Slowly Going Bald

And Pixar goes 10 for 10:

Click here for the review.

A good little TV-movie about Churchill and World War II:

Click here for the review.

Coming to America

Star Trek

"Glee"

Terminator Salvation

"Hitched or Ditched"

"Jesse James Is a Dead Man"

"The Goode Family"

Into the Storm

The Matrix

Up

I'm starting a new, limited series over at Pajiba to look back at some of the films of 1999. That was a great year for mainstream U.S. movies, and it was also a really good year to be 17 and starting to fall in love with the possibilities of the medium. I'm starting out with The Matrix, because why not, but I've got at least a dozen more titles in the hopper.

Click here for the review.

From Mike Judge, I expected a little more.

Click here for the review.

Jesse James doesn't come off as the sharpest knife in the drawer. This is not a total surprise.

Click here for the review.

I say it all in the Bottom Line: "I"m gonna go drink some bleach."

Click here for the review.

Like I told my sister: At first I was okay with it, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked it.

Click here for the review.

Man, when "Lost" went to a white screen, I just sat there, wondering how the hell I was going to survive until 2010 (!) to see what happened.

Also, in re: Locke, I gotta say: It feels good to be right. I don't do a lot of major theorizing about the show, but that one clicked with me back during "Dead Is Dead."

And finally, because I am a nerd like this, I am already planning my headline theme for next season's write-ups.

Click here for the recap.

A cute, energetic, funny show with lots of potential. (I hope I was able to convey that in the review; space constraints are killer at work, and 425 words is a "longer" review, which for anyone that knows me is a cruel, cruel joke.)

Click here for the review.

The first half of the season finale of "Lost" was, predictably, awesome:

Click here for the recap.

Rob: so want to see a potential future roommate of mine?
(sends link)
me: ...
huh
ask her what the 60s were like
Rob: the 60s?
me: the era in which she was born?
Rob: ah yes
me: maybe she's just done some hard living
Rob: haha
me: i think you should live with her
Rob: ryan thought she was hot
me: um
no, she's not
she's not repulsive
but i am not attracted to a woman whose chest looks like ricardo montalban's in Wrath of Khan

We had seen pictures of naked women before, as children. We discovered a weather-beaten issue of "Playboy" in an alley when I was in elementary school, the pages whitened by sun and rain. There was discussion and argument about who would take it. I don't remember who did. There was also Jason, who lived with his grandfather a couple blocks over, said grandfather being the owner of what we would still now consider a large collection of skin magazines but what back then appeared to be an almost terrifying amount. Some of these were rougher than others, offering images whose effects would scar over and dull the parts of us that needed tending.

We had seen the pictures, but actually finding a way to own the pictures was another challenge. (Sex itself was to most of us a bump on a distant and fogged horizon, a place to possibly be reached but not without a long and arduous journey through as yet uncharted territory.) I took driver's education at the local mall, and on dinner break one night walked into a store that sold memorabilia, sports cards, movie scripts, and various pop culture items that didn't go together.

They also sold old magazines, including back issues of "Playboy," that name revered by the pubescent and yearning. It was winter or spring of 1998, and among their plastic-bagged and retagged issues was December 1997, boasting pictorials of Miss Canada among what could only be a wealth of glories. The centerfold that month was Karen McDougal, who would go on to become Playmate of the Year; apparently my subconscious wanted a good one. I was too young to even drive, let alone buy the magazine, so I did what any 15-year-old would do when driven to frenzied madness by his hormones: I stole it.

I slid it into my red 1-inch binder and went back to class, keeping it behind the paper as I took notes and waited. I don't remember which parent picked me up, but I do remember the ride home, holding the binder as still as possible on my lap, praying to the God I was sure I was dishonoring to not let the notebook slide or fall. I was even so terrified of being found out that I kept it in my backpack and took it to school for days, as if it were a grenade without a pin, something that could detonate and destroy my life if I didn't keep constant watch.

The pictures lodged themselves deep in my brain, the way songs or movies do, only really making their hold known over time. I would see more, but these remain the first I ever owned, and in some weird and kind of nostalgic but also admittedly not good way, I've never forgotten them. I got rid of the magazine at one point, either plagued by fear or swept up in a fit of righteousness I likely regretted hours later, but I don't remember when or where or how it left. I didn't have it when I went to college.

It took me a while to even realize I wanted to tell the story, even though I'm still not sure what the point of the telling could be. I guess it's just one of those high school things that eventually processes itself and needs to be spit out.

I wrote the feature package at work for the 100th episode of "The Office," which included a story about the series and an interview with Greg Daniels. (Daniels, who's a dry and very funny guy, also worked on the fantastic and underrated "King of the Hill.")

Click here for the story.

Click here for the Q&A.

I'm looking for as many songs as I can find about California. I started out with those songs that featured the state's name in the title, and here's what I got:

"California Stars," Billy Bragg and Wilco
"California," Josh Ritter
"Going to California," Led Zeppelin
"California Dreamin'," The Mamas and the Papas
"California Girls," The Beach Boys
"California," Rufus Wainwright
"Back to California," The Wallflowers
"All the Gold in California," Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers
"California," Phantom Planet
"California Love," Tupac and Dre
"California," Mason Jennings
"Come to California," Matthew Sweet
"Just Like California," Old 97's

Then I narrowed the list to Los Angeles:

"Los Angeles," Denison Witmer
"Los Angeles Is Burning," Bad Religion
"Los Angeles," Counting Crows

I'm looking for more, but am also willing to take songs that mention the state in the verses and not the title. (Like, for example, Ryan Adams' "La Cienega Just Smiled.")

Let me hear it.

• This is the best Star Trek film to date. Hands down. The various series and movies were too susceptible to getting caught up in hard science, but really, no one cares that you can defeat the evil space cloud by blasting it with a tachyon pulse. The best stories are the ones about characters, and that's what this movie had. Kirk and Spock were simply but effectively drawn, on opposite sides of the fence when it came to following procedure but united in their desire to get revenge against the man who killed their parents. For the first time since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the film was actually about someone.

• The screenplay's alternate timeline device was ingenious. The film takes place before the original series and films, but it opens with the enemy ship traveling back in time and changing the past, killing Kirk's father before he could get to know him. The idea was efficiently introduced on the bridge of the Enterprise years later, and driven home by the elderly Spock's confusion that Kirk was the ship's first officer, not captain. It was a perfect way to admit that the characters originated in a separate series of stories but are now free to create new ones without ruining what some consider an unimpeachable canon. J.J. Abrams' film exists in a new universe, one with unwritten stories.

• The humor was perfectly done, a mix of one-liners and slapstick that was still always rooted firmly in character. One of the many things that made the scene where Bones kept injecting Kirk with various ailments so funny was that it wouldn't have played the same with any other characters. It had to be these two guys, and that's what made it click.

• The effects were dazzling and slick, and the production design was gorgeously crowded. The bridge of "The Next Generation" looked like a Chevy Suburban, but the glistening, white deck of Abrams' redesigned ship was a way of literally starting over with a blank slate as well as honoring the overall aesthetic of retro-futurism. A lot of the film is meant to look like what people in the 1960s thought the future might look like, and it's fantastically executed.

"Lost" keeps barreling ahead, adding one more solid episode to an already strong season:

Click here for the recap.

I have been, and always shall be, your friend.

Really good movie:

Click here for the review.

The best way to start this is with some background.

I attended Abilene Christian University from 2000-2004, and in the fall of my sophomore year, I pledged one of the school's local fraternities. (ACU calls them social clubs, since they're not part of a national system and they require a good deal more willingness to wear satin and harmonize, which is a whole other thing to unpack, but whatever.) I was a member of Gamma Sigma Phi, and choosing that club was one of the best choices I made at school.

Our rival club was called Galaxy, because why not. We were the two biggest men's clubs on campus, and each passed down their dislike of the other guys every year to the new pledge class. I pledged in the fall of 2001, and there happened to be at that time a large number of douchebags who were one or two years older, both in my club — a tall, slope-faced asshat named Cade Thompson — and in Galaxy. One of the elder members of Galaxy who was known for giving their pledges and ours a particularly hard time was a guy named Ted Misledine. There are all manner of stories of him harassing guys and being generally dickish; a guy in my pledge class who would go on to become club secretary made jokes about Ted in a few of our weekly newsletters, and was subsequently told through a mutual acquaintance to "watch his back." But as much grief as he gave GSP and our pledges, he was much worse to the incoming Galaxy guys.

So that's Ted.

Every fall, each club has a party called a grub; it's a costumed and catered affair centered around a theme chosen by the pledges, who are also responsible for planning the event and providing the entertainment. (For reasons I could go into but don't have the space for, the guys' grubs tended to have better acts.) A guy my age named Austin Lawrence who was pledging Galaxy had had enough of Ted's all-purpose douchery and decided to write a song called, simply, "Ted Misledine" and perform it at their grub. It's a funny, sweet-sounding little song that talks about hitting him in the crotch with a baseball bat and accuses Ted of cruising for underage girls and cross-dressing. It's basically what you'd expect a 19-year-old to write, and it's great.

Sometime before or after the grub, Austin recorded the song in his dorm room and put the mp3 on his shared folder, and I grabbed it and have had the pleasure of listening to it ever since. I can't quite remember who's doing back-up vocals; my gut says Chad Huston, but I'm prepared to be totally wrong and would welcome correction from any Wildcats who know better. Also, I should confess I never met Ted, or at least I don't think I did. (I'm not even sure I'm spelling his surname correctly.) If I met him now, he'd just be some guy about my age, but because of what he put my friends through, his legend has grown until he's become a mythic name connected with memories I forgot I ever made.

For your listening pleasure, I tossed a few random photos of Abilene together and set it to the song and put it on YouTube. But really, the cheap visuals are just a placeholder. Enjoy the song, and for those who knew the singer or the subject, pass it along:

It's the worst nightmare I've ever had. I say that because though it's possible that since then I've had dreams more legitimately frightening — sometimes my subconscious really lets loose — this is the one that's stuck with me.

I was 11 years old, and had borrowed Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark from the school library. Although I was only in 6th grade, I was a pretty advanced reader with a hyperactive imagination; I had read Tolkien in elementary school and would curiously pluck Stephen King's It from the racks at the public library a year later. On top of that, the Scary Stories books were extremely popular among kids my age, taking root in the kind of groupthink that can sweep through schools and create weird sub-universes throughout the city. (There was also a hardcover Encyclopedia of Dogs that was weirdly but powerfully beloved by the student body, so much so that the librarian classified it as a reference book and wouldn't lend it out.)

Anyway: The stories are moderately creepy, especially if you're in middle school, but the real killer is the artwork accompanying them, these disturbing and haunting images done in some combination of ink and watercolor and pure unfiltered terror. One image shocked me more than any other, and I'm not quite sure I remember correctly which story it accompanied, but it scared me. It was a woman with no face, just a worn skull and stringy hair, and jagged black holes where her eyes should have been. I hated it on a deep level I could barely define. That's what caused the nightmare.

In the nightmare, I was reading the book in my English class and came across the disturbing art, so I walked up to my teacher's desk to show it to her and complain about how frightening it was. "But why?" she asked. "We're all like that, Daniel." And I saw that her face had become the dead woman's, limp hair plastered to a gleaming skull. I looked around the room, and the rest of the students had turned into the same stark horror. I couldn't escape.

That's when I woke up.

I searched for that image online and found it right away; I've attached it below the fold for the morbidly curious, but I can barely look at it. I squinted or shielded part of the screen when downloading and then uploading the picture. If I'd just come to the image now, I'd find it unsettling, but because it's so inextricably tied to a childhood memory of pure fright, I can't look at it without beginning to breathe heavily and feel the slow creep of fear, like I'm still 11. I guess that's the point, in a way.

As part of our ongoing Pajiba Blockbusters series, I once again take a look at a modern classic. This time around, it's Coming to America.

Click here for the review.

Think about it.

A pretty solid episode of "Lost," and its 100th to boot.

Click here for the recap.