Fright Night, screenplay by Marti Noxon, directed by Craig Gillepsie, 2011 (Amazon VOD): I never saw the original, but 2/3 of this movie basically sucks. There’s a stupid subplot about the lead guy having deserted his nerd friend (who gets killed) so that he could hang with the Kool Kids Klub, and it’s just as dumb as he sounds. Apparently his skin cleared up and he… actually they don’t ever say how he made the transition from unforgivable nerd to horrible jock, just that he started dating the cutest girl in school. Oh and also, she doesn’t even like the dudes she hangs around with, and she’s dating the main guy because he’s different, and also she liked him when he was a nerd anyway, so… cheer up, nerds! Because… uh… those girls who hang out with guys you hate are just waiting for your skin to clear up, and then it’s on? There’s a Dr. Who in here, too, and he’s wearing leather pants for some reason.

The 1/3 that doesn’t suck is any time colin Farrell is on the screen. You can tell when an actor has hit a point where he or she just doesn’t care about their original career trajectory and is content to just screw around and have fun. James Franco did it, and to great effect. Johnny Depp did it and immediately fell off. You could make a case for Walken, I bet, post-King of New York. Samuel L Jackson. These dudes show up in marginal or awful movies, deliver the best role of the film, and then move on. Now it’s Colin Farrell’s turn, and it’s great.

Fright Night is basically “Colin Farrell is a dick.” He’s every nerd’s worst nightmare. He’s hyper-masculine, ruggedly attractive, competent, walks around in tight shirts, and would probably have sex with your girlfriend and mother at the same time. He doesn’t even really have a plan beyond “Mock the dork faking the funk next door, hook up with his mom, suck blood.” He’s Alpha Male Plus. He’s a walking, talking, source of constant emasculation.

All of the light, all of the interesting bits in this movie, are Farrell’s. He slings a broken motorcycle well over a mile through the back window of somebody’s car. He smarms it up with the main guy’s mom. Everything he says to the main dude is great, full of really charming menace. At one point, someone threatens him with silver bullets and he just says “Werewolves” and grins. It’s too good. There’s a bit in the trailer where he digs a hole in someone’s lawn, grabs the gas line, and yanks. It’s even better in the movie, because he goes and gets a shovel, aaaaaa! I can’t even tell you how much I enjoyed that or why, beyond a hard injection of the mundane and awkward into the fantastic being something I greatly enjoy. Man, actually, that’s exactly why I liked it. Same thing for the bit at the end of Collateral where Tom Cruise tries to run after Jamie Foxx and trips over a chair. It’s such a nice thing to see in a movie, like a dash of imperfection in what is otherwise a well-oiled machine.

There’s this weird consistently fresh feel to most of the action scenes that makes it quite a movie to watch. A few of them wrap up in a cliche way, but the depiction is always good. It sorta reminds me of Max Payne that way, because that was another movie that was incredibly flawed, but had such a filthy approach to effects and action scenes that I watched it a couple times. The demon hallucinations and awkward first-person were great, but the money shot is that bit at the end where the snow falls on the gun. It’s not a new idea (I think it’s even been done with swords), but dang, they really sold it in Max Payne. Fright Night takes a few of classic vampire movie gimmicks and turns them on their head in the same way.

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The FP, directed and written by Brandon Trost & Jason Trost: I thought this movie was skin-crawlingly terrible. I saw it at SF Indiefest in a theater full of people who seemed like they loved it, though, which made it even worse, in a way. I sorta realized I wasn’t gonna like it when they started in on nigga this and nigga that really early on in the movie. (I don’t remember seeing any black people with speaking roles in the flick.) There’s a conversation to be had about that sort of… ironic re-appropriation of the word nigger by white people, and obviously anything can be done well, but the wooden delivery and awful writing kept this movie from being anything I’d call “done well.” I mean… son is wearing Confederacy gear and he’s called Sugga Nigga. Really though?

It satirizes a bunch of different movies, subcultures, and character types, but it does it in the most asinine possible way. It’s just… thoughtless. I assume that all of the actors are so wooden as a style thing, but that really only works to make the movie a slog to get through. It disintegrates whatever emotional content the lines had, which was not much to begin with, and bad acting plus cliché writing generally results in a bad movie.

I liked a couple things. Dude that plays L Dubba E, Lee Valmassy, and Art Hsu, who plays KCDC, swagger their way through their roles and are funny sometimes. I wouldn’t mind seeing them in better movies. Past that, though… nah. No thanks.

edit: I saw this with three other friends, so we had the middle of a row on lock. That’s always nice, going to movies with a posse. BUT! The guy sitting directly behind me kept repeating fractions of the jokes of names of characters on the screen and laughing, like he was on some type of tape-delay laugh track that also read all the jokes aloud two seconds after they said them. He ain’t help my mood any.

A few years back, Max Landis — son of legendary director John Landis — created a video on YouTube called Cooking with Comics: Knightfall. In it, he prepares a meal while explaining the story of Knightfall from memory. His monologue is adapted into a bunch of scenes acted out by his friends in low-budget costumes with a lot of humor tossed in, like something out of Drunk History. I’ve posted it once or twice during This Week in Panels because I can watch it every day and still laugh at a black guy with a blond mullet wig and a cross in hand playing Azrael.

Now he’s back with a new video, twice as long, where he explains the story of Death and Return of Superman. That on its own makes it worth checking out, but he really went all out in getting famous people to show up for this. Not only do we have cameos from guys like Simon Pegg and Ron Howard, but Mandy Moore is Lois Lane and Elijah freaking Wood is Hank Henshaw, the Cyborg Superman.

If anything, you have to watch it for the absolute best incarnation of the Green Lantern Corps.

Turns out he wrote that superpowers-based movie Chronicle that just came out this week. That’s certainly an interesting way to go about advertising, but I’ll take it!

I don’t know anything about Yuki Kodama’s (shoujo?) manga Sakamichi no Apollon, but Crunchyroll recently posted an interesting bit of news about it. It’s being turned into an anime. Looks like the English title might be “Kids on the Slope.”

Key words: director Shinichiro Watanabe, music production by Yoko Kanno, set in Japan during the late ’60s, features jazz in a major way.

So yeah, to say that I’m “cautiously optimistic” would be underselling my feelings on this show. I want it like I haven’t wanted a TV show since Michiko e Hatchin, which I’m still missing because the anime industry doesn’t cater to me like it should, and I publicly offered to murder David “Second David” Uzumeri if that’ll help someone license and broadcast it online over here.

Help me help you, anime. (Sorry, David, but I’m sure you understand.)

Ever read that crossover with Planetary and Batman? There’s a whole gimmick where this crazy guy has powers to alter reality and without warning, Batman keeps changing incarnations throughout the story. He’ll go from Adam West to Frank Miller-style to wearing the purple gloves from his original appearance and change his tone to fit the situation. As great as that was, Star Wars Uncut brings it to an entirely new level.

The idea is that several hundred groups had been tasked to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope… 15 seconds each. Each party is assigned a specific 15 seconds and has to remake the scene however they see fit. Then all of it is stitched together to form a completely bizarre and hilarious interpretation of the full movie.

You’ll go from seeing someone’s kids dressed up as Stormtroopers to trippy animation to special effects and acting out of Be Kind Rewind to claymation to silent film to puppets to someone talking upside down with eyes drawn on their chin. There’s plenty of gold in there, such as Lady Gaga Darth Vader, C3PO getting way too sexual, a basket of ferrets reenacting the garbage scene, an Anti-Monitor action figure playing the role of R2D2 and my new favorite impression of Chewbacca. Sometimes the footage will go into completely different universes, like turning into a Disney movie, World War II dogfights, a western, the Seventh Seal, Tron, Yellow Submarine and even at one point the Big Lewbowski.

There are some stinkers in there, sure, but that’s all part of the charm. It’s a great way to spend a couple hours.

Every now and then, Something Awful does a bit for their Photoshop Phriday called Mixed-Up Movie Captions. The idea is that you take the still of one movie and add a subtitle of a quote from another movie. It’s an incredibly fun creative exercise. Over a year ago, they did one and I took part, coming up with a bunch of entries. Some got used, some didn’t.

Yesterday, they put up a new batch as created by the Something Awful forum. Once again, I had a grand old time playing this game and they even chose nine of my images in the feature. Since I did so many, I thought I might as well feature all my work.

Some of these will get a little more obscure than others. I have some reference at the bottom just in case. And sorry about the Buffalo Rider one. Not the easiest movie to find a clean image of.

Read the rest of this entry �

I grew up on or around Air Force bases. Shepherd, Langley, and most of all, Robins AFB. A grip of my family members served, and I gave some real thought to enlisting while I was in high school. A side effect of being surrounded by the USAF is that I love airplanes. I built a bunch of models as a kid. The SR-71 Blackbird was my favorite, probably because that was where the X-Men and the Air Force venn diagrams intersected, but I built bombers, fighters, whatever I could find. I actually built an F-14 model late last year when I got a model kit as a gift from a client. It was weird, exercising those muscles again, but sorta comforting, too. I remember killing like five hours on a lazy Saturday with the TV off, music on, and laser-focused on my task.

I like the stories surrounding planes, too. I remember really liking the story of the Tuskegee Airmen. It’s a great story, kinda the flipside of the Tuskegee Experiments, but it’s inspirational. It’s “The sky’s the limit” translated to real life. They were just one of several inspirational black figures people pointed out to me, from high level cats like Martin and Malcolm to less famous people like Ben Carson. I didn’t learn any of this in school, I don’t think. It came from family and church more than anything. It was a tonic. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and was too honorable to lie about it, but Ben Carson separated conjoined twins.

Red Tails, produced by George Lucas, drops 01/20. It’s about the Tuskegee Airmen, and despite my love of the subject matter, I was a little skeptical. I don’t hate George Lucas (I definitely like him better than modern-era Spielberg, for whatever that’s worth), so him producing wasn’t really a downside. Cuba Gooding Jr and Terrence Howard, two of my least favorite actors. Gooding has a history of starring in movies that I loathe (save for American Gangster, where he played Nicky Barnes to the hilt) and Howard is… that dude grates man, I couldn’t even tell you. There’s just something about that guy.

They were enough for me to feel some kinda way about Red Tails. My thinking was that if they put these dudes into the flick, then the rest of it was somehow compromised or tainted. I don’t know that I had any defensible train of thought about it, to be perfectly frank, just a gut feeling. What turned me around was George Lucas on the Daily Show.

The Daily Show
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While some of what he says is bunk (by what metric is Red Tails the first black anything? Wouldn’t Three the Hard Way count for something? At the very least, Bad Boys did gangbusters), he’s got a lot of interesting things going on. He talks about how studios wouldn’t fund it, and how he’s been trying to get it made for the past twenty-some years.

What got me were two things. First: he financed the movie himself. He believed in it enough to chip in more money than I will ever make in my entire life to get it done. Second: he said that “[t]his is not a movie about victims. This is a movie about heroes.” Which is basically exactly the approach I want to see. I don’t need more stories about how terrible racism is. I know how bad it was. The story of blacks and racism and being held back is, no joke, the one story I have heard the most over the course of my entire life. It is old.

The fact that Lucas and them approached this movie like an action film first, and Rosewood sixteenth or lower, goes real far with me. So I’m probably going to get over my big crybaby complaints about a couple of actors and check it out on opening weekend. The approach feels true, and Lucas says he has sequels planned, and I’d kinda like to see them. I doubt if it’ll take off the way I’d like it to, but I wouldn’t mind owning a gang of movies of black dudes in amazing mid-air dogfights. It’s one of those things I’ve imagined since I was a kid. It’ll be nice to see them realized.

I liked Spike Lee’s Miracle At St. Anna enough to buy the Blu-ray, despite it being a little overlong. How often do you see black people in actual roles in World War II pictures? Too rarely. I’m willing to support efforts like this, because they’re what I want to see more of. Black director, black screenwriter, majority black cast… I like this.

I just hope it’s good. The trailer is pretty straight, and the cast actually has a gang of people whose work I enjoy (Bryan Cranston, Method Man, Andre Royo, couple others). Fingers crossed, right?

I saw Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage at the Shattuck in Berkeley this past weekend. It’s my… probably third time seeing it. I bootlegged it back in 2010 when it dropped, and then I bought an official Hong Kong Blu-ray of it. It’s a thoroughly unromantic movie on pretty much every possible level. It’s not the sexy kind of crime movie, not even close. And that got me thinking.

I’m listening to this album right now, Greneberg, that’s actually pretty prime crime rap. Roc Marciano, the emcee on the album, is one of my favorite of this new wave of thugged out rappers. (It’s him, Pill, and Freddie Gibbs, really. That’s another post, maybe.) Part of the thrill of listening to their music is the actual music, of course–Alchemist and Oh No are great on average, fantastic regularly–but Roc Marcy’s rhymes are compelling. He paints a picture of crime that feels pleasingly authentic, brutal, and exciting. The authenticity is what’s crucial here. You listen or read or watch fiction in order to be convinced. You want to believe that this picture the artist is painting is real. In the case of Roc Marciano, its his low voice, ruthless nature, and matter of fact approach. For Scarface, it’s his desperation, storytelling, and bursts of vicious anger.

Part of the appeal of crime fiction is watching someone live out a fantasy that you wouldn’t mind being a part of. It isn’t aspirational exactly, but it’s in the same neighborhood. It gives you a chance to see someone live life according to his own rules, no matter who stands in his way. Sometimes that means Rae and Ghost playing at being coke kingpins. Other times, it’s about DMX raping and murdering everything in sight. It’s transgressive, but in an attractive way. It lets you step outside yourself and into someone else’s shoes.

Why do good girls go for bad guys? Because bad guys lead interesting lives.

I think this is particularly true of crime fiction featuring the yakuza. There’s an exoticness there that’s definitely attractive. The semi-legitimate and public nature of the yakuza, when combined with the organizational structure, fashion, history, and tattoos, is something entirely different from the mafia or street gangs. It’s cooler to read about and more interesting to study. That distance between what we know (mafia) and what we don’t know (yakuza) makes for a tale with built-in appeal.

Outrage feels like a response to the sexiness of the yakuza. I say that it’s unromantic because there is nothing aspirational, or even escapist, about the yakuza in the film. There aren’t any young, attractive dudes following an honorable code of their own. Tattoos are only shown before acts of violence and aren’t idolized in the least. The yakuza themselves, from the boss on down, are disloyal and dishonest, more than willing to lie to their boss’s face or deal drugs if it’ll make them money.

The dishonesty is what’s most interesting, I think. The movie gets going when a boss suggests that a sub-boss re-examine his ties with a man from a rival crew. The underling’s solution is to have Otomo, played by Takeshi Kitano, use his gang to start a minor argument. Otomo, ever-loyal, does just that, and what follows are a series of betrayals on every possible level. Boss betrays sub-boss, sub-boss betrays friend, and everything rolls downhill.

Thinking about it, Outrage is about a lack of integrity. The members of Otomo’s gang range from loyal to disloyal, but the traitors never cross Otomo in an open way. They skim off the top and look for ways to make their lives better. They do their dirt in secret, just like everyone else. The bosses speak out against dealing drugs, but just do it on the side anyway.

I can only think of one character with a speaking role who isn’t compromised. He’s a cop whose anger at a smoking yakuza is far out of proportion. His anger suggests frustration and impotence more than anything else. He isn’t telling the yakuza not to litter because he really believes in keeping the environment clean. He’s telling him that because that’s the only level of control he can exert over them. (There’s a couple of others who speak, generally waiters or greeters, but they say nothing of substance beyond “irasshaimase” and maybe “arigato gozaimasu.”)

That’s because a high-ranking and upwardly mobile officer is in bed with the yakuza. He lets them know about surveillance, drops tips in their lap, and takes part in sham interrogations. But he’s nothing more than a crony. He sold his soul for cash, and once he’s no longer useful, he’s no longer going to be paid.

One of the more interesting characters is a civilian who uses his place to throw parties with drugs and gambling. That lack of integrity makes him vulnerable to being taken advantage of, and when he sees a way to get out of his predicament, he trades freedom for money. He follows his baser instincts.

Outrage explores corruption and the fact that it isn’t something you can easily contain. It seeps and spreads and infests and eventually ends you. There are a few characters that aren’t loathsome (Otomo, Ozawa, and Mizuno), but you don’t want to be any of them. You don’t even want to step into their shoes to get just a taste of the life. This movie isn’t about the triumph of a criminal so much as the downfall of one. They’re all mired in corruption and compromise, and it damns them.

Not to say there aren’t several cool characters, of course. I liked Ishihara, who was played by Ryō Kase. Mizuno (Kippei Shiina) was great. Ozawa was played by Tetta Sugimoto, who is the exact kind of older dude who can really anchor a movie. I’d like to see more with that guy, in fact. But I like these characters in spite of their actions, not because of them. They played their roles to the hilt, but I never wanted to slip into their lives for a moment.

Outrage is good stuff. I liked it a lot, in part because it was so unsentimental and raw. There’s no fantasy here, nothing you’ll daydream about doing. Scarface is an intensely aspirational and escapist movie, and even though Tony dies at the end, it doesn’t play out like Outrage does. Tony led a glamorous and amazing life before Sosa takes him down. In Outrage, you get the barest glimpse of the benefits of life in the yakuza, and that’s always tainted.

You can rent it on Amazon for seven bucks, catch it in theaters, or get the blu-ray in January.

I’m really, really fond of Ian Edelman’s How to Make It In America (Amazon VOD at $16 bucks for eight eps or Blu-ray for $22). It’s… not difficult to explain so much as any brief summary won’t really get to the meat of why I enjoy the series. It’s not high concept friendly. Here’s the summary off Amazon, presumably given to them by HBO:

An aspiring designer and his free-spirited best friend plot to achieve the American Dream on their own terms in Season One of this HBO comedy series.

It’s technically accurate, though I’d probably argue against the “free-spirited” bit. Ben Epstein, played by Bryan Greenberg, is certainly an aspiring designer, Cam Calderon, played by Victor Rasuk, is definitely his best friend, and it is a comedy series that comes on HBO. But that’s a bland description for something that’s really more of a fairy tale.

You know how when you’re a kid, your parents told you about growing up? You’d go to college, graduate, and get to do something you liked to make money. You’d date someone who is handsome or beautiful or whatever, and life would just be real cool. The tough times would be dramatic, but doable. You’d be pretty, all your friends would be pretty, and life would be pretty okay as long as you have them. Here’s the cast of How to Make It In America:

Not an ug-mug among them, right? There’s something for everybody, particularly once you break it out to the supporting cast. The result is a cast that’s ethnically pleasing (like Martin Luther King’s dream woke up and took hold of real life by the throat and whispered “or else” in its ear), attractive, and living in the greatest city in the world. They’re all good at something, they have their little careers that let them scrape by, and they go to incredible parties.

I hesitate to call it a soap opera, because the majority of my experience with those was as a child before GI Joe and as an adult while getting my hair braided, but it’s sorta soap opera-y, except you know nothing too bad is going to happen. There’ll be tension and release, tension and release. It’s comforting, in a way that feels very much like a fairy tale. “It’s all going to out. Look, see?”

I’m super into this show, and here’s the bit where I try to explain why.

The Theme Song

The theme song is a version of Aloe Blacc’s “I Need A Dollar.” I loved this thing that my man Jamaal Thomas wrote about the song. It’s a little stripped of context when it’s laid over the show’s opening credits, which actually works out for the better. It lends the song a more universal feel.

I say universal because the song is stripped to its barest essentials. What’s it about? It’s about needing a dollar and needing help. It’s about talking to people. In short, if you look at How to Make It In America as a guide, the opening credits tells you everything you need to know. How do you make it in America? You need dollars and you need people.

How to Make It In America is about people in search of dollars and people. Ben and Cam date, screw up, and date again. They’re trying to get their clothing line off the ground. Rene, played by Luis Guzman, is trying to turn his life around by way of small business. Lake Bell needs to keep her job, but also sorten out her relationship issues. In essence, they’re us. We can relate to the need for money and how good it feels to have people around you.

Hustling

If you are working in America and trying to maintain a life that includes health insurance and some level of comfort, then the odds are good that you’re hustling. A forty-hour work week is just a starting point. You have side hustles like writing online. You have dream hustles like firing your boss and working for your self. You work because you need money to make anything come true.

But in certain cases, sometimes you work because you believe in it. You put in the extra time and the blood, sweat, and tears that’ll make that gig a success, something you can use as a building block, something that’s fulfilling. A lot of people have creative hobbies. Whether it’s whittling wood or ballet, everyone has something they’re good at and something they’d love to be able to do for a living. That’s just how it is.

In How to Make It, Ben and Cam cover both bases. They need money because they’re tired of not controlling their lives. The one informs the other, feeds into the other, and multiplies the effect. Ben and Cam work hard.

Facebook/Twitter

Ben and Cam play hard. One of the best parts of being in your twenties is the fact that people throw house parties. You can talk to incredibly interesting women, get super drunk or high for basically free, and make a whole lot of bad decisions.

In How to Make It In America, these parties are bursts of pretty people doing pretty things while less than sober. You can see glimpses of the goofy and/or stupid things people do at parties, boys desperate to impress girls, and a bunch of sexy young folks generally enjoying life. It’s a fantasy, and a fun one. It’s aspirational. “One day, you could meet a cool chick with a purple mohawk at a party and make out with her while you think no one is looking!” It’s why people watched all those movies in the ’80s about being horny high school or college students. There’s a thrill.

But what’s really cool is how the How to Make It In America gang captured what those nights out feel like once the next day dawns. They’re blurs of motion and strange tastes and things you hope you didn’t actually say aloud. Clarity comes when you get up and check Facebook or Twitter to find snapshot after snapshot of last night’s debauchery. Nowadays, everything gets documented, twitpicced, and tagged, whether you want it to or not. How to Make It In America nails it.

Stay CRISP, Ponyboy

The other thing about How to Make It In America is that it isn’t about the shirts. It’s about the life and trials of Ben and Cam. The shirts are a part of that, sure. They’re a way out. But the show is really about how a little bit of success, or a little bit of any variable, really, changes things. Once you get a taste of hope, you aren’t just going to give it up. You’re going to fight for it.

So we watch as Ben and Cam navigate the streets of New York and try to dodge snakes. Season two features my favorite snake. This character is the type of snake that seems like a blessing, but is actually a wolf in sheep’s clothing. (Metaphor status: a little muddled.) This character is a poisonous influence on one of our two main dudes. The snake preys on his lack of confidence in his talent and lives by the rules of realpolitik.

The problem then becomes figuring out how to stay balanced. Once you get a little bit of something, someone else will want a piece. How do you avoid the snakes without burning your bridges? How do you succeed and still keep your circle sacred?

Basically, how much compromise are you willing to suck down before your dream doesn’t belong to you any more?

Brothers & Sisters, Rebuild Your Lives

Luis Guzmán plays Rene Calderon, who the How to Make It In America homepage describes as “once the most feared gangster on the Lower East Side.” He’s an old thug who has finally realized that he can’t sustain that life. So, he’s going to change. He’s bought into a small business and he’s going to try to make money the right way. He wants to find a nice lady to settle down with. He wants a paycheck. He wants to stay out of jail.

Old habits die hard. Push Rene, and you might catch a bad one. “I don’t fucking fight. I shoot.” Try as he might to reign in his former self, his old life was easier and this new life involves eating a whole lot of crow. He has to convince his girl that he’s gone straight, he’s got to dodge prison, and he’s got to make sure his business gains a foothold in the community.

While Ben and Cam are finally trying to invent themselves, Rene is working on reinvention. And changing is hard. You can’t just instantly right your ship. That takes work. That takes drive. Rene is hustling doubletime, and he’s doing it in two areas that are entirely foreign to him.

Everybody Needs Something

Ben is the kind of guy who’s talented, or at least he seems pretty talented, but secretly wonders if he isn’t. He needs that support from friends to keep his confidence up, but at the same time, he’s open to manipulation. He wants to be liked, so he’ll go along with you if you let him.

Cam is in it to win it. He’s down for anything because, frankly, he’s got very little to lose. He’ll holler at girls at parties, fast-talk his way into clubs, and do whatever he’s got to do to make his life one worth living. He can’t live with his grandma forever; that’s just not happening.

Rene is more than ready to fix his problems, and has a concrete plan on how to get the job done, but his nature just leads him toward messing up. He’s got a temper and he’s got a rep, and that rep is one of those things that spikes his temper. He’s different now, he really is, but don’t test him.

David “Kappo” Kaplan just wants to be down. He’s got a high-paying job and a ridiculous apartment, but no girl and no game. He has some cool friends, but he’s a little lost. He wants to be like Ben and Cam.

Rachel has job security, but she has no idea what she wants to be when she grows up. So she dabbles. Journalism here, interior decorating there, and then traveling to Africa out of nowhere. She’s flighty, but that type of flighty that wants to be grounded. She just can’t figure out where she needs to be yet.

Domingo is that guy who’s getting by. He’s happy. He’s real happy, in fact, but his future consists of right now and what party he’s going to tonight. Tomorrow? That’s tomorrow’s problem. But even then, that sort of free-wheeling life only goes so far. Sometimes you need a solid foundation to come home to.

The Music

There’s a lot of music in How to Make It In America, and they post setlists after every episode. I may not like every single track, but this is a show that sounds good, and when it occasionally goes for a pointed song choice, as in Bobby Womack’s sublime “Across 110th Street” or Smif-n-Wessun’s “Sound Bwoy Bureill,” it’s deadly.

New York, New York

I love New York like somebody who grew up hearing about New York loves New York. It’s real, because I’ve been there several times, but it’s still a huge deal. It’s a fantasy of a city. It’s where magic happens and everyone is lovely, rich, or becoming both.

New York is the city, the only city. The only city even remotely on par with it is maybe Paris. (Los Angeles is different.) This is a show that features a lot of NYC. Subway signs, cross streets, brownstones, everything from the mythical NYC is in here.

It’s not Illmatic New York. It’s not a grim and gritty place where foreigners get their green card ripped up. It isn’t Life After Death, either. Nobody’s rich… well, one dude is rich, but he’s a square. There’s nobody dancing in puddles of expensive champagne on a speed boat with a swimming pool. It’s more like A Tribe Called Quest or Camp Lo’s New York, where you’ve got at least one friend or connect of every race, all the girls are real pretty, and you might fall on some hard times, but things are generally pretty okay.

wrap it up, this is over 2000 words already

I didn’t really think of How to Make It In America as a comedy until I saw that description on HBO’s site. It’s funny, yeah, and dramatic. But there’s this thing about it that makes it feel very low-stakes. I mean, these guys are definitely put into do or die situations, but I never really felt like they would collapse under the pressure. They might lose, but they’re not going to be destroyed by that loss.

Which is pretty much why this feels like a fairy tale to me. It’s a little too perfect, and things work out pretty well in the end. That’s far from a complaint–it’s nice to watch and see these guys make their way toward a better life. It’s entertaining and charming in all the right ways.

Working in the retail book business for so many years, I’ve seen my share of weird stuff. I’ve seen cookbooks written by Coolio. I’ve seen Twilight‘s popularity reach such an apex that we have a “Teen Paranormal Romance” section. Not only are there Nascar romance novels that come out two per month, but every year we get at least one Nascar Christmas romance novel. Still, few aspects are as head-scratching as the book/kit known as Elf on the Shelf.

Elf on the Shelf is deemed a new holiday tradition and makes enough money that they may not be kidding. When it first hit the scene, we underestimated it and sold out immediately. Over the past few years, we’ve sold hundreds of units. But what is Elf on the Shelf, you ask? Created by Carol Aebersold and Chanda Bell, the kit comes with a smiling and leering toy elf. There’s a book that explains the backstory and has a space for you to write the elf’s chosen name. Rather than play up the idea that Santa is omnipotent and knows if you’ve been naughty or nice through his… crystal ball… or Professor Xavier telepathy or whatever it is, it’s shown that he gets the intel from his elves. This disturbing little creature vacantly stares at your children all day in the weeks leading up to Christmas and when nobody’s looking, he tells Santa what the score is. The kids are also meant to tell the elf what it is they want. The parent is supposed to move the elf around every day to give the illusion that he’s in some way sentient while the children are warned NOT to touch him else it might remove his magic powers. In other words, don’t touch it or you will realize this is a rickety sham.

The whole concept bewilders me because of the hoops one has to jump through to make it work. The Santa myth has just enough inventive magic and reasonable doubt that a kid can go for years without questioning it. I can’t really understand how most kids don’t call BS on this one if they’re old enough to even talk. The holes in logic are legion. If it’s only checking up on kids between the end of November to the end of December, does that mean you’re allowed to be a total bastard in July? If mom and dad just brought home Elf on the Shelf for the first time, how did this whole Santa thing work before this? What’s the point of having kids tell an inanimate object about what they want if the parents won’t hear it? Santa is at least represented as a talking human being at malls, which holds more water to the immersion than a doll that doesn’t even have joints.

And more than anything else, it’s creepy. Both in concept and appearance. I’ve even had a parent return the item a couple weeks ago because her children found it creepy. But you know what? I’m okay with that. I hold no ill will towards the product for the same reason I hold no ill will towards Twilight or Jeph Loeb comics or any other book I’m supposed to look down on. It’s the retail business. These little guys pay the bills for me and my extended family. Just existing doesn’t raise my ire.

It’s the promotional video that does it. Elf on the Shelf is such a big deal that during the holidays, we have a DVD player set up to hype it. The video lasts three and a half minutes, is annoying and changes tone in the audio enough times that it’s impossible to mentally redirect it into background noise. Just hearing that thing on loop again and again is enough to drive anyone insane after a couple hours. Make it a month during the most stressful time to work and you’re in even worse shape.

This year, the boxes feature an ad for Elf on the Shelf Presents An Elf’s Story, a brand new animated movie featured on CBS on the night of Black Friday while at the same time released on DVD and blu-ray. After all the mental trauma this thing’s caused, I knew somebody at the store had to sit down and sit through this. That man had to be me. And so, a couple days after it aired, I mentally prepared myself the way one does to clean the cat’s litter box when they know they’ve waited a couple days longer than they should have and I pressed play.

The thing to know is that I didn’t go into this set on hating it. I never do for these kind of reviews. I may set my standards low, but I’m open to being wrong. Plus I love Christmas specials in general. Unfortunately… this is not a very good Christmas special.

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I’ve been following this documentary series called Little Brother for a while now. It’s composed of several interviews with young black boys from pre-teens on up. The producers talk to the boys about their life, basically what life is like. It’s counterprogramming, I figure, for black pathology, which teaches that black boys will be dead or in jail by 25, are crack babies, are savages, will stick you for your purse in an elevator, wants your white daughters, and on and on. It starts at the top, really, with “What’s wrong with the black community?” before trickling down to “How will black women date if all the black men are in jail?” to “Let’s completely ruin the perfectly useful phrase ‘down low’ so that we can push a paranoid and probably homophobic trend, also, how will black women date if all of the black men are secretly gay?” to “Why are black teens having so many babies?” and then on down to “Seriously though, black boys will rape and murder you just for living. Hide your daughters.” Talib Kweli had a good line in “Astronomy (8th Light)” that took a while to sink in for me. “Black like the perception of who on welfare.”

It’s an old and poisonous lie, and one we still haven’t gotten rid of. It’s taken new forms, too–Herman Cain is cooning his black behind off in order to convince the white people who will make or break his campaign that he isn’t like the dangerous black people, look! he hates Muslims, too! “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?”

This documentary hits close to home for me and probably a lot of other people, because you grow up seeing this on the news (this is back when the news was true), reading it in text books, and hearing warnings from teachers and/or DARE cops. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t actually true because you had no way of knowing better. You assume that it’s right, and maybe you start living your life accordingly, because that’s how you’re Supposed To Be. You get boxed in.

Personally, I grew up fatherless. My mom took me to the YMCA or the sports league on base so I could play basketball and soccer. She was a social worker at the time, so she saw the worst of us. I taught myself to shave, which is still one of my least favorite things to do, cut my hair, and talk to girls. I had to guess at what makes a man, or try to glean secret truths by watching other people. It was confusing and frustrating, and the sort of thing that everyone probably goes through. You’d never know it, though, because who’d talk about it? “Hey man, what should I say to Terra?” “How do I shave?”

This documentary is really interesting. I like seeing black boys getting a chance to talk about what they like and don’t like, how and where they’re growing up, and how they relate to their family. It’s nice to see them talking about what love feels like. It’s nice, I guess, to see a confirmation that I was normal, everyone I knew was normal, and things are probably gonna be okay.

The trailer:

I got an email this morning letting me know that Little Brother is airing on TV tonight. It’s showing on the Documentary Channel.

Don’t miss the U.S. National Television Premiere of Little Brother: Things Fall Apart on Documentary Channel, tonight at 8pm EST/PST with a repeat broadcast at 11:00pm EST/PST.

Subscribers of Dish Network (Channel 197) and DirecTV (Channel 267) across the United States will be able to watch the broadcast.

If you’re like me, though, and you don’t have that channel, you can check it out on Amazon. Little Brother: Things Fall Apart is available for seven day rental for $4.99.

I feel like this project is pretty important. It’s a humanizing effort, a reminder that these boys are no different from anyone else. They weren’t poisoned from birth.

Give it a look, if you’re curious.