and Fatboy as Fraggles (right), drawn by Tara Gidlow. Click to enlarge.
_____________

During the Friday, Jan. 21 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we were joined by writer and motorcyclist Becky Ohlsen. As Fatboy put it later, Becky has "survived a motorcycle wreck and working in an office with both Byron Beck and David Walker -- and the only thing that's ever defeated her is the PDX dating scene?" She explains why. It may involve our fair city's abundance of Whimpsters.

Also! "Dirty Dancing." A t-shirt idea. Geek Trivia and assertiveness. Johnnie To's "Vengeance." "X-Men: First Class" and "The Dark Knight Rises." An important word I cannot spell. Justin Timberlake and an echo effect, accompanied by singing. And our shared beef with a certain brand of vapid online movie writing.
______

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Jan. 21, 2011)

Martin, The Uninventor.

Here is a character sketch of a big bag of failure -- for a short thing I am making for Mr. Erik Henriksen. Click to enlarge. More soon.

Twitter sketch: 'Cort-3PO and Fatboy-D2.'

A sketch request by Twitter user @ElSuperHosen. You really can turn any cultural icon into Cort and Fatboy with the careful application of flannel and Kangol.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Twitter Sketches, Vol. 3 (Jan. 5, 2011)
• Twitter Sketches, Vol. 2 (July 18, 2009)
• Waiting Room Twitter Sketches (June 19, 2009)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'The Green Hornet' and TV theme songs

During the Friday, Jan. 14 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "The Green Hornet," our favorite TV-show theme songs, my longing for more "Geek: Remixed," running shoes, Woody Allen, "The Hobbit," James Bond, and a bunch of other nonsense.
_____

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Jan. 14, 2010)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Hood to Coast'

Longer version of a movie review in the Friday, Jan. 7 Oregonian. There are footnotes.

"Hood to Coast" (playing for one night, in movie theaters and at Portland's Keller Auditorium, on Tuesday, Jan. 11) is a beautifully shot, feel-good documentary about "The Mother of All Relays" -- a 197-mile race in which 12,000 runners in 2,000 vans make their way from Timberline Lodge to Seaside over two days.

I've run (or at least enthusiastically jogged) the Hood to Coast relay six times over two decades [1] -- and to my thinking, director Christoph Baaden, working closely with race organizers, does a superb job capturing the geography of the race, the wildly varied mix of participants, and the often-surreal experience of running the thing. He and his crew give this crazy, one-of-a-kind race an epic sweep while also capturing a few emotionally naked moments with their exhausted subjects.

What makes Hood to Coast special is the way it sort of perversely captures the entire human comedy -- it's pain and pleasure tied up in sleep-deprived logistics, [2] and the punchline is that the suffering is completely voluntary. The pleasure comes from the terrain; the carnival of runners decorating their vans and wearing ridiculous costumes; the punchy camaraderie; and the pride of having conned oneself into slogging through this ridiculous endeavor one more year.

Baaden's film crew nails all this in a crowdpleasing way -- alternating between spectacular helicopter shots, animated overviews of the route and intimate moments with four very different Hood to Coast teams.

The fastest (and most articulate) team is an aging crew of hyperfit Masters-runner pranksters called "The Dead Jocks." At least one Dead Jock has run H2C since its first year, 1982, when eight teams of lunatics raced to Pacific City. There's also a beer-swilling group of Laika animators with an alarmingly casual training regimen, providing much of the film's comic relief. Then there's a single-minded survivor determined to run the race a year after a heart attack briefly killed her on the course. The movie's most nailbiting moment comes when she jacks her heart rate into the 180s during a stubborn-bordering-on-insane defiance of doctor's orders. And there's "Team R. Bowe" -- a grieving team of family and friends running to honor a man who died far too young.

Their experiences range from grim to silly -- nicely capturing the range of emotions you can feel during this big, ridiculous moving caravan of sweat. I recognized a hundred little moments in "Hood to Coast" -- the dust-choked logging-road leg that requires runners to wear bandanas over nose and mouth; the weird Lynchian vibe that takes over the van at 3 a.m. [3] ; and the dread and relief of the final leg, which is run mostly on fumes and pride. [4]

Now, that said, if I have one very minor beef with the doc, it's that it doesn't address the impacts -- positive or negative -- that Hood to Coast has on people living along the race route. In my experience, locals either form temporary service economies or, less frequently, get annoyed. [5] Baaden sidesteps all this in the name of narrative tightness, keeping his focus squarely (and safely) on a participant's-eye view of the race.

Maybe some world-building material will turn up as bonus features on the eventual DVD. At any rate, the doc will go over like gangbusters in a theater full of running enthusiasts on Jan. 11. And if any of the featured teams return for this year's race, they'll be greeted as royalty.

To learn more about the documentary or buy tickets for the Jan. 11 movie-theater screenings (or the "Portland Premiere" screening at the Keller Auditorium), visit www.HoodToCoastMovie.com.
______

ENDNOTES

1. Twice just out of high-school cross-country in the '80s, when I was all sinew and idiocy, and four times in my much-slower 30s, when the race was better-organized and I was better-padded. Several of my most vivid running memories come from Hood to Coast. I drew a comic strip about the relay for The O way back in 2004.

2. Here, more specifically, is how Hood to Coast works. The 197-mile route is broken down into 36 legs, with legs ranging from 3.52 to 7.79 miles in length. Two vans, containing six runners each, cover the route in shifts. Ideally, each team member runs three legs over the course of the race. A van lets out a runner and hauls fanny to the next relay exchange -- maybe stopping halfway through to give the runner some water.

Rinse and repeat all the way to Seaside, with fitful sleep breaks.

(The infographic in the documentary actually whiffs these logistics a bit, suggesting a van "follows" its runner to the next exchange. Uh, no. It can be quite a bit more panicky than that, depending on the traffic bottlenecks.)

3. Cell-phone coverage vanishes for hours in the middle of the race, reality narrows to a single headlamp beam, and the middle-of-the-night relay legs feel like a cross between night-dives and horror-movie setups.

4. I've suffered through that extra-long 7.79-mile leg, which comes toward the end of the relay. It's horrible. Imagine lurch-jogging for over an hour, on about an hour-and-a-half of sleep, while your brain yells at you Sam Kinison-style that what you're doing is a terrible idea.

5. One family in Olney transforms their home into a wildly popular coffee bar and burger shack; the Jewell School turns its gym into a barracks for desperate naps and showers and old-school powdered-egg breakfasts; and of course there's the epic beer-garden aftermath in Seaside, during which thousands of grimy, lithe and semi-coherent people stagger around the tourist traps yelling "Woo!"
______

'Hood to Coast' (The Oregonian, Friday, Jan. 7, 2011)

CORT AND FATBOY: Nic Cage, Netflix and a 'Muppet Movie' yack-track.

 Above: The "Cort & Fatboy" hosts and guests re-imagined as classic movie monsters by Kaebel Hashitani. Visit his DeviantArt gallery for more.

During the Friday, Jan. 7 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, I didn't have a new-release movie review ("Season of the Witch" wasn't so much screened for press). So instead we had a rambling, unformatted conversation about Nicolas Cage, Netflix and a bunch of other nonsense.

We also recorded a new "Midnight Movie Commentary" for "The Muppet Movie" -- this one featuring Cort, Fatboy, Erik Henriksen, a just-back-from-the-grave David Walker, and yrs. truly.
__________

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Jan. 7, 2010)

The Midnight Movie Commentary: The Muppet Movie (CortAndFatboy.com)

 

Twitter Sketches, Vol. 3.

On Dec. 15, I posted the following on Twitter: "I am bored. I will attempt to sketch the first (simple) thing someone asks me to draw and post the results here."

Got a bunch of requests. Hastily drew 13 of them. They're all posted after the jump. Click on any image to enlarge.