The Gospel According to Prisco

Sometimes I Try To Do Things And They Just Don’t Turn Out The Way I Wanted To

That’s right, chilluns.  I gots to review Postal up at Pajiba.  And to be truthful and honest, I really, really, really wanted to like this.  I own the motherfucking videogame.  Right before the screening, I went back to the Paradise Mall and shot up Gary Coleman in his tiny white Scarface suit.  

One thing I forgot to mention in the review that’s been garnering most of the controversy is the scene with the cat silencer.  The Postal Dude sticks a gun up a cat’s ass and uses it as a silencer to shoot one of the Taliban in the head.  I hadn’t realized that people tossed such a hissyfit because frankly, that’s direct from the videogame.  You use cats as silencers.  They don’t die afterwards, which is even funnier.  In a game full of horrible things, including gunning down your own dog because you step in the dogshit, they keep the cat alive.  Actually, Boll actively made the choice to keep the cat alive after it gets used as a muffler.  So if anything he was avoiding PETA levels of tormenet.  

I just want him to remember that when he’s punching me later.  

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

I guess once you’ve made something as miraculous as Haunted, a reality TV, fifteen minute whore version of the most fucked up Canterbury Tales, you are bound to fuck up a bit.  I thought Rant was decent, but Snuff just drops the ball. 

It’s basically the story of Cassie Wright, an aging porn star who plans on breaking the world gangbang record by taking 600 men.  The story is told from the point of view of three of the men: an aging male porn legend, a washed-up television actor, and a young man who may be the illegitimate child of Cassie Wright.  We also get perspective from the porn queen’s assistant, Sheila.  Essentially, Cassie might be trying to fuck herself to death to give her lost child the insurance money. 

None of the characters are appealing or interesting in any way, which says a lot for a Palahniuk novel, who peoples his stories with the absolutely dregs of society.  And while it’s layered with the usual nuggets of trivial intrigue one has come to expect, it’s also got a lot of terrible, terrible lame jokes.  Particularly, the names of the porn movies.  I mean, it reads like a bad email forward written by a sexually starved english major.  Cassie’s features are on constant loop, so we are bombarded by something in the neighborhood of 80 titles like A Handmaid’s Tail and Beat Me In St. Louis.  While mildly clever, the device gets old real fast. 

Also, all the porn stars have liquor as their last names (with the exception of Cassie Wright and the authentic names peppered throughout).   Branch Bacardi, Cord Cuervo, Biff Bailey.  I guess these are all riffs on Jenna Jameson, or else they’re just kind of lazy on the part of Palahniuk.

At a brief and unsatisfying pace falling just a cunt hair short of 200 pages, the book just doesn’t capitalize on it’s premise.  Even as they start to whirl through the mystery and the set up, what was supposed to play out like a Rasho-porn, ends up as thinly plotted and characterized as late night Skinimax flick.  Maybe that’s the clever point that Palahniuk’s trying to make, and I just didn’t get it, but really, he’s far too talented and creative to have jerked out this mess. 

It’s not bad enough to start pulling the sticks from Stephen King and going after him with torches and pitchforks, but I’m starting to see the cracks in the facade.  And no amount of shaving and concealer can make those go away. 

Princess Naughty and the Voodoo Cadillac by Fred Willard

Do I really need to go any further than that title to tell you that this is fucking hilariously told story?  Honestly? 

It’s not THAT Fred Willard (I made the same mistake) but this guy’s got some brutal comedy in his bones.   It’s set in Atlanta, and has all the pomp and insanity of Tim Dorsey and Serge Storms’ Florida.  Basically, it’s a heist, kind of Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen, but it’s got more in line with say Tom Robbins or Christopher Moore. 

I believe Christopher Moore is the one who recommended this to me, and I’ve yet to go wrong on one of his suggestions (still need to make my way over to Bill Fitzhugh and Joe Lansdale).  He’s got an earlier novel called Down on Ponce that I’m itching to pick up.

To try to explain this plot gives so much of the ridiculousness joy of letting it unfurl.   For the most part, it’s a pretty wrote backstabbing, fake CIA type tale, with kinda gangsters, billionaire frogs, and a guy named The Shitass Ronnie Gordon.  Mostly because he’s a shitass.  Nobody is particularly nice in the novel, and that’s what makes it so fun to read.  I don’t know if Willard has done anything beyond the two, but I aim to find out.

I libraried this one, and I suggest you do the same.  But it’s definitely worth a gander.  

Small Favor: Book Ten of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

When you get this far in a series, you got to be careful.  You have to balance that fine line between bringing us something new, and not totally alienating your characters.  This is often the time in a series when inappropriate or awkward relationships start up, we start to see totally assinine villians, or everything begins to feel stale and repetitive. 

Jim Butcher has admirably been able to keep the Wizard going by literally throwing a dozen balls up into the air and then keeping them aloft with dazzling intricacy.  Taking a page from the Arkham Asylum Guide to Not Killing Off All Your Baddies at Once, Butcher populates his Chicago with so much richness, he’s going to be able to go for years without the well running dry, and it’s all going to have that sweet familiarity and comfort that you get from a series this deep.

Small Favor is interesting in that it essentially works as a median point.  It doesn’t create anything necessarily catastrophic, it basically shakes up the plotting like an aquatic game of Connect Four, and it makes everything fall into place slightly askew.  The easiest way to do this is to essentially create a royal rumble with all the different elements, and then let them dust each other off.  It’s a strategy that’s worked for the WWE, and it works just as well here.  It serves as a nice reminder for what’s been going on in the story so far, and it touches based on all of the myriad of storylines.  We’ve got the mobster Marcone, we’ve got Summer and Winter Fae, we’ve got the Denarians, we’ve got the Knights, we’ve got the Wardens, and we’ve got the Archive.  We’ve also got Harry trying to teach an apprentice in the midst of all this. 

Nothing much happens persay to move the narrative.  There’s still plenty of suspense and some major events taking place.  But for the most part, it’s sort of a checkpoint, a waystation and a reminder for all the shit that’s bound to go down sooner or later.  If the next book plays out like this, I’ll begin to worry about the character.  But as I said, the story is so grandly epic, and there are so many characters woven into the webbing, he’s got a long ways to go before it starts to fall apart. 

Dead Star Twilight by Chez Pazienza

I know Chez as well as I know most of my fellow cosmonauts in the Blogosphere, which is to say a few glancing facts coupled with a personality presented in little blinking typeface on my monitor.  But I like his writing, over at good ol’ Deus Ex Malcontent, and I amicably disagree with some of his viewpoints on things, while steadfastly whooping at some of his other comments.  I was pissed when he got shitcanned by CNN, but it gave him an opportunity to be even more skewering and also a bit more personal.  When picking up the banner of warfare and pulling off your helm, you draw the slings and arrows of outrageous douchebaggery, so I do not envy him the attention.  

Anyway, dude went and wrote hisself a book.  It’s available on his website to be downloaded for a meager $12 bucks.  About what you’d pay for a trade paperback.  It’s the story of his addiction and the road to recovery, and road that weaves through a blasted wasteland of television news, a crumbling marriage, and 9/11 in the aftermath of the devastation.  I will openly admit, I was skeptical.  Any one of these topics could be exploitative and schlocky.  Any time you read the story of some whiny twenty something who had it all and then: a) pissed it away on drugs, b) sought enlightenment, or c) lost everyone and everything in the attacks, it reads like a reality television script.  It doesn’t appeal, even when it’s faked so beautifully. 

What could have been a confluence of Oprah-grade catastrophe ended up melding into a delicious creamy nougat of a novel.  I loved James Frey (faked or not, it was captivating) and Chez’s book cannot help but draw parallel that.  Except Chez’s narration is more like that suave fuckuperry of John Cusack in High Fidelity.  He fucked up, he knows he fucked up, he never puts the blame on anyone else (even though he wants to), and he still manages to be endearing. 

His road is hellacious, and throughout the narrative, you find yourself wanting to kick the fucking balls off of him.  Every time he fires up that pen and foil, every time he seems to be getting better and stumbles, you want to grab Chez and shake him like a fucking Schnauzer with a bone rope. 

The narrative can be jarring, in that it jumps around quite a bit, from the days of his heroin chic marriage in LA, to the events around 9/11, to his stay in the hospital.  It’s effective, but it’s also a bit erratic at times.  It feels like a narrative device.  Fortunately, we’ve got an appealing narrator, so it doesn’t feel like three different stories.  At times, it felt like it was about to slip apart, but he manages to stitch just enough connectivity to make it stay.

If I have one complaint, and I always do, it’s that his wife in the narrative comes off as a bit shrewish.  I have no reason to doubt that she really was an all-consuming thundercunt, prone to violent mood swings and scathing bitchery flared in the darkest hell of a thousand Pajiban souls.  It’s just that while Chez plays the “No seriously guys, it’s all me, I done a bad, bad thang”, it’s uber-convenient that his ex tears off her face and swallows men whole.  However, I’ve spent plenty of time gazing through the rearview at the flaming wreckage of a few relationships, and it’s hard to remember the times she held your heart when you’re bleeding from the hole where it used to be trying to get to a hospital for a mercy fuck.  Plus, history is written by the winners, and Chez done won.

A few folks have commented that they wanted more Jayne in the novel.  Which I disagree with.  Not that I don’t love Jayne, she writes such lovely things for me and about me at Blog Me a Tale.  But in this story, she’s just the rainbow on the horizon.  Knowing them like we do, there’s already a happily ever after.   This book’s happy ending is that he got through all the shit and came out with the scars, and now he’s telling you the story, like some sort of Wolfman Jack version of Beowulf.

It’s funny, it’s charming, it’s a violin stringy at times, but it’s definitely a wonderful read.  If you even consider yourself a partial fan of James Frey or Augusten Burroughs, you would do good to visit Chez over at his website and give him some of your hard earned money.  Motherfucker needs something in his life besides a fine lady now that American Idol is over.

If nothing else, this book has inspired me to get cranking on the rest of the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo and think about publishing it via the web.  I really think that was an awesome way to do it, and I think you can reach a bigger audience that way.  It’s the smartest way to independently publish.   

My Mom Is Chuck Norris

For my post on Blog Me A Tale, I tried so hard to think of a funny story about my Mom.  Because there are about a thousand.  So I wrote them.  All of them. 

Read it.  It’s awesomedorable. 

I’m Bad! I’m Bad. You Know It. You Know.

Kudos to Mister Ritzen for the killer title.  Trying to find the appropriate song lyric can be difficult.  That pretty much summed it up.  I was going to call it SYT (Shitty Young Thing) but that would violate the sanctity of my spirit.

Also, I figure I’ve already riled up enough Pajibans with my defense of Romero, when I went and slammed Harmony Korine.  I know, beating up on Harmony Korine for making a terrible movie is like yelling at a fat kid for eating birthday cake.  It’s just going to happen.  Those words, and probably zombies since I’ll have no busty AlabamaPink to protect me, will come back to bite me in the ass.

Anyway, fuck Harmony Korine in the eye.

Boredom’s Not A Burden Anyone Should Bear

I really wished this movie was better.  But it had been shelved for two years, after taking four years to shoot.  I just didn’t care for it. 

It all started with a phone call.

I often complain about living in LA.  Because I don’t really live in LA.  I just exist here.  I work in a windowless cave during the beautiful sunny daylight hours that I don’t spend on a crowded smelly bus or in a car in the gridlock on the freeways.  Higginbottom and I rarely go out, and if we do, it’s to the movies. I don’t go to parties, I don’t go out with friends nearly enough.  I’m a social pariah.  I sit in my house playing at Pogo.com and watching Netflix DVDs or Law and Order marathons.  I don’t love LA, because I don’t get to experience LA.  I don’t often get to connect with friends or have a social life.  It’s no way to live.  I mine as well be back in PA, spending my weekdays playing bar trivia and playing Xbox at my brother’s house.

But then I got a phone call.  My buddy Zach leaves me a voicemail on my cell phone at work.  I never answer my phone.  So I check the message.  He says, “Hey, buddy.  Wondering what you got going on tonight.  The Kids in the Hall are playing at the Orpheum Theatre, and I might be able to get us backstage after the show.  Call me and let me know.”

 I run, not walk, but fucking run to where I can make a private call (which is next to impossible.  I’m standing in the middle of a warehouse next to a private airport.  All my phone calls sound like I’m in Kazhikstan taking heavy troop fire.  Ask Manny.)  I get him on the line, he tells me order my tickets through Ticketmaster, and then buzz him to let him know if I can go.  I immediately call Higginbottom.  We were supposed to go to the movies to watch Mister Lonely to review it for Pajiba and I would be her ride home.  I ask her if she wants to go.  She doesn’t know the Kids in the Hall, so she said it really wouldn’t be worth it to go.  I ask her if she’s okay with me going by myself.  She tells me she can get a ride, and go ahead.  I love her seventeen thousand times. 

 I feverishly get on Ticketmaster and order up a ticket.  Able to get one right in front of my friends and his three friends.  Score!  Paying the service fee?  Not score. 

 We meet up at Tom Bergin’s for beers and to meet another friend of ours who was unable to go to the show.  It was awesome.  A W&L theatre reunion of sorts, and we shoot the shit and eat potato skins.  I drink Guinness and it’s all good times.  I haven’t seen many of these guys in several months, and in some cases years.  We say goodbye to our buddy Truax, and I promise him that we’ll get together again.  Which we will.  In three months.  I need to fucking call people more often. 

It’s four of us on our way to the show.  The guys all start talking business, which is cool for me.  TW is an actor, he was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and had a two episode stint on Heroes (he was the dude from the Mexican prison that Syler killed with his mindgrapes.)  He was also in the Bud Light commercial at the Opera where the guys sneak bottles in and they explode.  Which was, ironically enough, shot at the Orpheum.  My buddy Zach does voiceover direction.  If you’ve played Call of Duty 4, he’s the Scottish commander McCallan (?) in the sniper missions.   You’ve probably all damned his eyes a hundred times already.  And their buddy Dave is a writer on the Chelsea Lately show on E!  He does work at Improv Olympic and Upright Citizens Brigade.  You might have seen him in the Wendy’s commerical where the guy filming the political rally grows Wendy braids and starts demanding fresh not frozen.  Yeah, that’s Dave.  I can’t believe I know semi-famous folks.  And then there’s me.  Fat Nobody.  My ego boost comes from TW telling me that inevitably I will eclipse them all.  If only casting directors, agents, and managers felt the same way as you, my man.

 We get to the show, and Zach goes to will call.  They gather their tickets.  We’re supposed to go down to the lobby after the show and meet up with the tour manager Marnell.  So we go to our seats.  Which are literally the last row up to the left in the balcony.  I was hoping to maybe catch a fly ball.  Or a t-shirt fired out of a cannon.  Two downsides to the seats: a) A lot of the show takes place on a video screen on the back of the stage, so most of the short films and skits had the words cut off or the tops of the heads of actors missing.  b) There was an annoying chubby lass who took every opportunity to scream at the top of her lungs, “I LOVE YOU DAVE!”  Except it would come out like some sort of autistic bark.  Which she volleyed eight or nine times.

 I’ve seen both of the other tours back at the Tower Theatre in Philly.  The first one, “Same Guys New Dresses” which is featured in the T-shirt on my MySpace page, was neat, but it was mostly them doing live versions of the sketches from the show.  “Tour of Duty” was better, in that it was mostly all of their old characters but in new sketches, sometimes combining with each other.  Like Gavin answering to his principal who was Daryll.  It was many years and career shifts before this show, “Live as We’ll Ever Be”, so I was really interested in how the show would turn out.

Holy fucking fuck.  It was the most hysterical live show I’ve ever seen.  Two hours of incredibly tight material.  There wasn’t a bad sketch.  Not one.  They brought back a bunch of the old characters, but in totally new sketches that were hilarious.  Even the Buddy Cole monologue, which was weaker in the other shows, was fucking hot.  He explained why Jesus was gay.  The short film was about Carfuckers.  The encore featured The Head Crushing Guy, going around the audience and crushing people’s heads.  And then finishing off the cast members, while destroying their egos.  Fortunately, no Uwe Boll was mentioned. 

 We cruise down to the lobby and wait as the show empties out.  People are standing around, purchasing T-shirts as the show clears out.  Zach waits patiently for the tour manager to show up.  He says, if he doesn’t we’ll just talk to my friend.  We’re all cool, shooting the shit and discussing The Last Dragon and Big Trouble in Little China.  Dave does a mean Lo Pan.  Zach once directed that actor in voiceover.  He said, he wasn’t playing Lo Pan, he’s actually that fucking crazy. 

 Meanwhile, Dave Foley and Scott Thompson come out and start chatting with fans and posing for pictures.  Both guys, incredibly nice and accomodating. We’re chill about it though, because we figure, we’ll we’re going backstage to the aftershow, we’ll get to meet them, let the common folk mingle.  Mwhahaha.  So Zach’s starting to get flustered, figuring this is going to turn into a total cockblock.  Then he goes, oh, good, there’s Mark. 

Yeah, Zach’s contact was fucking Mark McKinney.  He left that part out. 

 So Zach goes over and waits for the gathering throngs to lavish him with admiration.  Dave Foley actually lays down on the floor with the one girl and they chat quietly, while a crowd gathers and laughs at his antics.  Kevin McDonald starts to come from backstage, but is quickly rushed off by a statuesque blonde bombshell who was either his girlfriend or manager or both.  Bruce stayed downstairs, presumably to celebrate his birthday.

 Zach goes up to Mark and they start talking, and then Mark tells him well, just go over to the guard and tell him that you’re my guests.  And then if that doesn’t work, have him get Marnell.  I smile politely, thinking to myself, “Yeah, this oughta work.” 

 We walk over to the yellowshirted guard and tell him, “Hi.  We’re guests of Mark McKinney.  Mind if we go downstairs?”  He says, “You guys don’t have passes.”  Zach says, “We need to speak to Marnell.”  The guard says, “Dude, I don’t work for the tour, so I don’t know Marnell.  But at the bottom of the stairs, there is another guard who’ll be looking for passes too.  Sorry.”  Zach asks if he could go downstairs to talk to the other guard.  The guard’s cool with it.  Zach takes off. 

 I ask the guard if my good friend Thomas Jefferson could get us through the door.  He says, “You know, people always talk about bribing me, but nobody ever actually takes out their wallets.”  I like this guy. 

 Zach comes back.  He says, No dice.  We’ll just wait until Mark goes down and then go down with him.  So we’re cool.  I mean, dude actually knows Mark McKinney.  So we’re that much closer.  Then a little spritely fellow who resembled Michael Weston from Pathology comes up.  Zach goes over to him and asks if he’s Marnell.  He is.  He gives us four passes.  We’re in.

 The passes are actually stickers, our friend the guard explains.  So we affix them to ourselves.  I slap mine prominently on my protruding belly and declare myself a Star-Bellied Sneetch.  The guard stops us and says, “Sorry, those passes aren’t for THIS night.”  We look at him in horror.  He laughs, “Nah, I’m just fucking with you.”  I love this guy. We descend into the underbelly of the Orpheum.  The irony is not lost on me. 

 I have never been to an aftershow.  It was wall to wall people.  And standing among them are the Kids in the Hall.  As well as other varied celebrities.  Stephen Root, one of the greatest comic character actors in the history of the world.  Who is very svelte and looks much younger in person.  The guy who plays Craig on Malcolm in the Middle.  Dave fucking Chapelle.  I’m awestruck.  My friends all break off at various points to speak with people they know from the improv world and from different projects.  I go to the open bar and obtain a Jack and Coke.  I am lost in Neverland.

 I start talking to Zach and my friends.  We all felt like at some point, they were just going to tell us that we’re in the wrong place and we have to leave.  And then Mark McKinney comes up.  And I am talking to Mark McKinney, and I feel like an ass.  I can’t find words that make sense.  I begin to tell him that “I’ve seen the other two shows, and that by far this one was the soooooo great.”  Because I simultaneously realize that I’m about to tell him that the other two shows sucked compared to this one, and that I really thought this was so much better, and the two thoughts conflict in my brain, and grammar and syntax and social decorum completely leave for parts unknown.  So I stand around gaping.  He mentions that they toured the show at the Montreal Comedy Festival.  I asked him immediately if he saw the nudey magician.  The stripper.  These are the words coming out my mouth and I can’t stop them.  I can hear them happening, but it’s too late.  He looks notably perplexed.  So I try to explain that she does an act where she makes a handkerchief disappear and then makes it reappear, each time taking off a layer of clothing until she’s completely nude, and that the entire bravery of the act is that you don’t believe that she will be completely full frontal naked, but she does, and it’s all choreographed to Henry Mancini and the grand finale was hilariously shocking.  However, this thought gets translated to, “Oh her name is, funny foreign sounding but not all of it, but she, you know pulls the kerchief out of her cooter.”  Complete with fucking acoompanying gestures.  I am retarded.  My brain screams at me and passes out.  Mark smiles politely and Zach starts up the conversation that I airbolted in the cowskull.  I turn to Dave and say, “That just happened.  I am a psychopath.  If any point you want to murder my skull with that beer bottle, have at it.”  He agrees. 

 (In my defense, I wasn’t insane.  Ursula Martinez is her name, she does an act called Hanky Panky.  Check it out.  Get the NSFW version.  It will blow your mind.  And she did perform it recently at the Montreal Comedy Festival.)

 I managed to redeem myself later when Mark was talking about how they were so nasty to each other in the old days, just screaming at one another and telling each other how much their sketches were fucking terrible and hating on one another.  Then he said, “We still do that Dave.  You suck, Foley!”  I laughed and said, “You got most of your revenge with Brain Candy, right?  Who are you?  Just a guy.  Gave him all the asshole parts.”  He chuckled and said, “You noticed, heh?  Hahahaha.” 

 The rest of the night, I chat with my friends, and with some of their friends.  People come to us, because we looked like we were having such clandestine and intriguing and hilarious conversations.  We were mostly shooting the shit.  I chatted up a guy from Jenkintown (apparently everyone from Philadelphia is in LA — GO FLYERS!)  I chatted up a school teacher who went to school in Boston and told her about my brother’s idea for Shut the Fuck Up Penguin.  (For legal purposes I can’t go into it here.  Someday, though!)  My friends kept explaining that I was a chick magnet (I was wearing my T-shirt) because I would inspire random strangers to strike up conversations.  Like how at Tom Bergin’s the only two girls at the bar asked me if I wanted to take the seat next to them.  I explained that it was because they thought I was a young Santa.  Which made things awkward at strip clubs.  And mall benches.  Hi-LAR-ious.  That’s me! 

 I managed to tell Bruce McCullough that I was a big fan of his directing work, and I really enjoyed the show. I forgot to wish him a happy birthday.  Because I didn’t want to be a creepy stalker guy.  Same to Dave Foley and Scott Thompson.  I never actually had long conversations with any of the Kids, afraid I would then break into insane gibberish again, or worse, quote the shows or the movie to them.  I’ve got Brain Candy memorized, and I tend to spout movie quotes at weird occasions.  But I did get to smile and sort of stand around as they chatted.  So I felt like part of the game.

 At one point, Dave decided he was going to go over to Scott Thompson and talk with him.  As he walked away, TW shouted, “Have fun.  Don’t be creepy!”  Which is always good advice. 

 All in all it was an amazing night.  And I felt like I could do it again.  My only saving grace was being able to mention that I was a film critic for Pajiba.  It sort of legitimizes me.  And my friends kept touting me as a writer/actor.  Which feels good.  I really felt LA that night.  And I loved the show.  And some day I’ll go from being little fat nobody to little fat somebody.  Those guys are awesome, and I really want to spend more time with them and the rest of the LA people.  It’s easier to appreciate LA when I’m actually in the city having fun. 

 Now I just need to get together with my fellow Pajibans for beers.  

I Am A Man Who Will Fight For Your Honor

The latest review is up at Pajiba.  This was the middle feature in our three movie-adventure day at The Grove.  It was sandwiched nicely between Iron Man and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. 

David Mamet does an arthouse movie about mixed-martial arts.  Or as I cleverly describe it, martial artsy-fartsy.