Lots of Jeff Bridges talk on TedQuarters lately. This one comes via Jonah Keri:
Apologies for another slow day around these parts. Very busy in the office the last couple days.
I missed the premiere of Onion SportsDome on Comedy Central last night. Did you? I’m a little leery — as I always am whenever anyone tries to roll out a satirical sports show — but it’s mostly because I’m massively jealous of everyone involved and want very badly to have a similar show of my own. In college, I produced and hosted a campus TV show just like it, only far less professional and far more sophomoric.
I know that some of the upcoming episodes will feature former Nooner host and friend of TedQuarters Brittany Umar, which is awesome for all parties involved. And from the clips they’ve got posted online it looks reasonably promising.
I’ve got a doctor’s appointment. I’ll be back in the afternoon, but in the interim, enjoy CAKE’s cover of “I Will Survive.”
I may or may not be traveling for work tomorrow, which I will explain if and when it’s confirmed. The details are still murky and I’m trying to figure them out, but it’s making me extremely busy. So for now, enjoy Fishbone, and one of music’s most awesome bass parts:
Since we’re on the subject of Jeff Bridges. Belth provides the details.
Fun fact: I own the “ABIDE” shirt shown in the bottom picture. For a while it was the ace of my t-shirt rotation, until it started losing its fastball a couple years ago. Anyway, I happened to be wearing it on the Q train from Brooklyn to Manhattan one day when John Turturro came on and sat right across from me. I didn’t want to draw attention to him so I didn’t say anything, but I puffed out my chest to try to get him to notice the shirt. He nodded politely.
I saw Tron: Legacy last night.
SPOILER ALERT: This movie sucks.
Clearly it was inevitable that after Avatar filmmakers would start to figure, “Hey, if we make it look spectacular enough, no one will notice that we didn’t put a whole lot of effort into the script.” Only Tron: Legacy isn’t nearly as awesome to look at as Avatar, so it’s a lot easier to notice how awful some of the dialogue is.
Basically every time a character is introduced, a different character explicitly says exactly who the new person is. “Alan, you’ve been like a surrogate father to me.” “Quorra, you are a loyal assistant,” etc. The only character who isn’t really introduced as such is the main guy, who we learn is a cool guy from the assortment of cool-guy things he does in one of the opening scenes.
If in the first 10 minutes of any movie, you ride a motorcycle and/or leap from death-defying heights only to save yourself at the last second with some contraption no one realized you were wearing, that means you’re probably a cool guy. Xander Cage taught us that.
Anyway, the characters in Tron: Legacy all essentially adhere to the classic Shakespearean archetypes: The Cool Guy, the Old Guy, the Bad Guy and, of course, the David Bowie Guy. The plot is that the Bad Guy has captured the Old Guy and now the Cool Guy has to rescue him, with or without help from the David Bowie Guy. Some of them aren’t actually people and most of them are Jeff Bridges.
Then a bunch of stuff happens and some of it looks pretty cool in IMAX 3D. It wasn’t the type of 3-D where stuff flies off the screen at you, it was the kind where you sense depth in the field of vision, which is also awesome. It’s basically like a big laser-light show, only someone bothered trying to attach a plot to it. They should stop doing that. Just put a bunch of awesome looking stuff on the screen and I’ll come up with my own patter. That way we won’t have to sit through all the scenes before the guy even gets inside the video game.
The main thing is that IMAX 3D is awesome. I remember in grad school, a classmate saying she didn’t like going to the movies because it made her feel violated. She said she hated the experience of becoming lost in a movie, as you really only can in the theater, because she felt like she lost track of reality.
I think about that a lot because all the things she described — and I’m not doing them justice — are the same reasons I love going to the movies. I often go alone, which seems weird to people, but I’m not at the movies to be with people, I’m at the movies to see the movie. When there are people around I feel obligated to make snarky comments so I don’t experience the same sense of escapism.
Anyway, I find — and maybe this is just me — it’s increasingly difficult to really put everything else out of mind and just focus on the movie. I think my iPhone is partly to blame. That’s why I enjoy IMAX 3D. It’s almost mentally taxing just to be able to focus your eyes on the whole screen, and such an overwhelming experience that you really have no other option but to dive headlong into the movie. Even if it’s stupid.
The Yankees announced that Luis Sojo is returning to fold as manager of their Single-A team in Tampa. This means that now Rancid’s “Ruby Soho” is stuck in my head, as happens every single time I hear the name “Luis Sojo.”
Filmdrunk puts together a video history of product placement in movies. Very entertaining:
I, for one, had no idea Hershey’s paid Spielberg to use Reese’s Pieces. The way I saw it, it’s entirely likely that a kid might use Reese’s Pieces to lure an alien into his house. (Also, did Speak and Spell pay anything?) I suppose since I saw E.T. long after its theatrical release — and after Reese’s Pieces were already popular — I never realized that Reese’s Pieces were relatively new when the movie came out and actually owe some of their popularity to the scene.
The whole thing seems a bit slimy, for sure. But I guess the thing is, we use, discuss, joke about and interact in various ways with consumer goods daily. I figured by now we’d be seeing more of this in television shows, since DVRs allow us to skip all the commercials and everything. I thought the use of Sun Chips as a plot device in an episode of The Office was a harbinger of more obvious product placement to come.
Now that I’m thinking about it I’m considering all the great uses of products in things I like and wondering which were remunerated. Obviously Arrested Development’s beyond meta incorporation of Burger King was genius. Did Abba Zabba pay for placement in Half Baked, or did Dave Chappelle just think Abba Zabba was the comically appropriate candy bar for that scene?
Oh, and for the record, I find most of Adam Sandler’s fast food bits in movies funny. The highlight of Little Nicky was when Sandler’s son-of-the-devil character — after needing to be coached through his first experience chewing and swallowing earthly food — declares, “Popeye’s Chicken is f@#$ing awesome.”
Because he’s right, you know.
As you may have heard, Scottish singer and songwriter Gerry Rafferty passed away earlier this week. Though I cannot purport to be familiar with much of his work beyond his two most famous songs — “Stuck in the Middle” and “Baker Street” — a Wikipedia tangent this morning led to the uncovering of a bunch of interesting trivia about those two songs.
“Stuck in the Middle” was actually written as a Bob Dylan parody, which makes the lyric, “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right” make a whole lot more sense, since it’s unbelievably Bob Dylany sounding.
Another fun fact about “Stuck in the Middle” that’s not listed on the Wikipedia is that no one who has ever seen Reservoir Dogs can ever again hear that song without thinking about one particular scene. (That movie was awesome, FWIW.) Also, the Moo Shoo Porkestra covered “Stuck in the Middle” twice, but it didn’t really fit our style and never went over that well so we bailed on it.
“Baker Street,” best known for its absurdly triumphant saxophone riff, was actually supposed to have an absurdly triumphant guitar riff but the guitar player didn’t show up to the studio that day. Saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft, who was in the studio to record a soprano sax part on a different song and may very well have written his own Wikipedia page, suggested he record the part on the alto sax he had in his car. Thus spake the Wikipedia: “The solo led to what became known as “the ‘Baker Street’ phenomenon”, a resurgence in the sales of saxophones and their use in mainstream pop music and TV advertising.”
Furthermore, Slash has cited Baker Street as an influence on his guitar part in “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” which seems to make sense because everything Slash plays is also absurdly triumphant.
Lastly, my friend Bill has an apartment with a deck overlooking bustling Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and has been known to bust out an alto sax, go outside, and honk out a brutal rendition of the Baker Street theme in the evening, out into the night air. That’s also not on the Wikipedia page.
The real star here is still Kanye’s Twitter, but just exceptional work all-around:
Hat tip to Jonah Keri.
Tedquarters 