Looper is, with any luck, going to be the next film

by the people who made “Brick” and “The Brothers Bloom”

We have a finished script, and not much else.

 

Whatever world Tangerine Dream traveled from on their way to the Hollywood Hills via dronetown, a metal world wired for sound and breathing thought and pleasure, then Kylie once visited this planet under the name Barbarella. Wires were inserted into her body, circuits slotted into her mind, and years later she emerged, video-driving towards a city on the other side of imagination, as a finished mix of dream machine and celebrity. Somewhere in some universe down some wormhole on the edge of some supernova, Tangerine Dream were a time-traveling science fiction boy band, and Kylie, as a coltish, bare-cheeked Barbarella, guested on their biggest hit, a song that went on for centuries and who’s lyrics simply consisted of the sounds “la la la la la la la la” . Here she is on another adventure – it looks to me as if she, with a song and a smile, is being magnetised onto videotape, digitised and projected electronically miles into space, angled off the face of a satellite, back down to a central relay system, amplified, synthesized, redigitised, sent to peripheral relay posts, forked out to local signal sites, re-magnitised, and sent on her way along primitive copper wiring into homes around the world.

- Paul Morley, Words and Music (aka my favorite book all-time)

Soundtrack to alien invasions. Like, cover of The Genocides-style.

Well it’s Guy Fawkes day, so I guess we’ll talk about V for Vendetta. How about this one?

V is the story of a supervillain who does what he does for arguably the right reasons. He murders, destroys, tortures, drives insane, manipulates – he commits so many evil acts that calling him a hero is interesting. Alan Moore himself has described it as “a terrorist superhero story”, but for any similarities to Batman and the Shadow are superficial at best. No, V’s every action and aspect are objectively what supervillains do. He has an origin story built on medical experimentation and dehumanization, a lingering kind of insanity throughout his dialog, let alone his actual not-fun insanity throbbing underneath. He has a Winchester Mystery House kind of  lair, with interlocking rooms and doors that lead nowhere. He has racks and racks of disguises, a dead (non-romantic) love he’s dedicated his life to. He grows roses, he stockpiles plastic explosives. He subjects people to torture in order to force them to think like he does, to recreate versions of himself.  He kidnaps a young girl, has her help him commit murder, she leaves him, he kidnaps her again, destroys her personality through concentration camp-style tactics bringing her to the brink of death, and then on the event of his death he asks her to literally become him.

V is a bad person, who does what he does because it’s right. He wants to make the world a better place, and the only way he can do that is by burning a society down to its knees, just to prove a point. The brilliance of V for Vendetta is that not once do you ever think V is wrong. Not once. He is completely in the right, killing his way across his past so as to clear a path to bringing down an entire fascist government. He is either enacting a Hitchcockian revenge plot and then escalating to a society, or misdirecting the cops. Still – because of the way he moves, the way he talks from the first scene on – V is doing what he does because he knows it needs to be done. Moore and Lloyd are truly interested in portraying the terrorist, the villain, as a moral force.

That, of course, does not mean that he’s not evil.

That’s whats worth rereading V for Vendetta for the millionth time again. Because instead of a morality play in which we learn that fascism is wrong, we are given a story with no easy answers. V for Vendetta’s core is Evey’s experience in the prison, and the framed story of Valerie. There’s no disputing what that means. But in the story around it, we learn that ideology almost always hurts someone when its put into practice. That putting ideas over people is always damaging, and no matter what lengths are gone to and how right you are, you’ve ultimately compromised any ideals you had in the first place.

The end of V for Vendetta is Evey taking on the face of evil in order to do the right thing, because there’s no other way to complete V’s plot. It’s a malicious force asserting itself on a character we know to be innocent to commit its last wish on the earth. It is a possession, the demon of anarchy taking another host. It forces us as readers to see the horror in the moment, as well as the beauty.

The shitty fucking movie left that part out.

via his site, which also has maybe the only Alien comic you need to read other than Woodring and Plunkett’s Labyrinth.

On Simpsons first-draft king John Swartzwelder, from John Orvted’s Unauthorized Oral History of the Simpsons:

We would have story meetings with him outside. And I remember distinctly one time being a young comedy writer, and Swartzwelder just happened to be sitting there, smoking a cigarette on the lawn. And I though, Man, I’m just gonna ask John Swartzwelder a random question and see what he says in return. And I said “John, what would you do if you had all the money that you could spend?” And without a moment’s hesitation he said “I would buy a battleship and the Empire State Building. With the Empire State Building, I would just let it run down and get decrepit. Because people would say, ‘You can’t do that! That’s the Empire State Building!’ I would say ‘No, I can! I own the Empire State Building!’ The battleship,” he said, “I just think it would change people’s conversations with me if they knew that I had a battleship.”

- Brent Forrester

“Also, the day of OJ’s Bronco chase, John didn’t show up for work. He told us that he had been walking around Encino with a baseball bat – looking for him.”

- Jennifer Crittenden

Found, of course at the House Next Door. If you love anything about movies, this will fuck your head up, even if its just a little. Finally, someone has topped Jamie Thraves on re-utilizing the Vertigo soundtrack. See also Zombie 101.

So you’re there, and you’re trying to be creative, but over these long stretches of time. There were periods of time where you felt like, Gee, I think I lost my mind a bit during certain stretches.

I used to walk around the Fox lot, and once I found two pieces of a broken pool cue in an alley. There were two pieces that screwed together, with a brass fitting, and then unscrewed. Jeff Martin and I developed a whole game around unscrewing it, flipping both pieces in opposite hands, and screwing it back together, and seeing how many times you could do that in one minute.  And then we developed all these complicated rules involving how far your wrists had to be apart, and we really took it seriously.

It got to the point where Jeff had the record for forty-five flips in one minute, but then there was the time I broke it and got to forty-six; we were elated. And other people in the room would watch sometimes. I remember times where Jeff and I were doing it, and there was a circle of people around us watching and it got very intense.

If you’re trapped on a deserted island, you can build an entire religion around a seashell. It was that feeling. That’s an illustration of how we were driven to the edge of something, I don’t know what.

- Conan O’Brien, from John Orvted’s Unauthorized Oral History of the Simpsons.

Excerpt from the anthology film Chacun De Cinema starring Josh Brolin and Grant Heslov

I am like 90% sure only David Allison will laugh at this, but I had to do it.

Motherfucker took me out of the ghetto. That’s my dude, man. He’s been like a dad to me. I remember when I was on Saturday Night Live my first year and I wasn’t getting much. I was down; I was ready to quit. It was three o’clock in the morning, man, I’ll never forget. Makes me want to cry sometimes when I think about it. I love that man. I love that man. [long pause; starts to cry] I’m sorry, man. Excuse me. [another long pause] Son of a bitch … motherfucker’s good. I remember one time Lorne took me to his office, and he said, “Tracy, you are here not because you’re black. You’re here because you’re fucking funny, man.” [bursts into tears again; wipes face with shirt] Changed my whole perspective … They say every Jewish man is supposed to love one black motherfucker in this life. I’m glad Lorne Michaels chose me.

- Tracy Morgan

You need to listen to this interview with him at NPR too, it is seriously the most amazing thing ever.

A collection of Velvet Underground posters, some from Warhol’s Factory. (thanks for the link Beaucoupkevin)

A narco-fueled angry rant of a Mad Men writeup in TV of the Week at the Factual along with Matthew J Brady’s great Venture Brothers piece (also Fringe) and Tucker Stone, Our Man in X on House.  Actually I haven’t linked but I’ve done most of the season, click back if you feel like it, its the only consistent writing I’ve been doing the past couple weeks. Last weeks is really crappy though, it was written when I was all jacked up. I don’t know if the Mad Men pieces are as good as the Boosh ones, as I’ve only really gotten an angle in the past few weeks. The Boosh pieces were about how Adult Swim was botching the US release of a possible comedy classic (and how much the show was about rape). The Mad Men pieces are just kind of angry and unfocused and I don’t know if they’re funny, but pretty much every week I talk about Betty and Don and how much I hate the rest of the cardboard cutout cast. Then again, maybe Mike Sizemore’s right and the show is about the only people in the entire decade who weren’t armed to the teeth so why the fuck should we care? Joan Holloway isn’t even on the show any more to stare at.