film history #15

This is it, my faithful reading several, the last leg of my coverage of my post modern film history course. This week, we were treated to a work created by the ultimate ‘post modern” era film team, the Coen Brothers. Whom, frankly, are a film making team whose work I stopped caring about after “Fargo” was made because I thought their films were becoming too quirky for their own good. It’s supposed to be all about substance over style, not the other way around. How many times I have to tell you people this?

By “post modern,” my professor means “the era where the rise of electronic information transfer becomes more dominant” (i.e. television, internet) and the concept of “intertexuality:” the means in where which a modern text (or media) borrows ideas from a past text. (Or in other words, there no such thing as an original idea anymore!) If my professor wanted to choose the ultimate post modern film director to study for this course, he should’ve chosen Quentin Tarantino, because none of his movies have any original ideas in them at all.

This week’s film was “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” which was basically Homer’s Illad retold in a Great Depression setting. (There goes that intertexuality concept again!) what else stopped this film from being enjoyable for me was George Clooney and John Goodman, two actors whose theatrical skills are the death knell of any movie.

This film shall also be damned for bringing blue grass music out of obscure-musical-guest-between-the-funny-bits-of-Prairie-Home-Companion-with-Garrison-Keillor-ghetto and into the mainstream hipster, suv driving  ”I’m cooler than thou for no particular reason” crowd. An inexcusable offense in my opinion.

This is the end of the syllabus, so there is no film to review next week. Please keep an eye on this website for new and fresh topic ideas in the near future!

jareddriskill

random item tuesdays

1. Sorry for the lack of a new posting yesterday, the bad weather and some personal business just got the better of me. It’s all good now.

2. I must be getting older because every time I step in the shower I feel the urge to go urinate. (Even when I urinate in the toilet before stepping in the shower!) This frustrates me to no end because it always happens just when I start to lather up and I have to step out of the shower to take care of business.

I know what some of you are thinking: “jareddriskill why don’t you just let it go while you are showering?” I say to thee: Nay!  I believe that urinating in the shower is nasty and unsanitary. I mean no matter how new your plumbing in your house is, drains to not drain all the way automatically, so if you urinate in the shower you are effectively standing in your own urine. You may accuse me of anything under the sun, but “shower urinator’ is where I draw the line.

3. Today, April 29th, must be whoever is driving a white colored car must drive like an escaped lunatic on the run from the police day. I wish I had some video to back this claim up, but every white car I saw on the road today drove like they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing behind the wheel. Seriously folks, wtf!?!?!

class war #2

This is part two of my fictional fashion ad campaign called “Class War.” This piece is called “black velvet cocktail dress by Dior, murdered socialite by bourgeoisie revolutionary scum.”

jareddriskill

week 17 (54)

The Soul Train gods were smiling down upon me this week, not only they put up an episode that has never been reviewed on this website on the air this week, but I heard through the grapevine that there might be a feature length film about Soul Train in the works for a 2009 release! I sure hope that this news is true because I’ll watch this movie in the theaters at least a hundred times. Keep those fingers crossed!

This weeks episode came from the magical world that was 1974 and the fashion key phrase for the Soul Train Gang this week was “FUNKY” (pronounced FUN-KAY!) Geez, every bad 1970’s fashion stereotype that you could think of (and then some) was on display this week as the Soul Train Gang danced to heavy MOOG keyboard and wah wah guitar laden jams such as “Live It Up” by the Isley Brothers (The Soul Train “Blockbuster” of the week,) “My Thing” by James Brown, “Boogie Joe, The Grinder” by Quincy Jones and “Mainline’ by Ashford and Simpson. (Ok, the Ashford and Simpson track was not loaded down with moog keyboards and wah wah gutiars, but you aren’t going to hold that against me, are you?)

The Soul Train Scramble Board: Herbie Hancock! As The Commodores took it home with hard hitting funk that was ”Machine Gun.”

This week’s musical guests:

1. George McCrea! Who sung his smash hit, “Rock Your Baby.” You know the song where 80% of the lyrics consisted of “WOMAN! Take me in your arms/Rock your baby” and “Ah-HA!” sung in a drawn out falsetto. It’s not a bad song, but the bell bottom black pant suit with rhinestone accents that George McCrae wore on the show was.

2. Rufus! Playing their first “million seller single” the laid back, swampy funk called “Tell Me Something Good.” A young Chaka Khan was rocking the mic and a purple sequined tube top on this song and as well on their second selection, “We Got The Love.” Is it me, or did their keyboard player looked like an evil hippie character played by that fine thespian, Donald Sutherland?

3. Frankie Agaie (SP?) Not technically a musical guest, but a rather an unfunny stand up comedian. His jokes did not produce a single genuine laugh from the discriminating Soul Train Gang. He did make the brilliant, but true observation that “gym teachers are nothing but ex-hoodlums who have been saved by athletics.”

4. Billy Preston! Or shall I say, Billy Preston’s huge afro and the huge afro band! (I swear I think that one of the requirements of joining his backing band was that they had to have an afro that was at least 3 times larger than their heads.) In a rare Soul Train moment, Billy was able to play his piano live on stage during his hit song “nothing For Nothing.” I wonder if it felt weird for him to play his piano live but having to lip sync his vocals. For his second selection Billy played the instrumental track “Strutting.” In the performance of which, Billy acted like his keyboards were electrocuting him every time he touched them.

The Soul Train Line: “Bailero” by War. The camera crew this week showed some poor framing skills as the tops of some of the Soul Train Gang’s heads were cut out of the frame in several shots. I just can’t tolerate sloppy camera work, I’m sorry.

The Don Cornelius Interview Gaff of the week: Billy Preston just informed our good man, Don that he and his band just came back from England and France and the following exhange happened.
Don: “So… what did you do over there?”

Billy Preston: ( looking slightly frustrated and quite shocked at Don’s poor interviewing and interpersonal skills) ”Playing concerts.”

Don’t ever change Don, we love you the way you are!

That’s about it for this week folks, so on the behalf of Don Cornelius, the Soul Train Gang and myself: love, peace and SOUL!

jareddriskill

 

dreamlog #39

Had a dream that my father had bought a new house way the fuck out in the country and there was some stipulation in the contract with the Realtor that I was to spend the night in the house by myself before the house could close. So I agreed and packed my bags for an overnight stay.

The house is a dump. The only inhabitable room in the house is the sun room so I unpack my sleeping bag and lay down on a cot for some shut eye. I am woken up in the middle of the night by some rustling noises. It turns out that some animals (a fox, a squirrel and a rabbit) had entered the house through a broken window in the sun room. I chased them out of the house and blocked the broken window with a book shelf so they won’t renter the house again while I slept.

I woke up the following morning and picked up an old newspaper that was laying on the floor. Inside was a editorial cartoon entitled “those darn animals!” in which a fox sees a broken window in a house, enters the house and in the last frame, the fox is considerably overweight and sick from eating all the food in the house. I sat there in my sleeping bag on the cot dumbfounded and then I said to myself; “Man, I could kill for some pancakes right about now.”

jareddriskill

st george’s day

I forgot to mention this earlier, but today ( Wednesday the 23rd) is St George’s day! I am having a better day than I did last year when the date I took with me to celebrate the occasion with at Penny Lane Pub ended up dissing me and went home with some other dude that was in the bar. Because, as she said, he was shipping out to Iraq the next day and she “felt bad for him.”

Good riddance though, she was an unemployed alcholoic who ended up running away with her step father to california, true story, after her mother found out she was having an affair with him.   ( Saint George preserve us!) Thank god that I never slept with her!

jareddriskill

film history #14

Welcome to the penultimate edition of my post modern film history series. It seems like only yesterday that I, out of a fit of laziness, decided to use the course content from one of my college courses as material for my website. I can be so clever sometimes, can’t I?

Of course, what post modern film history course is complete without studying the works of Martin Scorsese? While I admire the hard work and craftsmanship that Scorsese puts into all his work and I admit he can come up with great scenes of ultra violence, but for some reason his films just do not appeal to me at all. He makes great films, don’t get me wrong, but they are not films that I care for.

Yeah, I know that comment will generate reams of hate mail, but I am about to state something that will generate more: I fucking hate gangster/mobster films because I think they are really fucking boring and I have no interest whatsoever in the gangster lifestyle.

But this week, my professor chose “Goodfellas” to show to the class, which I think is the better film in the whole gangster genre because it actually have a few scenes that actually shows how boring and mundane the gangster lifestyle can be. But a few scenes alone do not make for a great film. Like most gangster films, “Goodfellas” is rather long, boring and has too many characters and supporting cast to comfortably keep track of. And yes, the monotony is broken up by people getting whacked in some violent manner, but the reasons for them getting whacked are just too plot involved and byzantine for my liking. “You stepped on Uncle Joey’s shoe in a scene two hours ago, the only scene coincidently, that Uncle Joey appears in this film! DIE! DIE! DIE!

However, “Goodfellas” shall always be damned by this author for influencing those lousy “Joe Pesci Show” sketches on SNL (circa mid 1990’s) which where based on the “Do You Think I Am Funny” scene from this film. The irony of the whole situtaion is that I don’t think that Joe Pesci is funny at all. (Unless you consider having limited acting abilities “funny.” If that’s the case, then, yes, he is.)

next week on the syllabus: Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

jareddriskill

random item tuesdays

1. Happy Earth day! Maybe my memory is faulty, but when I was growing up, Earth day always seemed to fall on the first of May, not some random ass Tuesday in April. (Not that I was paying close attention back then or anything.)  

As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t known today was Earth day if I hadn’t read the comics section of the newspaper (the only place in my local paper where Earth day was even mentioned) at my internship this morning. (And for all this time, I had thought they cancelled that Earth day shit along time ago because I haven’t heard anything about it since the fifth grade or so.) 

Or… unless today isn’t really Earth day and this is some poorly thought out unfunny practical joke that was being pulled by the artists making the newspaper comic strips these days. I don’t know what to think anymore.

2. Why is it that when you pull up to an automated toll booth and lets say for example, that the toll is 25 cents and you are paying the toll with two dimes and a nickle, that when you throw all the change into the machine at once, it never registers one of the dimes, thus forcing you to waste another dime so you can drive on through? Of course when you throw in your change one coin at a time, the line of cars behind you honk their horns and generally cuss you out. So it’s a no win situation.

Of course, today being Earth day, I should suggest that you walk or ride your bike to work this avoiding the toll roads altogether. But seriously, who the fuck is actually going to do that?

3. Speaking of toll roads, the new toll plaza on the Powhite parkway here in Richmond is totally fucked up. They placed the new off ramp to the Chippenham parkway WAY to close to the toll plaza. So the unlucky bastard who has to use to the “smart tag only” lane to the extreme left of the toll plaza has to cut through 6 lanes of traffic within 100 yards of exiting the toll plaza if he wants to make it to the off ramp. Somebody will be killed within 6 weeks trying to pull this stunt off. Mark my words.

jareddriskill

dreamlog #38

In this dream, I was at the laundromat minding my own business (and my wash) when a female police officer came up to me and asked me to leave the premises. Not wanting to cause a scene, I obeyed the police officer and exited the building.

When I was outside, I turned to the police officer to ask about getting my laundry out of the machines, that’s when I noticed that the woman wasn’t really a police officer- but she was some insane person wearing a cheap, hand made police officer costume. I told her to go fuck off and I went back into the laundromat and finished washing my clothes.

jareddriskill

father ted series 4

Recently, I let a friend of my borrow my Father Ted dvd collection. Upon returning my DVDs, my frined commented on why there aren’t anymore series of Father Ted being made, ignoring the fact that the star of the show, Dermont Morgan, is dead and that series writer, Graham Linenan, has stated that he thought that  series had gone as far as it could in regards of originiality. (Or something to that effect.)

Undeterred, my friend still thinks they can still make another series of Father Ted and pressed me into thinking up new plots for a series four. Never one to back down from a good intellectual excersise, I took my friend up on the challenge. After several weeks of thinking, I realized that Graham Linehan was right, Father Ted had gone as far it could go and that creating a new series is nigh impossible. Except… for the following short exchange that I managed to scrape together.

(Cut to establishing shot of the Craggy Island Parochial house living room. Father Jack is sitting in his chair asleep and Father Dougal is sitting at the dining room table looking quite absent minded, or in other words: looking quite normal. Father Ted enters the living room looking frantic, he walks up to Father Dougal, who turns to face him.)

Ted:

Terrible news, Dougal! I’ve just been accused of being… a pedophile!

Dougal:

Wow, really Ted? I didn’t know that you were a foot fetishist!

Yeah, I realize that joke might be a little too “high concept” for the average sitcom viewer. But hey, Father Ted wasn’t your typical sitcom and I’m not your typical would-be comedy writer.

jareddriskill