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Los Angeles, California I'm a twentysomething white male with ambitions to be a professional film critic and generally spend my days getting paid to watch movies and write about it. I try not to think too hard about how I want to build my life around talking about other people's creations and not mine. A compulsive reader and stubborn cineaste, I take an often contrary stance to my more fundamentalist peers and upbringing by celebrating the pursuit of the good, and the Good, in life, love, art and film. If you watched enough episodes of a few TV shows ("The Hungry and the Hunted," "The Cut Man Cometh," "The Body," "Waiting in the Wings," "Out of Gas," "April is the Cruelest Month," "20 Hours in America," "Colonial Day" for starters), you would understand me completely, and you'd also realize that much of my worldview and philosophical insights are heavily influenced by fictional works/programs, and many of the good things I've said in my life are just a regurgitation of someone else's imaginings. I guess I was made to be a film critic. This Month
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Thursday, March 16
This Just In: Brett Ratner Still A Pathetic Tool
by
Dan Carlson
on Thu 16 Mar 2006 04:16 PM PST
You, Brett, are not Wolverine for the following reasons: • You are a hack director on par with Renny Harlin. • Wolverine is fictional. [Plus, and I don't know who's responsible for this, punctuation goes inside the quote marks, unless it's a special circumstance like a semicolon, which this isn't. It's just a comma, and you really should have known better, faceless copy writer who doesn't deserve their (likely) high salary.]
Wow
by
Dan Carlson
on Thu 16 Mar 2006 01:23 PM PST
Words fail me. All I can do is direct you to the video and let you see for yourself:
Angry German Boy.
Mmm, Sacrilicious
by
Dan Carlson
on Thu 16 Mar 2006 01:16 PM PST
Filmmaker Rik Swartzwelder has crafted a blunt, mocking rebuttal to the commercialization of his faith that he witnessed in the marketing blitz surrounding Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. His four-minute video, "The McPassion," is available online, though the site's navigation is a little clumsy. [To watch the video, click "Watch" at the bottom of the page, then scroll down and select format and speed.] Shocking and occasionally wince-inducing, the video is also really, really funny. Swartzwelder has said that his goal in making the short was to inspire debate, and I'm glad he's doing it. Churches are sacred places, and using them to push a commercial product or political agenda is a dangerous thing. The purchasing hype surrounding Gibson's film was disturbing, especially the upsettingly casual merchandise. There's a world of difference between telling people to vote with their conscience and heart versus telling them that one political party is doing the Lord's work while the other is catering to atheists and abortion doctors. Similarly, using the pulpit to turn a profit makes me queasy; I know you want people to go see The Passion or The Chronicles of Narnia, but be careful not to sound like you're doing PR for the studio. Swartzwelder sums up his position: "We're on the brink of prostituting our pulpits beyond recognition. When we start showing movie trailers during worship services and telling the faithful it’s their duty to buy tickets to the Cineplex … or to buy anything … I believe that’s as offensive as anything in 'The McPassion.' I'm not judging anyone's motives; by and large, I think people's hearts are in the right place … but I believe it's time for a fresh look at this issue." I'm glad Swartzwelder's doing this, though I disagree with him that crapfests like End of the Spear can be considered progress for faith-based filmmaking. That film makes Left Behind look like, well, a slightly less crappy version of Left Behind. Anyway, I hope Swartzwelder's short stirs up debate.
Possible Adult Film Spinoffs Of Well-Known Television Properties
by
Dan Carlson
on Thu 16 Mar 2006 12:18 AM PST
Will & Grace & Grace's Friend Kristi
Three Used to be Company, But Now We Kind of Like It Groin Pains Friends With an Inappropriate Lack of Boundaries That '69 Show The A-Hole Team Transgenderformers Leave It to Beaver |
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Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. — Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. — John Stuart Mill We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget. — G.K. Chesterton We were, for the briefest of moments, something greater than the sum of our uncertain parts; we were youth itself, in all its painful glory and sharp joy. — August Van Zorn There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there's a time when things can go either way. — Stephen King Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town. — Ask the Dust, John Fante |
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