I started making a longer video project… a “pilot” or short film or whatever. My goal is to finish shooting my by birthday this month and get it to the NY TV Festival.
Paul Rondeau is shooting it. Cast includes Jim Santangeli, Sue Galloway, Matt DeCoster, Rob Lathan, and Mitch Magee. And me.
Here is a completely irrelevant clip of Mitch ad-libbing. This will not be in the final video.
Despite the fact it may forward the curse, I watched the rest of Roadhouse this weekend, then followed it with The Great Moment (out-of-character Sturges heroic dentist biopic) and Real Life (showcasing Albert Brook’s horrifying shoulder fur)
My parents were in town, briefly, and I went to the Met (museum, not opera) with them. They’ve renovated the 19th/18th Century painting area (I can’t remember what the old gallery looked like… I probably could reconstruct the layout of the National Gallery in DC from memory, though). The three temporary shows were a parade of snooze and yuck though… Courbet,Poussin, and Jasper Johns: Gray.
However, on Sunday, I have found a new obsession. I’ve been a cranky snob about the last couple years about the revival schedules put up at Film Forum. They flipflop from being paint-dryingly dull retrospectives of the third-best forgotten masters of Japanese drawing room dramas where 2/3 of the movie is people emotionlessly staring at each other or, the UA screening coming up, so broad and mainstream that every movie on the ticket is available at your local blockbuster. Although, I really do applaud Film Forum’s ability to work my favorite movie “One, Two, Three” into EVERY series. Hooray!
Anyway, due to a listing in the New York Times (that I was only reading because my parents had a copy in their hotel room), I saw the New-York Historical Society (I don’t know why it’s hyphenated) was showing a double feature of silents. Turns out this group—Silent Clowns—has been showing extremely rare silents for the last 10 years. I finally found a film series nerdy/unpretenious enough to meet my specific film needs.
They seem to have a show once a month from fall through spring—there’s only two showings left this month. Next month is some guy with a mustache but the next one after that is Laurel & Hardy (meh) shorts AND a female slapstick duo and I’m intrigued. One is tall and one is short and in the promo picture they seemed to be tied together at the waist with a guilt look on their faces—that says “comedy” to me!
Oh, so many reasons to buy giant chess pieces!
Like, pretending you’re in an episode of the Avengers (or an Avengers-themed XTC video).
Even better—Plastic Chess Hats, particularly with the WARNING: ...these products may cause neck injury in the natural course of child play. Constant adult supervision is required. “So, how DID your son end up a quadrapalegic.”
A friend comments that the pawn hat looks like “a condom full of whale jizz”
I think it’s strange that the price of the chess hats bought individually scales upwards with the piece’s status in the game. I mean, the hats are all made of the same stuff… why is a queen hat $50 and a pawn $13?
(Site found by thebighonkin.com; they used a black knight for “Dark Horse” in Defenders of Stan #12)
First, watch the 3rd Mister Glasses, I edited the middle part.
Second item, I want to make a new show. I like making shows, but I’ve had a two-ton, cake-frosted albatross around my neck for the last year. I have a bunch of semi-developed ideas (many of these are really old), but I can’t tell if any of them have merit.
The more the trend towards really short one-off sketches continues on the internet, the more I want to make complicated, multi-scene, involved shows. I don’t care what they end up on, though I like seeing them live with an audience. These shows could be for any venue online or off.
Here are the top candidates, to keep a record of them for my sake as well as the handful of peeping peteys who read this blog (both of you).
Sui-slider
Main character is a overly-sensitive Poetry grad student who after a series of disheartening encounters with his advising professor, therapist, and ex-girlfriend; commits suicide. What he soon realizes that rather than find a tidy end to his put-upon life, he has become a sui-slider cursed to jump between alternate realities with each attempt to end it all.
Pro:
Cons:
Matt DeCoster: Dream Assassin
DeCoster is a hit-man with the unique ability to enter his victims dreams and kill them without leaving any evidence. The half of the episode sets up his target’s evil deeds, second half is the dream.
Pro:
Cons:
Dumpy
CathymeetsNeil LaBute. Neurotic-but-lovable office worker Mandy Dumphries (nicknamed “Dumpy”) struggles with all the problems of a modern woman in the big city. She has a crush on her boss, an overbearing mother, loves chocolate and is trying to quit smoking. All standard Working Girl, Bridget Jones cliche plot lines, but the hook is that while she’s this (sym)pathetic good-hearted Pollyanna, all of the people around her are cruel to the point of abuse… spitting in her face, her boss dressing her down while being serviced by a leather-clad gimp, lighting her desk on fire. The more likable and sponge-like her personality; the more awful the world is to counter.
Pro:
Cons:
Bowling Noir
The one hack move that pisses me off more than anything is badly done Noir parodies… sketches, videos, whatever. It’s always the same stock shit off a detective in his office and the dame comes in, voice over…zzzzz. The detective in his office shit is like less than 5% of the genre, and it’s 99% of the parody. I’d do a show that’s the rest of the genre, poor suckers getting pulled into schemes they don’t know how to get out of, insurance fraud, lots of night driving.
And the main character is the world’s greatest bowler, continually suckered into doing illegal things, played by Matt DeCoster
Pro:
Cons:
I found myself thinking about scientists who spend their lives teaching animals to talk, like Koko the Gorilla and the recently deceased Alex the Parrot. A lot of skeptics say the supposed teaching and logic on display that the researchers say is the breakthrough, is operant conditioning… rehearsed performances (usual name-check-dismissed with an eyeroll to “Hans the Wonder Horse“)
I found, through cross-references in Wikipedia, a current parrot subject who’s being taught through “conversational” methods. And just to throw some sand under the wheels of scientific legitimacy, Nkisi can not only speak and understand English… he’s psychic too.
Nkisi Speaks
I could listen to this for hours. Nkisi sounds like a teenaged girl from LaJolla.
It cheapens the whole having-an-astral-body-named-in-your-honor for the other honorees.
Why am I wasting my time making internet videos, when this guy already completely mastered the form?
