Instead of manning-up and actually going the emotionally hard route of being outrightly rejected by publishers, I’m rejecting them first and allowing you to give my entire book a preview, let you read the whole thing or, if you like, download the whole damn thing at no cost. Download and read my first book “Thank You, Goodnight†for FREE.
This is one DVD I don’t have to wish for this year and I couldn’t be more pleased. It’s A&E’s original series, KING OF CARS, and they’ve finally released the first season on DVD. The show’s real attraction isn’t in its plot line, there isn’t one, nor is it for any larger than life individual that so many other “reality” programs tries to lull you into believing was the cause for them getting their own show; it’s the averageness of everyone you see in this show that makes it a standout series and it’s why it is still one of my only favorites out there today.
One of the things that struck me as I re-watched this unbeleivably engaging series about a car lot on the outskirts of Las Vegas was how much you could identify with these men and women who are out to sell a few people on some deals. You’ve got the ringleader, Chop, who lords over his business with a flair for the extraordinary in order to motivate the unmotivated and for his constant quest to find ways to amuse every last worker under his employ to sell…just…one…more…car.
You get to know the salespeople by name, by their tactics, their catchphrases. For every single one of us who have ever had to sell anything to stay afloat (some of us still do and you get a lot of people’s stories as to why they’re selling cars) you can identify with these human beings who you see have down on their luck stories and are just trying to survive. While some are just blatantly ill equipped to sell anything more than a box of Chicklets there is genuineness in every person that crosses the lot in order to get an “up” or for every deal that goes south for no good reason.
And that’s the point here with the DVD: there isn’t any covering up for the deals that don’t get made or for why sometimes even a bad situation can be made into a learning situation. There are no scripted, ham fisted attempts to make a logical plot line fit into a round hole and there are moments when you see salespeople who you follow get told that they’re not good enough to have around because they’re causing the business money and I think this is where the series succeeds.
Chop is the old fashioned huckster who believes genuinely in what he sells and he’s not out to take anyone’s money who aren’t willing to part with it willingly. He creates an atmosphere of part pressure cooker, part circus sideshow and another part of passion that he hopes rubs off on those he’s trying to make into seasoned sales professionals. The problem with this is that people who dedicate their lives to the sales profession give themselves to a lifestyle that brims with a little obnoxiousness that others who sit behind a desk and push a pencil will never understand.
Want to know why you’re still allowed to push that pencil? It’s due to a salesperson’s success and any organization that wants to scoff at those who hunt after that feeling you get when your prey takes up a pen and scrawls their name at the bottom of a contract (there is *nothing* like it) deserves everything it gets. And Chop knows this. He treats the job as an un-job. There are no two ways of doing the same deal and this series continues to be a draw for me both casually and professionally.
Now, it’s also about that time of the year when my thoughts turn to Del Griffith and Neal Page.
TRAINS, PLANES AND AUTOMOBILES still remains in the top 5 of my personal holiday movies and, really, for good reason; it’s a film that transcends the normal sappy crap and pap that you get with other holiday flicks that normally flirt with the shtick that only after adversity can there be a happily ever after scenario where all is right with the world. TPA took that step beyond any preconception that a holiday movie had to be wacky, goofy and tied up with enough schmaltz to make it abundantly clear you would never come close in real life to comparing with the characters on the screen. TPA made you believe that Thanksgiving was just the means to an end that seemingly had no end and that those of us in the real world who are hucksters, sellers or businesspeople could easily relate to these goofballs who end up with one another. John Hughes finally gave the adults something worth watching, as evidenced by my father who took me to see it when I was still too young to see it myself (Steve Martin’s F-bomb laced tirade to Mrs. Patty Poole was honestly etched into my mind as one of the most shockingly fabulous moments I was ever allowed to witness), and secured his place as a dynamic filmmaker who transitioned out of kid/adolescent specialist and into the purveyor of Holiday Classic goodness.
TPA stands up to age. It stands up simply because of its faithfulness to its characters and its story. There could be any number of directions where the movie could have slid into Movie of the Week territory but it’s a flick that bucks every effort to put it in Hallmark territory. If you forgive the odd ending that seems to put a too fine a point on a story that could have ended on a more serious note, but it’s still an ending that works, then there isn’t any reason why this movie shouldn’t be a beloved tradition right next to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.
It’s part of mine.
Enjoy the holiday…
Director: Andrew Stanton
Cast: Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin (Voices)
Release: June 27, 2008
Synopsis: The year is 2700. WALL*E, a robot, spends every day doing what he was made for. But soon, he will discover what he was meant for.
View Trailer:
* Large (QuickTime)
Prognosis: Negative. You’ve just got to be kidding me here.
One of the first things I was on the record as saying, long before anyone else decided to go along with the theory, was that the concept of Pixar’s CARS was redundant. Seemingly based on visuals and an idea that had come along decades before in a cartoon that had cars that had headlights for eyes and talked out of their mouths where the bumpers are located, the concept was done. It was truly old hat and when Pixar got their mittens on it they did nothing more than add some talent behind the voices and viola.
RATATOUILLE similarly suffered but only insofar as the marketing went. It happened to be a great story that had less to do with an entire movie focused on a rat but was, at its core, had more to do with the humans in it than the trailers would have led myself and the rest of you in on; it was a pleasant surprise, mind you, and the eventual movie was received well because of its well-rounded storyline.
Now you’ve got a trailer that, and please correct me if I’m wrong, looks like someone deep in the bowels at Pixar thought that Fisher Stevens’ turn as the world’s greatest Hindi this side of such cross-national emulations like C. Thomas Howell’s twist on the black face in SOUL MAN or Anthony Hopkins’ bucket-o-bronzer for his debonair twist as a Spaniard in ZORRO. Yes, what you’ve got here is a movie, on the surface, that wants to resurrect the look and feel for SHORT CIRCUIT with a little *BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED for emotional measure.
I mean, really, just LOOK at that robot we’re introduced to in the opening sequence! I usually don’t get emotional about things in a trailer but as the little robot wheels on the screen to change out the light bulb on the Pixar lamp there is really only one reasonable, sound and educated deduction you can make as a rational human being: that’s Johnny Fucking 5! It’s like someone compacted the damn thing and he’s now a quarter of the size.
I can’t concentrate on what else we have to try and consume here in the trailer as I’m just reeling from the whole binoculars for a head looking alike, the tank tread that makes the robot go forward, all of it. If there ever was a case to be made as to why there needs to be a better vetting process when it comes to stories being eerily similar to something else which was already done and pounded in the ground this would be it.
Now, don’t take my shock for this concept as being somehow disappointed in the Pixar brand. I bet you all dollars to doughnuts that when this little trash-compactor-that-could finds out what he was really meant for in life that this could be the greatest story since Leviticus. What I am saying is that when you watch this teaser and you are hit with the “whoa” of the diminutive little robot, resplendent with doe eyes, natch, any person over the age of 30 has to scratch their head and wonder why this all seems familiar.
I didn’t mean to break bad on CARS last year but I still can’t get over how hackneyed the visuals were when you consider that it was done decades ago. Here, as well, we have a visual palate that hearkens back to a terribly done comedy and there doesn’t seem to be anything to take away that would inform me otherwise.
As far as it stands this just feels like another entry into the SHORT CIRCUIT franchise.
Director: Tony Kaye
Cast: Flip Benham, Dr. John Britton, Pat Buchanan, Noam Chomsky, Alan M. Dershowitz
Release: October 3rd, 2007 (Limited)
Synopsis: A graphic documentary on both sides of the abortion debate.
View Trailer:
* Large (Flash)
Prognosis: Positive. The trailer demands your attention even before you have a moment to judge.
One of the things that I really enjoy about finding trailers like this is that you have the expectation that the only way you’re going to have a documentary be accepted into the social consciousness as a project worth commenting on is to have the flash and substance of its fictitious brothers and sisters. A little baiting, a little sizzle, a little Michael Moore-ish type of bravado, is all one thinks they would need in order to turn a human interest piece into a marketing peddler’s dream.
Not so here.
What we get is a rather slow and methodical opening that goes against what you would probably expect from a powder keg. We’re given a static but effective “From the Acclaimed Director…†jazz that we would expect any good trailer to begin with but it’s the “18 Years in the Making†that starts me wondering. What could have taken 18 years to do?
Before I can answer I am thrust into the quote given to us by Time Out New York and, frankly, I didn’t think you could toss up that many polysyllabic fricatives without causing the general public to explode from the effort of reading the screen. It’s almost too much to say that there could no way the film could live up to the superlatives hurled upon it.
Now, when we get to the actual film, the first scene being allowed to play out wherein an older gentleman talks about the impact of education that supports the teaching of using condoms with regard to a little girl who stands right before him the entire time, you’re immediately pushed forward to thinking about what is really being discussed.
Some protester shouts out that Jeffrey Dahmer was pro-choice.
You have a wonderfully composed man talking about what is at the core of the debate surrounding abortion.
Some dude sings God Bless America (I’m thinking he’s on the side of pro-life), some rock and roll woman wearing black X’s on her nipples and donning some leather undergoods vamps on a stage, a person hoisting a sign dressed as Skeletor with the words “Abortion†scrawled on his chest as it carrys a sickle and a doll and then there’s a clinical worker who cleaves the meaning between miscarriage and abortion for a woman who looks scared as all get out.
Then there’s the woman who talks about three physicians she’s worked for in abortion clinics, all three of them murdered, as we see one of their prostrated bodies on the ground. And who would have thought that Alan Dershowitz would come correct with one of the more profound messages regarding this whole issue: Everybody is right when it comes to the issue of abortion.
The sheer ambiguity of the angles that usually infuse this argument, be it pro, hyphen, life or choice, is what makes this an interesting trailer that deserves some attention. No doubt that this movie will ignite the passions in all of us regarding this issue but this trailer does an excellent job in presenting its wares without pushing us to buy.
Director(s): Rob VanAlkemade
Cast: Bill Talen, Savitri D, James Solomon Benne
Release: November 16, 2007 (Limited)
Synopsis: From producer Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and director Rob VanAlkemade, “What Would Jesus Buy?†examines the commercialization of Christmas in America while following Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.) The film also delves into issues such as the role sweatshops play in America’s mass consumerism and Big-Box Culture. From the humble beginnings of preaching at his portable pulpit on New York City subways, to having a congregation of thousands – Bill Talen (aka Rev. Billy) has become the leader of not just a church, but a national movement. Rev. Billy’s epic journey takes us to chilling exorcisms at Wal-Mart headquarters, to retail interventions at the Mall of America, and all the way to the Promised Land on Christmas Day. The Stop Shopping mission reminds us that even though we may be “hypnotized and consumerized,†we still have a chance to save ourselves this Christmas.
View Trailer:
* Large (QuickTime)
Prognosis: Positive. Here’s the deal: we all know the message that Christmas has been commercialized beyond any veil of propriety. It’s immutably tacit every Sunday when you get the circulars in the paper, it’s on every channel on the televison when programs go to commercial and it permeates the environment with billboards, radio spots and everything else that can tell you that Christmas is only X days away.
We all know this and yet we consume. It seems to be more an issue of us trying to ignore what’s really at the core than it is our apparent consumerism.
Thanks be to the Lord, then, for Morgan Spurlock showing us what this holiday really, financially, represents. I really think it’s appropriate that we start this trailer with a man at a gas pump asking some deity for forgiveness for something. It’s bizarre but entirely appropriate as we launch into what the hell is going on.
It’s the montage we’ve all seen when any film fades into the holidays: visages of Santa, copious amount of lights and flickering tinsel, the ramping up of electronic cash registers and the passing of dollar bills.
“Last year Americans spent $455 billion during the holidaysâ€
I don’t know why Spurlock has chosen the Disney font for the above quote but it’s oddly comforting when you see the actual factoid roll across the screen; it’s at once sickening and enjoyable.
We get smacked with some other sobering data regarding consumer spending, get some dude talking about the Christmas spirit and how he gets into the holidays by making sure he has some sweet ass rims on his hooptie. Things feel strange when we get interview footage of people talking about what this time of year does to the frail or meek when it comes to trying have the latest and greatest under the tree for young kids. (I swear, do those of the Jewish faith have these kinds of gluttony issues in the month of December? Would a first step in stopping this problem be that we all convert to Judaism and, therefore, be limited to only 7 presents each?)
No, that’s no solution but there is Reverend Billy.
I understand that Billy is part sociological extension of all our greed and avarice, and part carnival sideshow, but there is something about his presence that I just can’t explain. He’s at once obvious but oddly engaging as the personification of what we all know to be true: We spend too much on needless shit.
I like Billy’s point during one event, on Main Street inside Disney, that all that Americana is coming to you from China is one that resonates even louder with all the issues we’re having with our human-rights bending, manufacturing monolith at the expense of worker abuse, free speech oppressing neighbors to the east.
While I can’t square my own purchasing habits come this time of the year I do know that we’ve got to throttle spending if we’re ever going to claim to be better than the marketers who know they’ve got us beat.
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