Episode 1,981 aka "Finding Chemo."

As expected, chemotherapy is kinda a big drag. Not only do I have to take it, I have to jump through serious hoops. As I don't have the mad ca$hmoney to re-up my phone all the time to deal with automated machines, my mom takes the brunt of these hassles. I'll never know the true amount of time she spent sifting through all the bullshit that it takes just to make one change, and no amount of times she hears my gratitude will equal how much I owe her. It's very much like 2pac's "Dear Mama," except that she never was a crack fiend, mama. I have to stay alive, only if to pay her a gojillion dollars and Make It Rain. I also got a plane ticket to anywhere in the continental 48 (I think), and I'm really wanting to go out west to hang out with Paul when he has time. If anybody else wants to put in a bid for me visiting their cit-ay, just give a shout. Perhaps a travel brochure...Lord knows I love a good pamphlet!!!

"Work" on the magazine is going well. We're always looking for new talent, and the thing I'm looking for right now is a decent photographer. Apparently, that takes gear. Maybe I'll look up some low-budget lighting techniques, or pair a crewless pro with an art school student's access to lights. We've got some exciting writers and some really cool stuff on the horizon, for sure. I think our slogan should be "Edge Magazine: What do you want for nothin'?"

I saw Once yesterday, and I really liked it. I'm not really big on musicals, but I really liked the way the songs came from the song writing/singing process and the emotion that each performance contained. Highly Recommended, unless you don't like heartfelt music*. My only regret is that the Miracle 5's soundsystem is wiggity-wack.
I also saw the return of Harry Potter and crew, and I enjoyed it very much. This is the first time I felt an emotional connection to the material, aside from Azkaban. I'm looking forward to the next, especially since the same director is doing it. And she's in it, which helps.

Last week I watched a 70's flick called Silent Running, an early outing by some dudes who worked on Blade Runner and Star Wars. Douglas Trumbull--definitely an early innovator of special FX and the things we take for granted today. Anyway, Silent Running's about this space station that's home to a lot of shipping containers and three large, organic forests--the last ones in existence, I believe. In charge of the forests is Bruce Dern, an actor that's been in many a classic film, mostly playing the conceited, smarmy jerk. He's so good at it! Anyway, he's pretty much a jerk in this movie, a hippie-type who is all smug about winning at space-poker** and being able to grow stuff well. The other 3 dudes, all shippers don't suffer him lightly and zip around his gardens in their sweet go-karts when they get a chance.
Anyway, Home Base gives word that the shippers and everybody can come back to Earth (which is apparently some sort of super-regulated place where all temperature is the same and everything is made from synthetics), and they can also get rid of those forests, while they're at it, too. Everybody's all about going home, except for our man Bruce, who is obviously Not Having It. Upset over the decision, he argues with one of his shipping friends, and ends up killing him in self-defense. Unable to morally turn back, he sends two of the forests out to be nuked, along with the other shippers. From there, he gets the drone robots to fix the injuries he sustained. He also renames the robots Huey, Louie, and Dewey...and they rock.

They're all played by multiple amputee little people - a pre-cursor for r2-D2. He teaches them to play poker and tend to the gardens--most of the movie is him hanging out. **

The whole thing is a tough posit--do you side with a bunch of cargo-carrying dudes who just want to get back to a crappy homogeneous Earth, or what could possibly be the Biggest Hippie Jerkass in the Entire Universe? I still don't know. Even he can't get over how much of a jerk he's been, so he sends Dewey to tend to the last remaining forest as he waits for home base to pick him up. He destroys the space station with him inside via nuclear detonation-a very 70's ending, I might add.

Now why did I write all that just then? Hm. It's a pretty good social commentary for sure (two of the songs in the movie are sung by Joan Baez, go fig) and it's got a good (if overbearing) message. However, what really struck me as odd is that 1972-Era Bruce Dern...


looks uncannily like Michael Bay!!!



Don't tell me you don't see it. I think it's odd that Jerky Bruce Dern pretty much does the exact opposite of what Mr. Bay does with his latest movie, which is take pretty great care of the robots and only blows up himself. If only the reverse had been true for ol' Mike...


_____

Everybody's leaving town and growing up/doing something, it seems. I'm cool with having a job here and all, but it's gonna come time for me to find some new hangout buddies and I'll be on the lookout, so hit me up!
Also, next week marks a big blow-out housecooling party at John's. It's also a My/Paul's birthday celebration, and should be great. Also, The Lookout is playing at SLB this weekend. If anybody has a wad of money lying around, I'll ask that you please check out my and see if you'd like to hook me up. Might I add that my birthday is also my Cancerversary? I think this will be the last time to milk this coincidence of ailment and birthday. *coughguilttripcough*


*or, Irish people.

**It's really just regular poker, in space.

***Has anybody ever seen a movie where people in space pretty much just hang out? I'd love to see that. A lot of my favorite sci-fi movies involve people doing ordinary stuff, just in space--then some alien/entity/disaster breaks out. Let's write something!

Joost Invites

Joost is a new free tv internet service. You have to get invites to get on it, so i'm gonna try and link to This guy's site to get an invite, and if that happens, I'll spread the word! I don't have a tv in my room/office area so this should be pretty neat.

Once again, I felt the need to travel out west, sit around all day and watch a multitude of films and perhaps meet some people whose work I respect immensely. Thank goodness for South By Southwest!

This year, my traveling companion was none other than TV's Nick. He came into Tally a few days early. During the spring break (woo) week, a few of us went up to Fun Station, where several miraculous events occurred:
1) The coin-catching games were totally full of tokens, which meant dollars and dollars of free play, just for arriving when no one had come early enough to care/check out the tokens, and
2) I actually won two rounds of mini-golf in a row, a first time for me (though Nick got the true miracle hole-in-one for the day, a wild bank off a hill that went straight into the cup). In addition to all this fun, the speakers blasted the hottest of 80's jamz (Head Over Heels, Get Down On It*, Africa, Kiss, Human, etc).

Anyway, on to the trip. We got to the airport wayyyy early, and the emptiness of the Continental section combined with the robotic airport voice reminding me that "Any luggage left unattended is subject to being seized and/or destroyed" immediately made me put on my headphones and play the score to Escape From New York. Has anybody thought about some sort of airport horror movie?

Tally to Houston, Houston to Austin. I get in touch with a friend of my mother's, a courier with TX connections. He talks a lot about Everything and gives us a tour of the town. We eat at the oldest tex-mex restaurant in the city, and we all have the Most Fried Thing We Have Ever Eaten, this super fried tostada, which has to be dipped in the velveeta-ey queso dip. It's fantastic, and I don't even care if I die early for having tasted its splendid glory.

Later on, we register and all that jazz, meet up with the SLB folk (a mostly new batch of folks than last year, many of them super cool) and later on, Moises. I also got to catch up with Crystal, a friend I met last year--sadly, I was never able to get her my picks for music shows...curse that Platinum Badge!

We watched like 16 or so movies, 2 of them were pretty bad. I'll have the mini-reviews posted in Edge, and the UNRATED EXTREME reviews up here later on. I got to hang at my most Favorite Theater In The World, and it was there that I found a new love: Italian Soda. Orange-Vanilla and Raspberry-Vanilla were my favorite flavors. Who could ask for more?

I have a crappy headcold right now, so I'll just get to the pictures that I took. There are no landscapes this time, and I didn't get to take a picture of Lori with a rematch with Godzilla, cause I'm lazy. However, there was a demolished parking lot that looks like the Incredible Hulk did an atomic elbow-drop on it, and it looked Awesome. Here are some people that I saw/met:


That's Bill Paxton. He's a pretty cool dude. I touched somebody who was killed by an Alien, and a Predator(too/Two). Not many people can claim that.


That's David Wain. If you are at least partially cool, you'll know him from the State, and Stella, two awesome comedies. He's edited The State, and he's directed both Wet Hot American Summer and this year's The Ten, a comedy about the Ten Commandments that is freakin' hilarious. Due to time/line restraints, I was not able to snag a picture with Paul Rudd or Jonah Hill, but some other folks I know were cool enough to do such a thing.


That's Paulo Costanzo. You may know him from movies like Road Trip. I put him on the same tier as actors like David Krumholtz, because they're cool and have really good comedic timing, while not coming off as jackasses. In fact, they're in a DTV movie called Scorched and they're quite good together, though the movie is pretty much a saturday afternoon Comedy Central flick, which isn't the worst thing ever. Good to eat lunch to. Anyway, he was in a movie called Everything's Gone Green, a Vancouver-based movie that I really loved. I got to ask Douglas Coupland a question (he wrote an screenplay for it, not based on any story, I don't think), but punked out on taking a picture with him after the show (I had to whiz.) During the Q&A, somebody asked about a sequel to Road Trip, to which Paulo calmly replied, "...I'll kill you." Also, Coupland's never seen or heard of Road Trip. Great times.


That's Richard Linklater. I wish i had a more suitable camera. He's an Austinite who made Slacker, School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, the "Before" movies (Sunrise/Sunset), and Dazed & Confused. I always end up really digging or at least respecting his points of view and how he came to be in the film business. This was taken at a panel where he talked to John Pierson, a representer of Independent film from way back. I really wanted to get a picture with Linklater, but he had to jet afterwards. Oh well.


That's Robert Rodriguez on the right. If you know me, you know how much I love (most of) his work, and how he does what he does. On the right is the Big Red Monster, Harry Knowles, the "Special Guest" of the Grindhouse 101 panel. I really wished Tarantino would have been the special guest, because if you know Knowles, you know he writes for shit, is highly studio biased (he's now a "producer" that hasn't made one thing, and still does reviews/breaking news), and also has a certain...musk about him. Anyway, Robert showed awesome clips from Grindhouse, and some stuff that will never ever be seen anywhere outside of an Unrated DVD--a trailer from Eli Roth in the Grindhouse fashion entitled "Thanksgiving." Let's just say there's a naked cheerleader doing splits on a trampoline, and there's also a butcher knife. Yeah.
I didn't get to take a picture with Robbie Rod, mainly because I hadn't entered anything into the competition and felt pretty wack for that--I can't step to the man without having a plan!! These were the top 3 trailer Winners:

Maiden of Death


The Dead Won't Die



and the Grand Prize Winner, which I totally agree with:
Hobo With A Shotgun






On the way from our last film, we decided to take a cab home. The cab ended up being a white Cadillac with the words "AUSTIN CAB" printed on the side. In the plush front seat was a driver that can be most accurately described as a Hispanic version of Morris Day from The Time. In the passenger's seat...a small guitar. We sped off into the night. During stops, the driver would regularly swig from a bottle of sparkling water (what was inside, I could not tell you) and alternate between playing his small guitar and wailing on a harmonica. Since I had my headphones on, I was alternating between trying to ignore the blasting music (r&b-tinged gospel, then stadium rock), and wondering exactly when we were going to die inside this cab.

We got monumentally delayed in Austin because of a huge thunderstorm in Houston, and after our arrival there, we also had a long layover with hundreds of disgruntled travelers. A five hour trip became thirteen! I wonder if I could write a romantic comedy/horror story taking place in a nearly abandoned airport. I'd call it "Layover." (copyright!)


Coming up this weekend is the Bruce Campbell talk on campus, the derby, and the mayo clinic on sunday/monday.
I'll post some more stuff later. Head colds totally suck.


*not to be confused with "Jungle Boogie," a common mistake.