Moot Point

If I was going to have a threesome with a movie star, I would probably want to do it to this white girl cover of this hip hop song.

Whatever You Like – Anya Marina

So I sort of fell off with the Gossip Girl blogging this year for two reasons: 1) I’ve sort of fallen off with all my blogging and 2) it got really hard to come up with things to say besides “So, Dan and Serena got back together and then broke up again. Again.” Though I loved parts of this season, there was definitely an ebb around the period of Blair getting kicked out of Yale (twice) for (as TWOP’s Jacob has pointed out) inviting someone to the opera at the wrong time, and the aforementioned Serena-Dan relationship yo-yo, not to mention basically the fact that disgusting Aaron Rose was ever on the show. It’s like they had 19 episodes worth of story, but they had to shoot 25.

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Aw, I kind of loved Jenny’s guerilla fashion show. It reminded me of that scene in…I want to say Girls Just Want To Have Fun, where they crash a society party with their contemporary dance or whatever.

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Ugh. I am sick, and the only thing worse than being sick and missing work is being sick and not actually having work to miss, and then wordpress doesn’t want me to upload images anymore, so anyway I am sorry my Gossip Girl post is two days late! Continue Reading »

The three best things about last night’s Gossip Girl. Continue Reading »

This week on Gossip Girl: a blackout pushes dramatic action forward! What a novel plot twist! (Like it matters.)

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Embedded below is Leighton Meester’s cover of “Bette Davis Eyes.”

It’s not laughably bad, but it’s resoundingly mediocre, which is something that Blair Waldorf would never allow.

(via Jezebel)

Oh wow, I completely forgive them for the slightly awkward season premiere, because this whole episode was magic.

Before I get to it, though, uh, Leighton’s making an album?! A music album? Oh, how I hope this is a lie; I don’t think I can deal with Blair Waldorf putting out a vanity project album, either of the Hayden Panettiere uncomfortable pop music writhing in high heels or of the Scarlett Johanssen pretentious Tom Waits cover, nuzzling Salman Rushdie variety. Continue Reading »

So, I was really excited that Gossip Girl is back for a new season. I have been rewatching the old season for …research (really), and I have to say that this was not exactly a top episode. Continue Reading »

Weekly Movies is probably going to be short on detail this week. I hurt my back and it still hurts to type a little. I did watch movies and not spend the whole week being obsessed with Gossip Girl, I promise. (Oh, but while we’re on GG: an entire (awesomely detailed) tumblr devoted to the greatest episode of TV ever.)

1. Labyrinth of Passions (Pedro Almodóvar, 1982): This is Almodóvar’s second film, when he still was a wacky, trashy punk. How many Academy Award-winning directors have appeared in their own films, in drag, performing a New Wave song that if I’m not mistaken is partly about having sex with rats in the sewer? I’m guessing not very many.
2. Waiting For Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996): I had never seen this, but I had seen Best In Show. This is better. It actually really reminded me of the best episodes of The Office, because you have the mockumentary factor, the fact that these are people whose lives you don’t necessarily envy and whose denials you can see through, but there’s still something really beautiful about them. I really loved the one guy on town council or whatever who was just completely enraptured with Corky.
3. Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2007): Okay, I’m not going to lie. This isn’t (as I’d hoped), a secret masterpiece. It’s not a good movie. Some parts of the story still don’t make sense, and not in a “man, this movie’s so complex” way, in a “there is no explanation for this chain of events” way. I was kind of okay with that, because all the porn stars and Marxists and WWIII and the oil running out and the scary government internet surveillance and the Rock being wrapped up in this big, sprawling messy narrative where everyone in the movie ends up riding a zeppelin kind of captures something real about the culture, even if I do think it was at least half accidental. But, more importantly, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. Every scene with Sarah Michelle Gellar is comedy gold (I’d really forgotten ho funny she is); and obviously all the Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri stuff was also actually funny, because Richard Kelly was all up with the political satire, but he still seemed to get that a lot of “Marxists” are really lame. For me though, the highlight was definitely Justin Timberlake, scarred and on drugs, lipsynching to “All These Things That I’ve Done” and pouring beer all over himself. Don’t ask me why.
   
4. Romance & Cigarettes (John Turturro, 2006): This is another neo-musical (which Southland Tales almost is), with actors singing along with old songs that express their feelings, and the ways that the musical sections, which start out clearly coded as fantasy, kind of seep into the world of the movie a bit. This one is strange, but it’s actually worth seeing. There’s an amazing cast (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker, Amy Sedaris, etc), it’s set in a working-class neighbourhood, it’s really depressing, and I have been thinking a lot about pop cultural nostalgia, of which this movie is a really interesting example. It’s like Woody Allen movies, in that it’s apparently set in the present day, but all the references are about a generation too old for everyone.