“I don’t wear the dress.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t think of her as a woman – that would be a mistake.”

Haywire may lag in places between its exciting set pieces and Gina Carano may need some time to work on her dialogue delivery, but the smartest thing this film delivers is a refreshing inversion and negation of the clichés of what women *usually* do in action movies. In a standard action flick, locales like the streets of Barcelona, a posh hotel room in Dublin, or the beach in Mexico, usually give the male lead a chance to cozy up to his sexy co-star and get some action-action. But in these same environs, Gina Carano does not stop to banter cutely with her dishy co-stars (Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender). She spends 100% of her time evading, chasing, and pummeling, as capable and confident and focused as her closest male movie star equivalent, Jason Statham (except his movies are never lucky enough to be written by Lem Dobbs). So as long as Carano has someone to chase, evade or pummel, the movie stays entertaining.

Despite the controversy around her voice, one should hope that Hollywood gives Gina Carano more chances to mash faces into a pulp. How many more utterly underwritten milquetoast girlfriend characters must we female fans of the action genre endure just to see a few car chases or fight scenes? That stuff is simply lazy writing and downright nonsense: give me more of Gina Carano and her powerful feminist fists.*

*Here’s a Michael Fassbender gif in reward for reading all the way to the end

I just learned from my friends Bryan Hilson and Brian Saur that the video store we used to work at, Laser Blazer, will shut its doors permanently on December 25th after 23 years of business. When I read this news last night, it felt like an old friend had died – one you sort of knew was really quite, quite sick – but still, you truly hoped they’d pull through and surprise you by, well, never dying. Alas, it was not meant to be. This big, friendly, family-owned video store will now only exist online as they continue to sell inventory and collectibles.

My friends and I worked together at ‘the Blaze’ in the late 90s/early aughts. I was at UCLA working on a Masters in Film Snootiness (”Critical Studies”) and getting a job at the video store was not just about earning a little pocket cash, but it was also an added bonus for school – a whole separate DVD (*and* laserdisc) library to plunder and raid and over-analyze and worship and love. Most of us working there were cinephiles, turning our paychecks back over to the store in exchange for first crack at the DVDs, right out of the box, right off the UPS truck – like fresh green movie apples. Seriously.

My sadness is definitely cut through with a sense of GUILT – after all, I now work for Netflix, the corporation that smashed the video store once and for all, from the lovable mom & pop places like Laser Blazer, to the soulless hellholes that were Blockbuster stores. As penance, allow me to ramble on semi-coherently about my video store days – the salad days.

1. The Famous People
Yes, it’s L.A. so YES, I am going to start here. Matt Groening and Benecio Del Toro were regulars. Ex-Tapper Michael McKean would come in with his son to rent movies. John Woo perused our foreign section and Wes Anderson visited – just once – to buy some DVDs; his receipt with the list of films was circulated amongst us film geeks for intense study. (Brian Saur, do you remember what he bought?) Snippy Hollywood blogger Jeffrey Wells used to come in all the time but I never wanted to ring him up, as he wasn’t the most pleasant customer and bitterly anti-chit chat with us. Randomly enough, Ray Manzarek of the Doors came a LOT. It felt strange to rent movies to someone whose music played incessantly on Arrow 93.1 at the time. I’m sure I’m forgetting other famous customers. Wasn’t Martin Short in the store once? Janet Jackson came in and asked Saur where she could buy a blank VHS tape. But the sighting that caused the most ‘whoahs’ from us all was when Joel Hodgson of MST3K fame was spotted in our aisles. That time, we just STARED.

2. The Laserdiscs!
Laserdiscs were firmly on their way out by the time I was working at Laser Blazer but owner Ron Dassa never changed the name of the store because hey – they were still there, taking up bins. Only hardcore movie collectors on Ebay were snatching up this bulky media form. Sometimes rare gems would surface – and by ‘gems’ I mean, very early Traci Lords’ “films” on laserdisc. Every so once in a while, we’d box up 30 Criterion laserdiscs and ship them to a faraway movie geek bidder in Australia. Once we sold a copy of The River’s Edge on laserdisc TO Crispin Glover himself. Best yet, once we sold a random laserdisc to Arch Hall Jr., the teenage star of Eegah!, a terrible drive-in turd that was lampooned with its own MST3K episode.

3. Airport ‘77
These were the days before you could get an HD flat-screen TV for $200 on a pepper-spray-laden Black Friday. The big, flat TVs were thousands of dollars and took up one nook of the store, along with combo DVD/laserdisc players – and we used to fight over what to play on these monitors. Ron, the store’s owner, always wanted Pixar. Pixar movies made the new TVs look extremely impressive and worth the investment. Once Ron came in and caught us watching Dragonball Z on the monitors (hey, I didn’t choose it) and declared the anime series too shitty looking to be on such nice TVs. Instead, we got stuck watching Airport ‘77 quite a few times, because one of our most beloved coworkers had a *major* Karen Black fixation. We also saw a lot of Logan’s Run, his other favorite movie. We all loved Mick and his joyous embracing of not-all-that-great 70s cinema.

4. That Golden Criterion Section
Laser Blazer always, always kept the Criterions separate from the other DVDs, AS THEY SHOULD BE. It’s not a DVD, it’s a CRITERION.

5. The Porn
Why would a feminist young lady of relatively good breeding actually miss the porn section? Because it was funny. It used to make me laugh my bits off. We’d have to make sure we were giving customers THE SOPRANOS and not the SOPORNOS because they were right next to each other in the bin. Schlubby male customers used to ask me why they had late fees and I’d have to tell them it’s because they kept Anal Gangbang Academy Volume 12 out for 3 extra days last week. 3 extra days, huh? You couldn’t just move on to Anal Gangbang Academy Volume 13 and save yourself both the late fees AND the embarrassment? The porn corner of the store was right next to the foreign section too, so it was awfully convenient if you wanted to fake like you were renting La Strada with the newest Chunky Chicks outing.

6. SIMON PEGG
Those of you who personally know me know I worship a zombie-killing English deity named Simon Pegg. YEARS after I worked at Laser Blazer I found myself lining up outside for hours to get my Spaced DVD signed there by El Pegg, Edgar Wright and Jessica Stevenson. I was hoping my former status as a clerk would help me jump the line but I should have known the unspoken rules of the nerd queue would be upheld by my former employer. That day I asked Jessica Hynes what it was like to snog the Doctor and Simon Pegg lightly rested his hand on my shoulder while I had my photo taken with him. Laser Blazer is not just the earthly home of my academic cinema lusts but my…womanly ones as well.

7. The People
No matter how hard you squint and how many drugs you do, Netflix will never be your friend. Sometimes Netflix acts like it knows you (”Violent Foreign Thrillers featuring a Strong Female Lead”) but it won’t ever laugh at your jokes. The friends I made as a clerk at Laser Blazer in 1999 are still my friends today, mucking up my Facebook and Twitter streams with sarcasm and plenty of film discussion to this very day. We used to actually help people find movies, we’d have long, rambling nerdy conversations with customers about favorite films and the newest underrated film that finally got a DVD release. It was like movie blogging – but with your mouth – and in person — remember that?

May we never forget the age of the video store – for all its pros and cons those little businesses represent a special age of browsing and movie discovery that can never be replicated in the over-lit aisles of Best Buy, or in the cold interfaces of the internet. So let us bow our heads for a moment, and pour a little Mountain Dew* on the ground for the Blaze.

*special shout-out for one Dave Lewis who drank epic amounts of this particular beverage as a Laser Blazer clerk

Taut, lean and not very talkative – Drive is a grown-up thriller about a cipher of a human being who becomes a hero under the simple influence of a mother and her son. Ryan Gosling’s dialogue rarely goes longer than Twitter-length, but he says a lot with the little he’s given, in his body language, in his eyes, in the way he drives a car – with authority and finesse.

Drive also happens to be one of the best Los Angeles movies made in a long time. The city glitters like an empty gem at night, the Valley stretches out in swathes, the L.A. river still remains a fun place to go for a drive, and like in many L.A. movies, the always-churning Pacific ocean is definitely going to put in an appearance.

The rest of the cast is stellar as well, proving that solid casting can really make a film come to life. Ron Perlman is always a solid villain, but Albert Brooks proves that he can be (hilariously) nasty too. Carey Mulligan is good at playing sad, and I mean that as a compliment, and we all know Christina Hendricks is great at being perfectly petulant.

In a funny way, this film reminded me of Crank – but not in a direct comparison way, so just follow me here. I loved Crank, a very different film set in a very different Los Angeles with very DIFFERENT rhythm and sense of pacing. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, Crank was a game-changer. Crank showed that even as frenetic as things have gotten in the action genre, they can go even FASTER. Drive – for a movie that also only has one word for a title – refuses to go as fast. Paying attention is rewarded – clues are littered throughout the frame, and the languid 80s synth-heavy soundtrack will even lull you back to a time when movies didn’t break their necks to set your pulse racing. No, in this film, all it takes is a steely young man carrying a hammer to give you a sense of dread.

A+ SEE IT NOW

I *finally* fulfilled a dream I had in 1993 (in 2011) and made a paper zine, with my hands, and my heart, for my friend, Gary Mecija for his birthday.

There was something ridiculously satisfying about folding it and putting it together.

You can Tumblr yourself into a stupor but there’s no paper at the end of the day. I liked getting my fingers inky.

15 or 16 copies of the zine cost about $8, maybe a little more.

I’m thinking about making more zines – and then I will get myself to a zine fest. I love fests!

Illustrations throughout the zine are by JESSIE JOHNSON – check out his Tumblr for more comiques.

Hey, Krylon huffers, you’ve got until Monday to catch the wildly popular Art in the Streets graffiti show down at the Geffen/MOCA. I had heard mostly good things from my compatriots, seen their Instagrams of the show (man, I love an art show that actually lets you take photos), and read all the buzz about it. Little did I know that it was going to piss me off like crazy.

The exhibit covers any kind of scrawling on walls willy-nilly, in a pretty unrelated fashion. The Crips have little to do with Keith Haring and Keith Haring probably never knew a graffiti-lovin’ East LA cholo who wouldn’t know a Z-boy if he tried to jack his ride, but here they all are, sharing the same exhibit space. It’s a tenuous thread running through the whole show that seems to be melted down to super cool people do graffiti, didya know? MOCA was full of families, khaki-pants-wearin’ grandpas and their opinionated wives, baby hipsters (seen below), and a fair share of aging hipsters. It’s nice to see any museum have this much traffic…

But then I saw the “fake inner city” that takes up a decent portion of the show. A fake alleyway, littered with trash, but smelling as clean as a contemporary art musuem. A bodega with the calling-card signs in the dirty windows. A few spaces that were meant to look like kids had been squatting in them – everything trying as hard as possible to be poverty-stricken and “interesting” as possible. Take another turn through this false urban jungle and you come across an animatronic display of three graffiti artists, stacked on each other shoulders so the top fellow can spray the tag, his arm moving back and forth forever, like one of the creatures inside Splash Mountain. At that moment, the exhibit took on a very Disneyland feel to me. I looked around and saw well-to-do art patrons exclaiming to each other how amazing everything was. But you know what? There are stores in my neighborhood that look just like this. There are piss-strewn alleys not that far from the museum, covered in wheatpastes and tags – would these people ever drive even farther east to see the REAL Los Angeles where some of these movements were born? Do they even leave their neighborhoods to begin with? Is Little Tokyo the roughest hood they’ve ever seen in L.A.?

Fake bullet holes. Definitely not “inspirational” to me. It felt like slumming. Safe, happy, slumming. “Oh, darling, the inner city is SO interesting, did you know? Ah! My goodness, a dirty urinal! Let me pose next to it!” I feel like New Yorkers and anyone else from a rotty U.S. city who actually traverses these corners of their worlds would roll their eyes at all of this.

I can’t even go into the fact that there were no politically controversial images at all on display. Very little to maybe NO nudity. The artists represented had moved on to successful gallery careers OR their artwork and styles have been absorbed into mainstream advertising. No mention of SMEAR and REVOK fighting charges and being plagued by hefty lawsuits from the city of Los Angeles. Bansky’s subversion utterly subverted by an actually crowded gift shop. Buying ‘Exit to the Gift Shop’ on DVD, IN the bloody gift shop? Irony lost. Game over.

HEY, I’m not discouraging you to go in the very last days of this exhibit. Go and see for yourself. And become a patron of MOCA and skip the lines.

Bonus link: Someone else’s much more articulate opinion – LATimes.com

Something my acupuncturist said recently (sorry, I live in L.A.) has stuck with me. She said the problem with social media is everyone thinks they’re the star of their own adorable, wacky sitcom. LOOK HOW MUCH SOCIAL MEDIA I HAVE. I must be in like 80 adorable sitcoms. I’m frankly tired of a lot of it. All of this clicking killed my proper blogging too.

Facebook - 100% pictures of babies
GoodReads - where I learn exactly how damaging Twilight has been to society
Tumblr - where fairly illiterate 17 year old girls show you how they’re “brilliant at life” (actually spotted this description on a Tumblr)
Google+ – where I post Beavis and Butthead screencaps from Tumblr (I don’t even understand my behavior here)
Flickr - where my photos go to die a lonely death
Instagram - photos of sunsets
Twitter - pretty funny during a State of the Union address or when a celebrity dies
Pinterest - 90% wedding-obsessed pins, 10% Reddit LOLs that have finally filtered down to housewives
Yelp - eye-rolling reviews by college kids who think $8.95 is a lot for an entree
Spotify - where you can quietly sneak a Britney Spears song into a pretentious playlist and shock your friends

I guess I’m glad I don’t have Foursquare? For some reason, I never jumped off the cliff on that one.

So…can I axe you some questions? Has Tumblr killed your blogging? Has Twitter made you hate Facebook? Do you have EVEN MORE social medias than I do? Are you sleepy? How sleepy? Sleepy enough to sleep under your desk?

PS I might have been harsh on Pinterest. It’s pretty addictive actually.

I posted this on the Bookface this morning and I want to open it up to anyone swinging by, say via Jitter.

To everyone going to see Dolly Parton at the Bowl tomorrow night: let us do a hive mind experiment. I want us all to visualize Kenny Rogers suddenly taking the stage to duet with her. I want you to feel the ‘WTFness!?’ of it all ahead of time. I want you to close your eyes and see my all-caps status update about it. Concentrate. Let’s see if we can make this happen using psychic energy.

Superhero movies got you down? I don’t see how that’s possible in this golden age of Fassavoy, but I understand. If you were one of those moviegoers who somehow caught Thor, X-Men: First Class and Green Lantern all in a row you might be tired of people with extraordinary abs and ridiculous problems.

You should cleanse your palate and spend a long afternoon at your nearest purveyor of artier cinema to catch Richard Ayoade’s Submarine and Mike Mills’s Beginners back to back. Wistful, sad, beautiful, heart-breaking, lyrical, and quite often hilarious – those are all good words, right? They describe both movies but each is its own creature, one a book adaptation about a clever, sometimes self-defeating Welsh teenager, and the second, a poignant autobiographical remembrance of love and loss and one scruffy Jack Russell terrier. (It’s to Mills’s credit that this dog’s presence in this movie never falls into Hollywood treacle-y nonsense. Cutting to an animal for a “reaction shot” should be a crime punishable by law, but Mills manages to do it very well.)

I feel strangely imprinted after seeing both these movies, as though I will be judging all the other touching indie dramedies of the year against these two films. Did you see either of them? How about back to back? I will tell you this much post-Beginners. After 34 years on this planet I have mastered crying quietly and non-dramatically in a movie theater.

Auteur Werner Herzog was in a pleasant & talkative mood before and after the Hollywood Forever Cemetery/Cinespia screening of the Treasure of Sierra Madre. Here’s a few things Herzog name-checked during his presentation & Q/A session plus a few quotes & facts. I had to write down these notes in the dark on the back of a menu from The Gorbals, I’m only sorry I ran out of paper!

- Herzog expressed his love of some other classics: Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata & Fred Astaire in Swing Time BUT he also said he only sees 3-4 films a year. Perhaps he was only talking about NEW films?

- John Huston is the only director to guide his father (Walter Huston – Treasure of the Sierra Madre) AND his daughter (Angelica Huston  Prizzi’s Honor)  to Academy Award wins. Herzog expressed his admiration for Huston by saying he was “phenomenally intense with actors” and a “loose gun – boozing, travelling, reading.”

- READING was brought up multiple times by Herzog, he expressed his admiration for the Hemingway short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” as well as Virgil’s Georgix. He also thought the Warren Commission report on the JFK assassination was required reading. Here’s his entire required reading list from his Rogue Film School website:

Required reading: Virgil’s “Georgics” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Suggested reading: The Warren Commission Report, Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, “The Poetic Edda”, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular The Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.

- Herzog’s longest anecdote was centered around the man who wrote the novel TOTSM was based on, a mysterious writer named B. Traven who managed to write and work for years without ever giving any employer or publisher any biographical information.  Some people believe him to be an anarchist named Ret Marut who was involved a very short lived Soviet Republic founded in Bavaria. During this story full of Herzogian mysteries and twists and turns, someone in the crowd shouted out, “ARE YOU FOR REAL?”

And here is the most amazing thing he said during the post-movie wrap-up:

“People think I’m this brooding Teutonic person. I’m more Bavarian. My wife will testify, I am a fluffy husband.”

The #movielistmania continues! Rupert Pupkin Speaks and Wixpix beat me to this one – favorite movies that have place names in the title.

Here we go, starting again, as I always like to start, with the most obvious one:

Casablanca

An American in Paris

Arizona Dreams (check the vintage Vincent Gallo!)

Berlin Alexanderplatz
(Nah, I ain’t seent this yet. I’d need a whole weekend to set aside.)

Brazil

In Bruges – “I’ll have one gay beer for m’ friend, and one normal beer for me because I’m normal.”

Chinatown

I Am Cuba

The Darjeeling Limited

Death in Venice

Fargo

Kansas City

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Manhattan

Palm Beach Story

Fellini’s Roma

Salaam Bombay!

Shanghai Express

Sunset Boulevard

Synecdoche, New York

Tokyo Story

Saved the best for last.