I’m thinking she doesn’t want me to work.
Photo: Ginger Carden.
Zach Braff: Wish He Wasn’t Here
So much hysteria has been floating around about this Zach Braff Kickstarter campaign that you’d think I’d want to just stay out of it–but no.
Here’s Braff:
Anybody that understands business will understand that most business investors are not taking 100% of their own money and investing it into their projects. They’re investing some of their money, and then going out for equity partners who invest with them. What’s revolutionary is that instead of four rich guys, I’m going to what may be 50,000 people who become my financiers. [emphasis mine]
Look, let’s put aside a couple of things: 1) the fact that Zach Braff is an insufferable knob, and 2) the fact that Garden State is somehow even more off-putting than its creator (quite a feat). And let’s note that the outrage over this whole experiment of Braff’s is even more ridiculous than the experiment itself. The world is far too ugly to get all upset over something stupid like this.
Rémy Brick-Head in Sour Sweetjuice
This is a short film I made in 2004; it inspired my webcomic, which has as of today run 100 times.
Ouch (Again).
A couple of years ago I took an opportunity to gloat over what seemed even then to be a relatively slow growth rate in film industry earnings from films presented in 3D. I noted then that despite all of the boosterism, nobody wanted to see their Underwear Heroes in the eye-poppingly ugly third dimension. It seems that revenue is declining even further.
A Quick Word on SPRING BREAKERS
Harmony Korine | 2012
I realize I’m arriving at this party particularly late, but it still seems prudent to make a brief appearance. You’ll have to excuse me for not delving into the depths of the ‘party’ metaphor here; trust me, it required some restraint.
I’d simply like to point out that the extent of the outrage and befuddlement over this film is, itself, rather befuddling. I’ll largely leave aside the “you debased My Sweet Disney™ Princess” narrative, because it’s boring, stupid, and ignorant (“You mean young actresses want to seem grown up? This has never happened before!“). The far stranger phenomenon is in the outrage from those who ought to know better. Yes, the film is to a great extent a withering mockery of the trashy, solipsistic decadence in which most of the Western world seems so desperate to wallow. No, the film does not have to avoid making you uncomfortable along the way (pop culture has no compunctions about making me uncomfortable, after all). No, not every film has to evince the narrative sophistication of a children’s picture book (the vast majority of modern filmmaking notwithstanding). No, not every film has to be read as a neat, unconflicted little allegory about The American Experiment (just ask anyone from Europe).
Maybe a film can just have a point to make, and can try to make that point in an artfully subject-appropriate formal style. I thought we’d all learned these things pretty indelibly by the early 1960′s, but I’d forgotten that our cultural celebration of fetid garbage has liquified our brains.
This will always be my favorite memory of Roger Ebert.
If there were any kind of great beyond, Roger and Gene would probably already be going at it. That’s how I imagine it, anyway. Sleep well, Mr. Ebert.
My Fiddly Idea-Tracking System
I’ve been using Drafts on iOS for a while now. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s an app which facilitates the quick capture and easy organization of text. One of the things I use it for is taking quick notes about ideas which might occur to me as I’m going about my day. I’ve set up a Dropbox Action which facilitates that process: I think of something, fire up Drafts, type a quick note, and then send it to a Markdown-formatted plain-text file called ideas.md. I can then open up that file later in any text editor, and see all my ideas in one place. It’s been really, really handy.
I Try To Spend 30 Minutes A Day Just Thinking
The world has become so noisy and full of disjointed stimuli that I feel like many of us don’t often get a chance to just let our brains run wild–and that because of that fact, we’re probably missing out on a lot of really good ideas. So I decided that on those days in which I’m in my office, I’d make thinking my only task for a solid half-hour–focused thinking about whatever writing project I might be in the midst of, about my next Rémy Brick-Head comic…or about nothing in particular, with the hope that some new idea might present itself. I also decided that I’d decide upon a hard, non-negotiable set of parameters for this thinking time, so that I’d stay on task and not get distracted. Below are my self-defined “rules” for myself.
Cream Soup (an animated film)
This is an animated short I made in 2007. I hope you like fart jokes. Enjoy.
Why Am I So Fascinated With Losers?
It might be fair to say that both of my features have taken failure-prone individuals as their protagonists. As I prepare to begin work on a third feature-length film–the protagonist of which can arguably be called as big a failure, if not a bigger one, than those of the first two films–it occurs to me that it might be a good time to ask myself what I find so compelling about people who try feebly and fail in a spectacular fashion.