Wednesday, August 20, 2008

No Detour Needed Here....

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Just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, first released back in September of 2006. One hell of a book, I must say. It's one of those stories that packs such a hidden wallop on your emotions and senses, you're left almost blindsided with self-directed questions, soul searching, passion for living. Humanity is veered at with a strong sense of duality; the darkest sides of man make you cringe and want to go postal, yet the beauty of true love and bonds give you hope. It's heavy stuff, I tell you.

The aftermath of an unspoken, unknown, mysterious global apocalypse. Buildings are charred, burnt to the ground or abandoned or half-sustained. Mother Nature cries gray tears, dusty gray snowfall and freezing-cold raindrops. The streets look like dust-filled corners of bedrooms. Corpses, mostly decomposed to extreme degrees, clutter the scenery. The lucky few who have survived have been left as shells of humanity---scruffy, scarred, unhealthy, clad in whatever garments they can scrounge up from the corpses they pass. No electricity to keep them warm. Just whatever fires they can muster up outdoors. The majority of those still living have devolved into the most savage degree of man, resorting to cannibalism to maintain breathing and killing whomever crosses their path out of a sort-of self-imposed survival necessity.

But "the man" and his son, "the boy," are two of the 'good guys.' Heading in an uncertain direction that they hope is South, they're hoping to make it to the sea, where they can ideally make an escape from the cruel world they're clinging to reluctantly. All they have is each other. All they need is each other. The boy, optimistic and innocent, yet maturing at a rapid pace. His one and only, his father, is a tortured soul, haunted by dreams of his loving wife who gave up on living and abandonded her family, constantly considering suicide yet harboring such urges at the sight of his dear offspring. If he dies, who'll look after the boy? He'd rather the boy die alongside him, so they can both enter the better place together. But, of course, he can't kill his own flesh and blood.


[I wrote that, btw. I didn't copy and paste from the book cover. I just wanted it to exist understandably as my own synopsis]

There's so much that I'm admiring about this book. It's one of those works of literature that makes a writer, or somebody who even fancies his or herself as one, immediately want to step his or her game up. Drastically. You think, could I ever create such an amazing piece of work, written with such clarity and such a distinct tone and secular vision? It's a National Bestseller and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, so please believe, I'm not merely blowing smoke here.

McCarthy employs so many unique touches here. Two particularly ring brilliantly for me: 1) Providing no actual names for any of the characters, for instance. In the post-apocalyptic world he's created, mankind is a mere fragment of what it once was, and nobody is special. Nobody is doing better than any others, alas nobody deserves any special distinction. 2) Never breaking the story up into chapters is another. It moves swiftly and urgently, yet is only divided into nut graphs, extended line breaks. It's a reader's equivalent to two love-driven survivors traveling across a barren wasteland with no clear path. They're just moving forward, just as the reader is here.

McCarthy's use of language is also something to behold. Example, explaining the bond between the father and son:
"....each the other's world entire."
The emptiness of their world:
"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already/ The sacred idiom shorn of its referants and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."
Questioning his existence after killing a man to protect his son:
"This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job."

Those are just examples I'm especially liking at this present moment. There's endless amounts of others. I could say so much more about this book, but I'll leave up to others to seek it out and read it for themselves. There's a movie adaptation coming out in mid-November, starring the great Viggo Mortensen. I doubt it'll better this book, but I have high hopes for it to at least do this work extreme justice. If not, at least the book is here to save itself.

We all travel down our own personal roads. After reading this, I'm fully realizing just how important it is to not take your life journey solo. You'll never make it out alive in the end.

Eat Your Soup

The Soup has officially taken over Family Guy as the funniest show on TV, according to yours truly. It was a tough, bloody fight to the finish, but Joel McHale and his clips emerged victorious.

The Soup's weapons of choice? Stuff like this:



Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Two Seconds In Heaven

Where would I be without life's simple pleasures. The one-or-two second happening that, for that brief instance, makes life seem like a treasure. Something worth hunting for and worth risking it all to unlock. Something with endless amounts of bounty stuffed deep within its perameters.

**Looking at a picture of Gianna and Nicholas sitting with Uncle Matt on a couch, as the rest of his family sings "Happy Birthday," not caring that Uncle Matt is turning 26, not 12, and that family sing-a-longs are better suited for younger kids, not adult men. But its that unconditional family love that keeps Uncle Matt going, and as they're singing, he's hoping that this same scene will be taking place on his 46th birthday.


**Walking into the front door of my parents' house every Thursday night and being greeted first by Zoey, the world's greatest canine and the one living being in this existence who is always happy to see me, no matter how bad my day was or how much stress I'm under, unbeknownst to those around me. She loves me with such a genuine conviction that I don't see her a four-legged nonhuman, but as an equal. A loved one, loved just as much as any other family member would be.

**Glancing into a mirror and thinking, "Damn, I'm looking pretty good,' knowing that not-so-many years ago the mere thought of a mirror reflection of myself would send chills down my spine. "I've really come a long way, huh? Yes, you have. Now look out, world. Here I come!"

**Tossing my DVD copy of the French horror masterpiece INSIDE into my laptop, just to watch the scene that always sends positive chills down my spine and gets me thinking, "One day, I'll write a scene just as subtle, simplistic, but simultaneously chilling and visceral" as the moment when the heroine emerges from the kitchen, bloodied up and covering the gaping hole in her neck with duct-tape, holding that homemade spear in her hands. Her head peers upward, eyes darting through the camera lens, acting as a cue for the most tribal and charging musical score I've ever heard.

**The moment when my pops says, "Don't forget to call me when you get back to your apartment" every time he drops me off at the NJ Transit station, knowing that he loves me so much that he won't rest easily until he knows for certain that I've arrived back safely and in one piece.

**The instance when my mom and I finish ordering our meals during our frequent weekend mother-and-son weekend dining excursions, knowing that the two of us have a good hour to chit-chat and bond. Even when the conversation is routine and hardly-revealing, it still feels right.

**Thinking back to my freshman year of college, that one random weekend I went back home to reunite briefly with family. My older brother, who I'd always thought saw me as a lame, walked into the kitchen wearing a St. John's University baseball cap. See, SJU was my school of study. He was so proud of me that he voluntarily chose to buy a cap representing the university his younger brother decided to attend.

Life has many more simple pleasures....I'm sure I'll feel inspired to add some more to this in the future. For now, though, these are some of the components to Uncle Matt's happiness.

Without each, I can't even imagine.....

Diggin' in the Fantastic Crates

I'm sure few will disagree with me here, but man did those two FANTASTIC FOUR movies really suck. Bad acting, lame stories, poor scripts, shoddy direction, etc etc etc

Jessica Alba as an invisible woman? WTF? I mean, her sexy factor has declined immensely over the years, peaking with her SIN CITY pole-dancing erotica, but still, the girl will forever be hot in some ways. So why the hell cast her as a gal who fellas CAN'T see? Dumbasses.

But yeah, those flicks were real turds, which makes the fact that this trailer I uncovered on Youtube seems better all the more sad. Handled by the infamous schlock-meister Roger Corman (dude is a veteran and notorious for producing and directing some of the most enjoyably-sleazy and low-grade cinema ever created), FANTASTIC FOUR was actually first turned into a movie way way back in 1994, but assumably because of the film's shitty quality and other ramifications, it was shelved and has yet to see the light of day. Fortunately, this trailer is available, and damn do I wish I could've seen this version over the two terrible ones we were cursed with. Enjoy the cheese:


Monday, August 18, 2008

Reading really is fundamental....who knew?!

If I truly want to be the unabashed cinephile that I long to be seen as, there's one crucial missing piece to the puzzle, and thankfully, I've realized it. And now, it's time ro remedy this dilemma.

So many movies, particularly ones currently in production or on the eve of release that I'm anticipating like Amy Winehouse does the crack, originate from books. You know, those hardcover/paperback collections of narrative pages and literature that I've neglected for far too long, opting for magazine stories and more recently comic books/graphic novels. The graphic novels are here to stay, as are mag pieces, but now I'm adding the fiction prose into the mix. I'm pretty geeked, too. Barnes & Noble is such an untapped resource, I'm envisioning many a dollar bill being dropped within its walls from here on out.

I started my first entry into this personal renaissance earlier tonight, and I'm alredy halfway through it, because it's fucking amazing so far:

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

The reason why this is my first choice is because its the source material for a new movie coming around Thanksgiving that looks pretty great, and I keep hearing how stellar the book is, Pulitzer Prize and all. Plus, McCarthy wrote the No Country for Old Men book, and that movie rocked my world, so now seeing how briliant a scribe he is, I'll have to go back and read No Country, the book, now, and hope that the Coen Brothers' take won't become totally inferior as a result.

But yeah, The Road is really some breathtaking reading, and I'll report back with a full post-game report on it once I'm done. Which, at the rate I'm going, could be like tomorrow or Thursday night.

And I'm totally open to book suggestions, if anybody wants to drop a note with some recommendations. Any and everything, other than lame romance novels that my mom would read. Clarification: if Fabio is on the cover, please keep the fact that you actually liked said book to yourself. Reps should grow bigger, not deplete.

No Thanks

Whoever said "chivalry is dead" is probably just as big an asshole as all of these people who refuse to acknowledge it when its presented her/his way. A bit harsh? Perhaps, but in my experiences, at least, the majority of the people in this world wouldn't know an unnecessarily-kind gesture if it politely smacked them in the face. Excuse me..."this world" should be replaced with "New York City and the northern parts of New Jersey,' my common dwellings and the places where I unconsciously go out of my way to be courteous, but rarely am shown love back for it.

Maybe it's a bit self-important to feel this way, but I ponder: is it that difficult to say 'thank you' to somebody who holds open a door for you? Especially when this door-holding lad has been holding said door for a good 10 or more seconds, having seen you approach yet wasting a good 12 seconds his day to spare you the chore of opening said door yourself? I think not. But alas, people seem to have some sort of allergic reaction to acknowledging when I do such an act for them, and it's pretty astonishing to me.

Here, good ol' me, who says "thank you" and salutations of the such more often than I probably should. Maybe I'm a chump for doing so, who the hell knows. It just comes naturally to me, I guess it's good parenting on my 'rents behalf, or just some internal inclination to go about my days as positively as humanly possible.

But it's wearing thin on me, this lack of respect from fellow pedestrians. Not to say I'm going to stop holding doors for people, or allowing people to go ahead of me on lines if we both arrive at the line's end at the same second. I'll surely just continue to let the resentment fester inside, 'til one day I unexpectedly slam a door right on some asshole's face. I can picture it now: as the hard door surface smashes into his nose, busting it open for a stream of red to pour out like somebody bit into a juicy chocolate-covered cherry, I'll stand there, Joker-like grin from cheeck to cheek. And then this broken-nose chap comes toward me, looking to fight back, but I swiftly unleash all of the pent-up rage from my lifelong lack of respect on the rest of his face, sparing the nose simply for the purpose of not adding insult to present injury.

All because that asshole lady with the scowl on her unpleasant face had to push into me even as I had the door for her miserable ass. Well played, bitch.

Surprisingly, I'm kinda smiling while writing this, though it may seem as if I've had to wipe off the fumes that have left my steaming ears and collected on the laptop monitor. Call it "silent rage," if you will.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

A Shot of Brandi

Really, my shame over this shouldn't be something I feel the need to defend or preface with a disclaimer, being that tons of my friends admittedly adore this trashy show, too, but still, my pride begs me to do so:

I Love Money is currently my favorite show on the boob-tube, save for my obsessive viewing habits surrounding Family Guy repeats on The Cartoon Network. But yes, I Love Money is the guiltiest of all guilty pleasures, a televisial feast that truly provides zero benefits to its viewers other than hot people and cold humanity. But I'll be damned if a Sunday goes by without me catching the latest episode. And more often than not, I opt for the first lowket airing at 11:30am, something VH1 doesn't advertise for whatever reason, but works wonders in allowing me to still have a Sunday night to myself, having already seen the shitshow episode in all of its seedy glory.

Going into the series, my personal favorite female from any of these ...of Love shows was Hoopz. Physically fit, gorgeous, sporty, cool personality, stays away from the drama (for the most part), and hotter than my bedroom without any AC in the dead of July, Hoopz had it all. But gradually, as the show has commenced, I've switched over to the bimbo side: Brandi C. is my present infatuation (well, "infatuation" in the most innocent, TV watcher sense, of course).

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[not the best picture, but it'll do....plus, that Vodka bottle only strengthens the points I'm about to make]

I don't know what it is about her. Typically, I'm not big on blondes, especially ones who bring the airhead-y, slutty-in-aura presence of a Paris Hilton type. But Brandi C. has me questioning my tastes. Have I gone over to the blonde side full force? Doubtful, but at least when it comes to her, I'm all about it. She just seems like the kind of chick who'd knock back some Petron shots with me and party the night away. No strings attached. No questions asked. No philosophical debates. Just wild times.

Maybe I'm totally misjudging her, and VH1 has painted in a way that masks her actual intelligence and multi-faceted character. But alas, unless I'm ever given the chance to hang out with her, this is all I have to work with: what I see on I Love Money. Hell, she just vomited profusely and apparently swallowed some of it after having to digest her meal for a challenge, and I'm still feeling her sexy ass. Which proves that, my heart will....go on.

Feel free to hate all you want, or condemn for liking such a bimbo. I'm already beating myself over it, so sticks and stones will do very little, my friends.