I KNOW I SHOULDN'T CARE ABOUT REMAKES THIS MUCH

I've known for a while now (and the rage has been simmering in me) that The Karate Kid, one of my favorite VHS tapes from childhood and the reason I fell in love with Elisabeth Shue at a very young age, is being remade. Jaden Smith (son of Will) is taking the role of the titular kid, and Jackie Chan (yep) has inherited the Mr. Miyagi role (that originally got Pat Morita an Oscar nomination). If you haven't seen the so-cheesy-but-so-lovable 80s flick, familiarize yourself with the trailer below. It basically tells you the whole movie.



What kept me not-so-angry, though, was that the remake was to be titled The Kung Fu Kid. That's really all I need, so it won't share much of a shorthand reference with the original in conversation (for example, if I say I'm a fan of the Pink Panther movies, people not as into old Peter Sellers movies will instantly think Steve Martin garbage. Incidentally, this remake of Karate Kid is being directed by Harald Zwart, hack director of the Pink Panther remake's sequel. Yikes.)

Unfortunately, Slashfilm just posted 4 officially released photos from the remake, and the news that it now bears the original title of The Karate Kid, as well as a plot synopsis. One of these pictures and the synopsis follow:

"Jaden Smith plays Dre, a skateboarding video game buff who is forced to move to China after his single mother (Taraji P. Henson) is forced to transfer to China for work. Of course, unable to speak Chinese, Dre finds it hard to settle in, and gets beat up by the local bully. Jackie Chan plays Mr. Han (the Mr. Miyagi character), a maintenance man who spots Dre’s black-eye and offers to teach him both martial arts and Chinese, so he can defend against the students of Li Quan Ha’s Fighting dragon school of Kung-Fu."

Yes, that's a scene taking place on the Great Wall of China. My own personal bias aside (although I'd like to ask one more time why they're still calling it The Karate Kid when the story bears more of a resemblance to The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) I'll pose this one really nerdy but legitimate complaint: Why the fuck does it take place in China? I ask this question mostly because it takes about five seconds of wikipedia research to learn that Karate is from Japan. Did nobody look into this during pre-production? I'm assuming they don't care and they just want whatever sales-boost they can get from association with the original movie (though I can't imagine any kids today care, which is not a complaint because god knows I didn't care about 25-year-old movies as a kid).

What I'm getting at is that it doesn't even make any sense to call this movie The Karate Kid, especially after changing it back from The Kung Fu Kid (and five more seconds of wikipedia research tells me Kung Fu is a term for Chinese martial arts, so if your movie's about a kid learning to fight in China... dude, just call it the The Kung Fu Kid.)

Seriously, Hollywood, go make your bad movie, but don't bring my childhood into this. It won't actually affect me much at all, but, c'mon, it's the little things.

I GUESS THE PREDATOR DIRECTOR READS MY BLOG

Just kidding. Apparently I wasn't the only one uncomfortable with the announcement of Adrien Brody headlining the new Predator movie (now titled Predators. I see what they did there.) I'm honestly a fan of Brody as an actor (he's awesome in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam) but I just don't think he's right for a testosterone-fest on par with the original Predator. I'll sum up my original post with this sweet picture I made for it originally:



After noticing all of the raised eyebrows in response to his casting, director Nimrod Antal (seriously?) talked to IGN.com:

"He plays a mercenary in the film and if you look at the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan today, they're not 'yolked-out' Schwarzenegger-looking guys. They're all very wiry and thin guys, and I think it's going to play well."

I'd like to take this opportunity to respond to Antal's comment. Nimrod (can I call you Nimrod?), of course real mercenaries don't look like five-time Mr. Universe, seven-time Mr. Olympia champion bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger. What I think you're not grasping here is that this is a fucking movie where men fight aliens. There's an important divide between entertainment and reality. One could argue that realistic casting would have worked for another sci-fi movie called Pretty Woman, in which a rich socialite falls in love with a filthy hooker (played by Julia Roberts). Julia Roberts looks nothing like an actual prostitute, but she worked for the romantic comedy because she is attractive. Real prostitutes are generally not very attractive.

To illustrate my point, I made another picture:

You see what I'm saying here. You're making Predator, sir. Not The Hurt Locker. This isn't a drama, this is fantasy - it's escapism in the form of sci-fi action. I'll leave you with an example of the approach that made the original film so good.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

Alright, now somebody is seriously fucking with me.

http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2009/11/05/exclusive-anna-faris-to-star-in-yogi-bear/

I JUST CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE

So today I get on slashfilm.com and I see two new articles.

1) Owen Wilson has signed on to voice the CGI lead character in a new Marmaduke film.


2) Shawn Levy, director of Night at the Museum, is developing a live-action/CGI hybrid film based on The Berenstein Bears.



Okay, kids, I just can't even go into detail about this. I'm finished. I don't want to go to Hollywood anymore. I don't want to be in film school anymore. I don't know what I'm going to do. This news has assassinated my Hollywood dreams.

IS THOR SERIOUSLY GOING TO BE THIS AWESOME

Alright, I almost posted about this before, but I didn't do it. And now there are more casting announcements for the Thor movie. Specifically, Anthony Hopkins has been added to the cast. I know what you're saying, "Alex, that's not that big a deal, he's a great actor but he's been in plenty of shitty movies, of course he'd show up in one of the five million comic book adaptations rushing to theaters before this fad blows over." Yeah, you'd be right. What I haven't told you yet is the rest of the cast, which has already been announced.

In Thor, directed by legendary Shakespearean actor/director Kenneth Branagh, the announced cast thus far includes Natalie Portman, Robert DeNiro, Stellan Skarsgaard, Colm Feore, Jude Law, Brian Fucking Blessed, and now Anthony Hopkins, plus the obligatory rumored appearance by Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Oh, and some guy named Chris Hemsworth is playing the lead role of Thor, but who gives a shit about him?

Altogether among the names I've just mentioned are 18 Academy Award nominations. This is literally the most absurdly star-studded cast of a superhero movie thus far, and it's the movie for one of the silliest characters Marvel has. Nobody's favorite superhero is Thor. That's just ridiculous. I mean, I have to see this movie for the cast alone, but wow. Dude's got a hammer.

I actually wrote a 17-page paper on the reality of comic books once. Thor's the only superhero whose ability of flight is physically possible - his gigantic hammer (called Mjolnir, nerdpoints) has a wrist strap, and he'll just throw it real hard, and the strap catches his wrist and carries him with the force of the thrown hammer. That's how he flies. That shit is seriously just ridiculous, let the motherfucker fly.

I'm sorry, I can't get over the fact that the most oscar-likely superhero movie coming out is Thor. THOR! I'm a lifelong nerd, and I've never even been remotely interested in Thor, not counting his cameo in the seminal 80s film Adventures in Babysitting (there played by Full Metal Jacket's Vincent D'Onofrio. They really should have just given him the lead in this new movie.)

SILENT HILL 2, AUDIENCES 0

Yes, you read that (almost) clever headline correctly - Silent Hill, the barely successful 2006 film adaptation of the huge video game franchise, is getting a sequel. I've encountered very few people who even remember the existence of the original film, but apparently that's successful enough - a sequel is officially in the works. So far the only two returning from the first film are writer Roger Avary and producer Samuel Hadida. The first movie actually wasn't that bad (largely due to the visual awesomeness of director Christophe Gans), but its biggest problem was, well, Roger Avary. The story in the first movie flat-out sucked, and had almost no closure, leaving a lot of loose ends (not even loose ends interesting enough to be the focus of a sequel, though - just strangely unfinished subplots that had no significance or effect towards the main story to begin with.) The dialogue was garbage and the story completely unfocused. With that in mind, the writer being the only creative member of the team coming back is not in any way exciting news. It's cool, though, because what the original lacked in story, it made up for with extremely hot female police officers.

Oh, yeah.

Laurie Holden is one of those not-that-famous actresses who should probably be way more famous. Seriously, just try watching any movie she's in without shallowly falling in love with her based on looks alone. Man. (Watch The Mist, though, that was seriously underrated and way better than Silent Hill.) This girl is half the reason I need to become a famous filmmaker in Hollywood, so I can aggressively pursue her hand in marriage. She may be sixteen years older than I am (yes, I checked), but love knows no age. For the possibility of more tough-chick Laurie Holden hotness I'd totally see a sequel.

Oh, wait. She actually dies a fiery, gruesome death in the original.

(spoiler)

Yknow what? Fuck this sequel.

Okay, okay, I'm being rash. I would honestly be really interested in seeing another Silent Hill movie - but, like I said, from a different writer with a different angle. The original video game (yes, my nerdiness extends beyond film) is actually a really solid, scary piece of interactive storytelling, and remains a common staple in the are-video-games-art argument that so many have raised (Roger Ebert in particular has been a real dick about it - but I digress.) A lot of the flaws in the story of the first movie came from Avary's structure being really close to an actual video game - which works for a video game, but not a movie. I'd like to see a writer just give us a spookhouse ride story through this creepy town without being bound by the specific events of one of the games, as long as they keep the atmosphere and mythology of it intact.

I'll leave you with a fun little youtube video.

THEY LOST ME SOMEWHERE

So Adrien Brody's been cast as the lead in Predators, the remake of 1987's Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers and Bill Duke and Jesse Ventura and all those other cinema badasses.

Let's recap the casting moves in the Predator franchise thus far, not counting those godawful movies where they fight the Aliens. The original Predator is a veritable showcase of manliness. Seriously, just watch the below clip. This is actually from the movie, and if it doesn't make you want to go lift weights, nothing ever will.




That's for real. That was Predator. Anyway, Arnold being one of only two survivors in that film (spoiler), they didn't really know what to do when he didn't want to come back for 1990's Predator 2. My personal theory about what happened next involves a rich studio producer with a whole lot of cocaine, because he decided that if he couldn't get Arnold, to hell with the movie badasses - and so, Predator 2 was headlined by Danny Glover, Bill Paxton, and Gary Busey.

Gary Fucking Busey.

And after that, the Predator franchise was basically dead, save for a few video games, comic books, and the aforementioned (horrible) cross-over movies. Until now. Robert Rodriguez, director of and Spy Kids and Once Upon a Time in Mexico is giving it a reboot. One could argue that today's movie badasses just aren't the same, and they'd be right, because Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson started doing kids movies too soon (Arnold had a shitload of great action movies under his belt before he made that move. The Rock's only decent one so far is The Rundown, and a lot of that has to do with Christopher Walken also being in it.) Anyway, I felt a Predator reboot was just a little unnecessary, because nothing so far can equal the pure testosterone that was the original. Watching the original will make any man want to strip naked to hunt and kill a savage animal with only his bare hands and his bloodlust.

And now they're rebooting it with Adrien Brody.

Alright, dude. You're a good actor and all. It's just that you'd better be pumping a shitload of iron already, because you've got a long way to go. Oh, and work on the roar. There's a reason this man runs California now.



(because that's all he has to do to win any political debate)

GHOST RIDER 2: ABSOLUTELY NO ONE IS GOING TO GET PAID

Variety is reporting that Marvel has decided to "rev the throttle" on another Ghost Rider movie with Nicolas Cage. I'm pretty sure anyone reading this right now is just beginning to remember that there was, in fact, a Ghost Rider movie with Nicolas Cage. Nobody cared back then, nobody cares now, and the idea that you're not even going to try to reboot it, you're just making another one for the one to two people in the country who anxiously await Cage's continued adventures as a flaming skull on a motorcycle, that's just silly. Really, Hollywood? What I fear more than circumstance forcing me to sit through another installment of Ghost Rider (I already spent two horrifying hours with it the first time that I'll never get back. It wasn't my idea. Honest.) is the possibility that this new one might actually be successful anyway. When Hellboy 2 came out in spite of the failure of the first movie, it totally banked, because for some reason everybody was interested in seeing it. I could totally see that happening again, with friends of mine going "i don't know i heard it was pretty good!" and dragging me to go see it, until once again I have to hear Cage's shitty character voice (JUST USE YOUR NATURAL SPEAKING VOICE IT SOUNDS SO WEIRD) say "Ah'm Ghost Rider."

You could say that I'm a little upset they're actually putting money towards this.

things done changed

soooo this is now going to be used as my personal blog for my Writing for New Media class. While I'd like to simply continue documenting my occasional reckless drunken shenanigans, I also feel I need to give the thing a little effort and do some more opinion pieces, kind of giving my blog a more focused feel. As popular as my barcelona entry continues to be with people i run into at parties (seriously, i hear about it as much as my shirt blog) i think this'll be twisting into something new.


i'll pour one out for you, previous-version-of-my-blog. it's time to grow.

let's try not drinking

okay so i got a $177 ticket for peeing in public that i don't even remember. this, along with the debts i already had from overdrafting while drunk, led me to a decision: i'm not drinking for two weeks. i have decided to document this at least a little bit, but i'm already three days in. in summary:

DAY ONE

I was hung over, so this day barely even counts.

DAY TWO

Job interview, making a video for eflexgroup.com (guess how i snagged this job? yeah, my dad owns it.) They have a terrible video on their website of my dad (back when he had a moustache) explaining to the camera how customers can use their flexible spending accounts (i still barely know what these are.) They want me to remake it and make it entertaining while still knowledgable, and funny! I don't know how the fuck I'm going to do this but the interview goes well and I have until august to retool their script (which is just a paragraph of voice over right now). I shoot in a studio in the first week of august with some woman who used to be a newscaster around here and whatever helpers I decide to bring along. It figures two days into not drinking I get a real sweet job. Fuck lessons.

Later that night I went to Andy Holt's, where a bunch of people were drinking. I brought a case of mountain dew and drank that instead of beer. By the end of the night when everybody is hinting for me to leave so they can go to bed I am stacking things on a chair to see if i can jump over it successfully.

DAY THREE

That was today/yesterday (it's kind of 4am now). I left my house one time today, and that was to pick up my takeout from chili's. not drinking sure is fun.

I'LL BE SURE TO KEEP YOU GUYS POSTED

wow

i have no memory of this incident.

i think i'm going to take it easy for a while, the whole drinking thing.

my dad just e-mailed me this picture

why did my dad just e-mail me this picture

my first night in barcelona

oh, shit. where to begin.
i was in barcelona for three days, kind of. two, really. the second day there i did nice touristy stuff that was non-dangerous. walked for a long time. that kind of stuff. not really blog material but makes for a nice photo album.

i'm not here to tell you about that day.

my first day, thursday, i arrive in barcelona, sit down, read stephen king and wait for taylor. during my full day travelling the day before, i watched, in one sitting, the last ten or so hours of the second season of The Wire. this will be important later. i get a call from taylor, we meet up and head for the city/our hostel. walk around. unpack. get food. meet up with various people (rachel, kris, brittany, and alaina). agree to meet these people again for dinner and head back to the hostel.

on the way back to the hostel, taylor and i begin a fairly destructive back-and-forth relationship when i say that i want to nap, because i havent slept in two days, and he says no, we need to get stuff to pregame for tonight. i didnt really fight this much. we went to some supermarket and bought these oversized juice boxes of wine for fifty cents each. don simon.


we also got a large bottle of cheap vodka and some bottles of soda for concealment purposes. i get back and say i'm going to take at least an hour's nap. these girls havent even called us and given us a timeframe yet. i nap for maybe ten minutes, fifteen is being generous, and then taylor just keeps talking to me and won't let me sleep anymore. i relent and chug a red bull before we begin drinking. while doing fairly well in our respective boxes (his white, mine red, i call him a racist) he stops about halfway and says he just can't drink it anymore. this is where i finally get to make a bad decision and i tell him no, no, we need to finish these boxes of wine. we need to. lets get wasted. because a great idea our first night in a city/country we don't know and don't even speak the language in is to get blackout drunk. he relents. we drink, drink, drink some more. then drink more than half of our sodas and fill the bottles back up with vodka, creating horrible mixtures which we drink on the road on our way to dinner.

as a sidenote i would like to say that we were meeting up with very respectable, nice people. why we had to do all of this before what could have been a very civilized dinner is beyond me.

whenever they called us while we were drinking, they basically said meet us at 9, no later than 9 15. we left at about 9 30. halfway on the road taylor gets a phone call from rachel, saying hey, what's up? and taylor immediately says SORRY WE'RE LATE, ALEX GOT HIT BY A CAR. instinctively, i shout "ouch!" in the background. rachel then tells him "what?! we're not even there yet, we're late, what happened!?" to which taylor replies OH. ALEX DIDN'T GET HIT BY A CAR. and hangs up.

i remember meeting up with them very, very vaguely, but i do not remember dinner, i do not remember what i ordered. i am told that i was being so loud and vulgar many people in the restaurant got offended and left. i know i finished my fanta/vodka serum, split a pitcher of sangria with Alaina, and drank more of god knows what. we also talked about the movie Angus for some reason. but that's all my memory will give me. i was told later they had no idea i was drunk because i was just talking about movies the whole time. which is great. that's kind of my element. one of the movies we discussed was Angus. more importantly, one of the movies that I think we may have brought up is the movie Face/Off. this will be important later.

after dinner is where things begin to take a downturn. i remember shots at one of the places we went to though i do not remember the place. brittany later told me that she saw me leaning against the wall and sleeping a little, and asked taylor if i was going to be okay. taylor says "oh, he's fine. he's from wisconsin." they do nothing about me. i drink more. we all drink more. after this there was a nightclub. i believe this is the one where the drama begins. it was called opium. i got one drink there and (this i vaguely, vaguely know to be true) asked the bartender-lady if her or any of her friends had ever been involved in illegally smuggling prostitutes into america.

at this point i was kindly removed from the bar.

i kept trying to sneak back in, but i'm not exactly the sneakiest guy when i'm drunk. anyway, i guess i was being a real dick (i'll explain this more later, i want to give you the information as it came to me) and i got separated from the group. i was very, very afraid for my life, was being chased by angry bouncers, and ended up sprinting, alone, for about an hour, until i was on the outskirts of barcelona. on the highway. i called my parents to try to get them to be mapquest for me but all i did was worry them. that was a very stupid idea on my part because after calling them i lost my phone. just lost it somewhere. i don't know where. so for the rest of the night they think i'm dead. this begins the subplot of my parents doing everything they can to find me from across the ocean. around here they have my brother scouring facebook for clues, my dad figuring out where my hostel is, and my mom constantly trying every phone number she has for me. all i have told them about my trip to barcelona is that i will be meeting my friend taylor. my brother sees post from mutual friend Duncan Davis on my wall about taylor, knows that we know Duncan Davis' girlfriend, Katharine Kou, very, very well, my mom calls Katharine, Katharine talks to Duncan, and boom - my parents now have taylor's cell phone number and the number to his home in wisconsin, to talk to HIS parents.

They try Taylor's cell phone to no avail, because by now, in a completely unrelated incident and miles away from me, taylor has fallen into the mediterranean sea. he also had a bit of an adventure that night.

anyway, i'm out by the highway and all i see is a mcdonalds rest stop that is closed. i hide in the bushes for a while (i will explain later) and then, sobering up, pick a direction and walk in it for quite a while until i find a cab that takes me back to the hostel. by now it is 7 30 in the morning. as soon as i get back, the guy at the desk looks at me and says "...Alex?" I nod. I guess my dad's gotten to him. I call home, say everything's fine, i'm not dead, and we don't have the money to keep talking so i'll e-mail you tomorrow. oh, and i love you, ma. yep. gnight. by the end of this phone call Taylor has made his way to the hallway and we reunite miraculously. he apparently had just gotten back as well, because he wandered off, too. i go back to the room and we recap while he shakes the sand out of his pants and wallet. we sleep until 3pm the next day.

Here comes the twist.

Sometime after my return to london I run into Alaina. We talk about our trip and all that, and that one night, and I tell her everything and how I was running away and I know somebody was chasing me, blah blah. What I know now to be true is that I was simply running away from angry bouncers, to whom I was being very disagreeable.

She tells me that, at the time, just before running away, i said something about how I stopped a shipment of illegal prostitutes and now the russian mafia wants to cut my face off.

this simply cannot be true. but let's put this in perspective.
Me. Two days with no sleep and drunk off my ass on wine, sangria, vodka, and apparently a bunch of bacardi judging from the receipts. Having watched ten hours of The Wire without time to go to sleep and let that be put into the long-term memory and not the short-term. the entire plot of season 2 revolves around the illegal smuggling of prostitutes into america. and we discussed face/off at dinner. so all i had swimming around my drunk-ass movie-oriented head was the wire and face/off.

and this is when everything clicks. like a recovering amnesiac in a movie, i begin to remember everything - not every little detail, but quite a bit. i know that i was yelling at the bouncers about how they shouldnt do that to young girls, smuggle them into our country and use them as slaves. i do not remember the chase but i know i was chased by more than one of them, and being courageous, this is why i sprinted away for an hour.

but honestly, what really does it for me, is that I said I stopped an illegal shipment of prostitutes into America. I thought I did it. I honestly thought I did some good. I was a crimefighter. I was Batman. and this is why I thought i was a marked man, fearing assassination out on the highway by that mcdonald's rest stop. i had brilliantly foiled their prostitution/smuggling ring cleverly disguised as a barcelona night club. how they became russian in my head is beyond me.



I think I can legally declare insanity now.
Also, I should be fucking dead already.

Oh, hey blog.

Whuddup. I'm in an internet cafe in Athens right now that I just kind of found while exploring. I left my hostel in Corfu at around 5:30am for my flight here. Now I'm here and my flight to Barcelona (connecting in London) isn't until 9pm. So I gots time, yknow? I'm just chillin in Athens alone.

Where to begin.

I believe the last time we spoke, you and I, I was just letting you know what it's like living in London. In summary, I like it. I've yet to mention any travelling, but I guess that's because I haven't really done that much. A few weeks ago I went to Dublin to visit the twin. That was fun. I'm going back next week for St. Patty's Day, but that'll be another story.

Anyway, it's spring break right now. My first half of it is done as of today, and that involved Greece. Me and that new-pal from a few entries ago Bret flew to Athens last friday and saw some stuff while waiting to meet up with Ashley/Michelle/Christine/Caitlin/Karen. We spent the night in Athens, didn't even go to sleep, and in the morning boarded a bus for Corfu that ended up taking around 9 hours (ferry included.) It wasn't so bad, though. I just kind of couldn't sleep in the back so I watched a bunch of episodes of The Wire on my iPod. Did you see that shit? I just spelled iPod and formatted it correctly with capitalization and shit. How awesome is that? Answer: Not at all.

Corfu. We arrive and are picked up and taken to the Pink Palace, where we're staying. Holy shit, this was the place for me. The staff heartily encourages and participates in bingedrinking. I felt right at home seeing as I black out about five nights out of any given week. The first night I got drunk and passed out at about 9pm after scouring their used book selection for any and all Stephen King (ended up with two books, Cell and Night Shift. I'm reading Night Shift right now, it's a collection of his short stories. Pretty fuckin good so far.) The next morning I was hung over so I actually made it to breakfast in time. It was fucking beautiful outside so they announced they'd be doing a 4-wheeler ATV safari. I signed up and rode that bike up and down the Greek countryside like it was a whore that owed me money. Man, it was sweet. We basically drove up a bunch of mountains and through villages. At one point we all had to stop because a man and his dog were in the road. That was fun. We had lunch on top of a mountain. The whole time I was driving I couldn't get the Mario Kart 64 music out of my head and I really wanted to start throwing different colored turtle shells or banana peels.

That night there was a toga party, so we all toga-ed out and I met a very, very nice group of girls (Chelsea, Chelsea, and Emma) from NYU who I liked immediately because they were really fucking funny, which set them apart from the rest of the girls there who were kind of sorority-whore cumdumpsters constantly shouting MORE TEQUILA SHOTSSSSS and making out with guys who call each other "bro" in a non-joking way. I remember having a really good time and talking to people, and then all of a sudden I opened my eyes and I was naked in my bed, breaking my record of wearing pajama pants every night for at least a year now. Breakfast that day was interesting because I found the chelseas and emma and they relayed to me a bunch of stories about me after I blacked out. Apparently I was trying real hard to get them to go to the hot tub and they wouldn't, so when they left I shouted after them "FINE! GO WATCH THE VIEW!" There had been no prior talk or reference of The View, so I guess I just said this because they are girls, and girls watch The View. Vaginas. Sure.

That day I was led by two dogs to the beach (they seriously would wait for me behind corners and stuff, and not keep walking til they saw me. I just followed them and ended up at the beach. Those dogs were pretty fucking cool.) I walked pretty far out and ended up climbing a bunch of huge rocks like in Lord of the Rings. Being alone, nobody could take a picture of me doing this, so I just took a bunch of pictures from there. It looks like a fucking beach, there was absolutely no difference made by me being on that huge rock. I don't know, I just did it I guess. Anyway, I decided to retire and nap because I knew I had to leave at 5am the next day (today) and planned on just getting drunk all night until my cab. I couldn't sleep all day, got maybe an hour of actual sleep while I missed dinner, and then just woke up and got drunk anyway. The aforementioned girls were back in full force and, being cool as fuck, stayed up with me at the 24hour hostel bar all night until I left for the airport. Thanks, Chelseas and Emma. The bartender was wasted too so he basically was just letting us go behind the bar and do whatever we wanted, changing the music and making ourselves shots. Bret stayed up with me for a little while but then gave up and went to bed, proving once more that NYU girls are way more hardcore than Bret.

5am rolls by. I bid a drunken, sloppy adieu to the girls and go to my room, noisily and obnoxiously packing all my stuff and undoubtedly waking up the three other people attempting to sleep in there. Fuckem. I go back downstairs, backpack fully equipped, say goodbye to the dogs, and get in the cab. At this point I was in such a state of sleep deprivation that shit all seriously blurs in my memory, but I guess I got on my flight, blinked, and I was in Athens. Here I am. I was going to just spend twelve hours in the airport but about an hour into that brilliant plan I was like fuck this and took a train into the city. I've been exploring and adventuring around, somehow not getting lost. Hopefully I'll be able to find my way back to the airport. I have about six more hours before I can even check in, and ten more hours before my flight leaves. I think I'll be able to figure it out. I'm gonna go try to find a gyro or something.

Barcelona soon. I'll be meeting up with shaboy Taylor, who is one of the better friends I've made in London because he
a) is also from Wisconsin, blessing him with the requisite reckless alcoholism
and
b) knows the movie Last Action Hero as well as I do
and a few other people who I barely know but have gotten drunk with at least once or twice.

Let's do this to this.

i guess i deserved that

"My granddad's house is older than your country."
-Sam, a local who disagreed with my making fun of the way british people say "zed" instead of "z"

i'm in london now

i had half a post written about getting here but i'm not even going to finish it. i jumped on a plane last week, came to london, and i'm here now. the hangover i had the morning after i got here, which was hangover combined with jet lag, was definitely on the top two hangovers i've ever had (in no order, the other being the hangover after the super bowl freshman year, during which i took a bath just to distract myself and ended up watching forrest gump with rob while we moaned the whole time about our heads). Yeah, I woke up and it felt like my skull was too small for my brain. I began to recound my night to my roommate (who chose not to go out) and he told me I already told him all about it last night. I don't remember coming back at all so this is a surprise to me.

My first night began in the student bar (we have a bar on campus, so close to where I sleep it's going to be dangerous) and then a shitload of us were led by our r.a.'s to a bar down the street called The Metropolitan. I imagine I'll be seeing a lot of this place. They had some great beer. The Guinness was, indeed, remarkably better than America's. I met a shitload of people, got some british dude's number (just as a friend, LOL!) and was taught the proper way to get a pint at a bar ("elbows in, shove to the front, then elbows out") before blacking out. I don't remember getting back. Apparently me and new-pal Bret hung out with some girls and drank champagne, and one of them was furious at me all night because i couldn't remember her name (they told me that my explanation was "well, i DID know your name, but that was the past, and we're in the future now." i'm pretty ashamed to have said that because "we're in the future now" is in every way incorrect. we can never be in the future. the future is in the future. we're in now now. where we'll always be.)

I'll continue this laterrrrrrrrrrrrr

timeless

So I was being a dick to my ex-roommate via the Facebook wall of his friend and was drawn into a discussion of what movies are "timeless," their definition of timeless being something that people will still watch in fifty years.

This just seems pointless to me. There are movies that I seek out and watch that were made over fifty years ago. 40s detective shit that rocks (because nobody can disarm Peter Lorre quite like Humphrey Bogart). I may only watch Murder, My Sweet once, and then send the netflix back, but that's a movie I enjoyed that is more than fifty years old - so let's say some kid in fifty years gets really into old George Clooney movies and ends up watching The Perfect Storm or Batman & Robin or some other non-"timeless" shit. That doesn't make a shitty movie like The Perfect Storm timeless. And that kid would probably really like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. One time. People are always going to watch movies. Not everybody will watch the older movies, but people like me, who are really, really into it, will.

Maybe the point is a movie that I myself would still be watching in fifty years even though I'll have already been watching it for fifty years. Well, in fifty years, I'll be seventy years old. I'll probably be willing to watch whatever the fuck my grandkids put in front of me as long as i have applesauce and a clean diaper.

While we're at it, where is the line drawn for a movie that's almost timeless, but doesn't quite make it? Is it a bad supporting performance? One redundant scene too many? Shit, what about "timeless" movies that get old after fifty-one years? It's pretty bizarre criteria for a movie to meet, and when you think about it, nothing in any art form really is "timeless" because human opinion is too much of a variable. Movies that people still watch in fifty years are the movies that got lucky.

I guess I'm just saying that I think whether a movie is "timeless" or not is completely irrelevant to any possible situation. Nobody's ever going to base their sunday night Blockbuster Video decision on which movie is "timeless." They're just going to pick whichever one their girlfriend feels like watching and hope she'll feel like sex that night after the movie. Timeless is a hyperbolic word that critics use to get their point across and get their names on movie posters and DVD covers. Who even cares?

That said, Robocop is totally timeless.


Mark my words.

the story of my holiday party. special edition.

i originally posted this a few days ago (sunday night i think), but then i removed it because i was nervous people would read stuff about themselves and be mad. this entry goes into more detail than would ever be necessary. however, i've decided: "fuck it". as a bonus, i've taken the time to include something i always originally wanted in this post, but didn't have the money for the first time around: more cgi dewbacks in the background searching for c3po and r2d2. enjoy.



so i got home last week sometime around midnight. andy holt is the yin to my bro-yang so he picked me up from the bus stop instead of my parents so that i could just drink like crazy and spend the night on his couch downtown instead of going home. the first thing he asked me when i jumped in his car was "hey, dude, wanna have a holiday party at my place?" yes, i did. "saturday or sunday?" megan wall, in the backseat, says "sunday! i want to hang out sunday!"

Megan, please, we're not in our late forties. saturday. then more girls will come.

An aside about Andy - sometime last week he asked me for relationship advice regarding his long distance girlfriend, Orchid, who is based in california. he was supposed to go visit her for a week starting friday, had the week off work, all was set, but he just wasn't really feeling it. what should he do? i told him if he cashed in his plane ticket we could spend a week in madison getting drunk every night with absolutely no responsibilities. "but it's totally your call." he cashed in his ticket and broke up with the girl.

that night we get all drunk and andy makes the facebook event, declaring the hosts as "Andy and Alex." He has two roommates. I am apparently hosting a party at their place. It's cool, though, because we invited them. thank god they didnt get out of line or else i'd have had to kick them out.

the next night Andy and I drink even more and both black out. My loving sister bought a glass boot filled with god knows what kind of beer and we all take turns chugging it.


I literally blinked mid-chug and when I opened my eyes it was the next morning and i am on my sister's couch. her roommate christine brings me water and turns on a dvd marathon of Are You Afraid of the Dark for me. i love christine.

i am able to retrace my night via receipts found in my pocket. all of my money is gone. i have receipts from two different food places and several bars. i only had two dollars last night. that's strange. bored with my sister and her roommates being hung over and asleep i get up and walk to the apartment next door where blake, chris, and billy live. billy has a final to go to. me, blake, and chris get drunk on Steel Reserve and watch a combination of Totally Awesome and cakefarts.com until blake's bus to minnesota removes him from our care for the duration of the holidays.

i don't talk to andy until that night when my sister calls me and tells me that she heard through the grapevine Orchid just showed up in Madison at Andy's apartment. Fuck, I wanted a single best friend while I was home. I call Andy five times to no avail. An hour later he calls back without saying hello, just letting me listen in on the conversation that reveals Orchid's sleeping on the couch. The next day, Andy doesn't answer his phone when I call him. Ever. David calls me and tells me he called one of Andy's roommates, and the roommate says the party's still happening.

For some bizarre reason, this flared up anger in me. This is my party, god dammit, not yours, roommate. I'm not even naming you because I don't want to link to a picture of you. Burn in hell. Just kidding, Jon Fok (but not really.)


Saturday. Game day. After my family (and by "my family" i mean kelly (my twin sister), chris (by the way he's her boyfriend), minyong, megan, david, and my dad) finishes taking in a celebratory holiday viewing of Die Hard, Andy picks David and I up to go buy liquor and then go to his party. Already in our festive christmas sweaters (David's had "NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN HO-HO-HO" written on it, which slayed me) we merrily skip down the aisles at the Woodman's Liquor Department with a shopping cart and buy every possible holiday-themed drink we can. I spend a lot of money. Fuck it, I'm hosting this party. My reputation's on the line.

We arrive at Andy's. I immediately put in my DVD that is an endless loop of a roaring fireplace. We drink. People don't show up for a while (save for the six that are already there). I get worried because on one of my previous nights in a drunken stupor I invited literally every possible awkward high school random person in madison I could, and nobody is even showing up.

An hour passes. John Boyer bets me that I can't go the night without yelling at anybody. I angrily agree to this bet, wanting to prove him wrong. Fifteen minutes later, I lose. Zog had turned off my fireplace DVD so that he could see the score of the football game.

Suddenly, in three separate but very close together waves, every Madison random shows up. And I'm already near-blackout drunk. The kind of drunk where I no longer have a filter on my mouth, so all of my speech is stream-of-consciousness. This is terrible because I have an encyclopaedic memory, especially for people. I'm the guy who remembers that girl showed up to high school one day with one red eye because somebody ejaculated into it over the weekend. I'm the guy who remembers that one time that dude was a total dick to me in the hallway. I have to say what took the cringe prize, though, was me talking to a girl I totally had a crush on in sixth grade (but never spoke to) about how I remember that she really, really likes Nirvana. Didn't get that phone number, no.

I also loudly referred to Orchid as "Andy's psycho ex from California that just showed up here in Madison unexpectedly" to everybody that asked who she was. In earshot of Orchid. Whoops. She was always really nice to me, too. Sorry.

I drink more and more. Soon I am just carrying around a bottle of Pumpkin Spice Schnapps and drinking from it straight while berating everybody I can. I don't remember what I said or did to my high school prom date but nothing i say or do to her has ever been positive since that fateful night so that can't have been good. Here there is at least a two-hour chunk of the night where I remember maybe one or two visual snapshots and nothing else. Another wave of guests arrive, all female and attractive. And I only already know one of them. Jackpot.

Unfortunately, that Alex Jacobs luck kicks in, and right around here, Ross pulled the building's fire alarm because he thought it would be funny. Madison's finest arrive. We evacuate the building while the firefighters do a search. I compliment the paint job on their truck. Vibrant red.

This ends the party right then and there, because who the hell wants to stick around during a fire alarm? Jamie Custer gives me a ride home and tells me he'll stop at Taco Bell. I only have four dollars, though, Jamie! "It's cool. I'll cover you this time." That's not what you tell me when I'm that drunk at the Taco Bell drive-through. I lean over Jamie and order around thirty dollars of terrible food. Jamie pays. I gorge. Jamie also does not stop me from drunk dialing pretty much every girl in my phone book, which, in retrospect, may have been his way of getting back at me for abusing his generosity like Tina Turner. While I remember talking to Allison Williams and it being generally positive, I did get a phone call from Katharine Kou this morning asking why I left her a voicemail threatening to punch her in the stomach. Hard.

My call log also tells me that I spoke with or left voicemails to Lindsay Porter (57 seconds), my sister (30 seconds), Rachel Maffitt (8 minutes 50 seconds), and Liz Cagle (4 minutes 0 seconds). I also sent Rachel Maffitt a text message at 2:37 am that just reads "Sweet, sweet boobs." She actually finds this funny. I'm a pretty creepy motherfucker.

This morning it took me two hours after waking up to make it out of my room and go eat breakfast. I then spent most of the day wrapped in a blanket and playing Gears of War 2 co-op with my brother. My phone rings a lot but I answer it for only a select few because my head really hurts and I didn't want to make my brother pause the game. Also, it really fucking rocked. There was a level where we seriously were inside of this giant worm and had to chainsaw all of its arteries so that it would die. There was blood everywhere. Our characters bathed in it.

Then he reveals that he set the drums up again in our basement. My dad jokes that we should get the Jacobs Family Band back together.

Within half an hour we're all downstairs. Our cover of Weezer's "Say It Ain't So" degenerates into my brother wailing on the guitar while I beat the drums like they owe me money and my dad calmly plays bass sitting down (because that song is boring without this stuff). This everybody-solo lasts a good five minutes. When we're done my dad gives me a list of songs to learn. I haven't played drums in at least three years so just this happening is enough in my day for me to do nothing else. I stay in and somehow convince my family (including my mom, who wanted to watch a movie with "no violence") that a good family movie for the night is Last Action Hero. Two hours later I'm happy as a pig in shit (even though the kid in that movie totally sucks.)

At 1:58 am, I get this text message from Andy:
"we need to talk soon. shit got more weird tonight. fuck. fuck fuck fuck."

PRETTY EXCITING STUFF

oh and i made this video

a list of plans my parents have made for moving me out

in chronological order

1. We'll move you out on Sunday!
2. It's going to snow. We'll move you out on Monday!
3. We're busy. Take the bus home on Monday, and we'll come back down to get your stuff that weekend!
4. We're really busy. Take the bus home on Monday, then take the van and drive to chicago to move yourself out!

tomorrow's showtime. i'm pretty excited to see what happens.