Posts tagged: movie

Every once in a while, I like to watch old black and white movies. I’m particularly partial to ones where men speak in clipped strong rhythms and people get murdered. But I’m open-minded and my TiVo recently suggested that I try watching The Wild One.

The Wild One is the classic 50’s flick where Marlon Brando’s Johnny character, when asked what he was rebelling against, famously answered “What’ve you got?” It is difficult to watch the movie in the present day and fully grasp the impact it had at the time. Supposedly many people felt that James Dean was a Marlon Brando wannabe and Brando’s swaggering performance in The Wild One informed the later acting careers of men like Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson. The rival motorcycle gang, lead by Lee Marvin’s Chino in the movie, is called The Beetles and is believed by many people to have inspired the name of the band The Beatles with an a. I’ve seen mention that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had a jacket based on Brando in The Wild One or possibly even the specific jacket used in the film, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation more solid than rumor on this. Regardless, even today, everyone from lesbian drag kings to Leonardo DiCaprio takes inspiration from the seminal role of troubled Johnny Strabler. Heck, I personally even commissioned a Cookie Monster Brando before I ever saw the movie in its entirety, so ingrained is this flick in the American consciousness.

Despite this, watching today, it is difficult to know what mood the movie could have evoked when it came out in the 50’s. The movie was released in America in 1953 and was banned in …

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My mama always told me to find something I’m good at and to then apply it in my day-to-day life. I’m one hell of a screamer. Throughout the years, I’ve developed a decent name for my screams on stage with my music, but one day my dream happened. A good friend of mine, Joseph Bishara (Rasputina, Marilyn Manson, 16 Volt, etc.) walked up to me after one of my band Satiate’s shows and asked, if he paid me, would I let him record me, audibly, for some horror movie work. His exact words were “how’d you like to get paid to puke?” I immediately was into the idea for a multitude of reasons. One, I’m a huge horror movie freak. Two, I’ve always wanted to work in horror movies. Lastly, how awesome would it be for someone to ask me what I do for a living and I can go “I get paid to puke and scream.” From this one conversation a few years ago, I get calls from time to time to come down to the studio and track vocals, screams, eerie voices and, yes, weird noises, like gurgling, gargling and yes, puking. Most of my work is featured in movie trailers and TV commercials, some of the more “known” work in my resume is: The Village, Amityville Horror (remake,) Silent Hill, and The Grudge 2. One of my latest treks into the studio was for the After Dark Films Horror Fest, 8 Films to Die For, The Gravedancers.

It’s very challenging work. The first half of the session was vocal pieces that range …

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I never trust any woman who lists Sixteen Candles as one of her favorite movies.

The most fundamental flaws with society today can all be traced back to 80’s teen movies, specifically the work of John Hughes. I hoped, when I moved to Hollywood, that I would someday get the opportunity to tell him so in person. I’ve been here a while and haven’t run into him yet, so I thought I would post it on a nice busy site and wait for him to find it while ego-searching.

The message of pretty much all John Hughes movies is that you should hate successful people, while coveting what they have and having the exact same sucky values that the people you hate have. If you hate someone, why would you aspire to be like them? I understand that sometimes one can take a wrong turn in life, but who actually wants to become something they themselves hate?

Let’s start with The Breakfast Club. Although Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful are so much worse, I’m going to try to go with chronology. The basic conceit of Breakfast Club, for those fortunate enough not to have seen it, is to place a group of dissimilar and unrealistically stereotyped students in a room where they are not allowed to leave and see how it all turns out. The results are an implausible and thoroughly unjoyous exersize in unhelpful group therapy. Anthony Michael Hall’s character blubbers and actually gets sympathy from fellow high school students trapped in detention with him. Molly Ringwald’s character takes the poetic and sexy character played by (much hotter) Ally Sheedy and gives her a makeover that would qualify her to play the ugly friend. You know how lots of …

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Universal’s Accepted Keg Party Photo Gallery

Estimated opening weekend gross for Accepted is around $10 million, which is hunky-dorey for a movie with a production budget of only around $23 million. I don’t know what percentage of those movie-goers also attended Comic Con or talked to someone who did, but Accepted did the most brilliant promotion at the convention.

Comic Con is the largest convention of its type in the U.S. This year, significantly more than a hundred thousand people showed up. Which is significantly more than the forty thousand or so the city of San Diego could probably handle. It was impossible to park anywhere near the convention center and it was approximately one billion degrees and the food in the convention center concessions started tasting kinda rancid by the second day. And, even for pretty literally nauseating food, the lines were likely to take an hour or so. Which cuts down on one’s collectible-browsing time. So, by the end of the day, everyone was sort of running on empty, streaming out of the San Diego Convention Center en masse, hungry and a long way, under a hot sun, from their transportation.

So the promoters of the Accepted movie threw a collegiate-style beer blast and barbeque across the street. The basic concept of the flick is that an enterprising young man is rejected from every college he applies to, so he creates his own institution of higher learning called South Harmon Institute of Technology. Yes, that acronym is what you think it is. The star-studded event featured a skateboard ramp and a giant banner reading “Welcome SHITheads” with the San Diego Gaslamp district as a backdrop. While waiting in a refreshingly …

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