SNL castmember Laraine Newman on Al Franken’s butt:
“He had this very defined musculature. His butt was like a cut basketball. Which, you know, you don’t normally see in comedy writers.”
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Category: Shallow
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How to get a head (or two) in Hollywood
The worst movie job ever: Cydney Cornell, hair stylist to Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
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The week of our discontent
…was not spent reading John Steinbeck, but rather, sorting out a whole slew of nasty technical troubles that arose with the lovely low culture database. Regardless, it’s all better now, like a world without first-run episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm that do a ghastly job of tying in painfully long segments from The Producers and an overacting (or is it underacting) husband-and-wife duo in the form of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. But that’s all behind us, now.
Oh, and confidential to MovableType: Fuck you, buddy.
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Naming names
Spartan is the name of David Mamet’s new movie. It’s called Spartan, this movie. It’s out Friday. This David Mamet movie, it’s got stars like Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, and William H. Macy. He’s no first-timer, William H. Macy.
The story, well, the plot, is about a kidnapping. This plot is intense. The story, too. The plot and the story, they’re both very intense, they’re very fucking intense.
And the title. Spartan. This title got us thinking. It’s a play on words, this title. A description of the main character, right? But also Mamet’s style, the style everyone calls Mametian. Which is easy to make fun of, right? But at least he’s being honest about it. What if other directors did the same? These other guys, see, they’d put it all out there, honest to the world.
Brett Ratner: Base
Michael Bay: Epileptic
Mel Gibson: Intense
Peter Jackson: Long
Martin Scorsese: Rote
Michael Mann: Remote
Robert Altman: Old
Steven Spielberg: Employed
Nora Ephron: Palatable
Coen Brothers: Sinking
Spike Lee: Declining, but still shot-through with vitality and inventiveness despite annoying public persona and occasional lapses into self-parody
Peyton Reed: Candy
Steven Soderbergh: Fluctuating
David Fincher: Dark
David O. Russell: Difficult
Terrence Malick: Slow
David Gordon Green: Green
Alexander Payne: Nebraskan
Kevin Smith: Insipid
Wes Anderson: Precious
Paul Thomas Anderson: Florid
Lars von Trier: Rigid
Lynne Ramsay: Oblique
Vincent Gallo: Narcissistic
Rose Troche: Lesbian
Lisa Cholodenko: Experimental
Michel Gondry: Dreamy
Spike Jonze: Hip
Sofia Coppola: Coached
Roman Coppola: Bitter
This, despite the fact that the latest Rolling Stone rehashes the EMI-versus-artistic freedom issue yet again. That’s roughly three consecutive issues of America’s most revered rock, er, lad, er, rock magazine that have documented DJ Danger Mouse’s travails of late (isn’t there some expression about “beating a dead mouse” or somesuch cliche?).
Nope, this particular post is for those obsessive souls who took their LPs of the Beatles’ White Album and played John Lennon’s incoherent utterances backwards, until they were able to discern that Paul was, in fact, dead.
Get out your copy of Danger Mouse’s Grey Album or, if you downloaded it, work with the MP3 files directly. Acquire a freeware audio editor. Take the eleventh track, “Interlude,” and reverse it. Sit back and pray as you listen to the track which follows, whose lyrics we’ve helpfully transcribed for you:
“6…6…6…Murder, murder Jesus…6…6…6…
Leave ni**as on death’s door.
Murder, murder Jesus…6…6…6.”
Of course, we all know that “asterisk” sounds awfully garbled when spoken either forward or in reverse, so you may want to substitute those asterisks mentioned above for the letter G. Just a su**estion.
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Mustang Viggo
Beautiful Beasts: Viggo Mortensen and his costars
Hidalgo opens tomorrow in theaters everywhere. Based on the trailer, the film appears to be about the passionate bond between scruffy Viggo Mortensen and his strikingly beautiful horse.
Haven’t we seen this movie already? Wasn’t it called A Perfect Murder?
What’s the deal with Viggo and ungulates? It’s not just the Spence-educated variety, it’s the real ones, too.
The director’s edition DVD of The Lord of the Ring: The Two Towers restores several scenes that show the deep bond between Aragorn and his horse, Brego. This is no mere directorial indulgence, it’s apparently vital to the Rings trilogy.
According to the copy on the back of the Aragorn and Brego collector’s toy:
Aragorn found a kinship with Brego, the wild horse of Rohan’s late Prince Theodred, who had been cut down by orcs at the Fords of Isen. Brego was traumatized by the loss of his lord, but Aragorn’s gentle hand stayed the beast’s fear, and in time he came to bear the king in exile as faithfully as he had once borne the Prince of Rohan.
Well, that clears that right up.
Ladies, if you love Viggo (that means you, Alex K.!), be sure to wash your hair with some Kiehl’s Equine Shampoo before galloping off to see Hidalgo. At least one person in the relationship should have clean, shiny hair.
Related: Hidalgo also features C. Thomas Howell. It’s been a long while, gentle friend, beloved soul man.
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Return of the King
The Real Messiah: Tony Soprano and His disciples, (photo by Annie Leibovitz)
The Sopranos returns to HBO this Sunday. The show’s been on hiatus for fifteen months, but returns just in time to save the world.
Maybe you’ve heard about the little culture war going on in America right now: frightening religious evangelism at the muliplexes, a bigoted election year proposal for a new Constitutional amendment , Clear Channel pulling Howard Stern from radio stations under pressure from the FCC, seemingly endless debate about a pop singer’s exposed breast. What we need right now is something to unify us, something we can all get behind. The Sopranos may just be the thing.
What we also need is a strong leader, someone who understands the moral ambiguities of this world but has the clear(ish) vision to (mostly) know the difference between right and wrong and who even occasionally does the right thing. Someone who has a leadership philosophy personally cobbled together from Sun Tzu and “that book Prince Matchabelli,” rather than handed to him by Karl Rove and Hop on Pop.
Re-enter Tony Soprano, and not a minute too soon.
Tony may seem like an unlikely hero, but who else do we have? (Superman? Guy’s a total fuckin’ square.) In Tony, we get a hero these times deserve: He’s powerful, but gentle, decisive, but racked by insecurities. Tony’s complicated, off-center sense of morality is the perfect antidote to the simplistic manichean world views of our elected officials and the supercilious ‘talking heads’ who attempt to contextualize them for us on TV.
Tony knows this world is fucked, which is why he feels it’s up to each of us to define our own destinies. As he told his shrink in the first episode of the series “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
If that’s not a “God is dead” for our century, what is? (Ask Anthony, Jr. who said “God is dead” and he’ll tell you “Nitsch”.) Through his actions and the ways he deals with their consequences, Tony shows us that we all in our own ways upset the moral ecology: if there’s a shit storm all around you, you better look in the mirror before you shake your fist at the sky.
With the return of The Sopranos, we’ll all finally have something to talk about besides the election, terrorism, the economy, and conflicting interpretations of family values. (Well, those of us willing and able to pay for HBO, at least.) And Slate will bring back its panel of shrinks to analyze the show for us, instead of relying on pundits to read the entrails of the body politic. Soon, Tony and Carmela will return to magazine covers and supplant that other power-hungry dynastic clan. And what a great day that will be.
Besides, this culture war’s gone on long enough, hasn’t it? Let’s bring on the entertainment. It’s gotten to the point where no one can even remember why the war started in the first place. As Tony once said, “This whole war could have been averted. Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this.”
That’s almost a little kinda true, right?
The Sopranos airs Sunday at 9PM EST on HBO.
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Exclusive: low culture blogs the Oscars®!
low culture asked Matt Haber’s dog to blog the 76th Academy Awards (“The Oscars®,” to those in the industry) in real time. Here’s her report from the biggest night in show biz:
8:30: I wonder if there’s anything left in my bowl. Sometimes I go back into the kitchen and there’s still a couple of pieces of food in my bowl for me. Maybe I should check.
8:32: Nothing in the bowl. Do I want water? Okay, a little sip.
8:33: Uch, I’m so itchy.
8:33: Ahhhhhhh… Scratching feels so good.
8:35: I wonder if there’s anything left in my bowl.
8:35: Damnit. Do I want water?
9:00: I’m not sleeping, just resting my eyes. I’m not even tired—
9:52: Itchy ear, itchy ear! Okay, that’s better. Maybe I should rest my eyes some more…
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Slipped Right Through His Fingers
Mike Tyson, London, July 21, 1989, Courtesy: The Ring Magazine. (From Boxer)
“Bankrupt boxer Mike Tyson is financially down for the count, saying things have gotten so bad that he’s struggling just to put food on the table.”
BROKE TYSON: I’LL FIGHT FOR FOOD, by Adam Miller, The New York Post, Feb. 27, 2004
Whenever I read about Mike Tyson’s travails—rape convictions, ear-biting, arguments with reporters, acrimonious divorces, fist-fights in a Brooklyn hotel, facial tattoos, bankruptcy—I always think of the scene in Barbara Kopple‘s phenomenal, empathic 1993 documentary Fallen Champ in which Tyson, age 15, has a breakdown between bouts at the 1982 National Junior Olympics in Colorado and sobs to his trainer Teddy Atlas:
“It’s all right now… I’m Mike Tyson… everybody likes me, yes, everybody likes me… I’ve come a long way, I’m a fighter now, I’m Mike Tyson.”
Just beneath the tabloid spectacle of Tyson’s public decline is a very real tragedy. Unfortunately, Tyson is such an unsympathetic figure that it’s hard to feel bad for the guy. Sadly, his story’s gonna get a lot worse before it ends.
“Billy Crudup, who starred in Big Fish, has managed to make crud enthralling.”
Unabashed Stars Break the Shackles of the Name Game, by Virginia (insert your own lame joke about my last name) Heffernan, The New York Times, Feb. 27, 2004.