I SAW MOVIES THIS YEAR!  I HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT THEM!  BEHOLD AS I ARRANGE THEM NUMERICALLY!

Look, I’m not going to start by apologizing for the movies on the list.  We all know the idea of assigning movies numerical value is ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop us from reading lists, comparing lists, and arguing about lists.  It’s human nature, like love, or pooping.  At some point, you just have to sack up and commit to the format.  That said, it’s a truth critics rarely acknowledge: no one saw every movie that came out this year.  I saw fewer foreign movies than I usually do, and in retrospect, I should’ve spent more time watching those and less time on The Last god-d*mned Airbender.  Oh my God that was terrible.  People are entitled to their opinions, but anyone who liked that movie should be locked a cage and buried in the forest.

Anyway, enough foreplay, it’s time to drop your panties.  Here are my favorites of this year.  KNIVES OUT!  GRRR, MIXED METAPHOR!

Like lists? I don’t care! This is a list of my favorite stories in the world! Here on FilmDrunk, we know we run a site that’s supposed to be about movies, but every once in a while, a story comes along that’s so insane that it sounds like it should be a movie, and we can’t help but cover it. Besides, how much consistency can you expect from me? I’m not even wearing pants. Stop harshing my mellow, guy.

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Right click -> "View Image" to see it in its full-sized glory

Every year, Barbara Walters picks her list of “most fascinating people.”  Hard to say how the old broad comes up with the list, considering half of them are people whose names by all rights she shouldn’t even know, let alone be fascinated by (in case you missed it, Kate Middleton, Justin Bieber, the Jersey Shore cast, Sandra Bullock, Betty White, Sarah Palin, Jennifer Lopez, David Petareus, and Mark Zuckerberg).  My closest guess is that she rips a huge bong load and watches E! on the crapper (Really? Kate Middleton?  B*tch, how high are you?). Read the rest of this entry »

Oh my God, there's a sun in my nightstand!

Natural light alarm clocks: Verilux, Biobrite, Soleil, and more, available on Amazon.

Since I moved back to the West Coast, waking up hasn’t been easy.  I feel bad letting my East Coast readers wake up with nothing to read, and that means waking up pretty early.  To make matters worse, I moved into a small apartment with very little natural light, affectionately known to friends as “the jack-off cave.”

That’s when I discovered natural light alarm clocks.  Read the rest of this entry »

Eastbound and Down: Season 2, September through November on HBO, Season 1 on DVD.

Gone are the days when everyone watched the same two or three comedies.  It used to be, everyone watched Seinfeld or Friends or Married with Children, and everything else was just so much Caroline in the City.  The point is, there were shows we talked about, that everyone talked about.  TV comedy is much more fractured now.  There’s a lot of great stuff on — too much, in fact — but there’s nothing approaching the kind of shared cultural experience that TV comedy was even just five or ten years ago.  Part of the problem is that the major networks are content to ride awful laugh-track shows like Two and Half Men all the way to the bank for the time being, even if everyone knows they’ll be obsolete in less than a decade.  One of the few places that you’ll still find an audience that includes my parents’ friends, the rednecks who never left my hometown, yuppies I know from college, and the twee-est, most obnoxious hipsters riding fixed gears through my neighborhood in the city is on HBO.  Somehow HBO has been able to maintain its cool factor to a lot of different people, and one of the shows everyone seems to be watching is Eastbound and Down. Read the rest of this entry »

Boardwalk Empire, September – present, Sundays at 9 on HBO

I have a confession to make: I don’t watch Mad Men.  I know, I know, it’s great.  It’s just that I got onboard way too late, and now I’m too far behind, and it’s impossible to enjoy episodes from two years ago when everyone you know won’t shut up about the latest episode.  I can’t watch the new ones because I don’t know the back story, and watching the old ones just to understand the new ones starts to feel like homework.  …It’s quite possible that we now have too much good TV.  That said, I’ve learned from my mistakes.  So when I heard about Boardwalk Empire, I got in early. Created by a producer from the Sopranos, produced by Martin Scorcese (among others) and starring Steve Buscemi, it wasn’t hard to predict that this would be the next big show.

And now that I’m watching it, it doesn’t feel like homework.  First off, ignore the idiots that say Steve Buscemi can’t carry a show.  He doesn’t play leading men because he doesn’t look like Jon Hamm, it’s not because he’s not a great actor.  He is.  Did I mention it’s about 20s gangsters?  I know everyone likes the slick hair and skinny ties and Jackie O outfits on Mad Men, but we’ve had that look coming out our ears for like five years now.  I’ll take prohibition-era wiseguys any day.  I miss Rome as much as the next guy, but as far as debaucherous period pieces go, the Roaring Twenties ain’t bad.  It’s basically Gangs of New York set in 1920s Atlantic City, and if I could think of a better pitch than that, I’d be rich.

Buscemi plays Nucky Thompson, the Atlantic City politician (based on real-life figure Enoch “Nucky” Johnson) taking kickbacks from the local bookies and booze runners, leading an ensemble cast that includes Michael Stuhlbarg (from the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man), Stephen Graham from Snatch as a young Al Capone, and of course Michael K. Williams, the unforgettable Omar from The Wire.  And thanks to Gretchen Mol and Paz De la Huerta, it has some of the finest nude scenes ever put to television. Gretchen Mol, who’s 37, plays Michael Pitt’s mother even though he’s 29, which is really weird, but far be it from me to complain about anything that involves Gretchen Mol running around with barely any clothes on.  And finally, can I say it?  A show with the promise of crime and violence is just more enticing than more rich people screwing each other.  Okay, don’t listen to my Mad Men-bashing, it’s just bitterness. But the Boardwalk Empire love, that’s real.

It’s sad how ignorant most Americans are of historical events, and how collectively dumb we’re getting as a society.  The other day my friend told me she read somewhere that 112% of Americans couldn’t identify the US on a map of North America.  I’m not sure where she read that and I didn’t look it up because I had some stuff to do, but still, pretty outrageous.  I might even start a Facebook group about it.

Strangely and possibly ironically, even as our knowledge of history declines, we’ve experienced an almost commensurate rise in our desire to see pictures of minor celebrities eating ham sandwiches or cleaning up dog poop.  “If only we could somehow get people as interested in history as they are in Heidi Montag pulling her underwear out of her butt crack,” many a history teacher has thought while looking down some bimbo’s shirt.  And that’s why I have used the magic of Photoshop to incorporate the kind of pictures dumb people enjoy into the kind of historical photographs they should know.  Too long has a knowledge of history been the exclusive domain of the elite, the intellectually curious.  What about the great grunting majority?  The willfully ignorant?  The slack-jawed asswipes?  At long last, historical photographs for all, especially you, asswipe.

And by that I mean yes, this is all just an excuse to make more of my juvenile Photoshops.  Oh, Sad Keanu.  I can’t quit you. Read the rest of this entry »

Kick-Ass on DVD and Blu-Ray , August 3rd.

Well here’s an easy recommendation.  Kick-Ass is one of those movies I assume everyone I know has already seen, but judging by its famously underwhelming $48 million domestic take at the box office, that must not be the case.  I’ve already reviewed this movie once, but suffice to say, it deserves to be seen.  It’s a lot of fun, I don’t mean that in the hurrr-CGI-and-boobz sense of the word that usually gets thrown around in reviews of movies you’d have to be an idiot to enjoy. What I mean is that it’s fun in the sense that it’s a smart take on the superhero movie genre, but not so intellectual that it doesn’t still appeal to that same need of ridiculousness and the fantastic that makes other, straighter superhero movies like Iron Man or The Dark Knight so popular.

It’s hard to do pulpy well, but Kick-Ass manages it.  I think part of the reason it’s so polarizing is that people go along with all the self-aware comic book hero elements and then feel betrayed when it takes them someplace un-PC, like a tarted-up little girl who kills people ultra-violently.  But that’s been inherent to the genre from the beginning — the thrill of the violence, the goofy spandex costumes and the confused sexuality.  Why try to deny it?  Kick-Ass takes it a step further, but that’s the point: you delight in the wrongness, like a deliberately tasteless joke.  I get the feeling some people wanted it to end on some high-minded critique instead of semi-camp violence, but the appeal of Kick-Ass is like that of a really good B-movie: sometimes you laugh at it, sometimes you laugh with it, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which.  In the end, I guess you’re either the kind of person who gets hung up on why Nic Cage is acting like a weirdo and shooting a little girl, or you just enjoy Nic Cage acting like a weirdo and shooting a little girl.  Hey, switch on the director’s commentary from Matthew Vaughn and get the best of both worlds.

Anyway, if you missed it in the theaters, now, thanks to the magic of DVD, you can still see it, but this time without being in a room full of other peoples’ stupid kids.  You can see it in room full of your own stupid kids.  Or your cats.  Or with your best friends, scotch and ennui.  Point is, the world is your oyster, man, slurp it down.