In the video, we learn that ballet is as brutal as pro wrestling, that Aronofsky is like a cuddly, beloved version of Lars von Trier and that ballet + malaise = ballaise.
The plan is to return with new videos in January. In the meantime, I want to create a episode guide blog post that lists all the Trailers Without Pity episodes we’ve done so far with links to all of them. I think we’re up to almost 60 episodes dating back to October 2008. Look for that in the next few weeks if things don’t get too busy and overwhelming around here.
I’m lucky to have an editor who reads my stuff (even on Twitter) and recognizes that when year after year I proclaim how much I love something, at some point it’s probably a good idea to assign that to me as a story for the paper.
The story was a lot of fun to write and you can tell where I was cutting loose a bit from the normal reporting/writing; as I was writing, I imagined the people I had interviewed from Wurstfest seeing the article later and crying, “What the crap is this!?” to the parts of the piece that were a little more personal.
Then I imagined them banning me from the festival, me screaming at the gates, and being forevermore labeled as a “Sausage Interloper.” That’s a real thing in Germany, right?
Seriously, I do hope that doesn’t happen because we plan to go at least 3 or 4 times starting Friday. Bonus: in the print version, my wife got a full photo credit for a picture she took of Lilly and me on the carousel.
Sometimes, lost as I am in an adult world of mortgage payments and shitty diapers, I forget that once upon a time I was quite the nerd and my classmates didn’t let me forget it. It’s nice to know I can always dip into my nerd hurt reserves when the need strikes. This was one of those times.
As for my use of the word “Penultimate” above, here’s the deal: we decided in the spring that when our two years of doing videos for TWOP was up (and when the latest run of our contract expired) in late October, we’d stop doing Trailers Without Pity. We asked for a raise and didn’t receive it, which we kind of expected, but we were starting to feel things had run their course anyway and that we should wind it down.
We held off on a final decision all summer and, weirdly, the videos kept being fun to do and seemed easier to put together the longer we kept doing them. So we decided to keep the door open and it looks like what will happen is this: we’re going to take a long break after the next video (for Black Swan), and then return in January with new videos.
The show would be broken into smaller seasons (maybe 10-12 episodes per run) and between those seasons we’d take a few months off. What’s really been killing us isn’t producing videos every two weeks, it’s doing that indefinitely without breaks or vacations. We’ll see how that goes, but I’m excited to have a break for us to catch our breath and to come back fresh in the ’11.
So, enjoy this one and we’ll see you for one more in another two weeks.
As is made clear in the opening seconds of our new Trailers Without Pity, we sure do like boobies, so it wasn’t hard to muster up the … uh… mustard of enthusiasm for Burlesque, a Thanksgiving movie starring Christina Aguilera and Cher.
This is a movie I don’t think I’d go see, despite the flesh and Stanley Tucci on display, but hey, if it floats your boat, have a great turkey day big-screen turkey.
Aaron Sorkin. Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-StatesmanI posted a few days ago on Twitter about this big pipeline of stories I’ve been working on that are suddenly going to appear one right after the other for the next few days. The flood started today with a movie review I wrote for the Statesman of The Social Network (B+).
I loved the movie, but had a problem with how Zuckerberg was portrayed. Making him meaner and colder than he is in real life makes for a much more entertaining movie and certainly a more dramatic one, but I was still bothered a little, enough to point it out in the review and to bring it up in different ways to Sorkin and Eisenberg, who both had very good reasons for approaching the story the way they did. But, having met Zuckerberg briefly and having seen him speak live several times, I’m pretty confident that a large swatch of his personality and his goals simply don’t come across in the movie. Not to take anything away from Eisenberg. I think he does a great job playing a character. It’s just that the character is not exactly Zuckerberg, at least not the Zuckerberg of the last few years. I think the movie also betrays Sorkin’s inability to see much that’s positive in what Facebook has become.
That’s his prerogative. Facebook is gigantic and growing and scary.
This was the first movie review I’ve written in a long time and I really enjoyed getting back to it, if only briefly. I worked very hard on making it well-written and I hope it comes from a slightly different point of view than most of the ones I’ve seen.
The other thing that ran in the paper today was a short story that’s been prompting some discussion on Twitter and might only be of interest if you’re in Texas and into politics. It’s about Twitter and the gubernatorial election.
It’s a walk-up to a much longer, more detailed piece about how Texas Governor Rick Perry and his November challenger, former Houston mayor Bill White, are using social media in their campaigns. That story, which I’ve been working on for weeks, is scheduled to run in Saturday’s paper (whups, it moved to Monday), hopefully on the front page (fingers crossed). I’ll link to it when it hits the Web.
Other updates: Lilly has started dance classes at her daycare. Carolina is driving us nuts because she wants to crawl everywhere, grab everything and put all foreign objects in her mouth. Not much else to report. Keeping busy, trying to get enough sleep at night, still missing summer, looking forward to the holidays.
This one was a lot of fun. Morning Glory is a holiday movie starring Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton and Rachel McAdams about a national morning TV show, which I’m sure will make for lots of mockery. (It sure made for some easy second-hand mockery on our part.)
We’re still figuring out the future of Trailers Without Pity; I think it’s most likely that we’ll either stop doing them after October or at least take a very long break. I’ll let you know when we know for sure. In any case, if either of those things happens, we’re probably down to the last two or three videos.
