Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Director pummels critics

Peter Carlson of the Washington Post tells a story about a movie director who is regularly eviscerated by critics, and finally got a chance to hit back.

"Maybe Uwe Boll really is "quite possibly the worst filmmaker in the world," as Wired magazine describes him, but he has done something that every filmmaker in history has dreamed of doing but none -- not Fellini, not Spielberg, not Hitchcock, not Kurasawa -- has ever accomplished: He challenged his critics to a fistfight and then met them in a boxing ring and proceeded to . . . well, we don't want to get ahead of the story, do we?

Boll, 41, is a German director who makes cheese-ball movies based on popular video games: "BloodRayne" and "The House of the Dead" and "Alone in the Dark" and the forthcoming "Dungeon Siege," starring Burt Reynolds.

"His movies are haphazardly scripted, sloppily edited, badly acted and, most crucially, brutally received," writes Chris Baker in "Raging Boll" in the December Wired. It's an evaluation that is apparently much kinder than Boll usually receives. His films are brutally savaged by the kind of online critics who take video games and the movies based on them very seriously.

"Boll is destroying the childhoods and fond gaming memories of internet nerds across the country with each and every cinematic bastardization he produces," harrumphed an online site called Something Awful.

That kind of mean, nasty comment hurts Boll deep down in his sensitive artistic soul. So last summer, Boll, who is an amateur boxer, challenged his critics to meet him in a boxing ring in a casino in Vancouver. Needless to say, most of the critics wimped out, Baker reports in Wired, but four were brave enough, or crazy enough, to take him up on the offer.

"The first challenger: webmaster and CEO of Something Awful, Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka!" the ring announcer bellowed as the crowd roared.

Kyanka, the guy responsible for that "cinematic bastardization" review, climbed into the ring wearing red, white and blue trunks and waving American flags.

That didn't help. Boll hammered him to the canvas in less than two minutes, leaving the battered critic muttering, "You hit me in the face!" as if he was surprised at that.

"Our second con-test-aant -- film critic for Ain't It Cool News, Jeff Snei-der!" the ring announcer bellowed.

Sneider bobbed and weaved through the first round but Boll caught him in the second and pounded him to the canvas, twice. A few minutes later, the unhappy critic was vomiting and sucking oxygen from a medical mask.

The third critic, Chris Alexander, who writes for a horror magazine called Rue Morgue, arrived wearing bat wings, a silver mask and fake fangs. Striding the ring, he spouted Aliesque poetry: "We're gonna put him to bed for House of the Dead ! We're gonna feed him to the sharks for Alone in the Dark ! He's gonna be feeling pain for making BloodRayne !"

Alas, Alexander's poetry proved more Aliesque than his boxing. Boll popped him with a couple of vicious shots to the cranium and the critic surrendered.



He made BloodRayne, and then he put his critics in a world of pain.

Boll's fourth opponent was Chance Minter, a 17-year-old amateur boxer from Frederick, Md. Minter isn't a critic and he'd never written a word about Boll, but he volunteered to fight anyway. Boll pounded him in the guts while Minter's mom screamed, "Move around, Chance! Hit back!"

But it was too late. When the night ended, the record was: Boll 4, Critics 0, Kid from Frederick 0.

Boll grabbed the microphone. "[Bleep!] critics!" he bellowed. "I hit them so hard they have brain damage! They love my movies now!""

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A little bit too much edgy

I know this is hardly breaking news but I just love this story. The NY Daily News headline: QUEEN IS WAY OUT OF LINE - Failed Test For Coke, Kissy With Teen Missy!

"Miss USA Tara Conner is on the verge of losing her crown after testing positive for cocaine, lustily kissing Miss Teen USA in public and sneaking men into their Trump Place apartment, sources tell the Daily News.

"Tara was a party animal," said a source who knows Conner, 20, and Miss Teen USA Katie Blair, 18, from some of the city's top nightspots. "I've seen them kiss before. They always dance all sexy on the tables. ... They definitely get close."

Conner packed her bags and left the bachelorette pad Thursday, and canceled a scheduled Miami charity appearance tonight. Pageant sources said she has no other public appearances this year.

Pageant boss Donald Trump scheduled a Tuesday news conference to announce her fate.

"First and foremost he is concerned about Tara and wants to do what is best for her," Trump's office said. "Then he will think about what is best for the very successful Miss USA pageant."

One clubgoer described for the Daily News seeing Conner snort cocaine in one of the nightclubs where she drank regularly despite being underage, and The News learned she recently failed a drug test.

The Miss USA runner-up, Miss California USA Tamiko Nash, would inherit the crown if Conner can't finish her reign.



I am now crossing "Miss USA sex and drug scandal" off my Xmas wish list...


Conner was named Miss USA just eight months ago, but quickly started blazing a trail through New York's late-night club world, scenesters told The News.

"She really is a small-town girl. She just went wild when she came to the city," one nightlife veteran said. "Tara just couldn't handle herself. They were sneaking those [nightclub] guys in and out of the apartment."

Conner and Blair shared a Trump Place apartment with Miss Universe Zuleyka Rivera, 19, but sources say Conner and Blair got in hot water with pageant bosses for getting Rivera drunk on her birthday.

Rivera cleaned up her act, sources said, but Conner still brought boyfriends home.

Conner grew up in a tiny town in rural Kentucky, trying her luck in regional pageants before winning the Miss USA title.

Soon she broke up with her hometown fiance and started dating around in the Manhattan nightclub world - when she wasn't traveling all over the country for pageant obligations.

Ironically, when she was competing for the title, she complained that celebrities like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were bad role models, TMZ.com reported.

"I think that they're getting a little bit too much edgy. I think that they are a little bit too risque," Conner said. "I think they need to tone it down a little bit.""

I also love the fact that this journalist uses the word "ironically" to refer to actual irony, not mere coincidence...

UPDATE 12:30 PM -- Tara Conner invoked the Mel Gibson Defense, will enter rehab to purge herself of her sins.

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Friday, December 15, 2006

Ernest Goes To Jail

The Smoking Gun reports that Trey Anastasio of Phish was arrested for DUI and drug possession!

Shocker!!



"DECEMBER 15--Former Phish frontman Trey Anastasio was arrested early this morning on a driving while intoxicated rap and New York cops found the musician in possession of a variety of medications prescribed to another person. Anastasio, who is pictured in the below mug shot snapped by the Whitehall Police Department, was nabbed at around 3:30 AM following a traffic stop by Patrolman Andrew Mija. He failed field sobriety tests and was found to be carrying Xanax, Percocet, and Hydrocodone. The 42-year-old Anastasio, whose first name is Ernest, was charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, DWI-drugs, and driving without a license. Whitehall is located in upstate New York, just miles from Vermont, where Phish was spawned."

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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Gestapo couldn't stop this limping woman!

This is a terrific story from the Associated Press. My favorite part is the anecdote about "Cuthbert."

"In 1942, the Gestapo circulated posters offering a reward for the capture of "the woman with a limp. She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her."

The dangerous woman was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native working in France for British intelligence, and the limp was the result of an artificial leg. Her left leg had been amputated below the knee about a decade earlier after she stumbled and blasted her foot with a shotgun while hunting in Turkey.

The injury derailed Hall's dream of becoming a Foreign Service officer because the State Department wouldn't hire amputees, but it didn't prevent her from becoming one of the most celebrated spies of World War II.

On Tuesday, the French and British ambassadors plan to honor Hall, who died in 1982 at age 78, at a ceremony at the home of French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte in Washington.

British Ambassador Sir David Manning plans to present a certificate signed by King George VI to Hall's niece, Lorna Catling. Hall should have received the document in 1943, when she was made a member of the Order of the British Empire.

"I think it was ironic that the State Department turned her down because she was an amputee, and here she went on and did all this other stuff," said Catling, who lives in Baltimore. Catling said she didn't learn many of the details of her aunt's espionage career until after her death.

Hall, who was fluent in French, was living in Paris when the Nazis invaded in 1940, and she decamped for London, where she was recruited by the secret British paramilitary service, the Special Operations Executive, becoming its first female field operative.

Hall was sent to Lyon, becoming "the heartbeat" of the local French Resistance, said Judith L. Pearson, whose biography of Hall, "Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's First Female Spy," was published last year.

"Any agent from London came through her flat. She coordinated them with Resistance members," Pearson said. "Most agents only stayed about three months in the field. She stayed 15 months."

After the Gestapo wanted posters made her situation untenable, she fled through the Pyrenees mountains into Spain. During the journey, she sent a radio message to London, reporting that "Cuthbert" — her nickname for her prosthetic leg — was giving her trouble.

Her commanders didn't understand the reference, and their reply suggested the gravity of Hall's circumstances and her value to the Allied cause: "If Cuthbert troublesome eliminate him."


An artistic rendering of Virginia Hall.

Back in London, she joined the American Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to the CIA — and returned to France in 1944, disguised as an elderly peasant. She located parachute drop zones where money and weapons could be passed to Resistance fighters and later coordinated guerrilla warfare. Her teams destroyed bridges, derailed freight trains and killed scores of German soldiers.

"I would certainly put her name in the pantheon of people who distinguished themselves in intelligence," said Peter Earnest, executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, which has an exhibit devoted to Hall.

Hall maintained her cloak of secrecy after the war. The certificate that went with her British OBE medal sat in a vault for more than 50 years because the British government was unable to track her down.

In the meantime, OSS chief William Donovan had presented Hall with a Distinguished Service Medal in September 1945 during a private ceremony in his office that was witnessed only by Hall's mother. She was the only civilian woman to win the medal for service in World War II.

In 1950 she married French-born OSS agent Paul Goillot. She took a job with the CIA in 1951 and retired in 1966, living out her days with her husband on a farm in Barnesville.

"She would talk about books and she was very into animals and things like that. But work, no. There was a big wall about anything like that," Catling said. "She always seemed kind of glamorous and mysterious."

On the rare occasions that Hall told war stories, they weren't particularly harrowing.

"One time she said she and Paul found a deserted chateau, and they discovered a whole wine cellar," Catling said. "They had a wonderful evening enjoying that."
"

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Friday, December 08, 2006

Wii have a problem...

There's an awesome new website called Wiihaveaproblem.com that documents the stunning destruction people have wrought on their living rooms while playing the new Nintendo Wii.

In case you don't follow this stuff, the new technology in this system is that you don't just push buttons on the controller, you swing it around like you're actually wielding a sword, throwing a pitch, etc. However, it seems that Nintendo did not anticipate the sheer fury with which Americans go about their living room gyrations, and only built in a dainty little strap that can easily snap off.

Consequently, the controllers ("Wiimotes") are being flung every which way, causing all kinds of havoc.

Here's one example -- a person who managed to impale his own TV with a controller while playing a bowling game on the Wii:



Another poor soul who destroyed her TV during a game of Wii reports:

"You read those little blurbs on various video game blogs about how some punk threw their Wiimote at their friend's TV and think, "Harhar, that guy must've had the coordination of a stroke patient. What an idiot!" Well, guess who feels like a complete and utter douchebag? *raises hand*

Words cannot describe how stupendously retarded I feel at the moment. It's like when you read one of those ridiculous Penthouse letters and think that it could never happen to you, and then surprisingly find yourself in an orgy with some dirty white trash, the dirty white trash's mother, a midget, and a guy named Pablo. Except this doesn't involve any naked chicks or a penis that is way out of proportion to its owner's body. Nope. This just involves a broken Wiimote strap, a broken tv, and a broken heart. =(
"

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Wednesday, December 06, 2006

I learned it by watching you!!!

GIANT magazine has an article on the 50 greatest TV ads of the 80s, and the first one on the list really brings me back. Without a question, this is my favorite public service announcement of all time, and a clip I hadn't seen in at least a decade.

The things I love about this PSA are too numerous to list, but the look on the dad's face when his son busts him for being a drug-using hippie...slays me every time.

One thing I couldn't figure out when I was a kid that still baffles me -- what kind of drugs ARE those, anyway? A pu-pu platter of various substances?

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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

the Single Stupidest NYT Sentence

Slate's Timothy Noah has identified the single stupidest sentence ever printed in the pages of the New York Times. I can't say that I disagree with him...

"The Dec. 4 New York Times contains the single stupidest sentence to appear in that newspaper since I began reading it more than three decades ago. It's in a news story by Holli Chmela about the Kennedy Center Honors, an annual ceremony recognizing lifetime achievement in the performing arts. One of this year's winners was Andrew Lloyd Webber. Here is the sentence:

Mr. Lloyd Webber is often referred to as the Shakespeare of his time with musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera.

Setting aside any aesthetic judgments (which I'll admit is difficult), this sentence has an apples-and-oranges problem. William Shakespeare was a playwright and a poet. Andrew Lloyd Webber is a composer. Yes, they're both popular and British and men of the theater, but to compare the two makes as much sense as comparing Nathan Lane's acting with the set designs of Ming Cho Lee. Moreover, a quick search of the LexisNexis database indicates that it simply isn't true that Lloyd Webber, however idiotically, is "often" compared to Shakespeare. What few comparisons turn up tend to fall into two categories:

1) Soup-to-nuts (as in the Liverpool Daily Echo noting that Cornwall's Minack Theater hosts "a 17-week season of plays and musicals in the summer, from Shakespeare to Andrew Lloyd Webber")

2) Your-face-and-my-ass (as in Ireland's Sunday Independent observing, "You don't go to an Andrew Lloyd Webber show looking for Shakespeare.")


What's the buzz, tell me what's happening.

The only favorable comparison I was able to find between Lloyd Webber and Shakespeare was from a piece by Peter Goddard in the Toronto Star, and that focused solely on business acumen:*

In truth, old Will was not a bad business role model himself, spending the years leading to his death in 1616 in Stratford-upon-Avon a very rich man, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of his time.

"For starters, Shakespeare was from a business family," says Bard-based American management consultant John O. Whitney, who sees the Bard as the Boss of Bosses. Shakespeare, after all, "was also a businessman, shareholder in the most successful theatre company of his time, a servant of the king."


I don't mean to hang Chmela out to dry. We all write something stupid now and then. But I've always believed it was impossible that the editors at the New York Times would ever let something this transparently stupid into their newspaper, except possibly during the last week of August or the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, when most smart people go on vacation. We live and we learn.
"

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Monday, December 04, 2006

Those irresistible cookies...