- Just what is a documentary these days?
So the salient question might not be, “What is a documentary?†— an abstract, theoretical approach to a form that is grounded in the concrete facts of life. Instead it might make sense to ask what (or whom) a given documentary is for? Is it a goad to awareness, an incitement to action, a spur to further thought? A window? A mirror? The more you think about it, the less obvious the truth appears to be.
- I think somewhere, in the back of my brain, I knew that Eric Stoltz had originally been cast as Marty McFly in Back to the Future — had, in fact, filmed for several weeks — but it’s still weird and kind of amazing to see the footage.
- The Wire Monopoly? Sometimes parody edges up right up against the things we wish were real. [via]
- Children’s picture books are apparently a dying art, thanks to parents starting kids on chapter books earlier and earlier:
Picture books are so unpopular these days at the Children’s Book Shop in Brookline, Mass., that employees there are used to placing new copies on the shelves, watching them languish and then returning them to the publisher. [via]
- And finally, The Doctor is now immortal. Or always was. Or whatever. I’m still a Doctor Who neophyte compared to some, but even I know “continuity” is a very slippery slope in that universe.
humor
Wednesday various
- A vexation of zombies! Supernatural Collective Nouns. [via]
- Wow, H.G. Wells would hate American journalism today!
- Swanky new Vegas hotel’s ‘death ray’ proves inconvenient for some guests. Imagine that. [via]
- That Johnny Depp, what a mensch! (I still don’t want to see the next Pirates movie, though.) [via]
- And finally, via Reuters: “A man carries a shark through the streets of Mogadishu September 23, 2010.”
I love how there is absolutely no context given for this.
Wednesday various
- Take the House Season 7 Challenge. Win points by correctly guessing the conditions or diseases that will turn up on the show week to week.
- The Room: The Game. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” [via]
- Things I’ve Overheard My Roommate Say to Her On-Again/Off-Again Boyfriend or Works by Joyce Carol Oates? [via]
- J.G. Ballard’s self-edits [via]
- And finally, Heather on why you should visit the Banff Centre for the Arts:
Just watch out for the elk. And the mathematicians.
In which I resort to reposting my Twitter feed
I don’t know what you did today, but me, I spent way too much time making up “facts” about the new Robert Rodriguez movie Machete.
You could probably argue that any time spent doing this is too much time, but every man needs his hobbies.
It all started when Joe Hill posted the following on Twiter this morning:
Robert De Niro has twice won the Oscar. By coincidence, Danny Trejo cut a guy named Oscar in jail, a couple times.
He appended the hashtag #factsaboutmachete, and I decided to just run with it.
Anyway, here are the so-called facts I posted about the ex-Federale-goes-on-brutal-rampage-of-revenge movie:
Based on the novel of the same name by Jane Austen.
“The feel-good musical of the year!” raves Gene Shalit.
A spin-off of Hans Christian Andersen’s heartwarming holiday classic “The Little Machete Girl.”
Audiences will have to wait until the director’s cut to see Danny Trejo have sex in 3D with blue aliens.
Ever the Method actor, Robert De Niro served eighteen months in Congress to prepare for his role as Senator McLaughlin.
Machete was actually the name of his sled.
“Whosoever pulleth the machete from the stone shall be king,” proclaims a possibly inebriated Cheech Marin.
Follows in a long tradition of characters named for deadly weapons: Bullitt, Blade, Celine Dion…
Legend has it that to every age, a new Machete is born. Frankly, though, I don’t what Legend has been smoking.
In Japanese, Machete is known as Happy Sunshine Sharp Pointy Man.
An origin story in which Danny Trejo’s character is bitten by a radioactive machete was scripted but never filmed.
Be sure to stay through the end credits for a thrilling sneak peek at Machete joining the Avengers!
If you stand in front of a mirror and shout Machete! three times, Robert De Niro’s character will appear and deport you.
Machete’s blades may not be crafted from adamantium, but they still put the fear of god into that gringo Magneto.
The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Machete from the bosom of the water…
A shocking twist in Martha’s Vineyard reveals Trejo to be Kyle Machete, formerly of the Kennebunkport Machete family.
A few other people got into the action, too. I particularly liked this from RichterCa:
Originally planned to be the next “Spy Kids” sequel, it was rebranded after children in test audiences cried for hours.
And this from TwittterRock:
He takes just like a Machete. And he aches just like a Machete. But he breaks just like a little girl.
Amazingly, I actually also managed to get a fair amount of work done, too. Today marked the last of my long summer-hour days. I have a half day tomorrow — provided Hurricane Earl doesn’t change those plans — and then I’m off until a week from Monday.
Maybe I’ll even go see Machete while I’m home…
Wednesday various
- James Cameron doesn’t like Piranha 3-D:
I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip..
Something tells me he’s going to hate Jackass 3-D.
Frankly, though, it’s films like that — cheap horror movies with visceral, jump-out-at-you scares — to which I think 3-D is actually most ideally suited. Cameron may be throwing his full weight behind it as a tool on the artistic palette, but even in Avatar I thought the 3-D was a lot less impressive than advertised. It has its uses, but even at its best, I don’t think it rises above a gimmick. (For which you trade a not-insignificant amount of brightness and comfort.) So a film like Piranha, which embraces it fully as gimmick, may actually be exactly what the technology is meant to do.
- Eye chart for geeks.
- And interesting look at Yiddish in America:
The survival of Yiddish in America is an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand story. Yiddish, once the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, is undoubtedly moribund, with its last full-throated speakers, Holocaust survivors, now well into their 80s and 90s. (A smattering of their children speak it through sheer willpower whenever they can buttonhole a comprehending ear, but some, like this writer, grew up nagging parents to speak English and regrettably saw their first language wither.)
On the other hand, the language is booming among Hasidim, for whom it is a lingua franca, mushrooming so prolifically that by some estimates the ultra-Orthodox will form a majority of American Jews by century’s end. [via]
- Have you been reading Kaleidotrope contributor Jason Heller’s weekly Frequency Rotation posts at Tor.com? You really should be.
- And finally, based on this clip, I would totally buy Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton rap album. [via]