quarterempty

WALK HARD, the next project for Jake Kasdan & Judd Apatow, is a mock(umentary?) biography of a ficitional musician.  It’s been getting a lot of buzz, and will hopefully break Kasdan’s feature slump (orange county, tv set) since his feature debut ZERO EFFECT.

CHUD.com – Cinematic Happenings Under Development

This isn’t exactly breaking news – it was rumored back in March – but Jack White has confirmed to MTV News that he’ll be appearing in Walk Hard as Elvis Presley, who meets John C Reilly’s fictional musician Dewey Cox backstage at a concert and, as White told MTV, “drama ensues.”Jack White isn’t the only great cameo in the film; as CHUD reader Justin Long revealed to Frosty at Collider a couple of weeks ago he’s going to be showing up as George Harrison, while Jack Black will be Paul McCartney (!), Paul Rudd is John Lennon and Jason Schwartzman is Ringo Starr. That’s a helluva Beatles line-up, to be sure.

my favorite bit of John C. Reilly trivia?  he was the sasquatch in the tenacious d short “let the dream die”

Wow, apparently Apatow has a hard time managing talent on set.  James Franco this time freaking out over not being able to improvise in making KNOCKED UP.  And for these clips to be leaking on the the internet like this, he must not treat his staff very well.  Whatta dick.

http://www.funnyordie.com/v1/view_video.php?viewkey=d0277922f8371d582729

A so-far-uncredited screenwriter, Matthew Dessem, has started a project, The Criterion Contraption, where he will watch each of the criterion collection films in order of the company’s release.  While this in itself is an admirable, ambitious project (there are 403 films so far!), his reviews are remarkably  creative, insightful, and full of pithy details.  It’s unlikely he’ll ever catch up (he’s been at it for three years and is only up to #70, averaging two a month while criterion puts out three a month), as he reviews the entire disc, all the features, commentaries and packaging, along with his own considerable film knowledge.  His writing style, while heavily informative, is never pedantic, nor does he take cheap shots at some of Criterion’s head scratchers.  Armageddon (#40) for example, exhibits a considered defense of not only the film’s existence, but even its inclusion on the list.    A digression on lenses and aspect ratios in his review of Rushmore (#65) is particularly idiosyncratric.  I recommend these reviews as well as:  This Is Spinal Tap (#12), The Silence of the Lambs (#13).

The Criterion Contraption: #12: This Is Spinal Tap

It took Spinal Tap years to find out who owned the rights to the band name before their 1992 tour; Embassy and Monarch films were long gone and as part of their deal with Embassy, they’d sold away all rights to the characters. It’s still not really clear who owned them when–the Criterion DVD has New Line Home Video’s logo, but MGM did the most recent DVD. Anyway, as part of some Byzantine licensing scheme, the members of Spinal Tap are allowed to use the characters now, but only if they appear as Spinal Tap at least once every three years. If they don’t, the rights revert. So they literally have to play a concert, or make a television appearance, or something, every three years, or they can never be Spinal Tap again.

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Most people who know me probably wouldn’t suspect the deep affection i hold for DAFT PUNK, or electronic music in general. I stole their first major release, HOMEWORK, off napster years ago, probably after seeing SPIKE JONZE’s music video for DA FUNK (though AROUND THE WORLD by MICHEL GONDRY is better), and consider it one of the perfect albums of my generation [this post coming soon]. Albums and videos since have offered diminishing returns, and their attempts at feature length music videos have been a terribly unproductive distraction from their stronger talents. I’m not a dancer, I don’t go to clubs, never been to a rave, but I love the energy of their music. I was unsurprised to hear DAFT PUNK started out as a guitars-based rock-and-roll band, so many of their songs have a garage rock spirit.

An electronic music label here in new york, PALMS OUT RECORDS, has a blog where, among other features, every wednesday is samples wednesday. not only do they track down the original sources of samples used in an artist’s songs, they provide mp3s of the original songs! Some of DAFT PUNK’s samples are obvious, others may have you scratching your head. As they put it: “you’ll either decide Daft Punk isn’t as genius as you thought they were or that they’re twice as amazing.” Other artists palmsout has pulled the curtain on: OUTKAST, JAY-Z, MISSY, LADIES LOVE COOL JAMES, MADONNA, and so on. It really is an amazing archive.

Daft Punk took their name from a review in Melody Maker of a single put out by their first band, Darling as “a bunch of daft punk.” Of course Darling has a myspace page with the single.

The boys from Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, have gone to great lengths since Discovery to disguise their identities. Even using the costumes featured in the Robot Rock video (and the Gap ad) on stage. They weren’t always so secretive, as in this 30 minute clip from a wisconsin festival in 1996.

In their first US performance since 1997, at Coachella last year, Daft Punk performed a cracking good show. They tear their music apart and put it back together again. BrooklynVegan posted the full set. rumor is, this will be released as a DVD.

Oh did i mention i will see them August 9 at Keyspan Park in Coney Island? Yeah, I’m a little excited.

And one last thing. Is it just me, or does the new Apples In Stereo album sound like Daft Punk rocking? It’s got all this weird electronic stuff. Weird good. Not weird bad. Maybe it is just me.

TVSquad recently linked to the first episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien.  It’s fascinating to see how young he and Andy Richter and even Max are.  It’s really endearing to see how Conan turns the magnifying glass he was under into a joke.  He’s still goofy, but so much more assured now.  Guests include John Goodman, Drew Barrymore, Tony Randall.

Wikipedia entry for Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

Parody of Studio 60 on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, w/ Liev Schriber 

When THE WEST WING came out and throughout almost its complete run, I disdained its inauthenticity. I just couldn’t buy that real people talked that way, really quickly and in fully drafted and edited speeches, and, as a recent political science baccalaureate, i was primed to love/hate a show set in the white house.

Then I caught SPORTS NIGHT, in re-runs on comedy central and loved it. I was unemployed at the time and it came on at 2am and 10am, perfect timing for the jobless, it turns out.  I knew the dialogue was ridiculous, some of the conflicts contrived, but the characters were so much fun to watch, and you could tell that the actors were having a lot of fun.  Also, I’ve never been much into sports, but it’s a world i’ve always been fascinated by, so while i couldn’t make it through SportsCenter, I could make it through a dramatized knockoff.

So a few years later, having caught a few episodes of the sixth season, as WEST WING began to focus on its presidential race, i got mildly interested in it and happened to come across the first season on dvd from the library. It sat unwatched for a few weeks, then I picked it up, intending to watch half an episode to fall asleep. I devoured the first season in a few days, immediately putting the second season on reserve and when it wasn’t ready the night i finished the first season, i drove to a blockbuster as they were closing to pick up the first couple of discs of the second season. I started downloading entire seasons with bittorrent. Now, the west wing ran for seven seasons, each season with about 22 45-minute episodes.  I got hooked at the end of the sixth season, 134 episodes in, which works out to 100.5 hours of television I downloaded and watched within about 5 weeks.

WEST WING does veer into ridiculousness, especially with the speechifying, but I was consistently impressed with the camerawork, the faux-policy wonk aspects and the essential, almost teasing, “there’s no way that could ever happen”.  One of the things I appreciate in writers like DeLillo, Chabon, or the McSweeney’s cabal are the little details, maybe one paragraph or half-page observations or facts.  The really clever, thoughtful asides that I would never considered (Arrested Development was a show made up almost completely of these asides).  I appreciated that an episode was never just about one thing, it was about six things and they might pay off in this episode or six episodes down the line.  I admired the level of complexity and trust they placed in the audience, which made all the middlebrow concessions in certain seasons just tolerable enough to continue.  And they had good act breaks.  There is something about a show, like 24 or The Sopranos, or The Wire that makes you just desperate to start another episode as soon as the last one ends.  It’s just a pleasure you take in watching something that, unlike the pleasure of eating cake or having sex that you just continue until your eyes cannot stay open any longer or you cannot be any later to whatever you have to do next.

And I like(d) Studio 60 too.  I think Sorkin may have set himself up for criticism in the pilot by setting the bar for the show within the show as reinventing television comedy, then following that solely with unfunny, unremarkable sketches.  If the Studio 60 were more about their failure to create a funny show, perhaps they could have sidestepped some of the criticism.  Or perhaps it’s that the endless oratory and navel-gazing asides are more in place when you’re dealing with issues of international diplomacy and national security.  The stakes for getting an unfunny sketch comedy show are maybe not so high.  Drama becomes melodrama.  And of course wincingly sentimental subplots and winking at tabloid details of Sorkin’s past make easy fodder for critics and difficult hurdles for supporters.

Want more Studio 60 ridicule?  Mad TV did a balls-on parody some time ago.