It didn't take much persuasion by a friend of mine to get me to see Paper Heart last week. "What's the movie called? Paper Heart? ...Wait it has that crazy awkward Asian girl (CharlyneYi) from Knocked Up in it along with George-Michael Bluth himself, THE Michael Cera? I'm in!" The very notion of these two nebbish characters joining their forces within a single film, much less one recounting the story of their true-life courtship, is brilliant. As you may imagine, the film stars Yi as a charming, quirky yet lovable up and coming comedienne/actress opposite of Jake Johnson, playing the film's director and Yi's friend Nick Jasenovec. Their mission is simple: Yi, who claims to not believe in love, will put her convictions to the test as she and Nick film a documentary and interview subjects all across the country. Her assumptions about love are put to the test when she meets Cera (playing the same character he plays in every film/TV show...at least this will hold me over until more Arrested Development) and a delicate romance begins to blossom between the two, all while the cameras are rolling in the background.
What unfolds is a very clever "mockumentary" that deftly blurs the line between reality and fiction. The film's most touching moments are its When Harry Met Sally style recounts of how various people met and fell in love. We hear the stories as shared by the couples themselves and view them not as a pure dramatizations, but rather in the form of playful dioramas that Yi seemingly created herself (see above picture for an example). One of the film's most laugh out loud moments came on a playground in the deep South, where 7 year olds quite literally lectured and interviewed Yi about love and dating ("...best date you ask? Hot wings at Applebees!"), exposing at least one child that is destined to be television's next Bob Eubanks or Bob Barker. Yi also interviews some of her celebrity friends regarding their views on true love, namely the hilarious Seth Rogen and Demetri Martin.
Coming off of seeing (500) Days of Summer just one week prior, I may have become a little indie'd out, but that said the movie's tone of quirky optimism makes you leave the theater beaming no matter how much you try to the contrary. Unlike (500) Days, which impressed with both its complex writing and cinematography, Paper Heart benefits from Yi and Jasenovec's simple structure and premise, a serene soundtrack (mostly penned by Yi and Cera), and its charming naivete. Paper Heart makes for a compassionate and hilarious summer diversion in which Yi and Cera take you along for the ride of their lives, documenting (or mockumenting?) the very roots of their budding relationship.
To all (now apparently 5) of my loyal readers, an explanation for my absence. Well, there was that whole "passing med school thing" from April through May, in which every week we had a final or midterm every week. Then there was that job I got telecommuting/tutoring this kid in prep school in Massachusetts (btw, best $45/hour I'll ever earn, love multitasking on YouTube). There was that awesome Spring Break in PuntaCana, where I won $5 at Blackjack (coming out ahead $305 in total compared to where I expected to be), read Pride and Prejudice for the first time, and witnessed a classmate of mine wearing a terrible banana hammock. Then there was the epic Scrubs farewell post that I had planned for, oh I don't know, ONE YEAR, and then I find out that they're bringing back the show without Zach Braff next year, come on! I had my closure and then they just yanked it away. But my greatest hurdle over the past few months has been my epic failure to compile my Unified Theory of Nazis in Film whereby I am able to predict, with stark accuracy, the box office potential and critical reception of a film based on the number of Nazis that die in the film. You see, I first postulated Price's First Hypothesis on Nazis about a year ago. I made the observation that the two Indiana Jones flicks in which Nazis were the main protagonists (just check out these scenes from Raiders and Last Crusade) both outperformed at the box office and boded better with critics than Temple of Doom (the new one, which grossed some ungodly amount of money, I will not even legitimize in this discussion as it was so awful). Then I thought about other films in which Nazis make a nefarious appearance: there are my beloved Sherlock Holmes movies, American History X (ok...neo-Nazis too), Enemy at the Gates, Downfall, American History X, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Cabaret, Defiance, The Great Dictator, and Casablanca.
According to this logic, you could have understood my rabid appetite for Quentin Tarantino's upcoming Inglorious Basterds, in which a band of Jewish soldiers exact blood-thirsty revenge upon hundreds of Nazis in WWII France. Similarly, now I could understand why (besides that whole Tom Cruise as the lead actor thing) why Valkyriewas doomed to failure from the start, not only did they not kill enough Nazis, but they failed to kill THE Nazi in charge.
As sound as I believed my hypothesis was however, I was troubled by another startling observation that I made, dubbed Price's Second Nazi Hypothesis, whereby I noticed that despite the failure of Nazis to die in certain films (The Pianist, Schindler's List, and Sophie's Choice being prime examples), the emotional impact of the pain that they cause seems to be correlated with their success. I was therefore forced to attempt to reconcile my two conflicting theories, and I squandered for months, until I gave up at the end of classes, approximately 4 weeks ago. It seems that I was doomed to fail to create my Grand Unified Theory of Nazis in Film just as Einstein failed to devise his Grand Unified Theory reconciling electromagnetism with his theory of general relativity.
In any event, many apologies for the absence, and as a sign of my regret, please accept these ten Scrubs clips as a sign of my regret. They should have been posted in ABC knew to just let sleeping dogs lie and not renew the show.
"This is not a love story. This is a story about love." Each of the many times that I have been prodded by a friend to describe (500) Days of Summer, I found myself resorting to this simple, albeit wholly accurate, synopsis of the film's themes and plot. This is not a love story so much as it is the story of Tom's (portrayed by 10 Things'/3rd Rock's Joseph Gordon-Levitt) agonizing journey from love at first site with Summer (get it? played by Zooey Deschanel) to post-relationship existential crisis to his ultimate recovery while along the way learning about the reality of love and relationships. The story unfolds in an Annie Hall-like, non-linear fashion, jumping between early "days" and late "days" (marked by screen placards) in his relationship with Summer, showing both the good and the bad, the shaky legs upon which the relationship first stood and then how easily they were cut out from beneath it. But to come away from that brief description with the assumption that the film as at all depressing, you would be quite wrong. In fact, you leave the film with a effervescent sense of happiness, pure and simple, as Tom finally gets his break.
(500) Days was brilliantly directed by feature film newcomer Marc Webb. As it turns out, Webb made his name in the film industry by directing music videos for a variety of major musical acts, everything from Daniel Powter to Diddy to Backstreet Boys (check out the video section of his website), and this background shines time and time again throughout the film. Whether it be a Disney style dance number with an animated robin, a Take On Me-esque pencil sketch sequence, a sequence showing Tom post-breakout that was highly reminiscent of Powter's Bad Day video, and a truly heart wrenching sequence showing side by side Tom's "Expectation" and "Reality" play out at a party. Webb also uses several techniques that harks back to the French New Wave, including a sequence with a French narrator in which Tom watches his story unfold before his eyes, and by splicing scenes from The Graduate into specific parts of the film to add emotional urgency. The inclusion of scenes from The Graduate immediately brought to mind not just Dustin Hoffman and Mrs. Robinson, but also Garden State, another film that not as overtly referenced the classic and a film to which (500) Dayshas already drawn much comparison.
In addition to Webb's playful, yet emotional, direction were the strong performances by JGL and ZD. JGL has quite noticeably matured a ways since his 10 Things past, and he has also lightened up his act since the teen-neo-noir Brick. He played both dimensions of his character with ease, as both the awkward, idealistic lover searching for excuses to talk to his crush and the cynical, misanthropic shell of a character that was left raw immediately following their breakup. As for ZD, I am convinced that the whole palette of the film may have been chosen to match her eyes and a particular sun dress that she wore to a scene set in Ikea of all places. We quickly find, however, that her disarming beauty conceals a very complicated, maybe selfish, maybe manipulative, maybe confused, but certainly emotionally walled off Summer. See what your opinion of her character is and how it changes as more and more days unfold, I think that the development, while subtle, is implicit in understanding why Tom fell for Summer in the first place.
Complemented by a stellar soundtrack featuring songs by Regina Spektor and The Smiths, (500) Days is the most beautiful film I've seen in quite a while, and the first to capture the same emotional sentiment evoked by Garden State five years ago now. Speaking of GState, be sure to look out for two legendary supporting roles played by Geoffrey Arend (GState's Karl, the pyramid scheme guy) and Matthew Gubler (an intern in The Life Aquatic). (500) Days will be a pleasure to watch, from the "sunny" optimism of Day 1 to the ending conceit of Day 500.
No your eyes are not deceiving you. Robert Downey Jr. is set to play the most bad ass, abdominal rippling, super stylized re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary Sherlock Holmes since the misanthropic and crippled Gregory House. I've had the idea for this post percolating for quite a while so I am taking advantage of my brief respite from exams to make the most of it. The upcoming film, set for release next November, will be directed by former Madonna Flame and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels director Guy Ritchie and will feature Jude Law as sidekick Dr. Watson and Rachel McAdams as "The Woman" aka Irene Adler. What's the plot? Well I have no idea but just look at Downey Jr! Knowing that Irene Adler, Holme's only potential love interest in the canonical literature, is set to be a character, maybe things start to get personal and Holmes has to lay down the law old school style with his fists as well as his brains. Either way, with such a strong cast and cult-favored director, I have high expectations for this film.
That said, however, the new Holmes flick represents a radical departure from the Sherlock Holmes films of yore, helmed by such legendary actors as Sir Basil Rathbone in a string of films in the 1930s-1940s. No longer, perhaps, will Holmes so elegantly and demurely puff at his Calabash and explain his "elementary" logic to his adoring fans as he apprehends Britain's most ruthless criminals. As much as recent revamps such as the Batman franchise have turned darker and more ominous, in a sense all Christopher Nolan had to do was to update the grim Gotham universe that Tim Burton conceived 16 years ago for a new generation of movie-goers. As much as I would love to see the notion of genius stylized on film, I can't help but worry that the incorporation of a literal ass-kicking Holmes may somehow taint the charm that the character had always had for me.
Not only that, but in my mind I will always miss the Sherlock Holmes who I grew up with on film, as my family had all of the Rathbone-Bruce films on VHS at home. I loved the films growing up as an extension of my love for all of the Conan Doyle short stories I had read even earlier, for Rathbone's now prototypical portrayal of the iconic character, and most of all for Bruce's comic relief as an inaccurately bumbling Dr. Watson. As I grew older however, particularly once I began studying diplomatic history in college, I grew to love the films for a new reason. You see, although the first two films in the series were set in Victorian England, as were the original novels and serials, the remainder of the series was itself "revamped" to take place in contemporary (read 1939-1945, WWII ravaged) Great Britain. Once I began actually learning about the history of the era, I noticed all of the references not just to the war as a backdrop to the films' setting, but I noticed the blatant propaganda that the producers must have injected into the films against Germany and for the UK, US, and Canada.
Take, for example, this clip (skip to 4:00) from the end of The Voice of Terror, a film based heavily upon the experience of Nazi radio propagandist Lord Haw-Haw. Not only does Holmes refer to the recent Battle of Britain, but at the end there is even an advertisement for war bonds to help subsidize the effort against the Nazis. Similarly, in the later Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, Holmes defeats a now Nazi-sympathizing Professor Moriarty to again save Britain in the face of annihilation (skip to 8:30). In another film set in Washington DC, Holmes also goes on to quote PM Churchill's oratory delivered to the US Congress stressing the need for the world's great democracies to protect the freedom of the world (skip to 8:45).
Even those who don't have an unhealthy obsession with ancient Sherlock Holmes movies have likely seen similar overtly propagandistic scenes in classic film. The most famous film I can think of is Casablanca, released in late 1942 at the height of German expansion in Europe. Not only does the film plainly depict the freedom fighter Victor Laszlo as a hero, but the film also takes some below the belt jibes at the Nazis while they're at it. There's that time when Laszloinstructs Rick's orchestra to drown out the Nazi national anthem with the Marseillaise. And how about when Captain Renault throws out the bottle of Vichy water at the very end (skip to 5:00)?
During WWII, in fact, the US commissioned some of the era's greatest directors to produce military indoctrination and propaganda videos for the nation. The most famous of whom, Frank Capra, produced a slew of films and shorts that have become textbook examples of propaganda, namely Why We Fight (clip here), Know Your Enemy: Japan, and Your Job in Germany. Even children's cartoons of the era made vicious fun of the Japanese enemies at the time and likely played into some of the most egregious (yet also so bad they're good) examples of racial stereotyping in film: Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's and the infamous Long Duk Dong of Sixteen Candles fame.
So what has become of propaganda in mass market film in America? Well the US agency in charge of placing propaganda was dissolved in 1999 (great timing right?) and by no means did Watergate or the Vietnam War experience help matters. In fact, throughout the course of the war there was only one film that positively portrayed the struggle in Vietnam, John Wayne's The Green Berets (the closing song, which is worth a listen, was even a hit single). Contrasting with The Green Berets is a whole genre of films representing America's national catharsis with respect to the Vietnam War, some of the most famous of which may be Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Born on the 4th of July, and Platoon. This trend continues today even, as movie executives have learned the hard way that, just as one should never get involved in a land war in Asia, you should never set a film in the Middle East lest it suffer at the box office. Case in point? See The Kingdom, Jarhead, and Body of Lies just for a few. Just imagine though what the impact on public opinion could have been during the Bush administration if there were a centralized force disseminating pro-war material to all outlets of the media. Would we have accepted it? Would our views on the war have changed? Well I don't know about that, but I can tell you for a fact that Israel is milking its propaganda for all its worth, and I can promise you that young men the world over are all about the what Israeli Defense Forces are doing for its nation and for democracy and freedom in Middle East...or at least they're really into the women of the IDF.
I figured that I would just embed that video as a reward for any men that made it to the end of this beast of a post. Women, I'll keep my eye out for a men of the IDF calendar for you.
PS. Seriously!? The week after I say how wholesome guests on Sesame Street are Chris Brown had to go and beat the living daylights out of Rihanna before the Emmys? Come on!
I have to admit that, not counting the important stuff, and second to getting onto Jeopardy! of course, one of my greatest life goals is to be asked to make a guest appearance on Sesame Street. Why? Well I figure that to get onto Sesame Street you've got to be pretty famous and the producers must think you're wholesome enough to be a role model for millions of kids that watch the show everyday. Now that I think of it, maybe I could parlay an epic 76 episode win streak on Jeopardy! into an appearance on the show....(insert Scrubs style daydream here)...
Back to the point though, being a guest on Sesame Street is really about a lot of different factors. More than any other children's show in history, Sesame Street always sought not only to engage its "target" audience of pre-kindergartners at home that still need to learn their letters and numbers, Street's producers have also always sought to engage parents as well. Before Shrek made telling adult jokes in children's media popular, Sesame Street had long played off of pop culture icons and parodies in order to make the show appealing for parents as well. Why bother? Well producers figured that by engaging parents and siblings in their children's educational process that they would be able to amplify the educational goals of the show. Besides, do 4 year-olds really know who "bookaneer" Tina Fey is? Do they realize that that is actually Feistteaching you how to count to the number 4? And my lord, do they realize that the world's greatest magician is teaching them tricks...I mean illusions! In the same manner that pioneered ways to get kids to actually watch their half hour long program (they tested if targeted audiences were interested by playing a video of a squirrel dancing on the corner of the screen, how cool?), producers also realized that the pop-culture cameo can do the same to hold parents' attention spans as well.
A long time ago, while I attended a high school not so far away, there was once an existence without The OC. Then I remember being in the mall (yes, remember when that's all we had to do with ourselves?) and seeing a gigantic billboard with nothing but a beach sunset, a surfer, and a tag line emblazoned across the wall opposite the movie theater. Little did I know that that show would ultimately redefine the prime time-soap genre and make being a smart, nerdy, indy-music loving, pop-culture laden Jew cool again (or maybe for the first time, either way I'm all for it). And I'll even go so far as to say that season 1 of The OC was genius; I dare you to defy me (Annabiotics? Genius!). The fact of the matter is that, for at least one season, The OC had some of the wittiest banter on television and a semi-believable premise with well-written characters. But I digress... it appears that I am not alone in my respect for The OC, for Andy Samberg has now proven to me in multiple ways that a little part of him too died when the show jumped the shark/nuked the fridge. Thanks to my ravenous love of Scrubs I couldn't help but notice that a particular web series on Andy's Lonely Island website featured none other than Sarah Chalke/Dr. Eliot Reid herself. The show? Why The 'Bu of course. You see, that's what young kids call Malibu now...or so says the series' tag line at least. The series is funny mostly for all of the tropes of teen soaps, dramas, and comedies of which it spoofs, in addition to some hilarious gags, most notably Frazzles the Squirrel's use of 3D glasses in episode 1 (trust me on that one).
As good as The 'Buis, however, I was even more surprised to see that it is not alone among his OC riffing repertoire. Last season on SNL, Shia LaBoeuf guest starred in one of the greatest digital shorts of all time, Dear Sister, submitted for your approval below.
For comparison, the original source material is online here. The main gags here of course are just the farcical nature of the clip itself paired with its apt parody of the above-referenced love for indy artists (here Imogen Heap, also of Garden State soundtrack fame, though you may know here there as Frou Frou) by shows such as TheOC.
Thankfully, we will not be running out of source material to parody any time soon either. Though The OC may have gone the way of the VCR, its spawn certainly have not. Not to get all "nodal" on you again, but let's think of what The OC and its creator, Josh Schwartz, have given us. There is it-show of the moment Gossip Girl, quirky spy-spoof Chuck, the Laguna Beach-Newport Harbor-The Hills-The City mega complex that airs on MTV, and even Baldwin Hills on BET (who knew?). The OC also popularized Death Cab for Cutie, Rooney, and countless other indy rock acts and enabled many to become mainstream successes (I mean come on, they dedicated an entire episode to attending a Rooney concert!). So enjoy all that The OC has given you and be thankful. And while you're at it, maybe watch The 'Bu also, it's pretty sweet.
PS- Sorry for the delay in posting, but I still do have to pass all of my classes here...And if you like Arrested Development skip to 4:00 in the following episode, love it.
Unfortunately I think the episode is rather pedestrian with rather unspectacular songs. But if this is what it take to get Mel and Murray back after the Crazy Dogs...well I'll take it. Enjoy, hopefully.
It didn't take much persuasion by a friend of mine to get me to see Paper Heart last week. "What's the movie called? Paper Heart? ...Wait it has that crazy awkward Asian girl (Charlyne Yi) from Knocked Up in it along with George-Michael Bluth himself, THE Michael Cera? I'm in!" The very notion of these two nebbish characters joining their forces within a single film, much less one recounting the story of their true-life courtship, is brilliant. As you may imagine, the film stars Yi as a charming, quirky yet lovable up and coming comedienne/actress opposite of Jake Johnson, playing the film's director and Yi's friend Nick Jasenovec. Their mission is simple: Yi, who claims to not believe in love, will put her convictions to the test as she and Nick film a documentary and interview subjects all across the country. Her assumptions about love are put to the test when she meets Cera (playing the same character he plays in every film/TV show...at least this will hold me over until more Arrested Development) and a delicate romance begins to blossom between the two, all while the cameras are rolling in the background. 
