I can’t imagine a poster more perfectly designed to make me not want to see something.
The latest Efficient Officiant! Watch it! And if you like it, tell your friends ‘bout it! “Like” it! Things like that. Because we often have no idea if people are even watching these.
Episode #9 - The Testimonial
Written by Katie Schorr and starring the SUPER FANTASTIC Kelly Hudson, Dan Klein, and Lance Rubin.
Shot by the great Ray Munoz. Special thanks to Julie Harnik for her gorgeous apartment! If we were only skilled enough to light it properly…
In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of low-priority, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. Schraw, Pinard, Wadkins, and Olafson have proposed three criteria for a behavior to be classified as procrastination: it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying.
Graffiti of the Month, January. The obvious subtext of No Strings Attached.
willow smith in ANNIE
me: hey jaden! hey willow!
jaden: what’s up?
willow: hi lance!
me: i’m doing all right. january’s been good. slow audition month, but i’m feeling good about 2011.
jaden: auditions? why don’t you just get your parents to remake a famous movie for you to star in?
willow: yeah, stupid! or at least have them get somebody to produce and write a hit single for you.
me: oh, yeah. good idea! thanks, guys! your worldview isn’t skewed at all! and won’t continue to be for the rest of your lives!
The one and, thus far, only time in my life I was a hard-core sports fan was for the New York Knicks, from 1994 through 2000. This video (which also serves as a reminder that 1994 truly was a long time ago) is from the first year I started following them, when I sorta felt like I was such a devoted fan that I had helped them make it to the Finals. Which they subsequently lost to Hakeem and the Houston Rockets. Sad.
But this vid takes me back to such a specific time and place, when I had a Knicks pullover Starter jacket, when I would try to watch every single Knicks game on the MSG channel, when John Starks, Patrick Ewing, and Hubert Davis (my personal favorite, a highly under-rated pure shooter) were completely awesome. Go Knicks.
Re-watched this gem last weekend to start off this Year of the Rabbit right, and it still shines oh-so-bright, almost 23 years (!!) after its release. After this movie blew my mind (“Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny onscreen at the same time?!?”), Roger Rabbit became my absolute favorite cartoon character for many years. And I was shocked when I later learned Bob Hoskins was British.
Why is the whole world not talking about Macgruber? Most highly under-rated movie of 2010. It had me laughing out loud (LOLing) way more than I expected and more than any other comedy this year.
If nothing else, you have to appreciate the first 15 minutes, which are a pitch-perfect take on 80’s action movies. Delightful.
I’m a little late in finishing up Season 2 of Bored to Death, but finish it I did. Because it’s a show I really want to like. Ted Danson is having such a great time and is really fun to watch and the tone is zany in a way that seems to hold such potential and Zach Galifianakis is spinning as much gold as he can out of lines that, on paper, aren’t all that funny or interesting.
But at the end of the day, this is a show with no stakes, a show where characters don’t learn or grow or change, and where our protagonist Jason Schwartzman seems completely removed from and unaffected by the world he is in, having made little to no progress as a character after 16 episodes.
One could argue that, in comedy, a protagonist doesn’t need to change. I mean, does Larry David change in Curb? Not much, but at least he is reacting to the world around him in a way that is hilarious and insanely relatable. And then, the fact that he never changes becomes part of the comedy.
One could also argue in Bored’s favor, “It’s just a comedy show! It’s funny! Look what crazy adventures they get into! They do so much hilarious running-around!” But when none of this is grounded in any reality, with no repercussions for anything that happens, when guns don’t even really matter, it all becomes a non-funny wash.
This lack of stakes was never more clearly on-display than in Ted Danson’s character arc this season. In a really awesome, interesting twist, his character George was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And I thought, “Wow, that was unexpected.” The show had been so fluffy-light that to suddenly bring cancer into it seemed smart, suddenly grounding everything in a new way. Lo and behold, after about 4 episodes of dealing with his cancer, the show shit all over any reality it had created when it turned out George didn’t have cancer at all. It had just been a clerical error the whole time; his last name had been confused with some other guy’s. Really, people? Really? Sigh.
So, though a small part of me still wants to like this show, still loves seeing so many fun Brooklyn locations on my TV screen, and still thinks there’s some potential for all these elements to come together in the right way, most of me realizes I already watch too many TV shows anyway, and it’s time to let one go. Farewell, Bored.
