Ok people. This is getting ridiculous.
And now…cupcakes….
Vulture has found these insanely decorated cupcakes from Regali Kitchen’s Facebook page.
The question is….can you recognize all the houses just by their fondant sigil?
Krakens look good even on cupcakes!
I shouldn’t complain. These look delicious.
I bet the Stark cupcake tastes like winter.
Mike Birbiglia – or Birbigs – might be familiar to some of you as a regular contributor on NPR’s This American Life. Or he might be familiar to some of you as Lena Dunham’s interviewer on the second episode of HBO’s Girls. Or he might be familiar to some of you as a stand up comedian.
Whatever the reason, he’s a guy you should be aware of.
And after Sleepwalk with Me comes out, I think you will be.
Birbiglia is a sleepwalker. Not the sort that mumbles a little and goes to the bathroom half-awake, but the sort that could walk outside in front of a moving car and get himself killed. He talked about a particularly harrowing sleepwalking experience on This American Life, which was an excerpt from his one-man show with the same name as his new movie. (He has had a second one-man show called My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend)
The movie, co-written by This American Life host Ira Glass, seems to focus on Birbiglia’s sleepwalking problem, which here stems from his relationship issues with girlfriend Lauren Ambrose from Six Feet Under. In the film his sister is getting married and that in turn puts intense pressure on his own very long-term-but-not-yet-married relationship. But the film is as equally involved with his stand up career and comedy in general. Guest appearances by Kristen Schaal (Louise on Bob’s Burgers) and podcast king Marc Maron should make this really interesting.
The film was a big hit when it premiered at Sundance earlier in the year, so my expectations are high on this one.
I was late to Breaking Bad. I’d heard how awesome it was from everyone, how brilliant Bryan Cranston was, how dark and messed and wonderful the show was. But for some reason, I never saw the first season and never caught up.
Heisenberg and partner
Until a few months ago when I devoured all four seasons. Three seasons on Netflix, and one I purchased off Amazon Streaming. It was like watching Mad Men or Six Feet Under for the first time – shows that made me say “where have you been all my life?” I saw immediately what had made this show such a cultural focal point, and so much of that rested on Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s heads. Their chemistry was, well, chemistry (sorry…) and Walter’s slow descent paired with Jesse’s ongoing struggle was so utterly compelling.
Gustavo Fring, always calm as hell
And of course, once you added in Gus Fring played expertly by Giancarlo Esposito, every episode was fraught with danger. But the sort of danger that lurks, quietly rather announces itself at the top of its lungs. Just think about Gus and the box cutter in the first episode of season 4 and you can’t help but get that fear in the pit of your stomach. That is the sort of fear that most horror films cannot produce because the fear is completely real. The danger is real.
So it is unsurprising that everyone is chomping at the bit for this final season of Breaking Bad. How much deeper will Walter sink into damnation? How will his wife Skylar deal with it all? Will Walter’s DEA brother-in-law Hank ever finally catch on? And will Jesse ever learn Walter’s secret from the end of season 4 and break from his partner once and for all? It is all unknown but that’s OK because at 10pm Sunday night on AMC, we’ll start to find out.
In honor of this new and (alas) final season, here is a great video of Bryan Cranston becoming Walter White, both physically and spiritually. The change is pretty remarkable.
Woe and alas, I cannot make it to ComicCon this year (or any year thus far, truth be told). However, I do scour the interweb to find things that will make me feel like I’m there.
Things like…
This choking safety poster from Bob’s Burgers that will be available at SDCC.
(Thanks Vulture)
I really enjoy the look of glee on Louise’s face as she yanks on Bob’s mouth.
And I think there’s nothing wrong with shouting “I’m a hero” as you perform the Heimlich maneuver.
While I am sure the whole interweb has seen this by now (I saw it on Vulture), I would be remiss if I didn’t do my little part to spread the joy.
Golden Girls + Super Friends = YouTube brilliance.
Is it not at all surprising that Superman is a Blanche? Not at all surprising.
Also, Batman is rocking that mustache.
Even for someone who has seen movies most of my friends have never even heard of, there are gaps in my movie education.
According to my two best friends, the biggest gap is that I had never seen Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see it – I enjoy Mr. Murphy’s earlier work enough to mourn the actor/comedian he has become. And I’d heard bits of the movie over the years so that I had a pretty good idea of what it was. But it just never happened.
Ok, I’m lying a bit. I know why I never saw it. BECAUSE my two best friends wouldn’t shut up about it. There comes a point where you become willful and defiant in the face of so much pressure. Heck, it took me several months to watch Some Like It Hot just because my mother kept telling me that I just HAD to see it. Granted she was right, and that movie has become one of my all time favorite comedies.
It’s genius.
You have to see it.
So there was a bit of not seeing it because they told me to, and before the internet, you really had to go out of your way to see a movie. Sure you could watch it but highly expurgated and as we know the funniest parts of anything with Eddie Murphy wouldn’t make it through any sort of censor. And because I didn’t really have any burning desire to see it, I wasn’t about to rent it from Blockbuster.
Yet for some reason, last night I was sitting at home, trying to find something to watch on Amazon Prime and happened upon – Coming to America.
And, because there was nothing else to watch and because I was tired of being lectured every few months… I clicked “watch”.
It was…ok.
I think I laughed out loud three times and maybe chuckled to myself a handful of times during the course of the film.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like the movie – it was fine, enjoyable, very 80’s but not in a terrible way. Miss Black Awareness was entertaining. The love story was sweet. The barbershop arguments had their moments. The Soul Glo commercial made me laugh. But apart from that, not much else made me sit up and take notice. Nothing that I will be thinking about for the next week, laughing to myself, telling others about. Nothing that will make me run to YouTube to find clips to watch and rewatch and rerewatch.
(Like this gif from last week’s Futurama.
I cannot explain it, but I have no laughed this hard at something in a long long time. Combine that with this
and my god, it’s a Jurassic Park Christmas morning…to give you an idea of what IS funny)
Not sure there is any country where this wouldn’t be an insult to their royalty
Part of why I wasn’t dying with laughter is the fact that I’d already heard so many of the punchlines before I ever saw the film. “What is that velvet?” is a particular favorite of my friends – and yes, it IS funny, but I think after I’ve already heard it fifty times, it loses its punch. This is no one’s fault mind you, but it just diminishes the comedy when you finally see/hear it. Meanwhile, much of the comedy is visual – the crazy costumes, the wacky makeup – and years of commercials and clips have dulled me to the funny. Though some of those dresses were more horrifying than funny, or just plain bizarre.
Now THAT is a turban. And THAT is a print.
Another reason I think that perhaps Coming to America wasn’t as funny for me as it was for others is that so many of the comedic tropes in the film have been done to death at this point. If Eddie Murphy hadn’t already done a series of films where he was dressed as other people, maybe I’d find it funny that he was dressed up as a number of people in this film. Yes, he wasn’t just putting on a fat suit like with The Nutty Professor, and yes, he was doing a nice jewish version of white-face, but it’s been done so often since 1988 when CtA came out, it has lost its novelty.
There is another reason I think it wasn’t as funny. Watching a movie as a kid, things are really really funny. Laugh out loud, snort milk out your nose, pee yourself a little funny. You want to see those things that made you laugh that hard and that loud over and over again. And then as you get older and you do watch those things again, you’re not just laughing at what is on screen. You’re laughing along with everything you remember those scenes being. You are laughing along with your childhood self. What is funny to you is an entire lifetime of associations. I know that when my friends are thinking about Coming to America, they are remembering every time they’ve watched it and all the other times they’ve laughed.
I didn’t have that history of laughter to fall back on.
Hey you guyyyyyyyyys!
It reminded me of the time a few years ago when some of my friends decided that we had to watch The Goonies. This is a film beloved in my childhood, that I still adore now. It’s funny, it’s sweet, and it’s got great bad guys. One in our group had not yet seen it and we knew, we knew that he would jut love it. So we rented it late one night and settled in for him to be amazed. While we all laughed at Chunk and Mouth, the Fratellis and Sloth, he just sat there fairly stone-faced. When it was over, he just looked at us as if we had been watching different films; the one he watched was some silly 80’s movie while the one we watched was a hilarious 80’s movie. We were laughing along with our childhood selves, while he was stuck watching some movie that perhaps didn’t stand the test of time as well as we might have imagined.
I told my friends last night that I didn’t love the movie. They were both slightly offended I think. One told me that it’s just not my type of humor. Another just couldn’t believe I didn’t laugh myself silly. I told them both my theories about how a movie you see as a kid have a hold over you that wouldn’t be the same if you had seen them as an adult. They agreed that it was a possibility, but I think deep down I’ve disappointed them somehow.
Our friendships will survive of course, and now I’ll share another common reference point with them.
But that doesn’t change things. Just wasn’t that funny.
A True Story:
A police officer calls a fast food restaurant and tell the manager that a young employee has stolen from the register. The caller tells the manager to strip search the employee and leave her naked in the storage room and because the caller says he’s a cop, the manager complies.
And the entire event was caught on the restaurant’s closed circuit camera system.
Where do we draw the line with authority? At what point do we just follow along blindly? When should common sense and reason take over? And doesn’t just following orders feel good?
The event is the basis for the movie Compliance staring Dreama Walker from ABC’s Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apt 23 and Ann Dowd, most recently a nun on Louie. The film got a lot of press at Sundance, a lot of divisive press.
From the trailer this looks like a true horror film, not one with imaginary monsters but the very ordinary monsters that we all are. It is never easy to see how quickly an essentially good person can do something so clearly wrong, all the while thinking it’s right. How long would it take any of us before we realized the truth?
I see so many movies and watch so much TV, I sometimes find it hard to find the time to scribble aka type my random thoughts about said pieces of pop culture.
I am in fact so behind that I thought I would do short reviews of two of the movies I’ve seen recently and put them in one post. Yeah. I know…lazy lazy lazy.
First up – Magic Mike
I really enjoyed Steven Soderbergh’s trip into the action film with his film Haywire which came out earlier this year. Was it a brilliant trip into the psyche or something I will sit back and mentally chew over and over, no. But it was fun. And that’s pretty much the same way I feel about Magic Mike.
I don’t really want to get into the whole argument of whether or not this movie is about equal opportunity ogling or whether this is a victory for feminists who have had to endure so much female flesh being thrown upon the big screen, without much reciprocity from the men. I don’t know if any of that was really in Soderbergh’s mind when he made this film – or if he was just looking to tell a story that happened to involved A LOT of naked men.
I prefer to think the latter.
Former stripper Tatum
Co-produced and starring Channing Tatum, Magic Mike is an all American story of boy strips until he saves enough to start his own custom furniture business. But the economy being what it is, that business is just out of reach. While working on one of his many jobs, Mike befriends a young kid, Adam (a mostly forgettable Alex Pettyfer) who is just lost enough for stripping to look like a good idea. And why not? You get to desired by women who shove cash down your thong every night and party every day. All you have to do is show off the goods and make the women feel special. Adam gets caught up in it all, like drug caught up, and the dirty side of the fabulous life style becomes all too evident.
Although I’m sure many people will see it because of the hot guys, where Magic Mike finds its winning moments are in the little things – the first time you see Joe Manganiello’s character is possibly the funniest moments in the entire movie, but blink and you’ll miss it. Tatum’s treatment of his truck is a lovely character note. And the scene where Channing Tatum goes to the bank to get a small business loan is sexier than any scene where he strips. Tatum’s charm is undeniable, as are his dance skills, but the film really belongs to Matthew McConaughey.
McConaghey as Dallas
As Dallas, the increasingly sketchy owner of the Xquiste, the club where all the men take off their clothes to music, McConaughey is in his element. Shirtless about 99% of the film and wearing some of the more interesting outfits, he has no shame. Nor should he. He looks amazing. But it’s his verbal dexterity and his ability to seduce both men and women that should shame him. It only till it’s too late that Mike realizes that his boss/future partner is a dangerous man in short shorts.
You also will see far more of McConaughey’s butt than perhaps you wanted.
No point in going into Mike’s relationship with Adam’s disapproving sister Brooke, played by Cody Horn.
He strips. She disapproves. Match made in heaven.
She’s fine and they aren’t awful together, but there isn’t much heat between then and even though you know where it’s all going to go, you kinda hope things will take a bit of a turn before the end.
They don’t.
Still a good movie…
Next – To Rome With Love
Midnight in Paris was a huge success, both financially and critically. It was nominated for multiple Oscars and even won an award for Best Original Screen play. So it’s not at all surprisingly that Woody Allen would try to recreate that magic.
He almost succeeds in his latest, To Rome With Love. It continues his love affair with Europe, where he’s filmed several movies in London, one in Paris, one in Barcelona, and now Rome. And it brings back his signature style of multiple stories that never quite converge but aren’t disparate enough to seem wholly unrelated. And he dips into the bag of magical realism that suffused all of Midnight in Paris, but to a lesser effect this time around.
The different stories are as follows: A newly married couple is separated and each manages to have a day full of very educational surprises including a prostitute (played by a very game Penelope Cruz), a everyman (Roberto Benigni) all of a sudden becomes the most famous person in Rome and finds celebrity a bit different than expected, a retired American opera producer (Allen) thinks he’s discovered the next Caruso in his future in-law but he’s stymied by the singer’s limitations, and a young architect (Jesse Eisenberg) falls in love with his girlfriend’s visiting friend (Ellen Page), despite being warned by an older and wiser guide (Alec Baldwin).
Newlyweds who have no idea what is in store for them
Some of these tales are more successful than others. Although it was probably the least fleshed out of all, I enjoyed the story of the newlyweds. It encapsulated every pitfall of getting married when you are too young to know the world, but so desperately want more. Both husband and wife experience a different side of Rome than intended and grow up a bit in the process. I never thought I wouldn’t hate watching Benigni, but his utter confusion at the throngs of paparazzi following his every move, questioning his every action, devouring every aspect of his life, was actually palatable. His story had the clearest moral – life sucks for everyone, so it’s better to be rich and famous in the interim.
Benigni finds out, it’s better to be chased, than to not
The funniest story was Woody’s own. Although the story didn’t start with him as one of the focal points, I suppose you can’t fault the man for moving the attention from Allison Pill who played his daughter, and her Italian fiance, to Allen and his new operatic find. This is the story where you find the most Allenesque touches, particularly the multitude of jokes about death, something I have come to expect in Allen’s movies. Judy Davis is back working with Allen as his long suffering wife who is, of course, a shrink, who cannot help but analyze to death every thing he says and does. You will never think of Pagliacci the same way again, or without wanting to wash your hair.
But the story that I found most interesting was the one with Jessie Eisenberg. Whereas in the past, the Ellen Page character would have been free to spout her randomly collected bits of intellect, seeming smart and free and exciting without anyone questioning her,
Alec Baldwin, voice of wisdom and conscience
Alec Baldwin is there at every turn to remind Eisenberg that what he’s falling for is a careful construct designed to entice him, but without much real substance. Baldwin points out every time Page’s mercurial character, Monica, changes to fit what she thinks will be sexy and he, rightfully, disdains her. I found Monica just dreadful. I’ve met women like her who have some sort of mystical hold on men without really having anything to back it up. These sorts of women have shown up time and time again in Allen’s films to varying degrees, even Annie Hall herself was a more charming version, but it’s rare that these women are called to task for their deficiencies. It’s wonderful when it happens. Not sure if that is why Baldwin is my favorite part of the film, or because he’s just so winning in the role.
The magical realism shows up in To Rome With Love in both Baldwin’s character – he’s not really there, spouting his wisdom to Eisenberg alone…but visible to everyone when it suits the story, and in the way time is treated in this movie. Some stories seem to take place in a day, some a week, some a month. They are all interwoven, but take place independently of each other. Time exists, but at a different pace for all.
Everything works, but seems just a bit too light and fluffy to have much substance. Which is fine – Midnight in Paris wasn’t the next Manhattan or Crimes and Misdemeanors. But To Rome with Love just seemed a bit less substantial, its stories a bit less important and without much focus or overarching central message to hold everything together.
Rome, like Paris, exists for Allen as a magical place, outside of time and reality. But he seems to understand the magic of Paris just a little bit more.
One of the great quandries in life is answering the question, “Is that Moby?”
Luckily a gentleman in the UK named Adam Buxton created this nifty song to help us in our quest.
To be honest, some of those photos really did look A LOT alike.
I’m starting to worry that Pixar is losing it. First Cars, then Cars 2, and now Brave. Granted, I don’t mean to insinuate that Brave is at all as bad as those talking cars, but it’s nowhere near The Incredibles, Toy Story 1-3, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, or my all time favorite, Wall-E. These were movies that took us somewhere special and lingered long after we left the theater. Movies that made us marvel at their storytelling as much as we marveled at the beauty we saw on screen. I just didn’t feel that way with Brave.
Of course it’s gorgeous. I mean, gore-g-ous. Merida’s hair has gotten a lot of press for a reason. It was almost a living thing itself, full of shades of red and gold, and every variety of curl and wave and corkscrew you could imagine. And that was just the sort of detail that the rest of the animation received. Scotland has never looked so green and lush and yes, magical. But for half of the movie, that’s all you get – something beautiful to watch but not much substance.
Princesses don’t like to keep their hair covered up
Pixar’s first movie with a female focus takes on the idea of independence and forging your own path, tradition be damned. This is a good solid message for today’s young ladies – or the young ladies of any day and age. Merida is a princess who doesn’t want to behave like one, no matter how much her mother tries. There is the usual montage of mother and daughter at odds with each other – “Princesses don’t do X” and Merida does X in a big way. It was surprisingly a bit disconcerting to have such an extended montage so early in the film.
All Merida wants is her freedom and a chance to follow her own fate. She uses these words so often they eventually lose their meaning. What does freedom mean to her? Is it just the freedom to choose her own husband, if she wants one at all, or is it something greater? (Seeing her choices for a husband you really can’t blame her too much on that front.)
Same with her fate – is it that she doesn’t want to be a princess? Who does she want to be?It’s not terribly spelled out and that muddiness just gets muddier throughout the film.
But the biggest problem I had was that the movie didn’t start in earnest until it was almost over. Merida visits a witch to get a spell to, yes, change her fate and it’s only in the aftermath of that spell taking effect and wreaking havoc that I felt the movie truly found its footing. Putting Merida’s desire for “freedom” at the forefront didn’t ground the film, but making the movie about her relationship with her mother gave it some real emotional heft.
Following the will o’the wisps to your “fate”
Pixar seems to do better when dealing with family dynamics – even Ratatouille was about a rat making peace with his own life choice and that of his family’s. Wall-E is the exception to the rule. You might want Merida to be able to ride her horse and shoot arrows all day, but it is the moment when she and her mother fear they might lose each other forever that you really feel something is at stake.
The parent/child relationship is a never ending well of material and when it decides to plumb those depths, Brave becomes a true Pixar film. The second montage in the film of Merida and her now-changed mother in the woods is delightful and emotional without becoming too sweetly sentimental. The silent acting by the mother in these scenes is as well done as the opening scenes of Wall-E, telling a story through movement and telling it well.
Once Merida figures out how to reverse the spell, the solution is a little simplistic for my tastes, but you are so caught up in the drive towards to the film’s resolution you don’t realize it till later.
Tapestry – playing a key role in the plot since the middle ages
Hamish, Harris, Hubert – the 3 Scotch Gingers
Brave has all the other things that mark a Pixar film – wonderful animation that picks up every texture and grain, fantastic voice work by Kelly MacDonald (Merida), the brilliant Billy Connolly (Merida’s dad Fergus), and Emma Thompson (mother Elinor) and a wonderful sense of humor – mostly in the form of Merida’s three red headed brothers Hamish, Harris, and Hubert and the competing clans that have come to claim Merida’s hand in marriage.
A special call out to Julie Walters’ character, the Witch. In a turn of events with witches, she isn’t evil as much as slightly scatterbrained. Her wood workshop is a wonder and the “bear” theme is carried through wonderfully. I would buy several of her trinkets. The entire sequence from the start with the magical will o’the wisps to Merida getting the spell manages to meld being funny with moving along the story – something I think Pixar can forget at times. The Witch’s “voicemail” scene is also pretty great with some great animated effects.
I know I sound like I didn’t love the movie, and I didn’t. I wish I did. But I did like it very much; I just wish there were MORE to it than there is. You will enjoy watching it, but don’t expect to leave floating on air as you have after so many of Pixar’s films.
Movies, TV, and all things Pop Culture 