Lemon Party
Monday, June 20, 2005
I want to sleep with common people like you
Let me begin this post by apologizing for not updating frequently anymore, I just wanted to let you know that it's nothing you've done... it's not you, it's me. I've just been so stupid these past few weeks to actually think that this would work out. I mean don't get me wrong, you've done everything you could I just wasn't ready for this kind of commitment.
I mean it's summer, I'm out doing summery things like staying in my room all day and reading pokemon / Alice in chains crossover fanfiction. Which basically means that while I might have more time to work on hilarious and insightful updates I don't really want to. So expect less updates from me (or more maybe) in the coming days. I'll be updating with the schedule: Whenever I feel like it but still slightly more than Mergatroid. Oh my, I did in fact go there.
Remember folks, absence makes the heart grow fonder. While not updating our humble blog I came up with ideas, not ideas for updates mind you (that would be too convenient) but ideas for the new season of reality TV shows. I thought I would post a few here so that you could all bask in the glory that is my genius.
The Island of Doctor Moreau
In this spectacular new reality show twelve couples will be pitted against each other as they not only battle each other in hilarious mini-games and trust based exercises but also battle their eccentric host Doctor Moreau as he tries to turn them into something less than human. It's sort of like a Real World / Road Rules couples challenge mixed with Temptation Island served with a side of HORROR.
Donkey Konga
Six overly hairy men are transported into the jungle to live with a community of apes. They will battle each other as well as rival apes looking for the spot at the top of the pack. The winner receives a bucket full of silver paint to let everyone know that hey, he's a man now.
That's all for now, tune in next week. Same lemon time, same lemon station.
And remember the guiding light, lest we forget the glory that be Lemon Party.
Because your blog sucks.
Friday, June 03, 2005
Cellars of IMDb: Matt Dillon is More Awesome than a Crate of Puppies
Now with special weekend update!
It's late Friday night, which can mean only one thing: it's time to continue our interminable completely open-ended journey through the Internet Movie Database. Today we'll be looking at reclusive Hollywood hunk Matt Dillon.
This week we are, surprisingly enough, picking up right where we left off: Employee of the Month. There's a complete transcription of the dialogue here, but it really doesn't do the film justice. This is a movie worth seeing. However I have difficulty classifying it as a good movie. You see this thing is chock full of good ideas-great ideas even. The thing is that they don't really fit together all that well. Predictably this is a movie written by a team of rookie screen-writers. Their only other writing credit is the Without a Paddle, produced the same year. Without a Paddle also rambles, but fits together far better, so I think we can reasonably hope for good things from Mitch Rouse and Jay Legget in the near future. In the meantime we have to deal with Employee. It was at Sundance, but no one actually cared. It was only chance that the film caught my eye on the shelf at Blockbuster, but I picked it up because Matt Dillon and Steve Zahn are cool. Dillon turns in a strong performance just ambiguous enough to leave the viewer with some lasting questions as to his motivations, but he is completely upstaged by Zahn rather frequently. (Including the single greatest biology lesson ever recorded.) Still Dillon gets chances to show a great deal of his much-vaunted range as this movie is all over the place. In a good way. And a bad way. Whatever, you should see it.
Now that we're back on track let's take a moment to examine the origin of that rare man who is called Matt Dillon.
You know the old cliche. The bigshot producer walks into some seedy dump and finds the next girl, usually greeting her with a line like "You ought to be in pictures." In theory it doesn't actually work that way, but that's about how Matt Dillon got his start. Seems talent scouts just happened to be in his high school, noticed him, got him an audition, and suddenly he was in pictures, lots of pictures starting in with his 1979 debut. Dillon's first films, including Over the Edge and Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish are pretty standard rebellious teenager/coming-of-age sorts of pictures, and he quickly established himself as a leading man. Leading boy, more accurately. Most notably in the unofficial trilogy of S.E. Hinton adaptations, Tex, The Outsiders,* and target="_BLANK"Rumble Fish.
He got hunkier every year and started to branch out into other genres with some success until the late eighties when he faded somewhat from the public eye after a series of mediocre films. He stayed in the background for awhile, doing more bad movies and some critically acclaimed but largely unseen films. He didn't really make another big splash until 1997's In & Out. Suddenly things were rolling for Dillon.
Next year was Wild Things and Something About Mary.
Then, just when thing were going well he completely disappeared from Hollywood for three years, most likely to begin work on City of Ghosts, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. His return to the silver screen was the quirky and ultimately unpopular One Night at McCool's.
This is no great film, and the cast is leagues better than the picture itself, but all the same it's probably worth checking out at some point if you're into that whole black comedy thing.
After 2002's City of Ghosts Dillon played a minor role in the nearly universally despised Deuces Wild.
There's definitely at least one more Cellars of IMDb subject in that picture, quite likely more.
Dillon's recent work was been on regrettably small circulation pictures, but this year he is once again returning to the multiplexes in the surprise indie hit Crash and the big-budget Herbie: Fully Loaded.
Crash is the sort of movie that hops around a bunch in space and time to deal with numerous disparate storylines. That is to say Crash is my favorite sort of movie. Now I'm not talking about movies like Pulp Fiction and Sin City** so much as films more along the lines of Love Actually and Reservoir Dogs. While Pulp Fiction and Sin City are certainly fine movies they just don't blow you away with the dazzling array of characters and relationships deftly woven together into a single narrative. Instead they're constructed as series of only perfunctorily connected stories. It just doesn't get my juices flowing the same way. Love Actually deals with eight different couples for the most part individually, yet still manages to keep the viewer from getting lost as ever more connections are woven into the web.
Crash is the that sort of film. We have innumerable stories each twining with others, some subtly, some with abrupt brutality. Crash is best at its best when it is setting traps for its characters readily visible to the viewer but completely invisible to the players. (That's called dramatic irony!) It is all you can do but to scream warnings to the oblivious, generally well-intentioned people poised upon the disastrous precipice and completely unaware of their danger. It's deliciously maddening. The characters are done, for the most part, in shades of gray, and it is never quite clear who is at fault, if anyone. Even when a character does something that looks cruel and petty an insidious justification will creep not long after. Matt Dillon plays his standard role: the handsome rogue. Each film is a different shade of jackass, but Dillon consists plays characters that fall just short of likeable for one reason or another. His character in Crash certainly matches the archetype, but a variety of factors mitigate our impression of his character, despite our almost immediate disgust at his first scenes.
So basically Matt Dillon gets paid to be a hot villain. Usually a badass, sometimes a jackass, occasionally a conflicted anti-hero. Sounds like a good life to me.
And remember the guiding light, lest we forget the glory that be Lemon Party.
Because your blog sucks.
*Also starring Adam Baldwin. You can safely assume that Adam, no relation to the infamous Baldwin brothers, will be getting his own entry in this series.
**I know I'm sort of trashing on the movie here, but trust me, it is the height of understatement to say that I am eagerly awaiting Sin City 2 and 3.