Literature For Life: Memoirs {MotH Original}

{Originally appeared in Man of the Hour Magazine on November 26, 2014}

From our earliest recorded works, mankind has shown a fascination with the lives of others. A craving to know the stories of those who came before and those of our own time whom we revere, whether it be the objective chronicling of Herodotus or the fictionalized, fantastic tales of Achean heroes by Homer. Yet strangely, within the broad pantheon of chronicles, there is a small corner, off to the side and at times disregarded, in a strange predicament where we give far more regard to biographical works written by just about anyone who should like to than we do the person who had actually lived the life itself. Admittedly, autobiographies and memoirs are indeed the most subjective of any attempt to capture an individuals life in words, but they also have the most unique and fully informed vantage point, which gives them a fascinating perspective often under-appreciated.

It boggles the mind how few memoirs are regarded with as high esteem as works of fiction, particularly when roman a clef works like The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Bell Jar and On The Road are so constantly apotheosized and picked apart by scholars desperate to be literary archeologists excavating from within the texts flakes of the autobiographical (indeed, it would be interesting to see how many frustrated academics have postured and postulated upon the autobiographical elements of Huckleberry Finn within the past two years and how many have paid any mind to the actual recently published Autobiography of Mark Twain). Yet, when properly composed, the memoir/autobiography can be the most exciting and enlightening of its ilk, be it the divine Confessions of St. Augustine to the remarkably honest Autobiography of Malcolm X(highlighted in last month’s column). We won’t go so far as to suggest the four recently published celebrity memoirs achieve what the above mentioned have. Indeed, these celebrity books may not even stand the test of time, as certainly none contain anything so scandalous as to cause an uproar as some other works have this year. Yet, indeed, that’s their charm. In this stressful holiday season, no one really has time for a full reread of the works of Ernest Hemingway or Rememberance of Things Past. Instead, settle in for a simple read, a self-compiled chronicle of honesty and wit that may serve as the first wade into the water of your return to (or first journey into) the genre of the memoir.

41: A Portrait of My Father by George W. Bush Though not a memoir in the strictest sense, the perspective is hard to ignore in the former 43rd president’s account of the life of his father, the former 41st.

Yes Please by Amy Poehler The comedian and Parks & Recreation star has followed in the footsteps of her best friend and Bossypants author Tina Fey by compiling this equally funny collection of essays and anecdotes.

 

The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look At A Shallow Year by Andy Cohen Andy Cohen is the hyper, spritely embodiment of everyone’s one friend who indulges in and embraces trashy television, trashy culture and trashy people. If John Waters had a talk show and a bit less of an obsession with the scatalogical, it would look a great deal like Watch What Happens Live, and now its host has chosen to put to paper what you didn’t see on screen.

You Can’t Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television by Al Michaels There’s no denying it, Al Michaels is a legend in the broadcast world. Whether you remember his voice from Monday Night Football, the literally earth-shaking 1989 World Series or asking if you believed in miracles, you know the man has countless stories to tell from inside some of the greatest moments in sports, and now he finally tells them.

The Buzz: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Birdman {MotH Original}

{Originally appeared in Man of the Hour Magazine on November 22, 2014}

Well, things are winding up as we get closer to Oscar season. Films like Foxcatcher, Imitation Game, andThe Theory of Everything (all strong contenders for the Best Actor awards) are on the horizon, so let’s kick this column off by examining what’s essentially the only lock in the category, a career-ecompassing piece of brilliance from Michael Keaton. From an Oscar hopeful we take a look at an Oscar winner hoping to sustain their charmingly brief narrative in feature length, NBC’s newest attempt to capture a cultural zeitgeist, a short documentary that attempts to paint the term “gentrification” in a positive light, and we mourn the terrible loss of an under appreciated legend.

Movies: Michael Keaton delivers a transcendent performance in this Oscar worthy trip down the rabbit hole as Regan Thomson, former star of the Birdman superhero franchise, tries to launch a Broadway production of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Hiring his recovering addict daughter (Emma Stone) to handle gopher tasks to try and keep her on the right track as his own life spirals out of control, Keaton begins to halucinate, convinced his psychic powers have injured his castmate, forcing them to recast a prime role with Edward Norton’s Mike Shiner, a pompous stage actor (reportedly based on Phillip Seymour Hoffman) whose erratic behavior and backstage antics cause even more stress for Thompson and his stage manager Jake (Zach Galifinakis). Each performer within this inventive piece of cinema deserves Oscar recognition, as does its stellar cinematography (much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, the film flows as one singular shot, and its a marvel to behold). It captures the spirit of live theatre with a maddening authenticity, which both draws in those who understands the allure of “the boards” and very likely will alienate those who don’t. Its a strange, divisive film, but its one hell of a ride to take, so those willing to try something new would do well to give the film a chance.

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Two years ago, the 85th Academy Awards presented the Oscar for Best Live Action Short to writer/director Shawn Christensen’s Brooklyn-set drama Curfew (though many felt it should have gone to the German steampunk flick Dood Van Een Schaduw instead). The film was charming and hip diversion about a hopeless man and his inspiring niece, and evidently the success of the short brought Christensen to the conclusion he could “Sling Blade” his successful short into an equally successful feature. However, the endearing nature of the story’s brevity apparently doesn’t translate to a 90 minute run time, taking on a tone of morose and cloying sentimentality and cliches, as Before I Disappear stumbles into cinemas. Skip the full film, and instead seek out the short, and indeed, you’ll see both why people fell so in love with the original, and why it couldn’t work in a feature length format.

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TV: It was late in the season to launch a new drama, but after one episode, its not hard to see why NBC pushed State of Affairs to such a late in the game release. Simply put: the show so tonally inconsistent, narratively over-complicated and stylistically bland. The only thing that comes out clear is the echo of some NBC exec 3 years ago saying “Get us a Homeland!” before that show itself imploded. Here we’re treated to an insufferable Katherine Heigel as CIA operative/Carrie Mathison knock off as she talks to a therapist, has supposedly funny banter with her co-workers and has casual sex (you know, because she’s messed up. Cause when Barney Stinson does it, its because he’s happy, but women, naturally never wanting sex, would only do so if she’s suffering on the inside) because her boyfriend died in Iraq, which she saw because they were on a mission together because that’s…how it works apparently? From the introductory flashbacks of tedium, the pilot drags on insufferably until the show collapses into its own self-importance and implodes like the failed knock-off it is, hopefully to be axed before the season ends, sparing us worse version of an already awful show.

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News: Born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin on November 6th, 1931, a young boy came to America with dreams to entertain. In time, he would help found the Second City in Chicago with Elaine May, whom he met at the University of Chicago. Together, he and May would record a comedy album which won them a Grammy in 1962 for Best Comedy Album, beating out the revered Jonathan Winters. From there, he would take to directing for the stage, winning two Tony Awards for direction (1964’s Barefoot in the Park and 1965’sLuv and The Odd Couple) before being invited to direct the cinematic adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And while that film would show the promise of a burgeoning young director, his next would be his masterwork. Though he’d go on to make beloved films like Working Girl, The Birdcage and Silkwood, in only his second time behind the camera, he’d redefine cinema with the landmark, groundbreaking masterpieceThe Graduate, which came to define a decade, a point in human life, and for some the art form of cinema itself. That film would earn him an Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. Though the film would lose Best Picture that year, and he never again took the Oscar stage, he took to so many more, winning 3 Drama Desk awards, 4 Emmys, 2 of which were for the HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s moving Angels in America, a Film Society of Lincoln Center Gala tribute in 1999, A Kennedy Center Honors in 2003, an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, and another 6 Tony Awards, his final being in 2012 for an astoundingly haunting revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman in his final stage role.

He would marry Patricia Scott in 1957, but they would divorce in 1960. Three years later he would try again with Margo Callas in a marriage that would survive eleven years and see the birth of his daughter Daisy. After another failed marriage which produced his children Max and Jenny, he would finally settle down with news anchor Diane Sawyer in 1988. Finally, in his apartment in Manhattan on November 19th, 2014, he would suffer a heart attack and die, and be mourned the world over by lovers of every medium his brilliant mind ever touched. Mourned, not as Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, the little boy from Berlin, but as Mike Nichols, the man for whom “jack of all trades” is an unfit title, as it implies he is also a “master of none”, a fact every glittering trophy that likely adorned the mantle of that Manhattan apartment rightfully defied. Soon, the lights of Broadway shall dim in his honor, and no matter how brightly they shine again a moment later, those sacred stages, much like the silver screen, will forever feel a little dimmer now. Here’s to you, Mr. Nichols. Here’s to you.

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Short Film: Gentrification (Without The Negative) in Columbus, OH is the kind of film its tough to form an objective opinion on beyond “There’s nothing there”. The film has so little substance beyond talking heads explaining the basic idea of “moving into an abandoned neighborhood” that its bereft of any depth, and indeed any true purpose beyond the surface. Of course, that surface itself can be pretty grating as, without any real story to tell that couldn’t be told in one sentence of a news article, we the viewer endure several artists going on and on about the important thing they’re doing because look how cool and innovative they are, etc. Perhaps some viewers can find the short inspiring, but not nearly as much as the speakers within the short wish you to find it, leaving most of us clicking to another browser window amidst what unfortunately feels like douchey, middle-class self-aggrandizing suburbanites.

Headphones: Young Gods Broke With Expensive Blank Spaces {MotH Original}

{Originally appeared in Man of the Hour Magazine on November 19th, 2014}

Album: Broke With Expensive Taste- Azealia Banks

Do you miss Lauryn Hill? Of course, we all do. Well, pop on the first track of Azealia Banks’ Broke With Expensive Taste to get a sense of what kind of brilliant Hill tracks the 21st century could have gotten if she hadn’t gone off the deep end. From the very first masterfully crafted track of the record, Idle Delilah, the listener finds themselves almost angry that a debut album can be this good, playing like a fusion of Fugees and St. Vincent. The second track, “Gimme A Chance”’s bass and rhyme heavy rapid fire delivery proves Banks can keep up with her far more popular peers, and its horn infusion proves Janelle Monae isn’t the only one to remember their musical roots. From there, the album shockingly goes bi-lingual and takes a full bossa nova tone, as though to burst open the frame your head has built around the album in terms of its genre, as though to say literally anything can happen now, making the rest of Broke With Expensive Taste the most fascinating, enthralling and enjoyable open playing field in an art form obsessed with labels and conforming to public expectations. It’s like when good kid in a M.A.A.D. city or The ArchAndroid first dropped, hearing a record determined not to be a tailor made hit debut, but hell bent on burning fiercely and bursting forth with a unique and untamed voice, Banks’ can spit rhymes as fast as anybody, set to beats we haven’t heard since the days of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest.

Originally, this review went track by track, analyzing and admiring each new turn this strange a,d brilliant record takes, but half the joy of this inventive album is falling down the rabbit hole and discovering these tracks like the strange new worlds of Swift’s Gulliver, so get on iTunes and by the most enthralling piece of experimental sounds since the last Tuneyards albums dropped.

Single: “Young Gods”- CUTTERS

Many consider the Foo Fighters to be rock’s top band (in terms of major label acts, that may be true, but being the top mainstream rock band in this decade is like being the best quarterback at a performing arts high school: it’s not hard, and it doesn’t mean much), and lament that the grit and overall fun of the genre has been overtaken by grandstanding and corporate sell-outs. Yet if you’re willing to dig a bit deeper than the radio, you’ll find some guys still keeping the spirit alive, like Brooklyn-based band CUTTERS, who recently took to the public access Chris Gethard Show with their single “Young Gods” off their We Are The Quarry EP (available for pay-what-you-want download on their Bandcamp page). Lyrics like “All my brothers have found drugs and God, where is my salvation” can be both biting or sincere, a tone the band blends brilliantly in all their tracks, and easily trumps anything your Spotify station has brought you from the genre in some time.

Music Videos:

Electronic: “Luna”- HEO

South Korean electro-pop act HEO has given us a real head trip of a video that tortures the mind to try and determine what it means, or even that it is (our guess? Two of those creepy mummies from Majora’s Maskgetting it on).

Hip-Hop: “I”- Kendrick Lamar

Perhaps the best rapper in the game today, Kendrick Lamar gives us his catchiest, most radio friendly single, accompanied by a video that demands MTV airplay, infused with his usual social commentary and ingenious lyrical composition.

Pop: “Blank Space”- Taylor Swift

The biggest pop star today puts out an album with an infinitely catchy (and self-deprecating) single, accompanied by her most enjoyable and cinematic video since “You Belong With Me”, how are we not supposed to cover it?

R&B: “LIPS”- Sisqo

So…the “Thong Song” guy is back, and you know what? He’s not half bad. Sure, the video doesn’t do anything unique. In fact, it feels like a typical John Legend video (save the dane moves of its singer), and the song has a similar tone. But that’s what makes the video such an interesting curio: This standard serious R&B video keeps the viewer going “Huh…that’s the ‘Thong Song’ guy”.

Rock: “The Wolfpack”- Angels & Airwaves

So…that band that one girl you dated in high school swore was her favorite has a new single out, and just in time for you to Facebook prowl her page to see if she’s still dating that skinny-jean wearing d-bag she left you for. The track itself is tolerable, and the video borrows heavily from emo-rock cliches and strangely the horror film You’re Next, but its a nice trip back to a time when such whining-voiced vocals were relevant (or perhaps a worrisome sign of aging that such vocals still are but you’ve just outgrown them).

The Buzz: Too Many Cooks can spoil an Interstellar Comeback {MotH Original}

{Originally appeared in Man of the Hour Magazine on November 15, 2014}

Well, here we are, winding down the clock on 2014. To think, back when the year started, after a stellar 2013 cinema season, we though this year would be hopeless with a hint of Lego Movie. Instead, we’re looking at a transcendent year of films (well, besides Transcendence, anyway) that cover all genres, all time periods, and in the case of today’s review, time itself. We also tackle the two-parter finale of the fate of Panem, catch up with Valeria Cherish and see whether Too Many Cooks has gotten too much hype. That and all the news you need in this week’s Buzz.

Movies: Its important with certain films, particularly those that contain a polarizing theme or artist, to know where the critic stands before reading their review. This matter has been previously touched on before in this author’s review for The Expendables 3, and given director Christopher Nolan’s recent trip along that roller coaster of praised/overpraised/polarizing (made worse by his militant, death-threat wielding fan base), its important to clarify this author’s previous take on Nolan so as to better aid the reader in understanding their take on Interstellar.

While The Dark Knight and Memento are undeniable masterworks, the the Hitchcockian aspirations ofFollowing and The Prestige are admirable and thoroughly enjoyable, this critic has felt Nolan was on a downward spiral after TDK, which itself was less a tribute to Nolan’s singular craft so much as a convergence, an “all the planets in alignment” bit of magic where every element from Goyer’s script to Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance all came together in such a complex and perfectly fragile arrangement that one thing out of place could have ruined the film. Yet Inception, in this author’s opinion, was painful overrated, unnecessarily complicated, and a nonsense display of “Look how smart I am” trying to anchor itself in a relationship which had no chemistry, and bland, cardboard performances. Yet, to question the creator of the Holy Bat was to incur the wrath of the Nolan leg-bumper fanboys, and even mores when this and other critics were silenced on Rotten Tomatoes after death threats were made by the aforementioned fanboys to any who dared give the third installment of the Dark Knight Trilogy a negative review (note that none of these fans had actually seen the film yet, but all were already prepped to call it the best film of the year, because the public is nothing if not objective). Of course, time has begun to show to all but the most fiercely leg-humping that The Dark Knight Rises is easily Nolan’s worst film, a hodgepodge of ideas and imagery riddled with plot holes and terrible incoherent moments without a single bit of understanding for the source material, as though the director didn’t really want to make the film at all. The poor quality of the film, mixed with the ardent love of its advocates, has created a sort of animosity amongst many who, when early reports of Interstellar were less than stellar, were sharpening their knives to take down the sacred calf of cinema. Those of us, like myself, who kept trying to assure the fanboys jumping for joy over the first sounds of Bane’s asinine voice from leaked footage that the film could indeed suck were ready to be able to rip into Nolan’s newest, which looked poised from the adverts to be even more overly, unnecessarily complicated, full of weak sentimentality from a man who doesn’t understand emotion, and ultimately be the downfall of the over-hyped, self-important auteur.

Instead, I found it to be an absolute delight. It was powerful, moving, and utterly cinematic. Admittedly, while Nolan shows his influences a bit more obviously than ever before (lifting shots straight from 2001, or setting up the NASA hideout and its rogue discoverer just like Dagny Taggart and Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged), and there are some hockey elements, the film works as a film, as a piece of pure cinema, self-aware without an ounce of self-consciousness like classic Spielberg used to do. Unashamed to be sentimental, uncomplicatedly and necessarily technical, full of astounding moments of beauty and sincerity, begging its viewers not to scrutinize or philosophize, but rather to dream. To hope. To gaze upward in wonder, the kind of wonderment the movies used to inspire before the “dark and gritty” movement Nolan himself popularized.

The film could be picked apart, all its qualities weighed out before you, the reader. But it would serve better purpose to say that even an extreme Nolan detractor can see this film for the extra ordinary spectacle that it is, so those wishing to tear it down might have a different, less objective motive at heart, and you truly should see it for yourself (though see it in 35mm, for that true vintage cinema feel, and skip the IMAX, whose sound mix issues are a totally legitimate complaint).

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What sets the Hunger Games franchise apart from all other YA films (Divergent, Twilight, and towards the end, yes, even Harry Potter) is its commitment to quality. The films are well-shot, well-paced, well-acted. Everything seems committed to making a quality product, nothing done for the sake of making a quick buck off some eager teens. Well, until now. Just like the final Harry Potter film, or the final Twilight film, the team behind the Hunger Games has decided to split the final book of the franchise into two parts, thereby killing the narrative flow of the surprisingly well-written novel Catching Fire. All the action apparently got pushed to the second film, and the character moments, while enjoyable, are hardly worth the price of admission. Sit this one out until it hits Netflix, then go see Part 2 on the big screen. No point paying twice for one movie (considering we’re now going to pay Peter Jackson a third time for the privilege of finishing a movie that started two years ago).

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TV: “Give her another take! Give her another take!” Such was the chant of the studio audience for “Room and Bored” the sitcom within a sitcom that Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) uses to try and relaunch her career on HBO’s cult series The Comeback. Though The Comeback was initially met with mixed reviews and was cancelled after 13 episodes, it had a loyal following who continued the cry for “another take” for almost ten years, and finally HBO relented, and gave The Comeback a comeback? So is it worth it? Well, I suppose it depends who you ask, and whether they felt it deserved it at all.

When The Comeback first aired, critics were mixed, criticizing it for its dry tone and lack of originality in the premise, though Entertainment Weekly would, years later, latch on to the cult obsession by calling it one of the 10 Best Shows of the Decade, and fans are quick to describe the show as “ahead of its time” and compare it to the holy grail of “ahead of its time”, Arrested Development. The thing is? Those criticisms were valid.

Full disclosure: This critic hated The Comeback when it first aired, found it humorless and grating, playing only on the humor of a character’s awkwardness and desperation to be loved, similar to what The Office did with Michael Scott, except robbing us of any of the humanity or pathos Carrell embed in his bumbling boss. However, in order to properly review the second season premiere, and in response to the myriad of “ahead of its time” declarations, I decided to binge watch the entire first season again, now in the time it was apparently meant to be in. And yet I found the show to be just as irritating and insufferable as ever. So with that context out there, let’s take a look at the premiere of season 2, though fans of the first run should likely take this opinion with a grain of salt (but feel free to comment below, as it would be interesting to know if The Comeback 2.0 satisfies those who wanted it in the first place).

Of course, by now the reader is expecting the negative review, and sadly that expectation can’t be defied. Yes, The Comeback Season 2 is bad (at least what’s been aired thus far), and in fact much worse than the original. Gone is the somewhat engaging dynamic of Valerie trying to control the reality crew filming her, and trying to connect with showrunner Jane (Laura Silverman). Instead, Valerie has amassed her own crew to film her in the hopes of getting picked up for another reality show. Where in the first series, the humor rested in Valerie being forced to take a supporting role in a bad sitcom to try and revive a faltering career (a believable premise, and one experienced by many an aging performer, which gave the show a sort of insider feel), this season reeks of desperation, and not just from Valerie but from the show itself, trying to find some reason for being. In place of it realistic premise the first time around, this season finds Valerie infuriated that her antagonist from season one, the smug sitcom writer Paulie G, has apparently gone through rehab for heroin and is creating an HBO series about his life called Seeing Red about a drug-addicted sitcom writer and his battles with an aging TV star named Mallory Church. Valerie attempts to cease production only to find out she has been offered the role of Malerie, which she accepts. So this is what we’ll be dealing with this season, an absurd batch of meta-humor on meta-humor wrapped in an insufferable amount of cameos (the premiere alone brought us Andy Cohen, Ru Paul and Carla Hall as themselves). Whatever charm or sincerity was within The Comeback, whatever sense of purpose was within it, its absent in this second season, which seems a desperate attempt from HBO to have a hit on their hands besides Game of Thrones. Perhaps eventually I may learn to love The Comeback Season 1, as many insisted I would. I can even see why people would have been fond of it, vague elements protruding that people could latch onto it. As for Season Two, however, to quote the catchphrase Valerie so often repeated “I don’t even want to see that!”

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News: After a more Bourne than Bond reboot with Casino Royale and an abysmal follow-up (perhaps the third worst in the entire franchise), nobody but the most die-hard fans of destruction really wanted them to trot out the seemingly dead horse that was once MI6’s best agent for another flogging. Yet Sam Mendes stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park with Skyfall, and he’s returning to the helm for what’s shaping up to be an even better installment in the rejuvenated franchise, as 007 has just gained some new cast mates that make for an extraordinarily promising dynamic. First off is the ever important role of the Bond girl, previously a role occupied by the likes of Eva Green, Halle Berry and Denise Richards, yet this time around it appears they’ve gone for someone with a fair amount of talent, as Lea Seydoux hs been all but formally confirmed as the love interest of the man with a license to kill. While Seydoux may not be a household name here in the states, odds are you’ve seen her, with bit parts in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, however she’s best known for her work in Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol, and for her remarkable performance in the Palme D’Or winning film, Blue Is The Warmest Color, for which she became one of only two actresses in history to receive the award, which is traditionally reserved for the film’s director (the only actress to receive the honor was her co-star from the film, Adele Exarchopoulos).

It’s shaping up to be a Basterds reunion on the 24th Bond film as another alum is set to join the cast, this one far more well known to the American public, but only in the last 5 years. Winner of two Oscars, one for the villainous Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s WWII action film, and one for King Schultz, a bounty hunter on a mission in the director’s follow-up Django Unchained, Christoph Waltz has just the perfect blend of charming menace to thrive on the dynamics of the typical Bond script, no matter what role he’s in (though its safe to assume it will be a villainous one, since that’s typically the juiciest role, as fellow Oscar wine Javier Bardem showed the last time out). Whether Waltz is friend or foe, or indeed a reboot of Bond’s old nemesis Blofeld, is yet to be seen. All we know for sure is, with this cast, the film is bound to be one hell of a ride.

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Short Film: We couldn’t not talk about Too Many Cooks here. The short film is an under appreciated art form, one we here at Man of the Hour have been trying to shine a light on. So when one rises to the surface and indeed conquers the internet for a brief moment (before Kim Kardashian had to take her pants off and steal the spotlight from our beloved Smarf), we gotta give our take on it.

Airing on Adult Swim at 4 am between actual infomercials, some perplexed Redditor thankfully uploaded it to Youtube and let the world bask in the madcap dissolution of structure crafted by the team behind the AS show Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell. Beginning like a typical 80’s sitcom intro, it introduces a predictable but amusing gag that Too Many Cooks has too many cast members, before it begins to brilliantly switch genres, all with a sense of dread and menace looming in the background. If you’ve not yet seen the short screened round the world, please do so now to avoid the spoilers.

You good now? Good.

The brilliance of Too Many Cooks is how infinitely rewatchable it is. It’s Twin Peaks influenced killer with the unreadable name (though I’m sure some intrepid viewers will dissect every name from within the tracking scramble) may seem to come out of nowhere when first introduced in the G.I. Joe segment, but indeed upon rewatching you discover him leering in the background from practically the very beginning, the darkness lurking just beneath the perfect image, echoing a sentiment David Lynch has expressed since Blue Velvet, but with a very Adult Swim style of stoner humor. One can appreciate it for its bizarre collapse of sanity in the vein of Don Hertzfeld’s Oscar-nominated short Rejected, or see it as a bold attack on the brainless, soul-crushing aspects of television, like the cult-hit Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared. Indeed, one could just get high and laugh at the repeated shots of the falcon. It seems to strangely never lose its appeal, the well of things to take from it and enjoy or deconstruct has yet to run dry. The creator admitted that he had some deeper meanings in mind when he created it, but didn’t want to elaborate on them to avoid seeming “pretentious”. So grab some friends, gather round the laptop, and discuss whether Smarf pushed the button or not, becauseToo Many Cooks is well worth a watch, and another watch, and another watch…

The Buzz: From A to Z, from Two to 6, from Bad Judge to bad movies, we've got it all {MotH Original}

{Originally appeared in Man of the Hour Magazine on November 8, 2014}

We’re in prestige picture season now, folks, when the studios bust out their big guns. While TV is putting the axe to a few shows that faltered, the movie theatre is the place to be as the Oscar-bait roll-out begins. This week Jake Gyllenhaal grabs at the gold with a manic performance, Disney lets us meet Baymax who wants to meet Oscar, and Amanda Seyfried takes a spin on the shorter side of cinema. Plus Two and A Half Menreturns minus the half-man for one final season and three shows don’t make it past there first.

Movies: Can a film be both dazzling and terrifying? Disturbing and yet somehow droll? Prophetic and preposterous at the same time? It can, and 1976 taught us that with Sidney Lumet’s dark news satireNetwork. It’s bleak and bizarre skewering of 70’s television by imagining an absurd future for network news proved to be an oddly accurate depiction of the cable news era, and now Dan Gilroy attempts to do the same by crafting Lou Bloom, a sick obsessed loner who plays like Travis Bickel with a camera and a Horatio Algier sense of the American Dream.

In the wake of the 4Chan murder photos, we can feel the creeping chill of Nightcrawler’s prescience much sooner than even Gilroy could have imagined, and I’d imagine for those seeing the film with both that and the Farmingdale beheading burned into their brains, Gyllenhaal’s Joycian named journalist’s Homeric journey into the seedy world of L.A. night-crime and the people who cover it might be all the more unsettling. Within this brooding mood piece are the finest works of both Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo, who give Oscar worthy performances as the haunting Lou Bloom and Nina Romina, the news director who indulges Bloom’s lust for glory by any means necessary.

To dissect the twists and turns in this Michael Mann-esque neon blue chiller is, like many great films, diluting the impact of the startling, unsettling imagery. This dark thrill ride is like a tone poem of obscenity, or perhaps a Swift-ian eulogy for journalistic integrity. Either way, while not for the faint of heart, Nightcrawler is a remarkable piece of cinema that dares its viewers stare deep into the blackest heart of the American Dream.

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Wanna take the kids to the movies this weekend, but think Interstellar might be too complicated (it is, but more on that next week) and Nightcrawler might be too dark (Might be? Might be?!?! Dude, get your head in the game, man)? They wanna see a cartoon, but you wish instead that there was another Marvel movie coming out so you both could enjoy? Well, Disney’s served up a nice compromise with this rousing animated take on one of Marvel’s more obscure properties. Sure, there’s no Thor or Iron Man to be seen, but Big Hero 6 takes you to the streets of San Fransokyo to meet a whole new team of heroes, including the adorable, highly merchandisable Baymax that will have you and your kids both quoting the film to infinity and beyond (or all the way to Disney Infinity, the video game tie-in your kids will likely demand after watching the surprising amount of ass these animated heroes kick).

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TV: Well, by this point in the year there aren’t too many premieres, save this Halloween themed season debut for the once top-rated comedy, so lets dive in to the kick-off of what will be the final season of Two and a Half Men (and as someone just tuning in after dropping out years before Charlie Sheen did, I’m thrilled to see this bloated behemoth of laugh tracks collapse). The season opens with an in-joke as Jon Cryer’s Alan chooses to dress as Ducky from Pretty in Pink for Halloween (ya…ya get it? Cause Jon Cryer played Ducky) and that’s about the smartest joke we get as this premiere trudges through lame, easy joke after lame easy joke, the insipid CBS laugh track like a cruel mockery, or a surrealist commentary on the blandness of sitcoms, where after a while, the stereotypes and misfire zingers are seemingly taunted by the canned laughter like something from David Lynch’s Rabbits. By the end, we’re introduced to the season-long story arc where Ashton Kutcher’s billionaire needs to be married in order to adopt a baby because the in shape, healthy guy conveniently has a heart attack which changes his life and blah blah blah homophobic humor he wants to marry Alan. There, I just spared you a half-hour of drivel and indeed an entire TV season of dreadful humorless episodes before we all inevitably turn on the curio of a series finale, perhaps out of nostalgia for the CBS distraction we once turned to in its early days of adorable Jake and Oshikuru the Demon Samurai, or perhaps just to see if Charlie Sheen really does return. But for now, avoid it like the plague it is.

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News: Well, folks, you knew it was time. NBC killed Community in hopes that a new show would take its place, yet here we are in a year of Mysteries of Laura (which somehow got picked up for a full season). So another year of peacock misfires means another year of forgettable shows on the chopping block. Hope you weren’t too fond of NBC’s newest cutesy comedies, then again, if anybody were they probably wouldn’t have been canceled in the first place. That’s right, folks, say goodbye to the rom-com where the dead mom fromHIMYM hooked up with the nipple-less ad exec from Mad Men entitled A to Z, and send an extra bon voyage the way of Bad Judge; well, that’s assuming you know where they are, what channel, what day or what time, though I assume most readers don’t even know what either show it about (we don’t blame you). More surprising to some would be the loss of the much publicized Utopia over on Fox, as they’d actually likely heard of it, and maybe even watched the premiere. Of course, that’s likely where they stopped as ratings for the reality experiment dropped exponentially, proving some shows can be too dumb for even Fox to let live.

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Short Film: A reader recently got in touch with me and expressed a sentiment of frustration that I rarely negatively review a short film. Of course, I hadn’t noticed this myself. I felt I’ve reviewed some films in a less than stellar fashion at times, some that felt disappointing, or cliched. Admittedly, there hasn’t been a short film upon which I’ve spewed hate and vitriol the manner in which I did for, say, No Good Deed (though may I point out how little joy I took from The Little Mermaid), and perhaps that’s because I do view the shorts before selecting one for the column, and perhaps unconsciously felt like avoiding those which were just painful to endure, sparing our readers seven days of wondering what went wrong in the brain of that Buzz guys just so I could round out the week with a Ebert’s North review style rant. However, I’m always interested in responding to feedback, and therefor have decided not to pre-view the short films prior to their selection for the column, so as to be certain to give a wide range of opinions in my final weeks here. And with that, this week’s selection, the first selected in this new approach, was Dog Food, a short that boasts many a festival laurel and Les Miserables star Amanda Seyfried to boot.

Well, with an introduction like that, you can’t be expecting all sunshine and butterflies, can you? Not to rely on another man’s words, but allow me to quote the aforementioned patron saint of cinematic hate: “I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.” Yes, Dog Food is a failure which telegraphs every insipid twist well before it occurs, concluding with a moronic, first-year-in-film-school attempt at a clever ending, and one marvels that an actress with enough clout to get real work would stoop to something so childish and inane. it’s characters are ill-defined, so much so as to make every action every one takes be inexplicable rather than unpredictable as the director intended, as nothing that happens in the previous scene justifies anything that comes to pass in the next one. The fact that it received as many screenings as it did speaks volumes to the current state of the film festival and its favoring of star-power over storytelling, and confounds any who still believe in the future of small films with new ideas and good hearts being able to triumph over Hollywood money and big names.