A celebration of some of the lesser known lights within the Muppet pantheon

South Dakota Dark brings us 5 worth remembering.

“There's a government official who was put in charge of figuring out how to introduce genetically modified foods...

... and whether they need a separate regulatory classification, or they can just be dumped on the marketplace, which is what ultimately happened. The man in charge of the safety of our environment and our bodies with this totally new kind of food was Dan Quayle.”

The Onion’s AV Club interviews Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to Hell!

While we were playing and living care-free in Vegas, back home something very precious was taken from us. After 37 years, Newbury Pizza has closed.

Located only blocks away from the Ten AM World Headquarters, Newbury Pizza was our home away from home for the past 5 years. We've often said it's the best pizza in Boston- yes, even better than you guys - and we were never challenged. Now, after more than 5 years of patronage by us, it's gone. Upon arriving there tonight, we encountered only darkness, and a sign saying "Thank you for 37 years of ..." and the rest is hazy.

At last, we understand the true pain behind these words…

*actually, only 9 of the Ten are mourning the loss. One of the Ten pledged his allegiance to nearby Despina's Pizza on Mass Ave 6 years ago, and has remained faithful ever since.

We Support his War of Terror

A sure sign that you've allocated too many days in Vegas: It's 3 PM on a Sunday afternoon, and you’re sitting in the Mirage sports book, bleary eyed, watching the Canadian Football League Grey Cup.

This is the situation two of the founding members of the Ten found themselves in last weekend. Finally, rather than risk any more money on sports or gambling, we finally decided to take in a movie while waiting for our 11:50 PM flight home.

(Note to future Vegas moviegoers: skip the movie theater at the Orleans. Although the Day Care facilities and in-house arcade are a nice touch for those gaming parents too strapped to afford a babysitter, after walking thru this Casino we were overcome with a wave of depression worse than the time we saw Leaving Las Vegas. We pulled the plug entirely and just went back to a theater on the strip.)

The movie we saw was Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Some observations:

• Was it funny? Oh yeah. As Graham points out, the extended naked wrestling scene had the audience in tears, and the "hang like sleeve of wizard " line is one of the best lines ever. There are plenty more.
  
  
• We're not surprised at its popularity. The movie's a great take for people too young to remember Andy Kaufmann and Tony Clifton. For those of us who do remember Kaufman, it's still a good laugh.
  
  
• Anyone who’s offended at the Jewish humor clearly doesn't get the joke, and probably should not be allowed near comedy, as the sharp edges can really hurt these people if left unsupervised. We recommend they stick to something with a slower speed.
  
  

Bottom line? Borat was as funny as advertised. But still…


We had some problems with this movie that still linger.

First and foremost, stop telling us it says anything about America. It doesn't. The easy analysis is to say that Borat sheds much-needed light on Americans and our culture and our attitudes. But does it? As Hitchens put it best, the only thing it says about America is that Americans are unfailingly polite, and would risk humiliation rather than be rude to a guest (humorless lesbians are apparently an exception to this rule.) We could care less if this movie has anything to say- just make us laugh. But so much of its press paints this as some sort of wake up call to America, and we just don't see it.

Secondly, it cheats. A lot of the scenes are clearly staged, or were put together using a number of different takes. And not all of the people were real; some were actors. We're fundamentalists about this, so forgive us for this greivance, but once you start to mix staged scenes with "real" situations, you risk taking the humor out of both. For example, a real New York subway rider telling Borat to "fuck off" is funny; an actor posing as a New York subway rider telling Borat to fuck off is simply cliché. Sitting thru the movie, we weren't really sure which it was, and our enjoyment of much of the Funny suffered.

Here's a Salon.com article about what was real and what wasn't (the article's free, you just need to watch an ad first, and a few days later you might be getting some recruitment info from the ACLU.)

Or maybe we just weren't in the right frame of mind for this movie, considering that up to that point we had enjoyed a profitable weekend in Vegas until Chad Pennington threw two interceptions and completely bolloxed the spread, and the Colts, losers of something like 2 regular season games over the last 6 years, inexplicably lost to the Cowboys in a game that was a pick 'em. How many times are you in Vegas and you get a chance to just pick a winner, no spread at all? And it’s a Colts game no less. Worse, one of the Ten Angry Wives had picked the Cowboys to win for reasons that we still can’t understand but expect that it has something to do with the shade of gray used in their uniform pants. After the day's NFL debacle, we had to be forcefully prevented from placing a $1,000 bet on the CFL coin toss before leaving to see Borat.

Tomorrow, we give you a review of Happy Feet.

* by the way, congratulations to the British Columbia Lions.

On the set of the new Evil Dead: The Musical

A narrated slideshow with the guy who put the show together. This thing bears further investigating. Aslo, check out a review by the NY Times.

The Saints Aren't Coming

Watched the new U2/Green Day video while we were flying home from Vegas last nite (or was it this morning?.)



First, a disclaimer. We hate Green Day, and we refuse to let Irish tax evaders lecture us about our domestic affairs. Having said that, what a video. Put a lump in our throat the 1st time we saw it. Still does, no matter how many more times we see it. Shows what we all wish had happened, and what we wish could happen*.

As always, here’s the grainy Youtube version

And the hi-res Quicktime version.


*Sure, as former members of the Bureaucratic Service we fully realize that any forward deployed forces are completely incapable of immediate response to interior locations within the continental United States and even if it was possible their mission capabilities are wholly unsuited for US disaster relief and imagine the irony if we did redeploy them on a dime because that’s what Rumsfeld was tying to accomplish all these years and now he’s gone and it’s all irrelevant anyway because even if we could redeploy a fraction of the Air Force and Army elements depicted in this video the time it would take to actually effect such a large-scale movement of men, machines, equipment and all the necessary support services would be far more than the four days it took FEMA to respond and it would be more like six or even eight months before all the forces were in place and besides the initial response to a natural disaster is strictly a local one and everyone knows that any Federal response would have to be led by the local National Guard units and everyone knows (well, except for Governor Blanco) that any such request would have to spell out in painstaking detail the exact force package required that would exclude us from sending over any combat-capable aircraft and besides who the Hell sends fully-loaded warplanes to airlift people off of rooftops I mean really imagine if two of those Apaches collided over some poor bastard’s house and they fell on the property and killed everyone inside why the Congressional hearings would drag on for years and the lawsuits from everyone within 100 miles of the accident would exceed the actual Hurricane damages by several billion dollars and the only saving grace of all of this would be that we’d find out a few days later that a Delta Force Recon Patrol looking for survivors got into a firefight with Sean Penn and there were no survivors in his boat and anyway this is all academic because everyone knows that Harrier jets don’t have winches and anyone standing under one of those Jets while they were in VTOL mode would be roasted alive. But still…

Whatever You Do, Don't Wish Us Luck..

Two of the Ten are headed to Vegas for the weekend, accompanied by our Consigliere.



We can't guarantee there'll be any postings until Tuesday, but we're sure you can deal with it.

No posting Tuesday.

The Game’s new album drops today. As a consequence, our Webgineer will be unavailable all day.

In the meantime, you can amuse yourself by testing out Marshall McLuhan’s Page 69 theory. (First revealed to us in Alex Beam’s column this past Monday.)

Best. Video Game. Commercial. Ever

Really.

It's for some game called Gears of War. Guess it’s popular with the kids. Kottke has some info on how the video came about.

(Note: The above link is a low quality version. If you’ve got a good connection, here’s a high quality Quicktime version. )

Ten Men and a Movie: The Prestige

This weekend, we saw the best fall movie you’ve probably never heard of, the Prestige.

Movie was by Christopher Nolan, the guy who made Memento (and was co written with his brother, Jonathan. This is significant. If you've seen the movie you'll understand why.) Same kind of movie as Memento - lots of twists, the narrative jumps back and forth (and back again) thru time, and some huge reveals at the end. Type of movie that you’re still talking about 1 hour later, when you realize you still haven’t figured everything out yet.

We recommend it. Good performances by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, and the story is top notch. Solidly structured, too - there are a LOT of twists and surprises in this film, but looking back on it, they didn't cheat. Most every twist was forshadowed, if you look closely enough. Also included a small thing we liked - there’s a subordinate storyline involving Edison and Tesla battling each other at the dawn of the electric age. Nice parallel to the Main story about the two magicians.

This is the second of two fall movies involving dueling turn-of-the-century European magicians, the other being the Illusionist (featuring Ed Norton and Paul Giamatti, written by Neil Burger) Taken together, both films complement each other nicely. Both are excellent period pieces, with the Illusionist being the more romantic of the two. The Prestige is a much darker take (Doug Henning, bless his soul, would never have the stomach for what these guys pull) .

(We’re also working our way though the 850-page monster that is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so we’ve just about had it had it up to here with these guys and their incantations.)

The power of editing

An Office Space trailer, cut to look like a horror movie. (via kottke.og)

We’re already sick of Borat.

And these guys point out how its only going to get worse before it gets better.

Last week we went by Tower Records on Sunset Blvd and saw the going out of business signs. Didn’t invoke the same reaction as it did with this guy..

We didn’t weep. We swept thru the place and tried to grab everything we could that was marked 40% off.

Just got back from LA at 3 AM this morning. Will be a few days before we can post a recap, but trust us- we’ve got lots of infotainment to offer.

Dispatch From Los Angeles.

Steve Nash watches his team fall apart against the Lakers at the Staples Center on opening night. We had good seats for the game, right next to the Phoenix bench.





But this was not the highlight of the trip. More tomorrow.