Not Quite There Yet

One of my closest friends on the planet, Fantasy author Ari Marmell, has just had his first original novel make it to trade paperback (after a successful hardback run) and sees its sequel come out in Hardback next month. To celebrate, he’s giving some copies away and handed a few to me to seed to my fantasy loving readers.

Ari’s greatest quality - what I love both about him and his books - is his wry, snarky sense of humor. His books, though gritty, bloody, swashbuckling fantasy, are rife with wit and choked with laugh out loud moments. So here’s the contest: between 3PM CST Wednesday December 29th and 3pm CST Thursday December 30th I want you to make me laugh. You have 140 characters - one tweet to make me laugh. @reply me (@massawyrm) with anything on any topic and the funniest three get prizes. 2nd and 3rd place get a trade paperback copy of The Conqueror’s Shadow and 1st place gets the trade paperback plus an advance hardback copy of the soon-to-be-released The Warlord’s Legacy.

Winners will be contacted at the completion of the contest to get mailing addresses for shipment. Now, make me fucking laugh.

While award season talk brings us chatter about the best dramatic performances of the year, often the best comedic performances get overlooked. This year, we aim to change that by taking a look at five of the funniest performances this year.

Find them here.

You never even begin to imagine that you’ll ever have to write an obituary for someone like Robert McCurdy. He’s not the type of person you hope to eulogize; he was the kind of guy you hoped would one day eulogize you. Most of you have probably never heard of him. In truth, when those of us in the Austin Film Critic Association received the e-mail announcing his death, most of us weren’t quite sure who it was either. You see, we didn’t know a Robert McCurdy. We knew Bobby. And Bobby wasn’t the sort of person you expected to receive this sort of e-mail about.

Read the rest here.

It’s rare that you get to see a film whose origin is so transparent that it pervades every second of it. I can imagine that, since she was quite small, Sofia Coppola has been told “Man, it must be so fucking cool to have a dad like Francis Ford Coppola.” And I also can imagine her shrugging and saying “He’s just a dad.” That’s not to say she doesn’t love or respect him, but rather that she knows him the same way we all know our own fathers and has all the same kinds of issues we do with them. SOMEWHERE is Sofia Coppola’s attempt to paint a somewhat fictional picture merging the experiences she’s had with bored Hollywood celebrities with those of her childhood following around her legendary dad. And while you’d think that she would have an awful lot to say on the matter, the truth is she either is unwilling or unable to say it.

Read more here.

Years ago Harry thought it would be funny to write (in passing) a couple of times that I hate the Coen Brothers and their films. That’s just the kind of friend Harry is; if he knows you can take it, he will troll the living shit out of you. It didn’t help that the Coens went through a rough patch mid-decade and then recovered with a trio of films that played against my personal taste, seeming to back up Harry’s assertions. The truth is that I find them incredibly talented filmmakers who have a special knack for making every day, real world circumstances and dialog very funny - a trait that carries over very well into what I feel is their very best film to date, the singularly perfect film TRUE GRIT.

Read more here.

Normally I don’t write counterpoint reviews, preferring instead to focus strictly on my personal reactions and thoughts independent of other’s opinions. But today I make an exception as I write the first of two pieces on what is already quite a divisive film. If there is one criticism that haunts TRON: LEGACY in the whole of its negative reviews, it is the overall, incredibly generic criticism that the story is too simple. Like AVATAR before it, critics have flogged near to death the idea that there isn’t really a lot going on in the film. And from a story structure standpoint, they are not incorrect. But calling the film simple overall means they are overlooking an awful lot.

Read more here.

This past weekend at Butt-Numb-a-Thon, we were treated to the 40 minute opening of Jon Favreau’s upcoming summer blockbuster COWBOYS & ALIENS. While the effects and sound were still unfinished, the film was a smoothly edited, already perfectly structured 1^st act introducing us to the characters – both good and bad – the situation and offered up hints that left a number of dangling threads leading into the second and third act. Unfortunately, as the film is so far out on the horizon (July), the offer to show COWBOYS & ALIENS came with the caveat that we couldn’t offer up spoilers or scene descriptions. What I can talk about is how good it is (thus far) and talk in some much more broad terms as to why this works – and might even prove to be better than any of Favreau’s previous films.

Read more here.

If there is one e-mail I get more than every other – even more than the “this is what *I* think INCEPTION was about” letter that choked my inbox this summer – it is from people who have read my gaming column and want to know how they can get started playing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. The penning of my very first column on the topic (my early review of 4^th Edition) brought people out of the woodwork. Friends and acquaintances came forward to admit that for years they’d secretly harbored a nerdy desire to play D&D, but just didn’t know how to go about it. The image of a table full of overweight virgins speaking in lisps about their Paladin’s latest adventure scared the shit out of them and, wanting no part of social pariah-dom, long kept that fucking secret to themselves. But things have changed. MMORPGs have introduced the idea of fantasy gaming to millions who never before had considered it and now the idea of sitting around a table of your friends delving into a dungeon doesn’t seem so alien.

Read more here.

Sometimes you run across a pitch in an editor’s email so bugfuck crazy - so outside of your comfort zone - that you can do nothing but nod and mutter “Challenge Accepted.” That’s what happened here. My editor wanted to see a story on a “movie pitch” about a Taylor Swift movie based on her songs and I broke out the headphones, opened up Napster and spent three hours balls-deep in the Swift. This was the result.

There’s just something about a vignette, that story that plays with the elements of shorthand to tell something we might ordinarily watch in 90 minutes instead in the span of about 10. So what would happen if someone took the works of a storyteller musician — like Taylor Swift — and applied it to a cinematic format similar to Paris Je T’Aime and New York, I Love You, in which each of Swift’s songs were translated by an established filmmaker into a short work of cinema? Or perhaps rather than the short film format, what if the works were assembled as an interwoven series of stories like Love Actually, Valentine’s Day, or He’s Just Not That Into You? What would that look like? Especially if they had the courage to not actually include the songs themselves in the film?

Read the rest here.

If you’ve never had the chance to see Patton Oswalt live, you’ve not only missed out on one of the best things going on in standup comedy today, but one of the truly geeky live experiences out there. Patton is one of us – a comic book loving, genre-obsessed fanboy - whose equal passion for the craft of standup has forged an act that seamlessly blends politics and pop culture into razor sharp and hilarious social commentary. I’ve had the opportunity to see him live a number of times, and count them among some of the very best shows I’ve had the fortune of attending.

But unlike many books by successful standup comedians, Oswalt’s new book ZOMBIE SPACESHIP WASTELAND (Scribner, 196 pages) is not a mere extension of his act. In fact, there are entire chunks of this book that bear little resemblance to his act at all. Fans hoping for two hundred pages of Patton Oswalt riffs might find themselves fairly confused at first. This isn’t straight comedy; it is satire. While chunks of the book are first person accounts of his childhood and teen years in Virginia, and one of the final chapters is a substantive narrative about his nightmarish first gig as a headliner, there are swaths of this book that feel like complete non-sequiturs – strange pieces of performance art amid what is an otherwise well written memoir.

Read the rest here.

Easily one of the most talked about (and some would say overly discussed) films of the last year, Christopher Nolan’s Inception is a dazzling mindbender that, love it or hate it, has spawned countless parodies, homages, and send-ups. Coming off of the record-breaking success of The Dark Knight, Nolan had the support of a rabid fanbase eager to declare the film’s genius long before its release. And when some critics stood up to question the film’s logic and execution, fans became overprotective and derided critics in angry rebuttals and comments. In my initial review, I questioned the film’s final shot and spent the next month sifting through emails either disagreeing with me or sharing various interpretations of the film.

Read the rest at film.com!

As many of my readers have only discovered me in recent years, they might not be familiar with pieces I’ve written that come up most commonly in interviews, conversation or panels. Occasionally I like to dust off some of these old pieces and put them out for folks to read again. As we rapidly approach the end of 2010, I am gearing up for my annual bad movie weekend - which I will no doubt live tweet again this year - during which I watch the very worst films of the year that I haven’t gotten around to yet. In honor of that, I will be spending December revisiting some of my favorite bad movie reviews. The following piece appeared on Ain’t it Cool News on February 27th, 2009 and proved to be my pick for 2009’s Best Worst Movie.

Some movies are so terrible that they transcend the mortal realm of what was intended and instead become something so spectacular that you dare not blink for fear of missing a second. They are movies that make you cry out in glee and howl at the screen as each attempt at being cool or funny or inventive instead fails, tripping over itself time and again in a series of blunders so magnificent that it defies every expectation. And as you’ve probably guessed by now, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li is just such a picture. A moist, gaping hole of sanity, this film is repeatedly fucked by its own incompetence, its mind numbingly awful script, and its complete and utter inability to even sustain its own logic.

In other words, it is one of the greatest things I have seen on screen all year.

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