My friends/associates at Dead Lantern Productions are having an open casting call for their next movie. So if you are in or around NEBRASKA then email deadcasting@gmail.com to get involved!
As of the beginning of February, AvantTrash.com in its current incarnation celebrated its first birthday. Thanks to everyone who visits, comments, emails us, sends us CDs to review, puts on guest lists and surprises me in actual conversations by complimenting me on something written on the site. That blows my mind and you are fucking amazing!
It means a lot and I’m glad we have something to offer. We started with ZERO audience like every site and I’m glad to say that we are now averaging over 3,000 hits weekly!
So in return, we will be sending Promo CDs to the friends of this site and immigrant friends from Horror Fansite DeadLantern.com. For those unfamiliar, I contribute to Dead Lantern’s World Famous Splattercast, a horror podcast of the highest caliber. We think so anyway. And were even written about in a recent article: Suite101.com
AvantTrash has existed in one form or another since 2003. It used to be hosted by my friend Duck at Ibusol computers when I lived in Lincoln, NE. Sadly all of that work is lost in the ether leaving no trace of my posts. I just have the HTML and Image files from it so long ago. But the best moment ever from that site came at a party where 2 guys came to kick my ass because one thought I was messing with his wife (which I wasn’t, we were just friends) and after I explained to him that we were just having a drink and hanging out he told me that he loved the way I wrote and cited a specific post that was very long and mostly listed out the specific things I missed at the time. I wish I still had that post.
February 14th marks my 2 year anniversary here in L.A. and as of Wednesday I will be moving to a new apartment behind the Whisky-A-Go-Go just north of Sunset Blvd. It has a great view, I will be paying less than in Hollywood and hopefully this will lead to more live reviews or a return to the music biz.
It should at least make for some interesting stories. I will after all be living across the street from Motley Crue’s den of depravity. There must be some cool neighbors left over.
Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi.
Thanks To Spooky McPhee, an associate of Dead Lantern for the link.
I worked 14 eyeraping hours today at my thankless hellhole of an office design job. I wish I could post the Weekly Trashing about celebrity glorifications of violence and Cappucino Shakes but my brain is going to fall out of my ear and my cat looks like he’s having too much fun sleeping that I need to join him. I’m a day late with this… but it’s still time to PARTY LIKE A BARACK*STAR!
If interested, I tried to host this week’s Splattercast @ DeadLantern.com. This week’s topic is TECHNOLOGY IN HORROR. Fans of horror click away.
DeadLantern.com’s World Famous Splattercast #101 ( Horror Podcast featuring intr0vert from AvantTrash) Available for free on iTunes. Click Here to Subscribe.
So i’ve been busy doing something close to nothing lately. I’ve had plenty of time to spew leftist rhetoric on facebook apparently but not much time to write about anything interesting or review any shows lately. But I have some new stuff coming up! Unfortunately my camera has truly, truly taken a dirtnap despite my successful Dr. Frankensteining of a 5 Megapixel Lens on a 6 Megapixel Camera, the second lens has finally given out. Crap Casios Anyway. So i’ll be releasing some old posts into the world that I never thought would see daylight.
One thing I have been doing is trying to keep up with the guys on DeadLantern.com‘s Splattercast. They’ve built a pretty good rapport over their 97 episodes of horror soaked podcasty goodness but the last couple mondays I have joined the gents in review of movies such as The Darkman Trilogy and a smattering of Werewolf films (including Teen Wolf). I’ve forgotten how to talk to human beings and only add occasional murmurs to the cast, but they figure I must have some Hollywood insight. Like, “Hey, Rose McGowan passed me on the stairs at the arclight last tuesday! Her skin looked like dead peoples skin, but in the sexy marble statue kind of way” (That really happened). Next week they will be reviewing classic horror films, tune in if you dare. Unfortunately I will probably be seeing Does It Offend You, Yeah? at the Trubadour next Monday the 22nd (hooray for label guestlists!). But coming up will be a theme episode of my choice involving horror movies about the dangers of technology and such! Yay Robot Apocalypse!
A bit of housecleaning in this post. But first, a plea for stuff:
The CHICAGO ork poster is world famous by now; and finally they’ve heard my plea. The LOS ANGELES ork poster is out.
For $22 (with a portion donated to charity, for your guilt-free buying needs) you can buy me this poster for my living room….cause I don’t feel like tattooing L.A. or CA on my other arm just yet, and I really want this!
Speaking of local pride: I saw Tilly and the Wall tonight here at the Echoplex and they were great! (i’d seen them opening for Neva Dinova at Knickerbockers in Lincoln before and both shows were so much fun, Tilly i mean, I don’t get Neva Dinova. I think they kinda suck.) But I’m aboslutely in love with their single “Pot Kettle Black” and am thrilled that another Omaha band have finally broken through. And Kianna Alarid is gorgeous and has the voice of a young Belinda Carlisle. And just to namedrop; both Blake Sennett and Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley were there. I swear I see her around town AT LEAST once a month, for real. (at a Cursive show, at Beauty Bar last week, by a salon in Silverlake…)
We got lots of posts in the works, We got a namedrop on the world famous Splattercast from our friends over at DEADLANTERN.COM, had a massive spike in hits, some graphic updates to the site and will reveal the winner of The Who contest this weekend. More contests to come (cleaning out our closets).
Stay tuned.
Show of hands, how many people expect “Speed Racer” to suck? Come on, be honest, I read message boards, I’ve heard your podcast, you aren’t thrilled at all, are you? The print campaign with the cars on the track is messy and the trailer was lukewarm. It’s not nearly the campaign of say, Iron Man, which is already a sure thing summer blockbuster to be. But maybe all of this bad publicity could have let you down again; because there may be a lot of very satisfied uber-nerds on May 9th when the Wachowski brothers’ “Speed Racer” live-action living comic book candy fireball sensory orgy hits theatres. I expected to be underwhelmed by this movie, writing it off as effects laden fluff but I might have found a bit more in it than the rest of the public.
The story is sparse and plays 2nd fiddle to the technically awe-inspiring visual effects, but I should hope you didn’t expect a repeat of the depth of the Matrix from this Manga-to-Anime-to-Live Action film. I appreciated that the storytelling was delivered at times in a liquid form with visuals co-mingling with the narrators as the timelines wrapped and coiled into themselves. The film centers around the Racer family: Pops, played by John Goodman – a racecar builder devoted to his family; His wife, referred to only as Mom, played with beautiful sentiment by Susan Sarandon; Rex, the eldest brother who dies in a shady racing accident; Emile Hirsch’s Speed, the prodigal son; Christina Ricci as Trixie, Speed’s love interest and best friend; and of course the comic relief, Speed’s Kid Brother Spritle and his monkey Chim-Chim. During the story Speed shuns the corporate sponsors who have corrupted racing to stay in business with his family and has to race to save their reputation and the very sport of racing.
Casting was spot on as the actors held this movie together wonderfully through the effects. The females that I saw this movie with admitted to misting up during a scene between Sarandon and Hirsch. Christina Ricci seemed to get hotter in the grimier moments of the film and although the dialogue like everything else becomes saccharine to the point of aspartame, the perfomances are true and warm. Adding emotion to a primarily green screen movie can’t be an easy task but each of the characters indeed has their opportunity to shine. And Oh how this movie shines. Us designers had conferred that the movie was more of an animated film than live action. Stylistically the exact polar opposite of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
I mentioned that this movie is eye candy right? Can I maybe repeat that a thousand more times? Maybe thats not decadent or bright enough to describe its seizure-inducing effects and Japanese inspired hyper surrealism. Think of having neon injected straight into your brain through your eyeballs. Maybe if you just lined your skill with an OLED TV above your Pineal gland. You know that feeling the morning after you’ve been tripping balls and know you are still kinda tripping because stuff is still kinda melty and the walls are still breathing a little bit? I kinda got a little of that going right now after seeing “Speed Racer” this afternoon. This is the exact movie that IMAX was made for. Not so coincidentally, it will be released in said format as well. I recommend that venue but only if you want your brain to turn to a happy pile of overstimulated nerd mush.
My proper introduction to Speed Racer happened sometime around 1996 when a pre-Adult Swim Cartoon Network had a sort of marathon one stormy Saturday night. I’d only seen a couple scattered episodes but when I sat down in front of the TV that night I expected to see 1 episode but what happened was them showing literally hours and hours of the show, in sequence and seemingly without commercial interruption. I was pretty immersed in the story. And what I saw today was a pretty faithful translation of that. Sure the characters are simple, sure the production designers have blown everything out of proportions; but you will learn within the first 10 minutes of this movie is that the filmmakers consciously decided that if they were going to make an over-the-top living cartoon, then the only way to do it is to go WAAAAAAAY over the top. There are some disgustingly kiddie moments in this film. I have an aversion to the use of chimps in films anyway but to summarize (like i never do), there was monkey poo. And unfortunately it was in the middle of a pretty good 60′s Batman style “Bank! Crash! Ka-Pow!” fight scene.
Assuredly there will be doomsayers next week saying the movie is “unfocused”, “simple” and “confused about it’s demographic” but it’s just because most film reviewers think they should squash a movie that doesn’t appeal to them, well, news flash, IT’S PROBABLY JUST NOT FOR THEM! This isn’t a movie that you have to bring any more of your brain to than the part that WANTS TO HAVE FUN …And maybe the part that controls bladder function, cause this movie is 2 hours long and there aren’t many places you can safely wizz without missing something.
Some people have said that they are put off by the video game-like graphics of the trailers, well then maybe you won’t like the movie. But there is a much better chance that you will get totally sucked in by the ultra-saturated seizure inducting shininess of this movie that simply never lets up. Half of this film is on par in action with the Pod Race scene in Episode 1 with the inevitable final race that will surely rival its excitement. Remember how you gasped the first time you saw the 18 Wheeler-collision scene in the Matrix Reloaded? There are a couple of those moments in this movie for sure. And isn’t that what an overblown summer blockbuster is all about?
On the DeadLantern.com 10 point rating scale I give “Speed Racer” a 7.5 overall with a 9.75 for the effects.
