A while back, David Milch came up with a show idea that he loved so much, he killed his excellent Deadwood off in the middle of multiple plot lines to make it. That show, John from Cincinatti, premiered last night, and wow, bad move Mr. Milch. A show about a rage-filled family of surfers and a mysterious man with a weird haircut, checkered Vans and magical pockets? Even the presence of the great Luis Guzman can’t save this one - I predict it’s dead before the end of the season. Swearengen’s revenge!

Since then, we’ve been consumed with wiring, moving, painting, cleaning, planting vegetables, weeding, mowing, making bread, and other house-related duties. We’ve also gone to Texas for 10 days, (briefly) visited Baltimore, bought a widescreen HDTV, and just yesterday celebrated our 6th anniversary.

Still on the home improvement to-do list:

• completely redo gnarly 70’s bathroom (peach walls/tub + brown tile + beige toilets = ouch)
• Finish setting up basement lounge of AWESOMENESS
• Complete my transformation of the 60’s TV console to an A/V cabinet

After months of hour-long commutes and years of cramped apartments, it is really nice to wake up every day, pad through our spacious ranch, leisurely sip coffee while staring at the splendor that is my new backyard, and be able to make it to work in 10 minutes. Check out more images of our new place HERE.

Growing up in the rural environs outside of Bad Axe, in Huron County, Michigan, I envisioned my future self moving to a bustling urban center far, far away - somewhere with lots of people, no trees, and where the flattened vowels of the michigan accent (check yours now!) would fade from my ears. Since then, I went to college, got married, and stayed in Michigan. And it’s looking more and more like I’ll be here for at least a while longer… I can still see myself moving at some point, but now that I have years invested in my mostly-OK job it seems less and less possible. Sure, Michigan’s economy just keeps getting worse as the rust belt gets rustier, and last week the high temps were below zero - but the Vernor’s and coney dogs keep me satisfied, and all I really care about is spanning time with the Bride of Spape anyway. After years living in relatively highly-populated areas, the other big surprise is that I actually think I don’t care about living in a city anymore - and that I might actually prefer being in the country. Not the our-nearest-neighbor-is-a-soybean-field country I grew up in, mind you - more of the our-yard-is-totally-big-enough-for-a-garden country that can still be found relatively cheaply around the Washtenaw area.

So anyway, we’re seriously looking at buying a house, something closer to the town where we both work than our current place. Nothing against Hamtramck, because this town is full of very friendly people, bars, bakeries, and delicious sausages; but gas money for the Volvo and the hours commuting back and forth to Ann Arbor are destroying me. So we are doing paperwork, meeting agents, and otherwise going bananas, but hopefully it will all be worth it soon when we’re tiling our bathroom, chopping wood for our (hopefully) fireplace, and hanging pegboard in the garage.

The original 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the best horror films ever made, and one of my favorite films of any genre. It has been ripped off, referenced, appreciated or appropriated over 27 times according to it’s Wikipedia entry, and has inspired many of the best (and worst) horror films that came after it. Even the much-maligned 1986, 1990, and 1994 TCM sequels have inspired today’s horror fims - Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses manages to reference almost all of them, for example - and each still has a group of fans that love the movies for the manic, hi-larious splatterfests that they are. In keeping with the modern trend of remaking EVERY movie that I love (I’m looking at you again, Rob Zombie, and you too, SciFi), in 2003, Marcus Nispel directed a completely awful remake of the original TCM.
I wouldn’t say that I had high hopes for the recently-released prequel TCM: The Beginning, but “Hey!” I said, “This one’s produced by Tobe Hooper! It promises to give insight into the horrific events that led to the terrible crimes of the Sawyer (or, apparently, Hewitt) family! It’s the only damn horror movie out right now!”

Oh, foolish horror fan that I am - when will I learn.

Like the 2003 remake, TCM: The Beginning tries to compete with the 1974 TCM’s wholly original, low-budget inspired combination of really, truly scary visuals (the bones! that shot of leatherface slamming the steel doors! the creepy dark corners of the house with the Texas sun streaming into the windows!) and black humor with 2006 big-studio-budget glossiness and gore.

Instead of being a piss-poor prequel, this movie is content with being yet another piss-poor remake of the original - or maybe, a piss-poor remake of the recent (you guessed it, piss-poor) remake? The mind boggles. Either way, this film does not, repeat, NOT, show you how this family got so damn crazy. As the film starts, we see a gigantic woman give birth on the floor of that famous Texas meatpacking facility. The baby looks weird (but not too weird - harelips can be fixed these days), so they throw it in the trash, where it’s picked up by a CRAZY lady who happens to be dumpster-diving for some delicious spoiled meat. Then, during the opening credits, we learn that

1. as he grew up, baby Leatherface had problems in school
2. he was into self-mutilation (he was a cutter before cutters were cool)
3. he got a job at the meatpacking plant (big shocker, that)
4. he liked to cut animals up (again, big surprise)
5. everybody except his family cleared the hell out of town for some reason

This 3-minute sequence, my friends, is what would have made a halfway decent movie fit to be called Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning - but as it is, after the credits, all we learn is that the family has resorted to cannibalism (why? I don’t know, but as R. Lee Ermey repeatedly says, “By God, we’ll never go hungry again!” ) and that young Tommy is 1) huge; 2) already wearing a mask; and 3) TOTALLY CRAZY.

Characters

From an interview with director Jonathan Liebesman:

For Liebesman, it was crucial his characters were more than just fodder for Leatherface. “I think every horror filmmaker tries their best not to do that. It’s at the top of your priorities because the kills mean more, the scares mean more, if you care about the plight of the characters. Everything’s going to mean more and be more frightening because you are going to be in the characters’ skin and frightened for them, and you’re not going to want things to happen to them. That’s important to any filmmaker.”

Sorry, Jonathan - All your hard work was for naught, because I couldn’t have cared less about these awfully written characters. The heroes of the movie are two couples - an older dark-haired brother who is about to return for another tour in the ‘Nam and his brunette tougher-than-she looks girlfriend, and a younger blonde brother who is afraid to tell his older bro that he’s a draft-dodger (with his blonde non-character girlfriend). The less said about them, the better, seriously.

R. Lee Ermey, is - well, he’s goddamn R. Lee Ermey, and just what the hell are you going to do about that? Ermey, as Sherrif Hoyt, was one of the good additions to the 2003 remake, and he’s just as dependable here in the same role (the man is a true genius at playing asshole soldiers, asshole ex-soldiers, asshole cops, and, apparently, asshole ex-soldier fake-cop cannibals). Unfortunately, his character is the only one of the entire bunch that really has a personality, and even R. Lee at his hammiest can’t carry the movie.

How about everybody’s favorite massive freak, Leatherface? Vern from AICN sums it up best:

This “Thomas Hewitt” Leatherface is NOT the same character as the Leatherface/Bubba Sawyer/Junior we know from the original movies. Those Leatherfaces had personality. There’s the frightened, squealing retard of the original, the bashful, girl-crazy one from part 2, the walkman-toting teenage rebel of part 3.

As Vern says, this Leatherface is about as boring as a mute, 7-foot tall, chainsaw-wielding, masked madman can be - and one that ventures way too close to invulnerable super-creep Jason territory. If the director had shown us scenes of young Tommy getting bullied (instead of having brief voiceovers about it in the opening credits), or looking longingly at his aunt’s dresses, or making a dagwood sandwich, or masturbating to McCall’s magazine, or doing ANYTHING besides hulking silently, I would have had some reason to think about his character - why he is who he is, and the cruelty of children or society or whatever. Some attempts are made to make you feel sorry for the guy - he’s referred to a couple of times as an animal - but it’s really hard to feel compassion for a big pouting superman.

Big Complaint Number One:

The Hitchhiker (a character from the original TCM films), was sorely missing from this movie as well as from the 2003 remake. I have to wonder why the filmmakers decided to leave him out of either movie - but especially why he wasn’t in this one? The Hitchhiker’s giggling, apshit brand of insanity would have really added to the boring family’s collective personality, and maybe given back a little of the extremely black humor of the original (or, at the very least, the completely unabandoned wackiness of the original 3 sequels). Also, I always thought of the army-green wearing HH as Hooper’s commentary on the lost, unhinged vets that were streaming back to the states in the 70’s. This could have been used to great effect as a nice contrast to the upright, good-guy Vietnam vet character here, but no dice.

Big Complaint Number Two

The worst sin of this movie, in my opinion, is completely squandering the crazy biker-gang characters it halfheartedly introduces. Look: if we see an entire crazy gang of doped-up bikers menacing our heroes, that entire gang BETTER come looking for their missing leader - if nothing else, this would give a great opportunity for more gore and a lot of extra-creative deaths. Instead, only poor Tobias Beecher comes callin’, and is completely wasted in his tiny role.

Don’t Bother

With a complete absence of the real scares and laughs that I still get from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this prequel completely misses the mark in my book - but it also falls short of the goals that the filmmakers set for themselves. From an R. Lee Ermey interview on the movie:

Let’s put it this way: we did the remake and there were some things in there that needed to be cleared up. There were some questions raised. What happened to Uncle Monty’s legs for instance? Why was he in that old wooden wheelchair? Sheriff Hoyt, how did he lose his front teeth? For that matter, how in the hell did Sheriff Hoyt, such a perverted individual, ever become a sheriff in the first place? Leatherface, how did he come about? Did a crow crap him out on a hot rock and the sun hatch him out? How did he evolve into what he is? We answer those questions. It was fun answering those questions.

All due respect to R., but they answered the questions I really didn’t give a shit about (How did Monty lose his legs? How did Hoyt lose his teeth?), the ones that would have been better left unanswered (How did Hoyt become a sheriff?), but completely failed to answer the question that the movie’s title begs - How did this family begin their descent into madness, and how did they evolve? Sure, it would be better to leave it all ambiguous - that was one of the reasons the original was so damn scary - but if you’re going to make the damn movie, at least deliver what you’re advertising. Or, you know, stop remaking good movies already.

SALAMI & PROVOLONE

My version of this classic combo was inspired by a great (if pricey) sandwich at Ann Arbor’s Produce Station. The key here is some extra crusty bread, with very thin slices of a good quality salami (I’m currently going with Genoa via R. Hirt Jr) and a good salty provolone.

Mix a few teaspoons of olive oil with a few teaspoons of balsamic vinegar.
Grab 5 or 6 whole fresh basil leaves and dunk them in the oil & vinegar mix. If you have some salad greens or whatever, you can dip those in too, but it’s totally optional - this is not a goddamn lettuce sandwich. Slice a day-old baguette in half, then drop the basil in and spoon the rest of the oil & vinegar mix onto the bread. Slice up that salami so thin that you can see through it (in a salami-colored way), and cover the bottom of the baguette with said slices. Slice up the provelone almost as thin, and toss it on.

BÁNH MÌ (Vietnamese Sandwiches)

I’ve heard about these forever, but only tried one last week when we discovered a stretch of Vietnamese businesses on John R. near 13 mile. This sandwich is hard to get wrong, and I’d imagine that it would work with a variety of delicious ingredients, but I went with pork tenderloin (why? because it rules). My only problem with this recipe is that the sandwiches are so cheap (TWO DOLLARS) it’s almost a waste of money to make them yourself - but that never stopped me before.

Grab a bunch of ridiculously cheap mini-baguettes from your local Vietnamese grocery store. If you don’t have a Vietnamese grocery store, you are shit out of luck, my friend - these delicious little loaves are a lot like baguettes, but different in that they use some amount of rice flour in the mix, which makes for a less dense, crumblier bread, and it’s goddamn key to this dish.

Take one pork tenderloin, and fix it however you want - I marinated it in a mix of soy sauce, sugar, vietnamese chili garlic sauce and 5-spice, then did a pan brown-and-braise, but grilling or roasting would be great also. I think that pork tastes way better the next day, so toss that in the fridge when you’re done.

Slice up some carrots, cucumbers, and daikon radishes (if you can find them) - bell peppers would also be good - into matchsticks and marinate for 2-10 hours in a solution of rice vinegar, sugar, water, and (important) a bit of sriracha hot sauce. the liquid should be clear but orangish, and taste hot & sweet. We’re making tiny pickles here!

The next day, slice one of those beautiful tiny loaves in half, and toss it in a 200 degree oven for a few minutes, so it gets all toasty. Smear the inside with a bit of mayonnaise (if you have some Vietnamese fish sauce, mix a few dashes in with the mayo before you get to smearing - ain’t nothing better than some fish mayo!).

Slice your tenderloin thin-like, and feel free to sprinkle a little salt & pepper on them. Toss these slices on the bread. On top of the meat, layer some of your mini-pickles - feel free to include as much or as little of the sweet/hot vinegar sauce as you want. Slice off some very thin cross-sections of a Jalapeno, and put those on top with a good handful of cilantro (stems are fine). Take it all in for a minute, then devour.

Hart Plaza was still pretty empty at noon on Sunday - but not as empty as my stomach, which was growling in anticipation of those dee-licious morsels… In the background, I could hear a designated speaker preaching (we missed the festival’s biggest name, Ray Parker Jr.), and I have to believe that someone up there was looking out for me - for how could I have ended up at ribfest otherwise? Oh man, did I ever eat some ribs. My plan to get samples from every stand fell through after the first half-rack, but it was worth it. Click the pic for the panoramic wondrousness of it all.

Oh, by the way - I live here now.  It rocks.  More ribs posts soon, I promise.

The first film by director Nimród Antal, Kontroll takes place entirely underground, in the tunnels and flourescent light of the Budapest Metro. Bulcsú, the film’s confused hero, works as a ticket inspector (apparently, the Metro works on an honor system - no turnstiles) with his “gang” — narcoleptic Muki, tiny Lecsó, new guy Tibi, and the ancient Professor. They have run-ins with an endless stream of hostile customers, get their asses kicked on a regular basis, feud with a rival gang of inspectors led by the über-asshole Gonzo - basically, it’s a job with few perks. For entertainment, the inspectors play an even crazier version of chicken - racing from platform to platform, down the tracks, in between speeding trains. Meanwhile, it seems like more and more people are jumping to their death in front of trains (”how inconsiderate”, sniff the inspectors), but it might actually be the work of a super-pushy and mysterious hooded killer. So what kind of misfit would do this for a living?

Well, it’s a perfect job for Bulcsú, who never leaves the tunnels, instead sleeping against a pillar after the last train passes and living on food from vending machines. His past is briefly mentioned when he runs into a well-dressed former colleague, who misses Bulcsú and refers to the important work (of some kind) he did in the past. In an American version, there would undoubtedly be long expositions and flashbacks detailing the tragedy that sent Bulcsú underground, but here – thankfully – the details are left to the imagination.

Along the way, Bulcsú tells jokes with Béla, the Metro’s wise, drunk old trainman, gets caught up in the mysterious hooded killer drama, and meets a crazy girl in a …bear costume who might be weird enough to get him back into the real world. Is the mysterious hooded killer just that - a random weirdo - or is he something else? Are the owls what they seem?

The actors actually “look like real people” (thanks, chanchan!), and extra-weird ones at that, and they do a great job at fleshing out these strange-but-loveable characters. Kontroll is well-paced, suspenseful, hilarious, and very, very well-made, and it does a damn good job at being several genres rolled into one.

As someone who is pretty intimately acquainted with the inner workings of art school, I loved the original Art School Confidential, a four page story in Daniel Clowes‘ Eightball #7. It worked because it made fun of the worst of what awaits unsuspecting students - intellectual masturbation disguised as conceptual art, flaky, bitter, and desperate teachers, students trying to “out-weird” each other - all from the point of view of somone who was there (Clowes attended Pratt in the 80s) and still resents the experience.

The team of Clowes and director Terry Zwigoff sounded like a good idea, too - I liked Crumb, Zwigoff’s documentary on the scuzzy father of underground comics; Bad Santa, a filthy christmas comedy; and his earlier Clowes adaptation, Ghost World - pretty well. The fact that he was a member of Crumb’s Cheap Suit Serenaders doesn’t hurt, either. So it was even more disappointing when this one turned out to be too long by half, too repetitive, too disjointed, and too goddamn meandering to hold my attention. When the movie sticks to the subject matter of the original comic, it does okay. Unfortunately, Clowes and Zwigoff added a murder mystery, a love story, and a confused cast of dozens in an attempt tie together all of the scenes about ridiculousness of art school, and drive their point about the pretentious, trend-seeking, bizarro art world home… But all these threads just don’t hold together. Why didn’t they just leave out the script add-ons and make a short? Why didn’t they try to make David Boring, or Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, or Ice Haven, or Caricature instead - did they really think that this glued-together, overpadded plot would be a great moneymaker?

THE GOOD:

• The first half hour was pretty okay. The introduction to young Jerome, his entrance to Swarthmore, and the breakdown of the various art-school stereotypes (the Critic, the Kissass, the Mom, the Army-Jacket guy) looked promising.
• Great performances by Malkovich (as a washed-up drawing/painting professor), Jack Ong (as the ceramics professor who really, really doesn’t give a shit anymore), and Jim Broadbent as the drunk, creepy Swarthmore graduate.
• The scene with the successful asshole king-of-the-art-world guy doing a James Lipton-style interview at his alma mater, coming to terms with his inner asshole.
• The actual art used in the movie - some was by Clowes, some was by Mark Mothersbaugh, and all of it was hilarious.
• The exploration of art as a way for skinny, picked-on kids to pick up chicks and become successful assholes - just like the jocks-cum-stockbrokers who used to beat them up, but with KNEADED ERASERS!

THE AWFUL:

• Anjelica Huston’s art history professor, who shows up for about 45 seconds, and then appears to tell Jerome that his quest for love is cute before the film’s end. Why? I guess she was the only character who wasn’t onscreen long enough to be a total asshole.
• Similarly, Steve Buscemi’s small role is completely wasted - if you’re gonna invite Buscemi, give the man something - ANYTHING - to do.
• The multitude of scenes following the cops around - we get that they’re shithead stereotypes, and seeing them (and their families) over and over is the worst kind of unnecessary.
• Jerome’s roommates - an in-the-closet fashion designer (snigger) and a fat, Tarantino/Kevin Smith/Whoever-wannabe film student. Oooh - one of them’s gay (har har) and the other one has no talent - just like EVERY OTHER STUDENT CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE. Maybe the film student was Zwigoff’s inclusion, so he could expel some of his own film-school demons… if that means he won’t do a sequel, awesome - but again, it just makes the movie much, much longer.
• The constant repetition of the one point of the whole damn movie - the art world will crush your spirit. We see Jerome constantly try, get rejected, and accept defeat dozens of times, and it doesn’t make us like the douchebag anymore. We got it, okay?

I guess my feelings about the movie kind of tie into my feelings about Clowes. He’s not really one of my favorites - for each thing he’s done that I like (Ghost World, Like A Velvet Glove…, Caricature), there’s one that I really dislike (David Boring, Ice Haven, Dan Pussey). I think there’s just way too much autobiographical Crumb-ness in the cynical, bitter record snobs, art collectors, and pop-culture hating characters in his work for me. But even at his worst, he’s way better than this movie ended up (and he’s way better than Adrian Tomine, but that’s a topic for another day).

I’d like to end with a quote from twinlesbianlighter (on the IMDB messageboards) that sums this movie up:

I went in expecting greatness and was extremely disappointed. It started out great and got progressively worse and worse and worse and then horrible. It’s like ordering food that you think is going to be great. The first bite is good, so it should get better, right? Then the second bite is ok. By the end of the meal, you feel like puking and you’ve got this disgusting after taste left in your mouth.

Oh, the things that terrified me in my impressionable youth… such as these bastards, the YEP YEP aliens of Sesame Street. They were visitors from another world who had come to earth to sound out words like “tel-e-phone” and “com-pu-ter” as part of their plan to take over the world by SCARING THE SHIT OUT OF SMALL CHILDREN. I’m not sure why they scared me so much, but it probably has something to do with the fact that they always invaded showed up when nobody was home, coming through the window while mindlessly droning, “Yep! Yep!”. Thanks a lot for the nightmares, Jim Henson!

For more Sesame Street fun and TERROR on YouTube, check out this enormous list of links from foldedspace.org.

BILLY DRAGO. After I saw his weaselly, creepy portrayal of hitman Frank Nitti in The Untouchables, I was freaked out for days weeks months …well, forever, I guess. Even the unforgettable revenge scene where Costner’s Eliot Ness tosses Nitti off of the roof in a blurry, blue-screen effects shot (see also: Alan Rickman’s similar ending in Die Hard, and many other classic bluescreen badguy falls) couldn’t wipe the specter of that Connery-killing crazyman from my mind.

Drago proved he’s still got his terrifying chops in the recent remake of The Hills Have Eyes - although his appearance was brief, his needle-nosed, cavernous, hollow-cheeked, spooky mug is un-missable as the bearded hill person who loves both the taste of human flesh and sprinting after his victims while shrieking (in a trenchcoat, in the desert).

CALIBOS! This demonic (semi-fictional) sonovagoddess (Thetis, patron goddess of the sea, and mother of Achilles, to be precise) was played by Neil McCarthy, with more than a little Harryhausen stop-motion magic, in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans. I loved that movie the most, but Calibos’ twitching clay tail and sourpuss face scared the bejeezus out of me. Worse than Medusa’s stony visage, f’reals. More recently, he’s shown up in a few episodes of Wonder Showzen as Rad Mark, for no apparent reason. He will take your soul.

SHARKS. Even though I lived minutes away from the shores of Lake Huron, which is way more likely to contain toxic chemicals, human feces and Zebra mussels than any sort of man-eating black-eyed fish, every time I went in that water I felt like a goner. I don’t even remember watching Jaws, but I didn’t need to see it to know the truth: Sharks are just plain scary, man.

Michael Jackson’s THRILLER. My older sister was a huge MJ fan (she had the puffy stickers and everything), and she had a bunch of his albums. I can’t even remember if I had ever seen the video or not - and I’m not sure how I would have, in our cable-less house - but just listening to that damn song would send me hiding under the nearest bed. The worst is when my sister and our MJ-loving babysitter would torture me by playing it over and over… there was no escape from the sonorous tones of Vincent Price, the pulsating Quincy Jones beat (that beat could make the DEAD RISE), the howling wolf/shrieking wind sound effects - it was all much, much too much for young Sluggo.