I hardly ever go the movies anymore.

It just doesn’t really do it for me like it used to, and I don’t particularly miss it. Maybe it’s the idiots who can’t stay off cell phones for a whole ninety minutes. It could be that home theaters have made the movie viewing experience much more pleasurable in terms of controlling content and ambiance.

Or it might be that I just don’t really get excited by actors anymore.

I’m finding that I can’t really distinguish the latest discovery-of-the-moment from the incarnation who preceded him. Young actors are starting to all look alike to me — I’m not confident that I could pick James McAvoy, Robert Pattinson, Cillian Murphy, or Orlando Bloom out in a line-up even if one of them attacked me on the street — and there’s always some new Brit, Irish, or Australian import (sultry vamp and nekkid-ass werewolf from Being Human, you get a pass) who seems to miss the boat to stardom before I can manage to get acquainted with him. Stateside, the crop of sloe-eyed domestic actors are all like hypertrophic twelve-year-olds, forever “in search of the right girl” and apparently quoting from a callow ’50s pop ballad. Hollywood comes off, like so many formerly great American institutions, as more desultory and phoned-in than ever; just as I haven’t been buying much in the way of new music because everything is Auto-Tuned to death, I find I’m turning to cultier, more obscure movie fare from previous decades and other countries. (read the full article)

What’s more maddening than getting job advice from the well-employed or dating tips from the perpetually attached?

How about sage wisdom on substance from fawning celebrity glorifiers?:

“If I could change one thing about our world, I would change how people measure their self-worth against material objects. I enjoy capitalism, but I do not let capitalism define me. You are not who you are married to or what car you drive or what kind of apartment you live in. What you are is how you are as a human being.”

Sometimes in life people can make statements in the face of all critical self-awareness that will result in my eyes involuntary rolling back into their sockets. I’m talking about the “Yes, Dear!” Cheney and Bush wives complaining about using gays as a wedge issue, Lindsay Lohan whining about lack of privacy, or Tyra Banks — she of the slimming cameras and fake hair — crowning herself a media-victimized Everywoman. (read the full article)

I thought of them as the Cocaine Trilogy: Xanadu, Can’t Stop the Music, and My Tutor. Movies made around the magic year 1980, written, produced and starring cocaine, that is, addled movie insiders whose every idea was taken to be fucking brilliant. The ruins of such cocaine circle-jerks can be seen in the trailer above. What memories it doesn’t bring back!

I was living in Hollywood at the time, trying to break into screenwriting, turning out magazine features for Andy Warhol’s Interview, where I began what I still laughingly call my career. The 80’s in L.A. … how does one conjure quite that ambiance of a bland Republican bank plaza at noon, blasted with direct, shadowless light.

That mix of flat vistas, of nothing-special brunch franchises where West Hollywood porn stars could be seen at noon, shirtless on the patio, nursing groggy Bloody Marys, the impression that day or night you would find somebody in striped aerobics tights shopping the Ralph’s, the big fluffy blown-dry hair on men who looked like blond televangelists, and those perky young girls on Melrose whose main mission was to find a new place on their head to put a ponytail.

Xanadu does it best, I guess, evoking that… certain nothing.

Lost years. Lost in an L.A. smog. Until suddenly…

FADE IN: Today. An email, a link, a YouTube. And through the massive power of art — that is, the above trailer — my misspent, youth was mine to misspend all over again. (read the full article)

If you’re like us and abhor your typical generic sitcom for its callow puerility, hermetically-sealed staginess, eye-rolling reliance on familial relations, and catch phrase-happy brats, then NBC’s Community may have slipped under your radar. Convention-breaking, wordsmithy, and deadpanningly unsentimental, the series — actually lensed at two L.A. community colleges — follows the continuing adult education misadventures of a motley, makeshift family of losers and wandering souls addled with neuroses and just gnawing at the bit to fuck the hell out of each other (read the full article)

Twilight Star Reveals He Hates Women’s Private Parts.

So reads the headline over at MTV Australia. Ace reporter Sophie Barnett fills us in with the following facts and opening bombshell: Robert Pattinson has hinted he may be gay. Or a straight zoophile. Frankly, we’re not sure

The Twilight actor — this decade’s answer to C Thomas Howell or Christopher Atkins — who’s been linked to his anemic, “I’m, like, so bored with fame and money…” co-star Kristen Stewart, has sparked rumors about his sexuality after he likened lady parts to shellfish or peanuts following a typically tawdry photo shoot for Details magazine. Class…

We’ll let Bedhead explain it himself:

“I really hate vaginas. I’m allergic to vagina. But I can’t say I had no idea, because it was a 12-hour shoot, so you kind of get the picture that these women are going to stay naked after, like, five or six hours. But I wasn’t exactly prepared. I had no idea what to say to these girls. Thank God I was hungover.”

So maybe’s he’s just into ass? Or strictly oral? Frottage? It only gets weirder. Figuring alienating legions of female fans and making himself look like he’s been huffing paint thinner just wasn’t quite enough of a self-lit immolation, Sparkly continued to elaborate. You see, the girly crevice may be a turn-off, but trunks — that shit is fucking hot. (read the full article)

To be a bankable Hollywood action star, you have to have some requisite aces up your sleeve if you hope to achieve success.

You have to sleep with the right people. You need to symbolically connect as straight men’s dream projections of their own idealized selves, while simultaneously embodying a fantasy mate for women and gays — one capable of merciless defense and slaughter, usually while shirtless. You need a PR machine at your back that will propel you up the ladder. You must marry a blonde woman, likely younger than you and willing to accept a prenup so you can trade her in for a less mature model when she hits her early 30s. (read the full article)

Everything was bigger in the ’80s.

The greed. The hair. The shoulder pads. The himbos.

The Me Decade was all about proving you had enough cash to provide you with leisure time, and the fads it introduced are aptly era-specific to a tone set by the excesses of A.L.F., Xanadu, and American Psycho. Dad frequented the sports bar, Mom had her aerobics classes, and the kids played Laser Tag at the video arcade.

Even the strip club became a legitimate business venture in Reagan America. Gone were the days of low-rent joints with seedy-looking women doing the Pony while having the DTs and just-out-of-the-joint ex-con rough trade shimmying to sleazy disco tracks; the men had their upscale gentlemen’s clubs where doctors, brokers, and lawyers could take in the buffet as they scoped out single mothers, dental hygiene students, and touring porn stars on the pole. (read the full article)

Nensha, bitches.

It’s a term I tangentially referred to in an earlier post this month, and a theory I’m frankly fascinated with.

Its essence is this: the human mind with all its untapped power has the ability to psychically impress or burn an image into our physical reality, and thus alter it irrevocably. Post-War Japanese researchers devoted much effort into proving its existence — it would later serve as the basis for the nation’s much-praised film Ringu and its equally effective American remake The Ring — but the doctrine was for decades deemed merely a The Men Who Stare At Goats-type of new age hokum. A flight of fantasy. A failure.

All that changed in 1999 when Nensha was revealed to be a wholly factual (and utterly terrifying) phenomenon brought about not to revolutionize telecommunications or create a super soldier, but from sheer corporate music industry greed and folly.

An affront to Nature of the highest order. (read the full article)