Here's the biggest thing I've ever written, a story spanning almost fifty years. It's about California in the 1970s, old highways, and one of those "crimes of the century" you used to hear about. I worked on it a long time and I think it's pretty good.
Blue Beetle had a $120 million budget and it looks like, if this box office revitalization holds, it could make as much as fifty, maybe even sixty dollars.
I don't care why Sam Elliott is in the news, but the single funniest thing about that dude is that he's from Sacramento. He's just going around with that mustache acting like he's not from the same town as Joan Didion and we let him get away with it.
No matter how weird you think Tom Cruise is, he's the ultimate movie star. This is a clip of a guy almost killing himself at the edge of the earth's atmosphere. Tickets to his movies should cost extra.
I love how the internet used to have tucked away corners where you could be funny and weird and they’ve all been replaced by three megacorporations that are fueled largely by people screaming at each other and falling victim to barely disguised data harvesting.
Mad Men was great and all, but I'm a huge fan of Jon Hamm's second career popping into whatever comedy shoots near his house so he can play one of the dumbest people ever to live.
The thing about Democrats that alienates me completely from the party is who they pick for president. Half the time they don't just pick a bad candidate, they pick *the worst candidate possible.* Then they guilt you into pragmatism and lose anyway. It's like they *want* to lose.
Priscilla Presley with my daughter Annie and me. She has endured the loss of a child with grace and courage. She has a new movie out called Priscilla based on her book. I’m writing a book based on my experience with KGB style weaponized prosecutions and imprisonment.
Can't believe they finally arrested the guy who spent the last ten years ending every sentence he said with "you know, this reminds me of when I was in Las Vegas and murdered Tupac Shakur with a gun that I think I still have in my garage somewhere."
Video game history is great because it hasn't been written about that much, which makes it all sound insane. Marlon Brando was in a Godfather game for the Xbox but his lines weren't really usable because he was on oxygen. I didn't even make that up.
Fun part of watching Buster Keaton movies is being blown away by a stunt and wondering how he did it, then looking it up and finding out the answer is "it actually almost killed him every time and would probably be illegal now."
Maybe the funniest thing futurists got wrong is video calling. It was invented fast, perfected really fast, and anybody can do it anywhere. But it sucks. It's just terrible. Everybody looks like they're being held hostage. Bring back landlines.
Everybody talks about how wages have gone down, but nobody talks enough about how every job posting has a section like “this job is very hard. We are going to punish you. We are going to break you. Your marriage is trash to us and your son is a coward.”
Elon M*sk is a reddit libertarian, and reddit libertarianism is malignant because 14 year olds get hooked on it through memes and cartoons. *That’s* the future of funneling wealth upward, union busting, and killing the working class. Not the old guard GOP, which is dying.
Remember when John Krasinski made a fake show about how covid lockdown is just kind of a weird fun slumber party and cashed out for like $5 million? Obvious proof money isn't real.
@LydiaBurrell
I’m a high school algebra teacher in the Los Angeles unified school district and I just wanted to commend you for sitting down and actually getting this math right. It’s so hard to make people care.
A hellworld parenthetical that everybody’s too tired to mention but is extremely annoying is that everybody gets twenty spam calls a day. We just let that one go.
Norm Macdonald is the reason I'm a writer. There's not a second reason. I studied him growing up. He got me my first job. I'm crushed. Rest in peace to the best comedian on earth.
It makes my heart warm to watch Facebook’s stock collapse under the weight of their own hubris. And it’s hilarious that Mark Zuckerberg’s genius idea for stalking people at Harvard was only useful for perpetrating a fascist uprising. It comprehensively damns technocrats.
I got MoviePass for Christmas, and I've seen about $150 of movies on it, so the gift was worthwhile, but the amount of entertainment I've gotten following their insane and terrible business model - essentially "let's lose a fortune for no reason" - is priceless.
Pitch: a gritty reboot of the singing frog cartoon and the trailer is a little girl singing a minor key version of Hello Ma Baby over a toy piano. The last shot is the frog (Tom Hardy) standing behind a stage curtain adjusting his top hat.
A friend asked for the best songs named after a woman (Jolene, Deanna, fifty billion others), and I just realized I can't think of any great songs named after a man unless he's a historical figure (Jesse James, Johnny Appleseed, Jesus). And half of them are traditionals.
I love the strips where Watterson, with no outside pressure, decided to make his job way harder. The soap opera strips and the film noir strips seem like a giant pain in the ass, and he definitely didn’t get paid extra for it.
It is important to remember at this moment in history that if two billionaires are fighting, both of them can be terrible people whose souls escaped their bodies decades ago. You don't have to pick a side.
I can’t believe we killed Tom from Myspace for allowing automatic ska revival playlists but we did nothing to Facebook for aiding the installation of a government that can only be described as one part authoritarianism and two parts clickbait.
Just in from Warner Bros: during Burbank reshoots for SPACE JAM 2: A NEW LEGACY (2021), a lighting rig collapsed on Bugs Bunny, severing his spine. He was rushed to Cedars-Sinai where he went into sudden cardiac arrest and died. He was 83.
I went to college in Malibu for four damn years and only now, at 30, do I realize that going to the beach kicks ass and it’s free. I’m furious at myself. I used to live a mile away and I decided to be sad with Nick Cave records instead.
You know, we’re probably only three months out from a major studio western with a trailer where an eight year old girl sings a half-speed version of Old Town Road over a toy piano.
Remember when people tried to make Mark Zuckerberg run for president even though his only qualification was making a surveillance network for perverts? Good times.
We watched the “despecialized” version of Star Wars last night. That thing is astonishing, like seeing the movie for the first time after getting lasik surgery, like seeing Pinocchio become a real boy. It’s monstrous what George Lucas did to his poor movie.
Oh no, it’s Thanksgiving dinner and my Trump-supporting uncle who loves to start political arguments forgot to put a turkey on the table and just put a huge pile of loaded guns on a tray instead and he’s telling me to eat the guns.
Let this be said about MoviePass: a bunch of people got to see movies for practically nothing because somebody successfully ripped off a bunch of venture capitalist paypigs. That's kind of beautiful.
Just tried out that Martin Scorsese thing of just leaving TCM on all day and getting distracted by it for a couple minutes an hour, and gotta say, that rules. Best channel, no contest. Zaslav is psychotic.
Intellectual Dark Web Translator:
Taboo Ideas: eugenics
Free Thinking: eugenics
[any statistic at all for any reason]: eugenics
Incomprehensible discussion of Renaissance art or European cities that seems totally performative and doesn't seem provoked by anything: eugenics
Alright, I got my billion dollars, my girlfriend is one of the coolest art-pop performers alive, and my solid gold private Space Shuttle I only use for sex tourism is almost out of the shop. Time to... constantly shitpost on Twitter?
I'm friends with a really old guard marketing VP at Hasbro and he has confirmed on the record that Potato Head is a communist and defected to the USSR in 1968. Says the only way he'll set foot on US soil again is in a coffin.
Joe Biden is the candidate of vampires who don’t care about you and are so sheltered they believe America works when it doesn’t. The man himself is a sad relic of the ‘50s in cognitive free fall. If he were the Democrat nominee, he would *brutally* lose.
Streaming is a scam that conditions consumers to forget the importance and necessity of ownership, to instead subscribe to the profit-maximizing whims of a megacorporation. Continued unabated, it will mutilate the history of film and music. Tech isn’t going to save us.
I dug Barbie, but nobody's gonna learn the right lesson from it (fun star-driven one-offs are good) and we're gonna end up with origin stories for Frigidaire and Uber Eats. Can't wait for 2025's highest grossing movie: CAP'N, the epic story of Cap'n Crunch, starring Danny Devito.
One thing I love about Quentin Tarantino is that his opinions are almost outsider art. He’ll say Paul Newman was the worst actor ever or the last great movie star was Jim Brown or Chinatown could have been better with some reshoots that he’s actually doing and completely mean it.
And yeah, I know there's actual cowboy culture up there. I used to live in Redding. He could just stand to tone it down a bit. He's from the Lady Bird part of norcal, not the Merle Haggard part.
That revival was so weird. People green-screened in, lighting so bad it's like it was taken on an early digital camera that advertised having video capability, and so much ADR you wonder if anybody was on the same planet.
An underrated great thing about X is that not only can you not google the band name, you can’t even google their singer, John Doe. They’ve got the worst SEO in music.
Depression is good to me. Love fighting a war to leave my apartment. It whips ass to feel like I’m one wrong move from total ruin. Nick Cave’s music just sounds like normal music also.
Louis CK is so narcissistic he not only thought he could make a monument to his predatory behavior, but he also thought people would love him for it. Good riddance to a horrible person, and good riddance to his toxic platform.
It’s your last chance, Disney. You still have 24 hours to change the ending of Star Wars to Bill Murray in that cantina doing his Star Wars lounge song. You can save this thing.
This story is incredible. A near-flawless mimic who impersonates studio executives and leaves no paper trail, working for shadowy goons in Indonesia, with intimate knowledge of Hollywood industry speak. If only Robert Stack could narrate the movie.
Congratulations to whatever city Amazon picks for its new location on having rents go up so much that the working class gets priced out and replaced with a bunch of people who have never seen the city before and love eating at Chipotle!!
The continued phenomenon of anyone believing in the Mandela effect is so odd. You misremembered three or four pieces of children's entertainment and don't know anything about African politics and that's proof of alternate dimensions even though there are no other examples.
What really makes this joke is actually the setup. How Ben Gazzara writes so seriously on the notepad before tearing off the paper and saying “excuse me,” like it was really really important and somber.
Jimmy Carter has spent nearly the last forty years of his life doing ministry and charity work, which is really the minimum amount of time you should spend atoning for being president.
Artists who died young and you're positive what they'd have done if they lived:
Hendrix: 40 jazz fusion albums. Good stuff hiding in there but he jumped labels too much for a real best-of.
Joe Strummer: Clash tour, new Clash EP, two songwriter albums
Phil Hartman: on Mad Men
I would kill to make a movie that takes place entirely in the desolate and barren parallel universe that we only witnessed once, in 1970s magazine food photography.
Today in good news: I just saw a dog free himself from an apartment, run a quarter mile into the LA River, completely submerge himself in the filthy water, then feverishly roll in a pile of dirt and garbage before leisurely walking back into the apartment like nothing happened.
The thing HBO never understood about why True Detective worked: Matthew McConaughey proving in every frame that he's a superstar. You thought of him as one guy and he proved he could be a completely different guy. It's like if Ricky Nelson made a metal album and it was good.
I give it two weeks before there's a flamethrower-related death that was specifically instigated by an argument about Rick & Morty. I am prepared to wager my entire fortune, $45,000,000 and my estate in the Hamptons, that this will take place.