Will Hines Dot Net

Rob Lathan hosted “John Kerry-oke” Monday night in which he played John Kerry and hosted a karoke night. A great idea, and Rob’s brilliant Kerry is more hilarious now that he’s lost the election. “I’m John Kerry and I’m not reporting for duty! I’m going to drink myself silly and sing hits from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and today!” The show was better for not being planned. To my delight, John Kerry brought only one karoke disc (“Male Pop Hits” or something) , so singers had to choose from among just 15 songs. What’ll it be, audience, Right Here, Right Now by Jesus Jones or Is She Really Going Out With Him by Joe Jackson?

Based on an idea from Curtis, I performed as Time Conway — time-travelling brother of Tim Conway. The real Tim Conway does his Dorf character a lot, where he pretends to be a little person, or whatever the term of the day is, and stands in a raised stage with shoes sticking out of his thighs. It’s a low point in American comedy, and I wanted to be part of it. So I took a pair of old K-Swiss, cut out the heels, tied them to my knees and stepped out on stage and sung “Country Roads” until a robot from the future (Pat Baer) stepped out and killed me. Good times. Even better later when UCB character/character actor Jawnee Conroy decided he wanted to be Chris Robinson and we sang “She Talks To Angels” (song 12 of 15) to each other. I’m not sure if the audience enjoyed a song that has three instrumental breaks, but Jawnee and I had a good time. Jawnee was a hit, making the most of the “is that guy for real, or putting it on” effect he has on audiences of non-UCB regulars.

Best part of the night for me was while sitting offstage, Seth Morris leaned over to me and said “Just to remind you of where you are, you’re 34 years old, sitting the basement of a Chelsea theater; you’ve got sneakers tied to your knees, and you’re waiting to step out and sing karoke with a guy pretending to be John Kerry.” I have variations of that thought roughly every 25 seconds. Truth be told though, I wouldn’t really want any other life. So Time Conway will rock on.

I finally finished Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz. It’s all good, but it’s also all sort of the same, so I had to take breaks rather than plow through. On to The Writer’s Journey, which will teach me to write huge blockbuster scripts. Look out, Charlie Kaufmann!

Saw The Life Aquatic yesterday. If you love Wes Anderson, you’ll at least like this one. It’s okay. I enjoyed it, but there are a lot of moments where you feel like you’re watching your favorite parts of his other movies. “Oh, is this ANOTHER movie where some random kid just stands next to the main character during big moments? Do these main characters all have brightly-colored uniforms that they wear too?” Also, as Wes Anderson progresses, his heroes get more and more competent and therefore less fun.

• Bottle Rocket’s thieves — totally uncompetent; hilarious
• Rushmore’s Max — a decently smart child but out-of-touch; very funny
• Tennebaums’ Children — once nationally-famous geniues, now kinda sad — funny
• Life Aquatic’s Zissou — internationally renowned documentarian, running out of steam, but still pulls off big action recsues — pretty funny.

That’s your gross generalization for the day, friends! I also wanted to be sick of Anderson’s insistence of choosing British 60s and 70s rock songs for his soundtracks, but they’re too good to ignore. I never really knew “Life on Mars?” by David Bowie and now I can’t stop listening to it.

Big spoilers here.

First of all, I really liked Sideways, okay? Honest. I laughed a lot. It made me sad sometimes and happy other times and all that. Really. What’s sticking in my craw is how several people have said to me that they were so impressed that Paul Giamatti’s melancholic writer was so realistic and that Tom Hayden Christensen’s unrepentent has-been actor/pussy hound was so complicated.

It’s a fun movie, yes, but it was not realistic, and it was not complicated.

The reason it’s successful is because it is NOT complicated. It tells you who these characters are very early, and then never strays from that. It uses clever visual clues to tell you what’s going on, and what the characters are feeling. You are never, ever lost in this film. The laughs come from how the characters live up to their nature as introduced to the audience no matter what the situation. It’s like the game of the scene in improv. Each character has a game, and they play it every scene. That’s it!

Here’s the sad character hungover in his messy aparment.
Here he is lying to his friend about why he’s late,
Here he is getting rejected from the publishing company.
Here he is stealing from his mom.
Here he is saying the wrong thing to his ex-wife.
To the new girl.
To his friend.
To himself.
Here he is sad.
Here he is sad.
Here he is sad.
He’s sad.
He’s sad here.
Look, he’s sad.
Now he’s sad.
This happy thing happened; he’s sad.

And the other guy: he fucked up big time, but he wants to get laid.
Now he’s talking about getting laid.
He wants to get laid now.
Now he wants to get laid.
This thing has happened which should make him never want to get laid; he wants to get laid.
He’s looking at that girl and you can tell he wants to get laid by her.
He is planning on getting laid.
He is laying that girl.
He just got laid.

That’s not complicated. — that’s a punk rock single. Three chords that you hit over and over. It put a topic sentence at the start of every paragraph, and made sure that every paragraph supported its central thesis, just like any well-organized B+ term paper.

It was not realistic mostly because of how unbelievably perfect Virginia Madsen’s character was for Giamatti’s. But also because the characters each have one game and they just hit it over and over. Just like the “realistic” characters in American Beauty.

“Realistic” is audience code for “actors who say ‘uh’ a lot in their dialogue” and “complicated” just means that there is a contradiction or morals in the character. But a single contradiction is NOT complicated – it’s a simplification.

But whatever. I liked it, even though I feel like Sideways pulled a fast one. It told the same story Swingers did in 1996, but dressed it up for the NPR crowd. And I don’t mind, because I am the NPR crowd and I liked Swingers. So I laughed a lot and had a good time.

Er, I don’t mean to make fun of this movie. And I really love that my friends are all going nuts over it. It’s way way way way better than when everyone went nuts over As Good As It Gets way back whenever. That was a goddamn nightmare!

In fairness, I should note that I’ve never even written one line of a movie screenplay and I don’ t know anything.

So you sit there and wonder: is this blog ever going to have entries with actual points that are meant for people to read, or is it just going to be a blog with entries about the blog itself? Because it’s doubtful that’d be a very interesting blog. Well, that’s certainly a valid question.

I have no valid answer.

Next!

Ok. Frustrated with my own attempts to make a cleanly-designed page, I’ve take a pre-fab stylesheet I like very much called “Kubrick” and installed it here. All previously designed styles (“whitealbum”, “roomy”, etc.) are no longer available, as the whole page is laid out differently and they wouldn’t apply anymore. Kubrick is clean and simple and if you’d like, you can get it here: http://binarybonsai.com/kubrick/

Kubrick (the style) is CLEAN and NICE to my eye. It’s something I’d want to actually add to. For someone of my poor design skills to try and articulate why this particular design works or does not is probably like Jeff Foxworthy trying to explain the appeal of Curb Your Enthuasim. But I THINK it’s simply that this style drops most of the unnecessary elements of a blog (the calendar, the author’s name) and adds in a lot of white space. That, and the link colors are consistent with the header, and the edges are nicely rounded and faded. Something like that. It sounds easy when you say it like that, but I can’t manage to do it.

The menu of green tabs beneath the header I stole from maxdesign’s Listamatic (1), which you can find here: http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/horizontal24.htm. They should probably be blue but I like that splash of green so I’m keeping it that way.

I’d like to change the header graphic to have either a photo of me, or a drawing of a stick figure. So that might happen.

How WOULD Jeff Foxworthy describe the appeal of Curb Your Enthusiasm? “Well, it shore don’t seem funny to me, but I guess city folk like to see the Jew people complain or sumpin’. And it’s all impervised so it seems natueeral. Hee-yaw! I’m a-thirsty! Some’un geet me a nice glass ‘a lemony-ade!”

More blog entires about this blog are sure to follow! Woo! Get comfy!