dyfl:

nickminichino:

Kristen Bell on ellen. The topic is sloths. Do not sleep on this video. 

It’s actually tough to overstate how much you should not sleep on this video.

I just experienced so many feelings and maybe cried. 

(also if I had any influence in the world at all, The Collected Kristen Bell on Craig Ferguson would have gotten a theatrical release instead of, like, When in Rome.)

(Source: oh-rebecca)

Easy, Pyewacket.

In the personal Oscars I hold in my heart I have nominated John Boyega for Best Actor in a Motion Picture that I saw on a summer day by myself, in a small theater, and I brought a sandwich. Attack the Block isn’t perfect or anything but it is nominated because it is a movie I actually wanted to see and enjoyed seeing and thought about later, which is pretty much more than you can say for. Well, I don’t want to say everything. But. It does that wonderful thing that science-fiction-action can do, sometimes, which is get you on the line while also jabbing at issues of race and class and honor. And fear. Anyway if you’re mad about The Bitchy Oscars, maybe instead of being mad you could rent this and see how you like it. I bet you’ll have fun.

James Brown, “Down and Out in New York City”

My coworker just sent this to me. He works roughly ten feet from me so he really gets me, especially at 2:52pm on a Monday when I’ve just eaten an entire gigantic undercooked brownie and I’ve got my ankle propped up on a box of Jiffys, to reduce the swelling.

It appears we did not as an Internet really talk about Crazy, Stupid, Love this summer because you guys have a lot to say about it! Let’s get serious for a second.

chiaraatik said: I also liked Emma Stone’s performance, but I walked out of this movie (the first movie I’ve walked out of since like, Wild Wild West). I was absolutely too furious at how women, specifically Moore and Tomei’s characters, were portrayed.

Mostly I am having a great time picturing you walking out of Wild Wild West! So huffy! Do you remember why you went to see it in the first place? Did it maybe have to do with Kevin Kline. Anyway, I agree: super-flawed.

elisabethdonnelly said: Whatta review. Pretty accurate, I would say. Feel like Emma Stone’s character got cut quite a bit? And soulmate and that lame little boy who looked like he missed the audition for a cameron crowe movie mattering…

Thank you! And I wonder. She could have had her own movie, right? But that was another thing, that I forgot to mention: this movie is LONG. It is two hours! TWO HOURS, THIS MOVIE. And a lot of it is really moody, put on a record and watch the rain fall sort of stuff. Which is a shame because the things that were so good were the funny bits. But it was like every twenty minutes the movie had to frown and say, “okay, that’s about’a enough fun, love is real serious.” And soulmate.

vanityferal said: THE LAUREN BACALL COFFEE COMMERCIAL IMPRESSION.

YES X1000000000000000000000 WHY IS EMMA STONE NOT ME or why is me not her AUGH

unbornwhiskey said: How can this many people fit in a movie

That is what the movie would like to know! It is pretty unsure of how to handle all of its excellence, like dinner at Downton Abbey without a footman and you never know exactly how the chauffeur or PTSD valet is gonna botch things up. (Right? Okay.) There is even at least one other character that I didn’t mention “the best friend” “of Emma Stone.” ALSO Analeigh from Top Model has parents, and one of those parents is played by Beth Littleford, for heaven’s sake! When by all rights it should have been Nancy Carell. I mean.

nickminichino said: TELL ME YOU HAVE SEEN EASY A

Nick. Come on. Nick. How long have we known each other. Of course I have seen Easy A. Did not an angel from heaven basically create that movie for me? Although to be honest I think my super-high expectations for Easy A damaged my perception a little bit, when I first saw it. I liked it a ton but I wanted transcendence. I actually caught it in my DVR net a few weeks ago so I could do a close re-watch. Maybe we can all talk about it then!

1. Did we all talk about Crazy, Stupid, Love over the summer? Internet? Did I miss those discussions? Wondering, it seems like something we would all enjoy discussing but the ad campaign was fairly awful so I understand if none of us bothered.

2. Some parts of this are so good! Really enjoyable. I don’t know if maybe I was just jet-lagged or dumb or what but I actually did not see the reveal coming, and I liked it, and the whole scene built around it is delightful. Is funny. Is a sweet little piece of farce. I know I can’t talk more about it but the second Gosling goes to take off his ring, HAH.

3. I think my number one problem with it was how it probably would have been a very successful ensemble piece, but instead it kept winding itself around Steve Carell’s character. And even that wouldn’t be so bad except that Julianne Moore’s character is underwritten at best, and, balance. Then you have Marisa Tomei dropping in from a completely different Carell movie, ANALEIGH FROM TOP MODEL doing the nudity challenge for sketchy reasons, and up against all of that you have the young daughter who is hardly ever in it and Emma Stone who is absolute perfection and we’ll get to that BUT, do you know what I mean? These are not particularly well-written women, these are, images of women carved out of a wistful-unbelievable preteenage boy’s mind. Because right, actually, although the movie is wound around Carell’s character, it’s shaded by the son. His viewpoint, his lousy, adorable, lousy romantic gestures. His insistence that you have to keep pursuing the object of your affection even if nay especially if this makes her uncomfortable. Or angry. Because the thing about women is that they don’t even know what they want, right? So, whatever it takes. 

4. The title is the worst.

5. The comedy of the Carell/Gosling makeover scene is pretty great, though, I will say, and it flew pretty close to a genuine romantic-comedy role-reversal situation, you know, make the ugly goose a pretty unicorn or what. Watching it at home in a post-Drive/supermeme universe it made me feel like I don’t actually have to be so suspicious of Gosling, because he is capable of something interesting. There’s something stupid watchable about him, you know the whole time that he’s not as dumb as he’s playing it, or at least you think you know, and you know what if it turns out he is as dumb as he’s playing it, maybe that in itself is a completely brilliant move, God. (Which is why all those macros work, right? Right.)

6. I never ever am sure that I am spelling Steve Carell’s name right.

7. I love Emma Stone. I don’t think I have to justify that, except The Help, but if I never see it then it doesn’t matter. Have you guys seen The House Bunny? Yeah, she’s great in The House Bunny. So. There’s a sequence in the middle of the movie that begins with her being embarrassed by Josh Groban and ends much better, and, I wish it was the whole movie? I wish it was the whole movie. You can watch part of it right here. No, go on, watch it. “AHHHHH I HATE GIN.” Get to :47 where she wish-fulfillments our whole lives. You know what I want, I want her to be in, some, a screwball comedy, a good one, where she talks fast and flusters and has it all or, did you get to 1:45 yet? “That’s not my drink.” THE FACE SHE IS MAKING. You can actually genuinely believe that she is putting what’s his name’s world all askew. “I am HERE. To BANG. The hot guy who hit on me at the bar.” Sorry, not to liveblog, but the face at 3:06? COME ON. Then there’s the part that they used in the commercials and it was stupid then and it’s stupid now a little but I just, I like it. “Is there dim lighting somewhere?” Okay, I’m done.

8. (“Can I put back on my shirt?” Gosling got that wrong, right? Amazing. What a fucking idiot genius.)

9. The pilot light scene was entirely great. Carell and Moore have genuinely strong chemistry. I guess we all hated her accent on 30 Rock (I didn’t actually) but personally I’ll just say I think she’s very funny. I know we’ve all seen The Big Lebowski but I want to be clear. And I know my recommendation means a lot to her.

[9.5. Remember when Edie Falco was Jack’s love interest, though? Remember when Edie Falco was in the Broadway revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune? Did you know that in that play there’s a whole thing where Frankie is trying to get Johnny to make her a western omelet, and do you remember in the first Edie Falco episode of 30 Rock there’s a scene where she’s listing the things she likes about Jack and one of them is that he made her a western omelet at 4am? I think that’s phenomenal.]

10. B-. By the way, Kevin Bacon is in it.

vanityferal:

VIBES is a movie starring Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Goldblum that I have seen, that I own, that I enjoy, and for which I have made a fake Criterion cover. Now I have said things about it on a website, which you can read by clicking this hyperlinked text. <End Transmittal>

“Had the spirit of New Wave music more thoroughly proliferated film in the ’80s, this would no doubt stand as one of the period’s greatest triumphs. ‘Vibes’ subverts the gee-whiz B-movies of yore with a rough sensibility of decay and irreverence. Were it not a film, it could easily have been a B-52’s song.”

So good.

(via vanityferal)

1. Is this what you guys have been talking about all day?
2. Is that my stomach growling or the cat snoring?

Joni Mitchell, “Raised on Robbery.”

1. My only problem with this song is that it’s like, come on, what did the hockey game ever do to you.

2. Do you take the high or the low? I take the low. I should take the high.

3. THIS GOES OUT TO YOU

This year we decorated for Christmas. Got drunk and strung garlands from Command hooks on the wall. Wrapped wire-shot ribbons around our gas meter, lettered our names on small felt stockings. Put a Maine wreath on the door. My roommate arranged within it pine cones, on angles. “Shouldn’t they be straighter?” I slurred. “Or like, at the bottom?” She shook her head and concentrated, binding the pine cones tight. Then she raised her hands up and I looked. She was right. “Angles,” she said. She’s in her third year of the MFA Directing program at Columbia. “I know about angles.”

The tree was small, a couple of feet, the base nailed directly into it. We bought it at Whole Foods using a LivingSocial voucher that was about to expire. Ten dollars for twenty. It was such a stupid way to buy a Christmas tree that I wanted to tell everyone I met, as though in telling it we would be absolved. Do you know how you get a tabletop tree in New York City, in 2011? I do, I would say. Of course I know it’s a bubble. Groupons and small business and whatever. But isn’t it funny how sometimes you can be just within that bubble, under the surface, hands splayed to keep your weight from being the weight that cracks it? My roommate objected to multicolored lights so we got white, instead, and she wound them around the tree while I outfitted the bathroom cabinet in sprigs of glitter. We bought a nightlight, too, shaped like an angel. She fades from one color to the next, an LED loop. “GREETINGS, PROPHET!” I yelled. I couldn’t remember any other lines. Bing Crosby crooning in the next room. “GREETINGS…PROPHET!!!”

Then last week we shook it all off and made our days normal. Got up at the correct time and went grocery shopping. I stopped leaning in to inhale the wreath every time I unlocked our door. I started to dread the reflection of treelights, down the hall. It was Thursday when, maybe I’d had a beer, but, I felt sad. Refilling the Brita. Next to the tree. That had never really smelled like a tree and in fact had, scent-wise, been pretty quiet on the subject of itself. But it was a tree. Saturday I had other things to do but, with resolve, went to the kitchen with boxes and bags. I started with the ornaments and then the ribbons and then the stockings and the garlands and the glitter. The tree was quiet. My roommate, a different one, came into the kitchen. Wearing shorts, it was warm outside. “I’m decommissioning Christmas,” I announced, as though in telling it I would be absolved. “Oh,” she said, then asked, “How long have you had that tree?” I looked at her. I didn’t know what she meant. “It’s a real tree,” I said. “Oh!” she said. “I didn’t even realize!” My gut swayed. “Yeah. You’ve been living with a real tree,” I said.

For a day and a half it sat unclothed in our kitchen, all else packed up and stored. I wanted to take it to the park down the block but for a day and a half wasn’t going that direction. So it wasn’t until this morning that I put on gloves and picked it up roughly. Took it to the basement, by the trash cans, where someone else had propped up another tree, taller and bare. I laid ours down and stepped on it, then crouched to pull off the base. Nailed-in, like I said. My leverage was wrong so I twisted. A piece of the base flew off and hit no one. The branches shook. I bent the nail but it was a long nail. Closed my eyes. Then was holding the base and stepping on the tree. I put the base in the trash and picked up the tree and we walked through the park. Morningside, where a stack of trees has grown high across from the playground. I walked around the pile and laid our tree on the far side, so I wouldn’t be compelled to look at it every time I passed. I didn’t say anything but I thought about it. I walked away and put my hands up to my face, to brush my hair back. My hands smelled like pine. My gloves smelled like pine. All the way to work this morning, needles clinging to the hem of my coat.