Tederick.com: November 2006 Archives
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Until the return of the comments, here are this week's quotes. These would go on the back of the EXTREME STEVE: VOL. 1 trade paperback.
"Oh my God I laughed so hard Tama had to ask me what was wrong with me!" - Rebecca J. Wood
"You just made the leap from cute ineffectual comic strip to The Watchmen of cute ineffectual comic strips." - Matty J. Price
"Awesome!!!! Just awesome!!!!" - Extreme Steve
The good news is, I still don't like anchovies.
The bad news is: I have retired from my active duties on the One Minute Film & Video Festival. The cat's sort of pretty much already out of the bag on that one, so this is just basically the official confirmation for anyone who was not yet in the know. What does this mean for you, the consumer? Very little. Someone else will be running the web site, someone else will be running the show, and hopefully everything otherwise will remain visibly unchanged. I'm still available to the continuing organizers to transition things out. And I'm feeling really good about the whole thing. The 2006 show was just so tremendously, rewardingly successful, so I really feel like I'm going out on a high note here. It would have completely sucked to leave the fest after '05 which was, to put it mildly, not my finest hour in this three and a half year adventure (for reasons that are entirely related to my disastrous personal life and my professional tasks on that year's show, and nothing to do with the rest of the staff or with the films themselves). But now it really feels like 1MFVF has passed from being a newbie indie wannabe sort of a thing, into being a genuine minor marker of the cultural landscape around here. So that's what I'm happy about: '06 got me excited about the possibilities of the festival again. And if that sounds like a contradictory state in which to be leaving said festival behind, then please try to recall: this festival was created to empower lapsed filmmakers to get off their ass and get new stuff made and shown. And I can tell you on a personal and professional level that I cannot wait to find out what the theme for next year is going to be, because I will be first in line with a one-minute movie to show.
Tederick.commies, do us a favour: if you were planning to spend some holiday money at Urban Outfitters, don't. They're selling a handgun as a Christmas ornament, at the store not two blocks away from where Jane Creba got shot last Christmas. Avoid those sick bitches. Better yet, do the Pretty Woman thing: go into Urban Outfitters with all the bags full of stuff you bought somewhere else, and tell them why.
On the lighter side, this afternoon I blindly guessed the first nine digits of someone's ten digit phone number. And this was not a phone number I had ever heard before or had any reason to know before today. I just literally started picking random numbers and got the first nine out of ten. Mentalism!! The first nine, by the way, were 416-893-550. (Okay, the first three weren't hard to guess.) I leave the rest to you.
I have received some very nice messages about EXTREME STEVE RESURRECTION. Unfortunately the comment problems means you don't get to see them. I feel your pain, X-S readers; this comic is best served as an interactive fan experience. Hopefully this will get worked out within the next few weeks.
Here's a pip: you cannot find the Superman boxed set anywhere in this goddamned city. Or at least, you can't find it at the Scarborough Town Centre, which is the only part of the city I have direct access to at this point. They (being all of the stores in the mall) never received it. Superman did not return. Which is vexing.
Sure, I could buy the 2-disk edition of Superman Returns, or the 4-disk edition of Superman: the Movie, both of which are in stock. But you know what?
That just ain't enough Superman.
I need a lot more Superman. I need a whole lot of Superman. I need fourteen disks of splendourific Supermania to put out this fire, yes sir. And I think fourteen disks oughta just about do it.
[shouting heavenward]
SUPERMANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!
Superman is going to be my 500th DVD, by the way. I was gonna run a big poll/contest/giveaway here on the blog but then the demise of the comments ruined my plans. You should therefore be just as angry as I am at Movable Type, because it has robbed you of free DVDs that Matt sends you. So the democratic process has failed once again, and Superman shall be my demi-mil shinydisk.
Get ready, because I am ready to pass judgment on Heroes.
I do not like Heroes. Tonight I figured out why. It was when they finally revealed Sylar. I found it downright creepy, the degree to which he looked like Brandon Routh (something they were clearly playing up, performance-wise and casting-wise). I thought to myself, this is interesting. This is a good casting move. I like this strange Superman-y guy playing the evil fucktard. And that was when I realized that I don't really like any of the other casting, at all. Oh, I guess I like Hayden all right and clearly Greg Grunberg can never do a thing wrong in my eyes. And Leonard Roberts has the Buffy protection. But take, for example, Erick Avari. I really like that guy. Yet from the moment he stepped on screen as Chandra Suresh, I felt like they'd hired the wrong actor, like they were trying to find someone who was like the guy who should actually be playing that role. And what I realized tonight in the light of this Sylar dude is, that's sort of how I feel about everyone, in front of and behind the cameras, on that show. They're all similar to who you'd actually get, as if they couldn't quite afford to buy the real thing - IKEA furniture with an "antique" look as opposed to actual antiques. The illusion of integrity... worse, the illusion of coolness. The Petrelli brothers are a good example - could the producers possibly have found two less interesting actors to play those roles? I know what those roles are supposed to be, I know what kind of actors are supposed to be playing them, and aside from the fact that Pasdar and Ventimiglia sort of vaguely resemble those other actors (same hair, same height, same "ooh I'm such a stud" boyporn power with 30something women), they're not the right ones. I'm staring at Pasdar's big, Pasdary face and it's like watching someone act out Brecht with a Ken doll. Series creator Tim Kring? The guy who's supposedly never read a real comic because he wants to invent a comic book TV show on the fly? Howsabout next time read a fucking comic so you know what you're talking about and aren't insulting your audience? If the Watchmen riffs are unintentional they're moronic, and if the whole thing is a con game he's just a fucking asshole. And honestly: I know everybody loves the guy, but I am ready to put a dishwasher through Masi Oka's face. That performance borders on a hate crime.
The weird thing is that in spite of all this and in full understanding of the level of hypocrisy involved, I'll keep watching the show. It's got the water cooler cred and a degree of narrative scintillation that will at least make me want to see this arc come to a close. But Heroes is officially the Melrose Place of the 2006 season, guilty as fucking sin. No wait: MP was perfectly cast.
The benefits plan at work is changing massively and I am thoroughly perplexed by it. I keep getting red X's in my signup system when I try to complete the various sections. Add to that the fact that I don't think about benefits very much anyways on account of a) single b) single and c) single. And d) not a homeowner, because I'm single. But the good news is that I finally get a little T&E! I'm going to Montreal on business in a couple of weeks and I'm going on the train!!! I literally could not be more excited about this in a million years of trying. Nerdy, but true.
At lunch I systematically destroyed the entire mens' jeans section at the Gap at Scarborough Town Centre. I did this because none of the size information was customer-facing. At first I tried to be polite about it - keeping things folded, putting things back - but by the fourth Christmas carol I was basically just throwing shit over my fucking shoulder into a large jeany pile that matched only the size of my righteous indignation at the sheer incompetence of the entire sales staff. After 40 minutes, I gave up because I had actually run out of time.
One of these days, someone is going to explain to me how the world works.
Least productive weekend ever.
Folks, I got nothing done this weekend. Sweet fuck all. I meant to at least get Standoff picture locked; didn't even manage that. I think post-festivalation just gobbled up all my desire to spend my off hours doing anything that resembled work. Aside from a bit of fest cleanup and some blogTO stuff, and twenty minutes of writing at the coffee shop yesterday, I didn't... wait you know what? It just occured to me that fest cleanup, some blogTO stuff, and twenty minutes of writing at the coffee shop is not "sweet fuck all." It's just "less than I'd planned." Shutting up now.
Every single pair of jeans I have ever owned has developed the exact same rip: right in the seam where the ass meets the crotch. (Only front-to-back, not side-to-side, if you get me.) Sooner or later this happens to ever single pair of jeans I've ever had. Surely the art of jeaning has developed to the point where they're able to manufacture jeans that resist this sort of wear? Is it just because I have large nuts? Do I have large nuts? How do you tell if you have large nuts? I haven't been in a shower room since we all had small nuts.
To post-script from earlier in the month: comments on Tederick.com are officially dead. I've tried everything that can be tried; I've given up. What's truly vexatious is that not only have they not worked for three weeks, but I also discovered today that a gigantic number of comments from earlier in the year got wiped out at some point. They're not in the database, not in the ground files, not in the backups. They're just gone. So... I'm basically stumped and fucked. (I'm fumped.)
I'll either have to reinstall MT on a more stable database platform or switch to WordPress, neither of which I particularly know how to do. Oh the irony that is the public opinion of my web development prowess.
Anyways. It's late and I'm tired, and not particularly looking forward to the week coming up. Still have a lot to get cleared out of the way before the end of the year, feeling generally foggy and socially inept, which doesn't help. There's clarity in 2007, and that's nice, but a lot of muck to slog before I get tucked in.
The plan had been to take this weekend completely off to get a bit of a break after festival madness. But you know me: I can't turn down a hundred bucks. So here's a quick preview on some worthy film happenings in T.O. this week, including the ever-enjoyable opportunity to pimp the screenings of my friends' work.
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
My father has become a devoté of the Benedict Chronicles over the last couple of months, and wanted to get in on the action. He noticed that the Homeway, a diner at Erskine & Mt. Pleasant (very near where I grew up), recently got one of those genuine, sponsored-on-TV restaurant makeovers, and now looks like the cat's pajamas. So this morning we saddled up to see what they could do with eggs benedict.
Dad ordered a couple of fried eggs over easy with a side of Mennonite ham. Mennonite ham was all over this menu (though not actually on the benedict itself), but when we asked the waiter what Mennonite ham was he just said "It's, you know, ham. From up north." Whatever. I choose to believe that genuine Mennonites were indeed directly involved in this ham and that they are excellent at it. Mennonite ham gets the job done. Not quite as enjoyable as their peaches, but I'd call it the best ham I've had in a very long time.
Meanwhile, I got the eggs benedict. And guess what? Brilliant, perfect, wonderful. I couldn't ask for more from a breakfast than this. On the menu they call it "Sinful Eggs Benedict." Cue the obvious segue: the only truly sinful thing here is just how freaking good these eggs are!
Our meal arrived in about five minutes flat which seemed a bit lean to whip up a batch of hollandaise and poach some eggs (see this entry for the dangers of quickly-prepared meals), but whatever they did in the kitchen to achieve this miracle, it worked like gangbusters. This benedict was velvety. The eggs were on the easy side of medium, the hollandaise was spare but flavourful, and the english muffin and peameal were both cooked but not to the point of crunchiness. The result was a pillowy-soft meal that went down like a good single-malt scotch. It came aligned with some of the best home fries I've ever had - salty, herby, crispy - and a decent cup of coffee.
Initially my sole complaint was that the portion size was about 20% too small. But you know what? This meal turned me around on that thinking, too. This is breakfast, people. Do you really want to come out of a breakfast full to bursting? No. You want to feel like you've eaten something substantial and had a good start for your day, but not bloated or lethargic. Those are my current feelings, so well done.
Eggs benedict at the Homeway costs $10.95, coffee included. A superlative meal in every regard, it earns my second four eggs out of four.
The Homeway is located at 955 Mt. Pleasant Road, at Erskine. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series. No, Matt did not eat two eggs benedicts this weekend like last time. He just wrote two reviews.
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
A lot of years ago, when we'd get done playing poker at Erik's old place on St. Clair, Courtney and Matty Price and I would occasionally figure we were close enough to the airport that taking a midnight station wagon ride out there to go to the Perkins for some food wasn't a particularly big deal. The other day, having had our Mamo plans stuffed back a bunch of hours by commitments and circumstance, Matty Price and I decided to do a midnight show over eggs... and chose Perkins as the venue.
Perkins has a lot of benedict variations on their menu. It would actually be worth going back a few more times to try some of the other ones, like the Double Bacon Benedict. But for this go-round I stuck with the classic, figuring that you can't really explore variations until you've established a baseline. So look for potential future Perkins BenChros to explore the rest of the menu.
The regular benny ain't bad. It's not brilliant, but it gets the job done. I suppose if you're going to go cheap crappy and disgusting you're better off with the strange non-thing that is Golden Griddle's plastic benedict. Perkins sort of falls in the middle ground between too good to be crappy and too crappy to be good. I don't like the home fries much, because they're those weird shredded dealies that I don't understand. I do like the addition of toast, especially given that they butter it for you. And the hollandaise is pretty freakin' good, I must say.
But on the whole this one just doesn't come together well enough to get a recommendation. And the coffee was terrible. So for a $9.50 benedict, I'm going to hit it with two and a half eggs out of four and call it even at that.
This particular Perkins is located at 600 Dixon Road, out by Pearson International Airport. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
So as it turns out, J. Michael Straczinski is the writer to beat this week. Folks know I've had a contentious relationship with Spidey at the best of times, but Amazing Spider-Man #536 is in fact the finest single issue yet published under the entire Civil War banner - including the Civil War proper issues themselves, and all the other cool shit like Bendis' Iron Man issue of Avengers last week and the better issues of Front Lines.
Somehow, in one appealingly concise issue, Straczinski manages to address the meaning of life, the role of the hero, the stakes of this Civil War, and Civil War's metaphorical relationship to the real United States as it exists today... and he manages to work in Mary-Jane taking her top off. In 22 pages, with too many ads breaking the flow, and it still works. He gets right at the heart of what makes ol' Peter the lovable fellow he is, and makes us figure why we all - Iron Man boosters and Cap supporters (rah!) alike - have been waiting for the moment when Spidey switched sides. As Spider-Man goes, so goes the nation.
The other day I got home from work (as I often do), and then (as I often do) I changed into some at-home clothes for the evening. You know, the sort of clothes I would never wear outside but keep around the house for comfy evenings-in.
About an hour later the water went out in the apartment, which has happened a few times in the past, so I (as I often do) went downstairs to the apartment below to ask them if they're having the same problem. The downstairs apartment is currently occupied by a single mother and her two sons. The single mother answered the door and I asked her if the water was out in her apartment. She said it was not. She was acting a bit funny - jumpy sorta - but she often is, so I (as I often do) paid it no mind.
About an hour and change later I was taking a piss and I caught a glance of myself in the bathroom mirror, and staring back at me was the answer to my neighbour's jumpy behaviour. In the mirror, my shirt said:
?tnuc tog
And though reading mirror writing is not necessarily my forté, a bell went off in my head.
D'oh!
(This story, and that shirt, are dedicated to Rebecca J. Wood, who definitely does have one.)
Slept late, woke up with a bit of a hangover, and a nice quiet house, sunshine, and a day off work. I had coffee and croissants for breakfast and watched Ocean's Twelve in various segments. I enjoy the shit out of that film. Everything should be so light and effortless. But then, this has been a week of con games and fine suits. I went off to the coffee shop to read comic books and enjoy a bit of the day; Daredevil was pretty good this month and I'm getting back into Front Lines in a big way. (How hot is Sally?) And Runaways and The Boys were tight. Quite obviously and firmly, I am a Marvel man.
This afternoon Daniel and I watched the rest of The Maxx and had a script meeting about Captain Napalm and the Legions of Havoc. I think it's relatively safe to make an announcement on that now: I am going to make that film in 2007 if I have things my way, one of three film projects I aim to complete in that calendar year. This one, particularly, will probably go ahead later in the year (September/October) and will require a bit of the government's $$$ to achieve, so plenty of steps ahead, but we have an agreement in principle on the thing, and I am excited almost beyond speechmaking. Somehow, in the five years since it was written, this script became exactly the thing I like making. Plus, title!
Tried out the new burrito place, came home and got my affairs in order, and plunked down in front of the TV for what turned out to be a surprisingly long-term plan of clearing out weeks of backlog on the PVR. Got caught up on a trio of sublime episodes of Studio 60, whose appeal was helped generously along by the sheer loveliness of Amanda Peet's early-term pregno-boobies. Wait something just occured to me: Steven Weber, awesome on Studio 60; former TV brother, Tim Daly, gulagged on horrible The Nine. Matthew Fox, couldn't be better on hit TV series Lost; former TV brother, Scott Wolf, also choking his life away on The Nine. Is The Nine where they send the less-able acting brothers?
Scotch in the glass, about ten more minutes before bed, and a single-day mini work week beginning and ending tomorrow. Life is good.
Well, pretty much... best show ever.
I don't think that could have gone better. As One Minute Film Festivals go, in fact, I'd say that was as good as it gets. I'm still a bit drunk from the after party (and also, generally, the GLORY), so who knows, but yeah, I don't think it's possible to be more satisfied with a show than I am with that one. No technical problems. No irritating weirdnesses of a personal or professional nature. Good teamwork, good filmmakers, good audience, good ticket sales, good shirt sales, good overall vibe and goodwill. And the monologue? Killed. Went off better on stage than it ever did in any rehearsal. No stuttering, no dropping key talk points, no nothin'. For five straight minutes I was on the perfect wave, man. It was that perfect slice of snow. Sweet P.
And people were so nice. Stunning quantities of applause/cheering between films. Enthusiasm about the show like we've never had before, about the variety and the quality and the amazingness of the story itself and the fact that this film festival exists at all. And when I went into the theatre at halftime, folks (strangers, mind you) actually freakin' swarmed me to tell me how much they were enjoying it. That has never happened before. Met a bunch of moviesTO fans, met a bunch of completely new people, met my parents and brother... at last!... met a tremendous number of really cool filmmakers who totally dug the vibe and made it really, really fun. Yeah, don't think that could have gone over better on any terms.
I feel like the James Bond of technical directors.
The after-party was terrific, too, great space at the Central, great vibe generally... man I'm sort of overwhelmed and in awe about the whole thing right now. Mer, Amy, Anthea... can't say enough about the entire thing or the dedicated nights-and-weekends teamwork that got us here. No matter what ever happened to get to this point or what happens after, we can say "this one thing was exactly, prismatically perfect." Fucking tremendous. What a show!
A midnight Mamo before a film festival, what could be better (and more rambling and incoherent) than that?
I am officially going to have to host the show completely naked. I rather like the idea. Like my father always said, if you're gonna make a mistake, make it a big one!
(Wait. That wasn't my father.)
Here's a cool one: go to this site and light the candle (which is fun anyway), and Bristol Meyers will donate a dollar to the fight against AIDS. They've only got about 23,000 lights so far. Try harder, internet!
Here's some more context on the PJ situation, which I didn't comment upon yesterday any more than to call the news bad. It is bad news, but hardly unexpected. The nut of the issue is the awareness that with Hobbit (unlike Rings) there are two studios involved, and one of those studios has finite time to move forward with the project. And since we all know none of these (studio) people give a fuck about anything other than the fact that a Rings spinoff will generate a guaranteed box office windfall (because the audience is always a picture behind in its responses), this situation is like holding up a fistful of cash and telling New Line that they should either grab it right now or accept that someone else is going to get it. Would you accept that?
Now, it occurs to one that what Peter and Fran did on the weekend could very well be a cunning tactic to ensure their continued involvement in the project, a flag-waving of their intentions as a means to signal to MGM that they need to get the New Line issue solved and out of the way so that everyone could move forward. Tricksy little hobbit.
BUT: I don't think PJ's really one to play the Hollywood game. I don't know the man personally and it is of course entirely possible that the persona he projects is not accurate to the kind of person he really is, but if his "congenial Kiwi" shtick is a ruse, it's a pretty freaking elaborate ruse. It's a ruse recorded in about 60 or 70 hours of supplemental video footage going back a full decade on his various projects. Given his apparent nature, then, I think it's in fact entirely likely that faced with the overwhelming legal wrangling of two studios fighting to get a piece of what is, after all, only ever going to be the scraps from the Lord of the Rings table, PJ and Fran looked at the situation and said "fuck the scraps." No matter what they or anyone else ever achieves with The Hobbit, the film will hold the same place in cinematic history as the Star Wars prequels: it will be an also-ran, an addendum to a great event. It's not worth fighting over a second place finish.
It would be nice to pin the moral of the story as "the studio should make it easy for the best talent to be involved, or they should accept that they don't get the best talent," but the reality is that the best talent is irrelevant. Brett Ratner could direct the proposed Hobbit duology, and the first film of the pair will still pull down at least $300 million domestically and half that again worldwide. The second picture may or may not fly depending on how good/bad the first film is, but given the source material, it's hard to imagine that the Hobbit flick, even if directed by a rank hack, could be any further down the chain than, say, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Maybe not the best film ever, but hard to imagine it being the worst. So overall with a studio looking at another billion dollars in gross revenue, why should they care who's shooting it?
This is becoming an editorial rant. It was supposed to be a link to a Variety page. But that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
I don't want to gloat too much about the tower of gladness and light that is my day job, but good lord in heaven, it's been awesome lately. The other day we had a bubble gum chewing contest. Today one of my vendors took my team out for a steak lunch. And on Friday? There were flying monkeys. Actual flying slingshot monkey toys that scream when you send them launching across a bank of cubicles. An aerial flotilla of shrieking kamikaze monkey plush. Flying. Monkeys. And sure, work too. But monkeys!
I had a notion that I wanted Big Fuckin' Hellboy to come in and stand on top of my cabinet, lording over the entire office space. But as loyal readers will recall, Big Fuckin' Hellboy broke his back a few years ago, and that makes him a bit... "dainty." So I bought a Medium Sized Fuckin' Hellboy to take into work instead. And I think him quite good.
So anyways, Friday was cool with the flying monkeys and yesterday was our last soccer game of the year and I took a tremendously satisfying full-body tumble onto my back. My body needed a decent pounding of earth, and hadn't had one this season, so it was nice to get it in for the last game. But otherwise, the weekend's work on the 1MFVF reel handed me my ass. We have a new Destroyer of Worlds - no longer Demetre - and while the show reel for Wednesday night is now in pretty decent shape (and I've already sold $150 worth of advance tickets, how cool am I!), the nightmares of 2004 will not go away. I know something is going to break. I know it.
Peter Jackson is being excluded from the opportunity to make The Hobbit, which might very well be the worst Monday morning news ever.
I fucking love this show. I'm in a high Bond fever right now anyway and admittedly, doing theme shows about the shit I love is a big part of the moviesTO appeal. But yeah. This is just fun.
Watching the Bond producers jump through so many hoops with Casino Royale - and to see so many of those jumps successful - calls upon the audience to engage with a Bond picture in a manner untried in what must be three decades. For the first time in a long time, a James Bond film is not automatic handwriting.
Advance tickets for this year's One Minute Film & Video Festival have gone on sale at Queen Video (480 Bloor Street West, NOT the one on actual Queen Street). They're $8 a pop and from what I'm told they're ever so pretty. Support my life! The (greatest) festival (ever) is just five days away!
So I get to spend the weekend lost in the process of creating a mini-DV reel and listening to The Two Towers complete score and King Kong commentary. It's a PJ sorta vibe.
Addendum: There's always one who thinks he can add ten seconds of credits after his minute has played out and I won't notice or do anything about it. He underestimates my pernicious nature.
This week we look at the Simpsons movie trailer, the Bond lead-up, and the Borat aftermath. Watch Matty Price officially become part of the backlash!
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Now, they say autocunnlingus is "hypothetical." I would like to believe, however, that all things are possible under God our King. Please don't take this away from me now that I have it.
This is why it's better when I don't read news.
Militant apologizes for beheading girls: I think this militant's mother clearly overemphasized the healing power of apology.
Baseball's first new pitch in decades: only the Japanese would name something the Demon Sphere Gyroball. Hiro should wield such a device on Heroes.
O.J. tells how he would have done the killings: Wait, they didn't convict O.J.?
I have spent the last five hours or so knee-deep in Kong, and I am very happy. (If a bit addled and stupid from the video overload.) I don't think the extended cut of the film really does anything for the movie at all. There are some nice moments; it's good to see an actual apotheosis for Jimmy (if a characteristically miniscule one) and the swamp scene was cool, if a bit disappointing in that I'm actually quite fond of plesiosaurs and would have liked to see one. But before the monster had even shown itself I realized that there was no way PJ was gonna be able to justify having an actual plesiosaur in four feet of water.
The theatrical cut is probably stronger on the whole, because once freaky-girl jumps out the tension just doesn't slacken for about an hour and change, not the case in the extended version. But I buy these shinydisks for the backstage pass as much as for the movie, and god-damn... a three and a half hour doc. Plus a little intro from PJ telling us how we're supposed to navigate his special features. Why? Because he's the motherfucking BUGMASTER, that's why. It really is my very favourite sideline in the entire filmmaking universe, watching that man and his team do their thing.
Here's postive word on The Hobbit, while we're on the subject. Nice if it's true.
An in-between show (Borat to Bond) wherein I nevertheless get fairly excited about November's DVD offerings (Supes! Monkey!) and other miscellany.
Fine, you're so clever: how do you hit on the hot offensewoman playing opposite you in the first playoff game of the season? No really, tell me. I want to know. (Just don't bother with the comments on this site which are, of course, still broken.)
I tell ya, it's an abomination. Everywhere I go. And I can do nothing. My Tn'O column for next week starts with the line, "When it comes to dating, I am essentially a special-needs child."
So anyways, first playoff game and we lost 1-0 to the top team in the league. I didn't even know we were playing the top team in the league and I'm glad I didn't, because knowing would have freaked me out a bit. We played hard. Particularly Jeff, who had a really solid second half offensively speaking - he was all over that ball. It was crazy. Unfortunately, I must count myself as the reason for our single-goal deficit. They had a good cadre of male offensive players who were big with the power, and I had position on one of them and was holding him away from the net, and I knew that if I just stayed where I was he'd be forced to shoot and deflect off me, and in spite of fully being aware of this fact I made the stupid decision to rush him. As soon as I did so I knew he would get around me and score, and so he did. Sucks because in a 0-0 shootout in overtime we would have had this suckers. And then we woulda been number one, baby, deal with that!
This is the best Lost theory I've read lately. The nut of the concept being that the island is, in fact, a giant heromaker. That it uses its black smoke monster holographic technology to set up each of its inhabitants with taylor-made hero journeys that will turn them into a generation of warriors, leaders, shamans, and mystics - basically, Jedi Knights - who can save the world. This explains pretty much everything in the Locke episode including why the island's only advice to John would have been that he had to rescue Eko; it also explains everything in the Eko episode up to and including why the island would have John rescue Eko only to have the island kill Eko the next day. It explains why Desmond was running naked through the woods after deciding to blow up the world, and why he can see the future now. The only thing it does not explain is the Others. I don't buy the "Others as threshold guardians/extension of Old Smokey" thing one little bit. I think they are something else.
Of course, this theory could easily be a pitch-perfect example of putting the cart before the horse, in that the writer of the article is essentially saying that Lost follows hero-journey archetypes to the letter as part of its overt plot, when as any writer is fully aware, it would hardly be possible for the characters to not follow those same archetypes as part of the show's covert structure.
See you in February.
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
In our last episode, Captain Picard was being held captive by the Borg, Locke had blown open the Hatch but we hadn't gone down inside yet, and Bex and I had eaten some truly atrocious eggs benedict at a dive called McSorley's on Bayview. We had only ourselves to blame, being as how sheer lethargy had kept us from walking to the Fate Bistro (our first choice). At the end of our McSorley's meal, Bex and I looked at each other and then began weighing the pros and cons of going over to the Fate and having the benny anyway.
Reason, health, and common sense would seem to suggest that this was a horrible idea.
So off we went!
Now, Tederick.com does not advocate the wanton consumption of eggs benedict. This shit is not good for you. Do you have any idea how much butter goes into a hollandaise sauce? I do. I've made it. I'm damn good at making it actually (I will post my benedict recipe in a future BenChro for your perusal). So do you think it's a particularly good idea to eat a meal that consists of no less than four eggs (two poached, two hollandaised) and half a stick of butter, twice in one day? It is not. Kids, play safe. Use condoms, and don't try this shit at home.
Fate's eggs benedict runs you $7.50 and is already a significant improvement over the McSorley's garbage. There's not enough hollandaise, to be sure, but it's served on a well-toasted english muffin, with well-fried peameal bacon, and the poached eggs are to die for. Cooked a smidgen under a medium to allow for some runniness (but not too much runniness... think blood rather than water. Damn why have the last three posts made reference to the consumption of blood? What the funk?), and white and fluffy as can be.
Hollandaise very decent, and side salad was all right if I hadn't just eaten another full meal an hour prior. The real gold star here goes to the coffee - this is the best coffee I've ever been served alongside a benny. It was worth it for the coffee alone.
Fate is a nice place that can't quite escape its office spacey vibe, but it serves a solid benny and I wish I'd just gone there in the first place, rain or no rain. Three eggs out of four!
Fate Bistro is located at 214 Laird Drive in Toronto. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
Today Bex and I decided to undo any physiological value of our yoga session and go get some eggs benedict. She enjoys "seeing Tederick.com in action." We were going to go to a place called Fate Bistro that's over on Laird, but it was raining when we left the Yogashoppe, and a place called McSorley's was only a few doors south and offered a benny. So in we went.
It may have been the largest mistake ever.
Look at that picture: does that look right to you? The bennies (she had one too) arrived not five minutes after having been ordered, which is never a good sign. The hollandaise, though plentiful, verged upon brown. Brown how? How do you achieve brown when you mix something yellow with something white? Was there baby blood in this hollandaise? Or was it - as may have been the case - entirely made up of mustard? Mustard in hollandaise??? There was a definite mustardy tinge to the proceedings which made the meal highly suspect, but it was but the first of a series of affronts.
The ham in this benny was ham. Like, cold cut ham. Like, the chef walked up to the A&P a block south of the restaurant and bought a packet of sliced ham and then put it, uncooked, in the eggs benedict, on top of a not-toasted english muffin and under a easy-medium poached egg. It was gross. I'm getting sick just thinking about it. The egg was all right, I guess, but it couldn't save the benny from itself. We have finally arrived at the Worst Benedict Ever.
This benny cost $6.99, which follows through on the "you get what you pay for" maxim. It came with home fries. They were good home fries. Bex said of the home fries, "Yeah, they mean business." But in yet another ignominy, there weren't nearly enough of them. And the coffee in this dive? Terrible beyond human understanding. So there you have it: not a single element of this entire meal succeeded.
McSorley's gets the Benedict Chronicles' first 0 eggs out of 4. Here they aren't:
Bex and I, by this point, were horribly unsatisfied and felt that our decision to not go to the Fate Bistro was a gigantic error in judgement. Nauseous, disspirited, and not even all the way full. Only one thing could solve this horrifying debacle.
Oh no.
Oh yes....
McSorley's Saloon and Grill can be found at 1544 Bayview Avenue in Toronto. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
GOOG9EMBARGOGOOG9
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This post in no way refers to the real Cs*ba V*gh. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Jack Palance is gone. I'm pretty sure the first encounter I had with him was as Carl Grissom in Batman, which delighted and terrified me when I was 13. Actually "delighted and terrified" was a good pair of descriptors for Jack Palance. He was one enjoyable, scary old son of a bitch.
Ed Bradley is gone too, which is also strange and sad. He was my favourite, the only 60 Minutes guy I'd actually want to have a dog and a beer with. But admitedly I came to 60 Minutes under duress. It was everything painfully mature and sickly foreshadowing about Sunday night. It was never something I wanted to like. What does this have to do with EB? Nothing. I still have a kick-ass interview he did with Spielberg back in the Hook days, though.
You know, for pretty much the entirety of my time with Bearshark, the DVD Wave was like an unofficial third member of the team, and Hope - DVD Wavestress extraordinaire - was basically a Bearshark babe. (I don't think she ever knew this, nor would have wanted to.) When I started working at the current (I can no longer call it "new," being as that it's almost a year old) job, and with me having no car, it basically became impossible for me to be a patron of a store that was in Richmond Hill (then Markham), so the DVD Wave just dropped out of my life, and not without a little bit of sadness - for a shinydisk emporium, it was the closest thing to the Happiest Place on Earth this far north of the Silver Snail. I even sort of worked there for about two hours on a Tuesday just before Christmas one time, helping customers find shit, because I knew the place that well.
Anyways, today was Hope's last day at the Wave, and so Jason and I pointed the Bearsharkmobile north and went to see her one last time. It was good for me: I hadn't realized I actually needed closure on visiting a fucking store. But I guess I did. Bearshark was a big part of my life for five years, and our madcap DVD excursions were a big part of Bearshark. So once again, a book closes. I'm getting leaner by the day.
Below on the left, we see the prototype for Sideshow's 12" Aragorn figure. On the right, the just-released photos of what Sideshow customers will actually be receiving in the mail this month.
I am so glad I didn't order this toy. The item on the left is so damned gorgeous that I very nearly cracked and bought it. The one on the right looks like a rapist. An actual rapist with bad fashion sense and a sword. The paint job on the head, particularly, is a freaking disaster (you can see more pix here). Honestly if I got this in the mail, I would return it. The clothing between the proto and the production model doesn't even look like it was done at the same scale; does the fabric not look like it's two times thicker than it used to be?
Anyways this has me damned nervous about my Boromir figure (which I did order), but I will hold out hope on account of how awesome the Star Wars figures are.
I have a lot of problems with the "completely humiliate someone and ruin his/her life live in the popular media" thing, but someone forwarded this to me at work and if you can tie up your conscience in the broom closet for ten minutes to get all the way through it, it's pretty dang funny. (Because, I suppose, in order: cheating husbands are funny, foreign people are funny, and fat radio jockeys laughing are funny. God I feel yucky.)
But I particularly like the part where the wife rebuts the husband's point about "not using the mouth" by saying that she has learned on American television that men are supposed to "use the mouth" on women, too. I didn't know American television regularly promoted the importance of cunnilingus but if so, bravo for the yanks! Maybe some progress really is getting made, somewhere in this neo-Victorian dark age.
Yet another hot mamolucian podcast. This time I had a migraine! I don't know if you can tell or not, I haven't listened to it yet. But otherwise it's the second of two podcasts this week about Borat, and also the second that makes liberal use of the "I was at the Borat Incident" backstory.
Last night laid me low. The migraine persisted until around midnight, after which through the dark alchemies of painkillers and stress, I began veritably climbing the walls. I spent four hours fighting through a hailstorm of anxiety, restlessness, and an endless turning of wheels. Finally managed to shut it all down just before four in the morning - having watched the Fight Clubbish late broadcast of Lost, at least - and slept a hasty three hours and twenty-two minutes before waking up in skin that felt like leather ruined by a rainstorm, and eyeballs scraped clean on both sides by a carrot peeler. Stumbled into work inhaling coffee and sweat, useless in conversation and action and in even the most menial tasks, until wisely advised to get a bacon and egg sandwich and a moment to clear my head. The clearing works, at least; through a fugue of semi-hallucinations and the after-effects of my body having, in the most fetid and self-denying way, attempted to reject its own head, I see the clear spot for a brief moment, and the gears tumble into place. In an uncanny microcosmic immitation of the macrocosmic life decisions I have made in the past month, the pieces on the day's chessboard silently stand up and rearrange themselves in the order they need to be: here's what I have to do. Here's how I have to do it. And... go.
Tonight, of all nights, the ABC digital feed breaks and I can't watch Lost.
Seriously suck it.
It hasn't been a great couple of days generally, and I have been fighting the migraine to end all migraines since about noon today. Now my eyeballs actually hurt on the outside. What's that about?
I saw about two minutes of Filliony goodness but no more. I have a low-def recording starting at midnight, by which point if there is any mercy in the cosmos I will be in a deep, deep sleep.
So I haven't received a comment on this site in five days, neither regular nor junk. Thinking this fishy, I sent myself a test comment and discovered that for some reason or another, I'm not able to moderate new comments. So if you've tried commenting in the past five days and haven't seen your note pop up on the site yet, that's why.
The finest Movable Type minds in the world have been consulted but I've gotta say, the system's slow downslide into a complete inability to maintain itself has me completely pissed off. Is it really this hard? REALLY??
Knowing that Borat is real is the key to Borat's successes. Knowing that Baron Cohen really does have his moustache stuffed cleanly up a fat Kazakhstani producer's asshole, in a nude wrestling match that no cock-stocking could possibly have helped, is what elevates a depraved Jackass gag to a level of comedic scope as yet unattempted by man.
Yesterday I was at Lick's and this annoying teenager was strolling back and forth in the ordering line over and over again with a milkshake in her hand. (I think she worked at Lick's but was off-duty, so she was hanging out with her on-duty staff friends.) It was really getting annoying so I imagined that the next time she passed me in the line, I was going to trip her, and that vanilla milkshake was going to hit the ground and explode, spraying all the bystanders with frothy white goo. And no sooner had this thought run through my mind when, completely of her own accord, the girl did trip and did spray frothy white vanilla goo all over about six or seven people. It looked like a horrible crime scene except in white instead of red. It was brilliant!
This put me in mind of the fact that on Friday my boss and I were talking about what would happen if one of those window-washer guys fell off the platform in the performance of his job. And I swear to you: not ten minutes later, the window-washer guy did fall off his platform! He was only on the fourth storey of the building, and he hit a tree on the way down that seemed to have broken his fall by shearing off all the branches on the north side, so by all reports he will be fine and they only took him to the hospital as a cautionary measure.
Nevertheless: determining a strong link here, I have decided to fight crime as The Mentalist! Fortifying my brainskills in my arctic igloo, I will strike fear into the hearts of criminals and teenage layabouts everywhere! My gown shall be a midnight-blue satin fringed with a deep purple cape! My car, the MentalistMobile (or MentMo for short) will thunder down the streets of New Haverstock in the deepest night, recognizeable (as always) by the great, spinning brain made of pink-and-blue neon piping that adorns its rear chassis! Beware, vagrants, when the azure corona of the brain's glow sees fit to lighten your neighbourhood! The Mentalist! is there!! ALL SHALL FLEE BEFORE MY BRAIN POWER!!!
I want some honey.
Turns out this was a "big show." Half an hour of me just blethering without taking a breath of a drink of water. Damn! But I had to cover Borat, Rendezvous with Madness, and Flags of our Fathers, so it took time. I was going to do the entire show in character as Borat, but I figured that would push even my abilities to take a joke way too far.
It would sound somewhat strange to say it, but right around the moment when Borat and his manager were in a drag-out naked wrestling match on their hotel bed over a pinup of Pamela Anderson, and Borat had his moustachioed face stuffed right into the voluminous folds of his manager's flabby ass crack, something like a great cosmic tumbler clicked into place in my soul. In some way, I knew immediately, I have been travelling my whole life to get to this moment. And now that I'm here, I can see filthy Kazakhstani butt-hair for miles.
I watched I Am Curious: Yellow last night, a film that was seized by American customs and labelled obscene when it was brought into the country in 1969, because it showed penises and pubic hair and oral-genital contact. I published my first sex column today on blogTO about how you can't buy Lost Girls in the city any more, but I can look over from where I'm lying in bed right now and see my copy of that naughty, dangerous work on my shelf. Over in the Goo, some or all of the Box girls are going to see Shortbus at the Book Shelf, because they can. Shortbus will be on my list of the best films of the year and will be marked alongside all these other beautiful, treacherous things that are doing more than just treading the status quo on the planet Earth. Real art still breaks like VCRs, and the noise still gives me THE SHIVERS.
And in its way, Borat is in there too, because man howdy, you can't do that shit on television. But you can do it somewhere, and I can see it here, and not get shot. Pretenders beware: when someone really cracks the mold, it is readily apparent not just that they have done it, but that everyone else has not. Thank goodness we still get to see things like this, and all the nauseating brilliance of their ruined flesh.
Daylight savings completely messed me up this year. I don't know why, because I'm usually pretty indifferent to time changes... but this whole week has been screwy. On Tuesday I fell asleep at 9:00 and woke up the next day at 5:30, and since I'd already planned to go to work later than usual, I spent a couple of hours watching Aqua Teen. And now it's 7:30 in the morning on a Saturday and I just can't be in bed any more. Oh, bed pain.
Last night the boss let me go a bit early, I went downtown and dropped off the RWM screeners I reviewed this week and then went to Burrito Boyz and the Snail, which are now permanently connected in my mind: go get comics, go get a burrito. They live in the same place. Anyhoo being that I'm reading Kavalier and Clay at the mo', my comics nostalgia is sort of through the roof. This week I bought JLA #3 and Superman Confidential. JLA was hard for me because I'm still sort of on the outside looking in at the DC universe - I don't know who 90% of the characters are. The only reason I'm digging the book is because I twigged to the fact that I actually had a Red Tornado action figure when I was a kid (and didn't know who he was) and now Red Tornado is easily the best element of the current story arc. And as for Supes, I would have enjoyed it a lot more if DC hadn't ruined the comic with ads. I mean, this thing is fucking ridiculous. Three two-page ad spreads, a six-page mini story about the Teen Titans, and to top it all off, a pair of fucking 3-D glasses that act as unintentional bookmarks on pages 4 and 20! If I were Tim Sale I'd be spitting blood right now. The comic is virtually unreadable, and nothing suffers more than his gorgeous art.
I took the long way home - meaning, I sat on the Queen streetcar as we inched our way through traffic, night fell, and I read Batman. Got home, spent about twenty minutes in rank indecision, and then watched I Am Curious: Yellow and chased it with "Spock's Brain." No illicit narcotics were involved; better that. Sometimes I worry that if I involved drugs in a scenario like that, my brain would actually rip in half.
Linking outwards: Star Wars costuming! Remember when I used to do that? Well, here are the winners in Rebelscum's costume contest this year. I'm pretty sure the little girl who won second place for her Zam Wesell is the same one who was trundling around Celebration last year dressed as a pitch-perfect miniature Aurra Sing, so clearly her parents are working through some pretty serious bounty hunter issues. And Darth Waiter? With the training remote pepper grinder? Priceless!
The most heartbreaking of the patients is Brittany, a dour-eyed 15-year-old who looks like Jena Malone (had the actress been hit by a garbage truck) and must contend with the hormone-soaked angst of teenage in addition to the very real dangers of her condition. When Brittany's insurance runs out and she is forced to leave the facility, the rest of the women hold a Hail Mary counselling session for her, in which Brittany sobs "I just want everyone to let me die" before disappearing out into the real world.
Click here to read my review, and here to learn more about the Rendezvous with Madness film festival (November 9-18 in Toronto).
It's not as good as the Natalie Portman gangsta rap hotness, but it's still adorable: Nobody's Watching Lost.
The most stunningly pertinent piece of junk mail ever just arrived in my inbox.
The sender's name was: Question Service
The subject line was: Cockburn American Empire: Speak
Naturally I opened it, expecting it to be D-Coc related. It was not. But now I think these elements - the Question Service, the Cockburn American Empire, the strange "Speak" missive - are pointing us towards the next great deconstructionist Daniel Cockburn project. Is it a short film? Is it a puppet show? Is it a dystopic vision of the future so brave that it will make Brazil look like dog crap? Is it all of these things somehow horribly combined into a kind of stunted mutant figure with sprigs of thatchy hair placed haphazardly across its violated, ruined flesh? Time will tell.
I am lonely. I had a very pleasant dream last night about someone who does not exist, and it was lovely, but it can only have been the biproduct of a rather dour October and an increased feeling of estrangement from anything like a normal dating life. I completely loathe comparing myself to other people and think that it is generally a bad idea, but it is so hard watching the rest of the world moving to the degree that it is. I'm that cliché shot of the guy sitting on the bench trying to keep absolutely still because the camera is undercranking to speed up the motion of everyone around me. Fuck! I'm not even an original shot! Stupid movie of my life.
Oh, terrific. Waste the guy I like, but leave those two despicable new Baywatch babes that they've inexplicably added to the already-corpulent cast standing.
Enjoying:
Not enjoying:
War movies! Americans! And hilarious waiters!
