For The Film Majors

Notes From Lowes & the Coolidge Corner

After a few weeks of working night shifts amid bubbling chocolate and scraping forks, calling French etiquette consultants and New England craft brewery owners, pounding Tsing-Tao over chopsticks at Yan's Best Place Restaraunt, and watching Joaquin Poblate think he's Spiderman and climb a Beacon Hill brick wall while citing Boston housing statistics in a 50s radio announcer voice, let's review a few lessons learned from the cinematic experiences of the past several days, snatched amid all of this chaos, now that we have fifteen minutes to breathe.

Not more than fifteen minutes, though. Soon I have to put on a monkey suit and listen to Steve Schipps blow my mind at The Artist And The Making Of Meaning in a voice eerily reminiscent of the Big Lebowski.

Film reviews are not the province of this publication, though print & music reviews are, and so gleefully I can cast aside the pretense of critical detachment while saying three (3) - at most four (4) - things.

First, Josh Whedon's Serenity - Whedon being the script doctor for Waterworld and Toy Story as well as a writer, producer, and director for television shows that include "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Firefly," the Fox-aborted 11-episode series that Serenity continues - puts a boyish grin on my face so fucking big that even now, a week later, when Thom Fucking Dunn and I look at each other across burrito bar lunches and cranberry smoothies we will occasionally get giddy and start quoting lines. I haven't been this geeked out since I was 12, man. This is the biggest kick in the balls to George Lucas and shittily written pretense I've ever seen. I mean - and I say this as somebody who saw The Aristocrats last night, which also puts a big smile on my face - this is a Bob Saget detached-retina skullfuck to the Star Wars prequels and anybody who ever convinced themselves they were good. The writing's awesome, it lives inside out genre convention, it never takes itself too seriously, and in the end it's a Western-in-space with Chinese cursing, which is a dubious mouthful that turns into a great time. Sure, the trailer sucked, but isn't that always the case?

I mean, take National Lampoon's new movie, Pledge This!. Note the exclamation mark. If you're ever feeling really, really happy - like, post-Serenity happy - watching this trailer is a great way to sink you right back down to earth and make you go back to wanting to pull a Cobain. Pledge This! makes me fantasize about taking a time machine back to just after the premier of Animal House and throwing molotov cocktails into National Lampoon's central headquarters. Though if I had a time machine I probably wouldn't waste it on dreck like preventing Paris Hilton in a sorority movie. I'd be too busy hosting World Leader Boxing Matches and trying to convice Napolean to take the fall v. Gandhi.

Third and finally is something I hope you've seen already. Plunged into existential despair by shitty trailers? Seeing The Shining recut as a feel-good foster father drama might just save your life.

That's all for now. I've got work until midnight and a holiday to celebrate about a syphilitic European who enslaved a race.