Random Holiday Thoughts

• That old SNL skit, “The Lost Ending to IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE" isn’t half as funny as you remember.
• Conversely, ELF seems to get better with each passing year.
• Egg nog really is delicious. Especially in coffee.
• Even most ardent Christmas music haters can’t deny the awesomeness of Jimmy Smith’s CHRISTMAS 1964 (aka CHRISTMAS COOKIN').
• But they should really also get to know the majesty of the holiday sounds of Frank Sinatra, Julie Andrews & Andre Previn, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Ramsey Lewis, Brenda Lee, James Brown, Nat King Cole, Kenny Burrell…
• But it's true, contemporary Country, R&B and over-vocalizing Pop stars can destroy even the most indestructible carol.
• There are really few things in this world I find more beautiful than Christmas lights.
• Damn global warming.
• You are the sweetest, most thoughtful chick ever
• How on Earth can someone have grown up in this country and never seen A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS?
• Speaking of, Paramount home video REALLY needs to get on that special edition DVD (although since it's currently out-of-print, perhaps my dreams will come true...).
• Clarence was right.
• How did we ever get all this stuff done before online shopping?
• I’d love to edit a collection of Christmas comic book stories (with the Archie tales from the 60s given top billing).
• When I master the technology to burn better DVD compilations, watch out!
• Being too cold is far preferable to being too hot.
• Snuggly is a good adjective.
• You don’t have to believe in God to believe in “Peace on Earth, Goodwill towards men” (In fact, given all the violence in the world begat by religion, it’s probably an easier concept to get behind if you DON’T).

This time of year, I always get a lot of raised eyebrows from people who know me primarily as a somewhat cranky cynic who tends to reject a lot of what our culture tries to shove down our collective throats. You’d think I’d be just as cynical about Christmas, especially as it (like everything else) does become more and more commercialized and overexposed every year. Besides, don’t I totally reject the ostensible reason for the season? What the ef?

The fact is, this is and will always be my favorite time of year, regardless of my somewhat rabid atheism. But Christmas has certainly evolved over the years (and it’s always combined elements from secular celebrations) and, like most other holidays, it can mean different things to different people.

Certainly, I have a huge affinity for the usual stuffs of the season: the decorations, the music (shut up, it’s great), the gift giving and receiving, the parties, the cards (which I didn’t do this year, sorry), the TV Land Merrython (the DVR is set for Monday), the possibility (ever-decreasing, but still existent) of snow, cookies for breakfast, etc. But I am aware that Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.

To be honest, this has been a fairly rough year for me. My Dad almost bought the big one, Mom had her own health issues, as well as my dear Aunt Pix, and even my baby bro’ gave us all cause for concern. In November, I lost my one regular freelance gig (and a big chunk of my income), and have yet to do anything to build on any momentum I may have built by doing the MTV column for two and a half years. (Not to mention how incredibly awful the state of this country and the world is right now, thanks in no small part to our Naked Emperor).

But through it all, I’ve had a really good group of people around me (not the least of which is a certain designer hottie) who always made me feel better. And so, in addition to all the festive trappings of the holiday, Christmas is mostly, for me, a chance to not only be grateful for the people in my life that make it worth living, but to let them know it. Not that I’m not cabable of being a mushy bastard the other 11 months, but, well, it’s more acceptable this time of year to tear up and tell someone how glad you are they’re in your life.


That and egg nog. I really love that crap.

Peanuts Mystery Solved!!

I would wager that I cradle A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS as close to my geeky breast as anyone on the planet (I could stage a one-man show of the darn thing… just ask my friends). But there was always something that slightly nagged at me. There are three kids in the show who were unidentified. Who were the twin girls and the spiky haired kid who does that shoulder-head-bob dance at the school play? Were they just unnamed extra characters used to fill up space? Or did they have identities?

Well, Volume 7 of Fantagraphics’ indispensable COMPLETE PEANUTS (1963-64, covering, ahem, the year I was born) has solved the riddle. On Monday, Sept. 30, 1963, Linus and Charlie Brown meet the spiky haired kid… whose name is… 5. Actually, it’s 555 95472, but everyone calls him 5 for short.

And the twins? They’re 5’s sisters, whom we meet some weeks later on October 17th. Their names? 3 and 4. (Predating SEINFELD’s gag about George naming his kid 7 by decades).

The numerically-named siblings were Charles Schulz’s commentary on the ever-increasing use of numbers to identify individuals, from Social Security to zip codes to expanded phone numbers. There are a few funny strips surrounding the kids (such as the one in which Snoopy, who has problems with names, isn’t sure if it’s 5 or V), but it seems as if Schulz came to feel that they were one-note jokes. They didn’t disappear from the strip altogether (5 makes appearances through the end of the book), but, as in the Christmas cartoon, they quickly become relegated to tertiary status in the Peanuts universe.

It’s also interesting to note that their last name, 95472 is their zip code… which would place them in Sebastopol, California. So, did the kids just move from the west coast to Charlie Brown’s unnamed, but very seasonal neighborhood? Or does it snow in Sebastapol California? Hmm…

Only future volumes will tell how long 3, 4 and 5 stayed in the ‘hood, but it’s nice to now be able to fully identify every single character in A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS. Although in all honesty, I can’t tell 3 and 4 apart at all.

Defending the Enemy

I cannot stand Kathy Griffin. I find her to be the epitome of Hollywood hypocrisy, someone whose entire shtick of trashing the superficial, narcissistic nature of celebrity is rooted not in a genuine disdain for it, but a jealous narcissism that’s every bit as despicable as the behavior of those she excoriates (I’ve heard stories from people who know her that back this up). I never thought she was funny (remember when she had a fifteen minute “bit” that was just about the fact that she had a line in PULP FICTION? Hilarious!!!), and still don’t.

NOW, having said that, I gotta back the bitch. For those who missed it, upon receiving an Emmy® for her Bravo reality show (at the B-Level Creative Arts Emmy ceremony, which I guess makes sense), Griffin said, "A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now."

Immediately, of course, the Christian community came out against Griffin as if she were the Antichrist (as opposed to simply being anti-Christ). Catholic League President Bill Donohue called her comments “Hate Speech” (and he should know, being an expert practitioner himself against gays and non-Christians) and successfully lobbied E! to censor her statements from the broadcast when it aired.

Of course, as an avowed atheist who finds the concept of God to be the most damaging invention in the history of mankind, I found Griffin’s speech to be hilarious. But beyond that, I thought it was a refreshing change of pace and a challenge to the insipid tendency of award winners (in any field) to be so presumptuous as to declare that God (if it does exist) actually took an active hand in the acquisition of their shiny trophy. “Forget all those starving people, victims of war and general injustice in the world, I have to make sure that Rihanna wins a VMA!”

Now, I know that a lot of times, award winners aren’t LITERALLY claiming that the Almighty made their award win a personal project for that day, that they’re just giving general thanks to the deity in which they believe. But a lot of times, they DO seem to be taking that ridiculously self-absorbed notion of a guiding hand to a petty, ludicrous extreme (joining the silly ranks of God-thanking lottery winners, disaster survivors and game-winning athletes). If that idea is offensive not just to atheists like myself, but lots of Christians as well, then can we just please allow ONE PERSON to make a blasphemous gag about a lack of divine guidance?

Apparently not.

All Trick, No Treat

I went to see Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN with fairly low expectations, but was completely amazed at the bland, unfrightening misfire I experienced. It’s almost as if the filmmakers decided, “I know! Let’s remake one of the most iconic, groundbreaking horror films of all time and take out all the scary stuff!” Yes, the long backstory (which shows Michael Myers’ bad childhood) is utterly superfluous. Not only does it remove all of the mystery from the character, but why make Michael sympathetic if you’re going to continue to show him as an utter psychopath? Also, switching most of the climactic action from the mundane suburban home of the original to the spooky, decrepit abandoned Myers home makes the terror less relatable to the audience. The whole film is over-designed (the more intricate mask is not nearly as scary as the simple original).

But the movie’s remarkable lack of suspense is its worst affront. To wit, one of the most horrifying scenes from the original is the one in which Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), after discovering the dead bodies in the house across the street and being attacked by Michael, runs back to the home in which she’s babysitting and bangs frantically on the locked front door for Tommy to open it. The camera cuts from Laurie to the view over her shoulder of Michael leisurely walking across the street, knife in hand, while Tommy, asleep upstairs, slooooooowly awakens and agrees to come down and let his babysitter in… it’s a beautifully agonizing scene, but in the remake, after Laurie discovers the bodies, she runs back across the street and bangs on the door…. But there’s NOT ONE SHOT OF MICHAEL FOLLOWING AFTER HER!!

What makes it so mind blowing is that writer / director Rob Zombie is an avowed acolyte of the genre, the film and the film’s auteur, John Carpenter. Is it possible that he simply doesn’t understand the elements that made 1978’s HALLOWEEN so terrifying and successful? It is possible that, based on nothing more than Zombie’s tattoos, the concept of “Less is More” is a foreign aesthetic to him.

But what’s even sadder is that it was obvious at the showing we attended that most of the young audience had never seen the original. Two girls next to us were screaming and jumping and talking through the whole thing, and their response to my opining that the film wasn’t at all frightening compared to the original was, “It was scarier than THIS?”

So I stabbed them in the necks with knitting needles (Good thing I always knit at the movies).

Autumnal August, SUPERBAD and Other Unpopular Opinions

It’s 85 degrees, and humid as a cheesemonger’s armpit today. Back to normal for August.

For three days last week, northern New Jersey and much of the east coast became wrapped in the most unseasonable weather. In the midst of August, traditionally my most hated month… it felt like Autumn. It was gray and chilly and rainy. Tuesday the temperature hit a high of 59 degrees. It was glorious.

Of course, not everyone agreed with me. One of my coworkers referred to the weather as “gloomy.” Janice Huff, the meteorologist for WNBC in New York (aka TODAY SHOW Tryouts) was practically apologizing for the cool weather, promising that by the weekend, things would be “better.” Why do weather people always have to editorialize about the weather? Isn’t it all subjective?

I found the wind and the rain and the cool brisk and invigorating in a marked contrast to the stifling, oppressive, soul-sucking humidity of a dog summer day. But then again, I don’t like a lot of things that are popular.

Which brings us to SUPERBAD. Despite my ever-increasing distaste for Judd Apatow (don’t even get me started on the bullshit conservative fairy tale that was KNOCKED UP or the fucked up mixed message of THE 40-YEAR OLD VIRGIN), the fact that he didn’t write or direct SUPERBAD gave me false hope. I loved the ads for it, particularly the bit about Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) declaring their best-friend-love for each other, capped with a “Boop!” on the nose. I was hoping for an atypical comedy about some awkward teens’ friendship during that key transition from high school to college. What I got was a typical comedy about teens trying to get laid, full of dick jokes and unfunny slapstick and characters so broad they might as well have been cartoons. Whoopee. It’s not hard to believe that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg started writing this when they were kids.

I absolutely despised the entire half of the film that followed Fogell / McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, the Neo-Screech) and the fun-lovin’ cops on their booze-fueled escapades. The awkwardness of Evan quickly went from charming to annoying. And worst of all, Seth… is an asshole. He thinks nothing of using people (even his so-called friends) and doesn’t give a shit about anyone except himself (and Evan when he feels like it). His ultimate plan is to get the girl who seems to like him drunk so he can fuck her, and “make” her be his girlfriend for the summer so he, uh, has experience when he gets to college, where he thinks he’ll be able to fuck anyone he wants. What a winner. Why should I root for a lead character in a movie that I’d hate in real life? (And don’t tell me we’re not supposed to root for him; This ain’t ELEPHANT here).

Maybe my problem is that I didn’t spend every waking moment in high school trying to get laid or loaded (not that I was pursuing loftier goals), I just can’t relate to the notion that it’s what everyone did during their teenage years. I laughed out loud numerous times during SUPERBAD, but there were long stretches where everyone around me was in stitches while I sat in silence, kinda wishing I were home watching DAZED AND CONFUSED or RUSHMORE.

I’m also bemused by how excited people are about the Van Halen reunion. Um, Van Halen always sucked, regardless of its frontman. But again, I chant my mantra: “It’s All Subjective; It’s All Subjective; It’s All Subjective….”

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COMING SOON: A 40-year old conundrum solved! Who were those mysterious twins and the spikey haired kid in A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS? The answer will astound you!

Less Than Meets the Eye

As life gets back to normal (for now, anyway), I can return to the mundane…

I saw TRANSFORMERS. Not because I wanted to so much as I felt I had to (see here for reason why). The movie itself was silly and loud. But more than anything, it made me feel old. In fact, no piece of pop culture, not SAVED BY THE BELL, not that book about Emo, not even BRATZ: THE MOVIE has ever made me feel more ancient than TRANSFORMERS.

There’s a shift in every nerd’s life that can be a jarring epiphany. When you’re a kid, everything you ingest from food to TV shows is made by people older than you. When you hit your late twenties, you start to notice advertising and other elements of consumer culture that prey on nostalgia… your nostalgia. I remember freaking out when a car commercial put a vehicle at the start of an enormous orange plastic Hot Wheels track. Realizing that the guy who wrote that ad was my age was kind of an signpost of adulthood. Suddenly, movies were being made of comic books from my youth, documentaries were produced about bands I grew up with (as opposed to those from the 1960s), nostalgic tomes about food packaging I remember picking up with Mom at the A&P were being published by Taschen and Chronicle.

Time marched on. And then one day, another car commercial. As the camera rotated around some vehicle lost to memory, the announcer asked what kind of lunch box I had as a kid. As I pondered the metal (now) collectibles that carried my Chef Boy-ar-dee Beefaroni and Fritos to Rohrerstown Elementary (Superman, Batman, the Green Hornet), the punch line came: “Was it THE A-TEAM?”

Wha--- NO! I was in COLLEGE when that stupid piece of crap premiered! I realized at that moment that I was no longer a part of the prime demographic, that even though I lived the life of a 25 year old, I was now in my thirties. Madison Avenue was done with me.

And now Hollywood is kissing the collective tuckus of the generation that followed X. True, I was (and remain) enough of a pop culture geek to know what Transformers was, to even have a snippet of the old theme wedged in my head (the “more than meets the eye… robots in disguise” bit, of course). But I’d never seen the show, never owned a toy, never read the comic book. I had zero… ZERO interest in seeing this movie.

And on top of that, when I’d see the trailer in the theater or a commercial on TV, I’d get very confused… “What’s happening? I can’t tell what’s going on in that shot! Is that a truck?” It all just looked like a jumble of CGI machinery with almost no discernable design.

And yet, there Y and I were, plunked down at the AMC Loew’s 19th St. Theater in Manhattan, loaded up on margaritas and cheese, as Peter Cullen’s voice explained the origin of the Allspark… well, sort of. Actually, very little is explained in this movie, and even less makes sense if you’ve never owned one of the toys. I sat there feeling as if I had snuck into someplace I really didn’t belong, waiting for the lone nerd whooping and clapping behind us to notice my befuddled ambivalence and have the usher throw us out.

Of course, the fact that the movie had Michael Bay written all over it didn’t help. His patented rat-a-tat clichéd dialogue spoken by caricatured humans, the frat boy humor, the extreme angles and rapid-fire editing, the way that every woman is filmed like she’s in a soft-core porno (or, worse, an ad for Tag or Axe), the utter shamelessness of the product placement and the blasting music that should only come out of an IROC all made the experience even more alienating. Then again, it’s doubtful that a Transformers movie would’ve benefited from the light ironic touch of Sam Raimi or the introspective gentility of Bryan Singer.

TRANSFORMERS is what it is. And I am forced to remember my mantra, the words with which I try to ground all of my opinions, written and spoken: Everything’s subjective. Having no tie to the source material and no affinity for the style of filmmaking, I am in no position to judge this movie any more than I am BECOMING JANE. Then again, that movie at least has Anne Hathaway.

But I gotta say, I will NOT be going to MY LITTLE PONY: THE MOTION PICTURE.

Cut to Black

So, after re-watching "Made in America," the much-dissected and highly controversial final Sopranos episode, I tend to side with the theory that it wasn’t Tony (nor Carmela nor AJ) that got whacked in those last seconds of the show… it was us.

I’m not speaking metaphorically as a disgruntled fan who thinks the episode was anti-climactic and sucked; I’m speaking literally (well, figuratively literally, if that’s not too oxymoronic). I mean that we, the people sitting at home watching the TV show have been cut out of the Sopranos’ lives, not the other way around.

Think about it: The 11 seconds of black screen seem to refer back to Bobby’s statement in “Soprano Home Movies” about getting killed and how he thinks (or hopes) “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens.” But the final shot is not a subjective POV from Tony’s perspective of Meadow coming through the door, it’s a shot of Tony looking up. So for whom do things go black in that scene? The viewer. We’re out. The music stops and there’s no song accompanying the end credits (I wouldn’t be surprised if David Chase even tried to ditch those).

We were so distracted by trying to figure out the motives of the strangely familiar background characters (are those the guys who tried to kill Tony? Is that Phil’s cousin? I think no to both) and the (ironically?) uplifting power ballad and trying to suss out the actions of the leads (why can’t Meadow parallel park in that huge space?) that, like with so many departed characters in the show, we never saw it coming.

Maybe Tony got whacked right after we did. Maybe not. Maybe life goes on, at least for a while. Carlo’s flipped, so that’s going to be a mess, and when Agent Harris said, “We’re gonna win this thing,” was he talking about New Jersey over New York or the Feds getting the evidence they finally need to take down Tony Soprano? Maybe Meadow’s pregnant, maybe AJ’s going to slip back into depression. The point is, it doesn’t matter.

We’re dead. And I think that’s fucking brilliant.

I also don’t think it’s a stretch to view the last episode as a sort of kiss off to the obsessed, nitpicking and impossible to please fans from David Chase (and by proxy James Gandolfini). One song in the episode, Vanilla Fudge’s version of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” is about someone being badgered by an ex-lover, someone who really wants to just move on to the next phase in their life, someone who asks, “Set me free, why don’t you babe? Get off my life…” If Chase sought some kind of catharsis by whacking his audience, well, I grant him that. He earned it. The Sopranos may have had a few off episodes, but I would not go so far as to say it ever let me down. Its perfect send-off makes me miss it even more.