by Danielle Berg



The Printed Blog, a new venture by Josh Karp, of Chicago, is taking blog posts across the Internet and putting them to print. A small team of (for now) volunteers is fighting the strong media current with a paddleboat, and as far as interest goes - it seems to be working.

It’s not that the Printed Blog is trying to change the direction of the current; they’re simply rowing in the opposite direction. The first issue isn’t perfect, but it’s fresh. Blog posts taken from various sources and times (some posts were written over a year ago) allow entries to escape expectations of time-sensitivity, and is a great addition to my Internet addiction.

Some posts are great (“Don’t Make Friends at Work”) and others less than great (“Blog Annoyances”). Subjects range from bound-up wives to reflective plants, and photos, like the text, range from amateur to fantastic.

“Don’t Make Friends at Work,” written by Brad Boose almost two years ago, is one of the more humorous posts. Following the link to his blog, I learned that he no longer updates the linked address, and was fired from his job when his boss found out about his blog - which he updated from the office. But he got a much better job, so good for him. (Not having a time stamp on your blog is a good idea. Just sayin’.)

After sharing Brad’s piece with my coworkers - who, like Brad’s, are much older than me, but misery trumps age so we’re buddies* - I got to thinking about another office anomoly. Outside the office, coworkers have the terrible habit of talking about work, when all you want to do is engage in temporary amnesia-activities such as watching House or Lost, or stuffing down burritos, or any combination of these things. Yet inside the office, coworkers will talk about anything but work. So when you’re trying to concentrate on the article you’re editing, you get to hear all about your coworker’s sex life or another coworker’s eighth husband. If you’re lucky, you get a detailed report on a bunion, or a heated debate about how to get rid of the smell of poop in the bathroom (answer: keep the window open; stop spraying that tropical shit that makes the room smell exactly like that - tropical shit).

You can read the first issue here. I rather enjoyed the cupcake article as well, and the comic strip.

*Don’t worry, we’re not really miserable. That’s just a euphemism.

Tags: eighth husband office habits the printed blog
January 31, 2009 at 7:46pm ∞

by Daniel Erenberg

The new Marvel ongoing series, Dark Avengers, wisely plays off of the fascinating results of their big 2008 event series, Secret Invasion. Norman Osborn, the former Green Goblin, has wrested control of S.H.I.E.L.D., the world peace-keeping task force, away from Tony Stark, disbanded the whole thing and set up a new organization, which he calls H.A.M.M.E.R. (in this issue, he sets a colleague with the task of what the acronym will actually mean). In getting this honor from the President, Osborn also takes official control of the government-sponsored super-team, the Avengers. The only former Avengers that agree to stick around are the schizophrenic basket case, The Sentry, and Ares, the God of War. Osborn fills the rest of the team with such shady characters as Venom, Bullseye and Moonstone, fresh from the murderous Thunderbolts squad, Marvel Boy, plucked from a prison for super-powered individuals, and Wolverine’s insane son, Daken.

Brian Michael Bendis has set up quite an interesting cast for this book. It’s a risky proposition: a mainstream superhero book, filled with murderers and psychopaths. But Bendis, who may be the best writer Marvel has at its disposal, knocks this one out of the park. You can tell how passionate Bendis is about a project from the way he writes. The mindless sci-fi of Halo: Uprising and the fluffy fun of his run on Mighty Avengers were reminders that Bendis would be better off doing something darker and more psychological, like his early graphic novels or his work on Daredevil or Powers.

David Mamet is a huge influence on Bendis and you don’t have to read an interview with the man to learn this. It’s right there in his dialogue. And, in Dark Avengers, it crackles. The book is packed with long, winding conversation. It’s a superhero book with relatively little action (especially since it’s mostly a set-up issue where we meet the team), but it hardly matters when there’s this much movement in the dialogue.

The art is by Mike Deodato Jr. who gives his pencils the same noir-ish tone he did in Thunderbolts and, most recently, in Wolverine: Origins. He does have a propensity for using photo reference of Tommy Lee Jones when he’s drawing Norman Osborn, but you just have to get past it and start reading Osborn with the voice of Tommy Lee Jones.

Dark Avengers is a refreshing and different superhero comic book. And that’s not something I find myself saying too often these days.

A

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January 26, 2009 at 7:52pm ∞

by Daniel Erenberg

The Lodger was released in theaters on January 23^rd. It comes out on DVD on February 10^th. This is not usually a good sign for a film, but it seemed like The Lodger might have been different. It is billed as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, complete with many of Hitchcock’s signature shots and set-ups, and it boasts a truly impressive cast, which includes interesting actors like Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, Donal Logue and TV’s The Mentalist, Simon Baker, in the title role. The film is a modern take on film noir, about a killer copycatting the murders of Jack the Ripper. This all sounds like it could have come together. It sounds like it could have been an interesting film.

The Lodger is not an interesting film. It’s an impossibly bad film, mesmerizing in its lack of anything resembling competence from anyone behind the scenes. The excellent cast looks embarrassed reading the “hard-boiled” dialogue, and no one comes across well. David Ondaatje is the writer/director. David Ondaatje. David Ondaatje. You’d do well by yourself to remember this name. If you see it poking out anywhere in the credits of any film, do not watch that film. This man is that untalented. If I saw another overhead, time-lapsed shot of LA, with the clouds moving very quickly indeed, my head was going to explode. Ditto slow motion shots of a killer stalking a prostitute set to opera. Ditto artificially staged crime-scene sequences that would make the writers of even the worst CBS forensics procedural (Cold Case?) bust their ribs laughing.

That being said, it was an entertaining filmgoing experience in that there were a ton of unintentional laughs, Hope Davis was looking mad fine and it provided wonderful and hysterical conversation for the rest of the night. “Wow,” I said upon leaving. And that was all I could say for a few minutes. This, by the way, was after the awful ending which was like a shot-for-shot remake of the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, followed by an epilogue straight out of a nineties UPN revival episode of The Twilight Zone.

I’ll be showing this dreck to drunken friends for years to make them laugh. Just like The Fog, House of Wax and Rob Zombie’s Halloween. But you know. It’s not quite as good.

F

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January 26, 2009 at 7:42pm ∞

by Daniel Erenberg

3-D technology can make anything cheesy. So a film that is meant solely to scare the shit out of you might not be the best choice for it. I can sort of see what they were going for though. The first killing in the movie pops an eyeball out at you, and later in the film a human heart goes flying out into the audience. But these shots should elicit more shock and less giggles. The only time I jumped in the entire film was when an ugly dog went running towards the camera, followed by a dwarf woman chasing after it. That freaked the shit out of me. Moments later, when the killer (a dude in a miner’s uniform) cut a naked lady’s chest open with a pickaxe? Didn’t react at all.

The flick’s premise centers around a group of teens, who escape from this miner’s massacre and then reunite ten years later, the same day another massacre begins. Two of them (Jaimie King and Dawson’s Creek’s Kerr Smith) have gotten married and become a grocery store manager and the town sheriff, respectively. Another of them, played by the shockingly bad actor Jensen Ackles, from TV’s Supernatural, has just come back to town after being gone for the past decade. And the fourth is that naked lady who gets killed really early on after an exceedingly unsexy sex scene and some reasonably hot full frontal. The best acting of the bunch comes from King, who manages to save her scenes simply by not being awful in them.

The film spends its first half trying to convince us that the killer is a supposedly dead mine worker named Harry, but turns the tables in the second half, completely forgetting that character and trying to set up a mystery as to whether Ackles or Smith could possibly be the killer. By this point, we don’t really care because they’re pretty much the same character, and even though there’s a love triangle between them and King’s character, we can’t muster up a single shit as to who she ends up with, because the two guys are just so, so boring. So the second half of the film just ends up being a bad acting contest between Gay Jack from the Creek and the guy from Supernatural who didn’t used to be on Gilmore Girls.

Note about 3-D: It’s really hard to wear 3-D glasses over prescription glasses but it was the only way I could see this film. Let’s do something about this, 3-D Scientists. And please try to do it before the February 2nd 3-D episode of Chuck, because that’s sure to be better than My Bloody Valentine 3-D.

D

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January 24, 2009 at 1:59am ∞

by Daniel Erenberg

I’ll give FOX the credit they deserve. Tim Roth is an inspired choice to headline a procedural dramedy, and the fact that the network was able to steer him away from the new Quentin Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds in order to appear in what is essentially House if they let Hugh Laurie be British is nothing short of remarkable. And Tim Roth does not let his network down. He earns what is sure to be his very large paycheck with an easy-going, no-frills star performance as the eccentric (aren’t they all?) Dr. Cal Lightman, a guy who specializes in telling whether or not people are lying. You might be wondering what the difference is between this and the similar-sounding CBS hit The Mentalist. Well, Tim Roth is a much better actor than Simon Baker, but that’s about it.

Unfortunately, Roth is the whole show here. Lie To Me is very defiantly rooted in the classic procedural case-of-the-week structure, and every time the show inches towards breaking out of it, it’s quickly pulled back in. There’s a good scene in the pilot where Roth recruits an airport cop to join his crack crime-solving squad. But that just allows this new character to make an important discovery later on about the case of the week (involving a teenage Jehovah’s Witness who may or may not have murdered his hot teacher). In another scene, Dr. Lightman answers his door to find his daughter’s boyfriend and asks him point blank, “Are you going to try to have sex with my daughter tonight?” This is, of course, so Lightman can use his skill of squinting at body language to decide whether the poor kid is telling the truth. It’s a cute scene, but it’s the only scene in the entire pilot that doesn’t take place in the workplace and it’s only about three minutes long.

Roth could also use better support from his cast. Kelli Williams plays his partner. You know the archetype. We’re supposed to be rooting for them to fuck. But we don’t really care, because Dr. Gillian Foster is such a boring, empty character. The new recruit, Ria Torres (Monica Raymund) adds some ethnic flavor to a cast that really needs it, but we haven’t really been given a reason to care about her yet either. The best actor of the supporting cast is probably Brendan Hines, who plays the compulsive truth-teller Eli, but even that’s not really saying much, as his performance pretty much amounts to a decent-enough Paul Rudd impersonation, and his dialogue is almost fully comprised of exposition.

With Tim Roth sitting pretty, Lie To Me could grow into something more than what it is. But with its seemingly unwavering desire to be the same thing every week, and to bring nothing new to its already tired genre, it’s hard to imagine how.

B-

Tags: TV review Tim Roth Lie To Me
January 24, 2009 at 1:51am ∞

by Daniel Erenberg

Toni Collette is going to win an Emmy for her performance in the new Showtime series, The United States of Tara. After all, this is the kind of performance that the Best Actress in a Comedy Series category was built for. As Tara, a woman with split personalities, she is also required to play three “alters,” including T, a 15 year-old lolita who is besties with Tara’s teenage daughter, and Buck, a chain-smoking southern hunter. In these three characters we see her inhabit throughout the pilot episode, Collette is heartbreaking and vulnerable one moment, and tough and hilarious the next. And we believe it every step of the way. As T, the tramp, she’s downright sexy, and then later, when she’s back to being simple old Tara, she proves she can be even more sexy in a subtler manner. Toni Collette’s performance in The United States of Tara is a marvel to behold.

The show, however, while exciting and extremely promising, isn’t quite perfect. After all, Diablo Cody (and I’m so glad we’re past the brand “Former Stripper Diablo Cody”), the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno is still learning, but getting better all the time. Her dialogue, while still at times forced, has gotten sharper and more natural, and this is largely due to the fact that the performers on screen aren’t playing up the stylized nature of the dialogue as the cast of Juno did. They are taking the still-just-as-stylized dialogue and performing it as though real people in the real world would actually say these words. “Dude,” T tells Tara’s daughter Katie at one point. “I have been digging around in your closet for an hour and I can’t freaking get to Narnia.” On paper, this line is awful. But Collette delivers it with such offhanded conviction that you’d never give it a second thought. I even chuckled at it.

 The heart of the show is in Tara’s supportive family. After the pilot, we still don’t know how long Tara’s had these other personalities and we don’t know just why or for how long her family has been this supportive, but we are grateful for it. That aspect of the show could have been gratingly melodramatic, but instead it’s a wonderful treat. The finest scenes of the show (and there are many) are when the whole family is at home together. John Corbett, an actor who too often looks bored on screen, is rejuvenated and totally charming, fighting his attraction to the “15 year-old” T, but holding off on sleeping with her until she turns back into his wife. The kids are great too. Brie Larson is fun and engaging as Katie, and Keir Gilchrist is the finest of the batch as youngest son Marshall, who is clearly the Diablo Cody analogue of this show.

 The United States of Tara could just end up being a great show. For now, we’ll just have to settle for entrancing and addicting. And I’m just fine with that.

A-

Tags: Diablo Cody TV review Toni Collette Showtime
January 20, 2009 at 7:46pm ∞

by Daniel Erenberg

So after the monstrous rush to see every supposedly Oscar-worthy film that came out in the tail-end of December in order to be eligible for award consideration (by the way, who are you kidding, Defiance?) the first film of 2009 that I give a shit about is Notorious. Notorious is a lovely Alfred Hitchcock film, but now it is also a very Ray-like biopic about the life of Christopher Wallace, the dude who wrote “Big Poppa” and “Hypnotize” and brought the world the crabs-filled menace of Lil’ Kim. And, just to reiterate, we are still waiting on the long in-development biopics of Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley and Janis Joplin, but you can check out the Notorious B.I.G’s life in theaters now in a film produced by P. Diddy and directed by the guy who made Soul Food.
 

My biggest worry going into this film was that it would idealize the life of the departed rapper way too much, what with his good friend, the Didster, in the producer’s seat. Notorious isn’t a bad movie though. In fact, I’d wager that it’s the first good movie of the year (this year’s Cloverfield, but even scarier). And it certainly doesn’t idealize Biggie’s life. In fact, I went into the film a Notorious B.I.G. fan, and now I fucking hate him.

There’s a scene early on in the movie where child-Biggie sees some douche on the street wearing gaudy gold chains, so he decides to be a drug dealer. We flash forward to teen-Biggie carrying a gun in his pants and hiding crack rock beneath his bed. His long-suffering mother, well-played by Angela Bassett, still doesn’t know about his crack-slinging. Of course, this film is completely unreliable because I doubt anyone knew who this guy really was. We trace him through three romantic relationships, with his first baby mama, Lil’ Kim and Faith Evans and he treats them all like shit. We see his friendships with dudes like Sean “Puffy” Combs and Tupac Shakur and he’s a total dick to both of them (he has a temper tantrum at the Source Awards about a pair of shoes that don’t fit, which is the wussiest thing I’ve ever seen a self-described “playa” do). And, worst of all, he’s awful to his mother, the most sympathetic character in the film. At Biggie’s funeral (spoiler alert!) we see how proud she is of her son. But why? Why, I ask. Homeboy was a prick. A horrible, horrible prick who put out two good records, but whose gangster rap personality we are all hopefully far beyond at this stage.
 

So the Soul Food guy did an okay job, newcomer Jamal Woolard gives a phenomenal performance as Smalls and Bassett is What’s Love Got To Do With It-good. And I can’t fault the film for being honest about Christopher Wallace’s life. But I never want to listen to Ready To Die ever again, man. And too bad. I used to really like that dude.

C+

Tags: Notorious movie review Biggie Smalls
January 19, 2009 at 4:26pm ∞