Here’s a slapdash amalgam of behind-the-scenes footage from our Mock Rock. I still can’t believe we took home the gold—literally nothing went right. We lost the “Tangled” tower, someone forgot to contact our wrangler to get the live elephant onstage, Sam forgot all his lines and completely improvised the whole thing. “We Found Love,” wasn’t even part of our act; DJ Kelly D-Lux threw it on as transition music and everyone just felt the beat.
Overall, being a part of the creative team that put this thing together will be one of my fondest college memories. Can’t speak highly enough of those guys, particularly Kevin Wilson who oversaw all our props.
Here’s the first true Spitchtown original since we did “Jurassic Parker Bros.”, a video that only slightly makes sense if you’ve seen Jurassic Park within the last 20-30 minutes. It took us up til now to recoup our losses from that financial debacle. No joke, “JPB” cost us $4,330,000 to make and we earned $0.25, for a net of -$4,329,999.75. If you wanna get real technical, we earned nothing because we found that quarter on the ground in the woods shooting Peter’s scene.
Anyway, “Requiem for a Mealplan,” was AJ McKay’s baby, and by that I don’t mean it was a project he held close to his heart from the time of its inception to uploading the final film to Youtube. I mean he literally was impregnated by creativity and gave birth to an embedded thumbnail of himself, myself and Matt Lewis trying in vain to pull off a 3-person piggy back ride. And when we clicked on it, it was 3:26 of existential bliss revolving around a poor sap without a mealplan. We’ve all seen this situation happen dozens upon dozens of times at the caf, and you can’t help but stare when that horrid beeping rears its ugly head.
Written shot and acted by me, AJ, Matt Lewis and Jenna; the Interterm foursome that held down fort while Biola was in its impressionable pre-Spring semester state. Glad we could crystallize the memories of such a volatile period into a video where the main punchline is our close friend running around campus completely nude.
-Sully
Moonrise Kingdom
Trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie. Looks like we’re all gonna die of quirkiness suffocation, but in a good way. By the looks of things, this is easily going to be the most Wes Anderson-y movie yet: intentional awkwardness, Bill Murray, widest angle lens ever, Jason Schwartzman, the color yellow, poetic souls and inane dialogue… yup we’ve hit just about everything on the Wes Anderson movie checklist.
-Sully
Cinema 2011 compilation
Movies, man.
-Sully
The Hobbit Trailer
Looks like it’s nerd movie trailer release week over here at Spitchtown.
Nerds are raging across the country right now. It’s 11:29pm on a Tuesday night and even now I can still hear faint awkward, breathy cackling outside. I’ve sporadically overheard the words, “Bilbo,” “Catwoman” “Gollum,” and “Joseph Gordon-Levitt” upwards of 200 times each. The nerds get a little too rowdy so you can’t blame me for breaking out the hose every 45 minutes or so. The water makes them choke and wheeze, rendering them from talking about The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit Part 1 for about 5 minutes on average. Which is better than nothing, I guess.
All bets are off if the next Spider-Man movie’s trailer drops tomorrow.
-Sully
The Dark Knight Rises - Trailer #2
It’s that time of year again! Another Christopher Nolan trailer is released so that every single solitary frame can be viciously scrutinized, discussed and dissected ad nauseam for 6 months by fanboys. Finally summer rolls around and the midnight premiere is just an elaborate 2 and a half hour game of connect the dots.
-The cast now includes Marion Cotillard, Joseph-Gordon Levitt, and Tom Hardy along with Michael Caine. I’m curious to find out why this film isn’t titled Inception 2.
-I’m so lukewarm on Anne Hathaway right now it’s not even funny. But I mean, when Paul Thomas Anderson said his next film after Magnolia would be 90 minutes long and star Adam Sandler, people were scoffin’ hard. Then Punch-Drunk Love happened. With these brilliant auteur directors, you can never tell.
-Word on the street is that Tom Hardy’s voice of Bane is a convoluted combination of a thick accent + mask covering his mouth, which means you can only understand like 4% of what he says. I literally can’t wait for this movie if only because the first onscreen argument between him and that growling dog Batman will be the most unintelligible back-and-forth in cinematic history.
-Sully
Hotel Story
So get this: American Airlines pulls a Donnie Darko and loses an engine out of thin air. Lo and behold, my flight gets delayed a few hours until they can find it. It gets awkward fast in LAX because everyone’s looking at each other like, “Now what am I gonna do? I have a life and now it’s altered!” This petite blonde with glasses and a UCLA sweatshirt starts sobbing quietly, mentioning something about her grandmother in Louisiana, but LAX security is on its toes; she’s arrested immediately.
At one point, the pilot shows up to our gate sweating buckets. His mom calmly rubs his shoulder and says, “Irvin, did you check the last place you saw it?” And the pilot goes, “MOOOOOMMMM. Duh of course.” But then he pauses and a lightbulb very visibly comes on in this guy’s brain. He snaps his fingers and everyone at the gate lets out a collective sigh of relief as the pilot remembers where he left the engine. So the flight is back on the menu, but unfortunately I miss my connecting flight in Dallas/Ft. Worth to Tulsa because of the ordeal. I was dismayed for a few seconds until I realized that the airline is due to comp me a hotel and food. Plus it means one less day I have to spend in Oklahoma.
Upon my arrival to Dallas, I took a free shuttle to this hotel next to the airport called the Wingate. They gave me a key and I was immediately consumed with pride and elation over my budding independence. Cue me remembering I have a camera in my backpack and this video is born. I walked around this room for 4.5 hours filming and commenting on every single object before I whittled it down to 2.5 minutes in Final Cut.
Some side notes:
-Dominos gets a bad rap, but it’s actually delicious. Along with a sausage/pepperoni and a chicken/bacon pizza, they gave me free Cinnastix which were the bee’s knees in every sense of the colloquialism. If you’ve ever seen me in the caf, you know I put down 2lbs of cinnamon a week easy so I had the time of my life with these things.
-Most people don’t mind Up in the Air and The American but if you substituted Clooney with a coathanger you’d realize how much he made those movies watchable.
-I’m not being the slightest bit sarcastic about Drake’s Take Care. It has the same over-the-top emo soul of 808s and Heartbreak, only with better lyrics. I’m astonished how little music there was this year that I liked. I’d be hard pressed to compile a top-10 list, but I’ll probably attempt it anyway in the coming weeks.
-For those keeping score at home, that juxtaposition shot of me watching Mad Men to impress the people sitting next to me and the kid in the row ahead watching Spongebob is poignant and I can’t be bothered to explain why, mostly because I’m not sure what poignant means.
-In all fairness, I didn’t know the Golden Spoon coupon was expired until I tried to use it a few hours after exiting that good Samaritan’s vehicle (I’d stolen it back out of his cupholder).
-Sully
Sully & Anders Live Reaction to Unprecedented Red Sox Collapse
I don’t know much, but what I do know is that if I’m ever forced to utter the words, “Let’s go Yankees!” and sincerely mean them, something’s very awry. I guess it just goes to show you that emotionally investing in a bunch of conceited millionaires playing sports thousands of miles away might have more cons than pros.
Maybe this is a wake up call that we should start acting more professionally. It’s common knowledge that laying face down in the street isn’t exactly something you do to impress your contemporaries. Anyway, I’m glad I had Anders. Sometimes you need somebody to yell with, preferably someone hailing from the same general geographical location as you, when stuff like this goes down.
-Sully
Curb Your Enthusiasm - The Best of Leon
Saw this video posted on Grantland and had to share it.
In the 6th Season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s wife invites a black family (“the Blacks”) whose home had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina to come live with them. Their relative Leon also moves in with the Davids even though he was completely unaffected by the disaster (as the video points out, he lived in LA at the time). Leon has been nothing short of comedic gold ever since. Even after the Blacks move out in Season 7, and Cheryl divorces Larry, Leon still lives in Larry’s house without paying rent as of Season 8. Superbly portrayed by JB Smoove, Leon Black is easily one of the most vital supporting characters on television.
-Sully
Jay-Z and Kanye West - “Otis”
Here’s the video for the Watch the Throne single “Otis.” It’s an overtly simplistic video which is appropriate for a song with such an overtly simplistic beat.
I’ll be honest, “Otis” isn’t one of my favorites off the album. I like old soul samples as much as the next guy. “Try a Little Tenderness,” by Otis Redding, which this song samples, is deservedly a classic. But that stubbornly incessant repetition of Redding grunting for 3 minutes straight is downright grating. I want to rip out my own teeth when I hear it. I guess one interpretation of this video is that the car untouched was “Try a Little Tenderness.” Once Kanye and Jay are done mangling it and there’s four girls in the back, it’s now “Otis.”
It seems like these guys are having difficulties choosing singles. The first was “H.A.M.” which was so underwhelming it was dropped all the way to just a bonus track on the deluxe edition of the album. Next is “Otis.” After that will be “Lift Off,” which I like, but there are definitely better single choices further down the tracklist.
Kanye’s songs sometimes take a while for me to properly digest. I was lukewarm when I first heard “Power,” and now I consider it a cemented top-10 Kanye track. Admittedly, I’m starting to accept “Otis,” the more I hear it, but it’s certainly no “Power.” Honestly, the production and repetitive looping makes the song sound like it was thrown together in an hour.
“Otis” was directed by Spike Jonze, who could very well be the best music video director in the game. By my count, this is the third time he’s worked with Kanye; that simultaneously ominous and bouncy “Flashing Lights” video and the short film “We Were Once a Fairytale,” which is a minor work of art and one of the reasons I appreciate 808s and Heartbreak more than most.
