Halloween

Today children across the country will dress as things they are not and take candy from strangers.







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Gentlemen Broncos

Gentlemen Broncos is the new movie from Jared and Jerusha Hess (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre). It's kind of like Napoleon Dynamite with a plot. A quiet lonely kid lives with his mom in a geodesic dome, writes a sci-fi story about a hairy, monotestacled space warrior who rides missile-firing deer in battle against cyclopes, and enters it in a contest. Celebrity sci-fi writer ( Jemaine Clement of The Flight of the Conchords and Eagle Vs. Shark) plagiarizes it while the boy's strange friends adapt it into a homemade movie. Sam Rockwell plays Bronco/Brutus, the space warrior who is fighting to get galactic, life-sustaining yeast back, in the sci-fi portions of the movie.

There is a good amount of Wes Anderson type eccentricities and details. The plagiarist, celebrity author character's last name is Chevalier (as in Hotel Chevalier, the prelude short to Anderson's Darjeeling Limited), the shot of him reading in bed is strikingly similar to a shot of Jason Schwartzman in Hotel Chevalier, and the opening credit sequence, a series of straight down shots of sci-fi book covers, recalls the opening credits of The Royal Tenenbaums. For every Anderson-inflected piece of this movie, though, there are at least three to five that are pure Hess. Good ugly clothes and accessories, amusingly peculiar mannerisms, a big snake taking a giant dump, odd looking extras, and almost-swears in place of any genuinely foul language.

I give it a 93%. There is a bunch of explosions and a revolver versus blowgun fight and hilarious weirdness, and even a little Black Sabbath.


I went to the screening at the Arclight. My mom brought shepherd's pie into the theater, and ate it with a giant spoon, passing it to my dad and brother to share. Jemaine Clement came out in character and introduced the movie. We watched it and laughed (and I think I cried a little - touching cry, not laughing cry). Then I rode home in the seatless back of their minivan. It was a fitting way to envelope the experience.

The movie comes out in New York and LA on Friday, with a wider release following.
Hopefully it picks up like Napoleon Dynamite.

Also, stay after the credits.

Pocket Book 3 by Andrew James Cox

For the third year in a row Andrew Cox has released a mini comic called Pocket Book, each one twice the size of the one previous. This one contains 36 pages of black and white drawings and sentences that are sometimes childlike in their simplicity and humor, sometimes detailed and dark like black metal. The work lies somewhere between David Shrigley and Mike Mignola.

You can buy a signed copy directly from Andrew Cox for only three bucks!

Buy here!

Where Bas Jan Ader is with the Wild Things Under Polaris

The blog page of Bas Jan Ader's website is maybe the saddest place on the internet, in a beautifully haunting way. He set sail from the east coast of the United States in a 12 1/2 foot sailboat which was found partially submerged off the coast of Ireland six months later. The videos he left behind are pitch perfect most of the time. He falls down a lot in them.


Another recent experience involving small boats on rough waters, Where the Wild Things Are, scored about a 94% with me. Almost nailed the high expectations I had thanks to the trailer. You can't put together the Arcade Fire and beautifully shot, Henson-made monsters and get anything unawesome. Spike Jonze is about to steal away my movie watching heart from Wes Anderson.

The evening after I saw the movie I attended a performance at Redcat by Cloud Eye Control called "Under Polaris" in which Anna Oxygen huffs up to the north pole singing sparkling avant orchestral poprock songs and trying to plant the seed of the human race, all while overlaid and interweaving with intricate projections on shifting surfaces. She even takes a boat over the ocean.

Under Polaris-fixed from citrusink on Vimeo.