Author: matt

Little Jackson Pollocks, Exploring in Oil Paints
New York Times 10/4/04
Which Was Painted By a Child?
New York Times 10/3/04
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
New York Times 9/28/04

Oy, we’re kvelling over here about how many mentions of Jews there are in today’s New York Post! Nu, it gives us such nachas to see that this city’s true paper of record is finally recognizing Jews’ valuable contribution to the city!
First, there’s an article on Jews in reality TV shows sensitively headlined Jew-Insult ‘Apprentice’ Fired Twice by Don Kaplan and Braden Keil (two nice Jewish boys, yes?). Strangely, this piece about Apprentice contestant Jennifer Crisafulli‘s anti-semitic comments (“It was those two old Jewish fat ladies!”) is not on the Post website (conspiracy?), but you can read all about it here. (Why isn’t this article online? Such a shande!)
Then the Post saw fit to run a press release article by Suzanne Kapner (a nice Jewish girl, maybe?) about a hip [sic.] Jewish clothing company called Jewcy.
From the hilarious headline (New Jewcy.com Web Site’s Offerings Are Strictly Kosher) to the article’s pitch-perfect lede (“Call it knish kitsch.”), this has to be one of the best, most spot-on pieces about Jews I’ve ever encountered! And I’ve read tons of Jewy crap!
Since the very headline was a plug for Jewcy junk, you just gotta check out their website for hilarious T-shirts emblazoned with such clever, easily accessible Yiddishisms as Yenta, Kvetch, and Meshuggenah! It’s shtetl fabulous—even for your shagetz boyfriend who gives your mother such tsuris and makes her want to plotz!
Feh, it’s enough to make you chaloshes! I just wish I could remember Jewcy‘s URL and help them make some more gelt. Oh, well, guess they get bubkis.

“This nation of ours has got a solemn duty… We have a duty to defeat this enemy. We have a duty…”
“Now, we’re doing our duty…”
“…active duty…”
“We’re being challenged like never before, and we have a duty…”
” It will help change the world. That we can look back and say we did our duty…”
“…the enemy attacked us, Jim, and I have a solemn duty…”
“…active duty…”
“I add two active-duty divisions…”

Where on earth does hard-hitting editorial cartoonist Sean Delonas come up with his ideas?
Oh, right.

That’s a heart. And it’s for you. Well, it’s for you if you plan to blog about I ♥ Huckabees this week.
But be careful. It’s easy to mess up this special tag and wind up with the wrong title, like:
I ♣ Huckabees (Way too violent.)
I ♠ Huckabees (The ASPCA does advocate the spaying and neutering of Huckabees, but only by a trained veterinarian.)
I ® Huckabees (Only David O. Russell can say that!)
I ‾ Huckabees (Only Jon Brion can say that, and he doesn’t tend to over-score the movies he works on. Well, other than Magnolia, that is.)
And, finally, a title that seems unlikely since Huckabees is opening in limited release against Ladder 49 and Shark Tale this Friday:
I $ Huckabees.
I’d ♥ that, but I doubt we’ll see it.

Hey, world: Stop Playa-Hatin’, okay?
First, you piss in our PBR by telling us that the batteries in our iPods have about as much lifespan as a potato clock.
Now, you rain on our dodgeball game by telling us that our bikes would be safer secured with a diary lock! Goddamnit! Why must you hate on our hipster lifestyles*? Are you jealous or something?
What’s next? Onion T-shirts cause cancer? Are you gonna tell us that The Killers abuse child labor laws? Oh, is blogging going to be characterized by the DSM V as a mental illness? Then I bet you’ll tell us that PBR is already 70 percent piss! Thanks for sharing, you goddamn haters.
* Yes, your middle-aged boss has an iPod and your mom has a bike. Maybe your boss and your mom are hipsters, ever think of that, jackass? (I guarantee your boss has a Member’s Only jacket in his closet and your mom wears those flat nurse’s shoes.) Next you’re gonna tell me that making fun of old people and squares makes you look like an immature, bitter, Urban Outfitters-shopping monkey-boy! Goddamn haters!

A Dirty Shame, feat. Waters (lower right)…Jersey Girl, feat. Smith (upper left)
Designing movie posters isn’t easy.
Believe me, we’ve done enough parody movie posters around here to know. Trying to sum up a two hour film in one image while tapping into various mutually exclusive market forces—Teenage boys! Adult Women! Down-Low Homosexuals!—is hard work. And even though it’s essentially a marketing medium, there are enough iconic examples of the form to make designers want to aim for the rafters.
But listen up movie poster designers, there are some things that are beyond lame. Like squeezing the movie’s past-his-prime director into the poster like an apparition: These eerie, out-of-context photos are like Banquo’s ghost crashing an otherwise fine party.
Take the poster for John Waters’ latest, A Dirty Shame. What does Waters‘ creepy visage (the director himself is fond of pointing out how closely he resembles a child molester) add to the poster that Selma Blair‘s pneumatic prostheses or Johnny Knoxville‘s Gene Simmons-esque fake tongue don’t? If anything, most young filmgoers have no idea who John Waters is and probably assume he’s just another cartoon pervert in a cartoonishly perverted movie.
And then we have Jersey Girl, the DVD and video box for which shows Kevin Smith looking as surprised as we are that he’d be involved in this sub-PAX daddy-daughter cutie-patootie ‘comedy.’ (The masked bandit over at Defamer already deconstructed this box to great effect in two recent entries.)
It’s only natural to make some connection between the quality of these films (“crammed with wince-inducing contrivances, false notes and fizzled jokes,” The Times Stephen Holden wrote with noble restraint) and the desperate attempt to remind potential filmgoers of the directors’ alleged marks of quality. Does the movie suck?, goes this line of thinking. Then let’s slot in the creator and hope that at least the hardcore fans come out to see it. (And hardcore fans don’t come much harder core than those of Mr. Smith’s: someone somewhere bought this. He—certainly he—may have even watched part of it.)
But what about the early example of Wong Kar Wai‘s excellent Chungking Express, the box for which is marked by the stubbled face of Quentin Tarantino who served as the film’s “executive producer”? (Read: the cool director who convinced Harvey to distribute the film in America.) Adding QT to the design was bad, but hardly a red flag for the film, which ten years after its release is still enjoyable. (Faye Wong dancing around to her own cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams” and Tony Leung talking to his forlorn bar of soap are still great.)
I just hope we’ve seen the last of this trend. God forbid this chump‘s carb face starts popping up on the posters for his next couple affronts to cinema.

Yes, we’re reusing this picture. How could we not?
And now, the easiest spec script sale in the history of man (from Done Deal):
Title: Untitled Addario-Syracuse Pitch
Log line: Two intensely competitive rivals on the women’s beach volleyball tour must learn to combine their vastly different playing styles to win back their honor.
Writer: Lisa Addario and Joey Syracuse
Agent: Sandra Lucchesi of The Gersh Agency
Buyer: Paramount Pictures
Price: Mid-six figures
Genre: Sports Drama
Logged: 9/9/04
More: Pitch. Preemptive buy. Vincent Newman Entertainment will produce.
No title, stars, or director? I know I’ve bought my ticket already!

Hell just got a little bit more crowded, according to today’s New York Times.
Richard G. Butler, founder of Aryan Nations, died at age 86. (Not to be mistaken with Richard Butler, the former UNSCOM chairman who warned us about Saddam’s phantom W.M.D.’s.)
According to the Times‘s Daniel Wakin (Richard G. Butler, 86, Founder of the Aryan Nations, Dies), Butler, who had congestive heart failture, died in his sleep in Hayden, Idaho. No word on how much drawn-out, agonizing pain the old man endured or his karmic fate as a furrier’s mink in his next life.
The reason I point towards this piece is to address one of my biggest pet peeves: the misspelling of Adolf Hilter’s Hitler’s [Thanks, Matt!] name. According to Wakin, Butler, “lived out his final years in a house adorned with crosses, relics and books about Adolph Hitler and Holocaust denial.”
Sure, we all make mistakes, but this is one that seems to occur so often in publications it’s like a strange, unshakable tick. One possible excuse may be Microsoft Word’s spell-check preference for “Adolph” over “Adolf”: Can anyone explain that?
When “Adolph Hitler” appears on the web or squeaks through at an alt-weekly, you can almost overlook it, but because of its status as “the paper of record” a mistake like this in the Times makes it almost canonical, especially for copy editors who’ll frantically Nexis/Lexis the spelling during hellish, late night closes for their jobs and make the same error. So, hypothetical, overworked copy editors: use The New Yorker, and ignore MS Word, okay?
So, once and for all: It’s Adolf Hitler. ‘F’ ‘im—please.