Dave Eggers writes about his musical tastes (and the Kings of Leon) for Spin. There are numerous digressions. Some of them are tolerable and got me to smile. Others, such as the candy analogy, are unpardonable. Come on, Dave! Make me love you!
Month / April 2004
Textbook Price-Fixing Under Fire
For those following the exorbitant textbook issue, there’s some interesting reform going on up in Oregon. Oregon Congressman David Wu has proposed a bill that would require the U.S. General Accounting Office to report on the circumstances that lead a textbook publisher to set prices. The legislation was sparked by students in Oregon and California complaining about being fleeced. However, Pat Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, noted in the CNN article that the student report was flawed.
Because All Novelists Are Financial Wizards
So what do you do when you’re a financial site looking to garner some Wall Streetcred? You, uh, interview Kinky Friedman about money. Fortunately, Friedman keeps up a goofy poker face:
Bankrate: What would you have done if you hadn’t sold that book?
Kinky Friedman: I was going to commit suicide by jumping through a ceiling fan.
The Blog Warrior
James Marcus: “Already there are turf wars, low-level spats. No doubt a pecking order will gradually materialize, since even cyberspace operates according to the familiar logic of Animal Farm: All bloggers are created equal, but some are more equal than others. There will be stars, contract players, boffo traffic numbers. There will be a proliferation of advertising on the most visible sites — there is already, in fact — and a defiant tug-of-war between the early bloggers and their entrepreneurial successors.”
NEW YORK (AP): Lit blogger Edward Champion was announced as Maud Newton’s bitch last night. Mr. Champion, who lost his right to blog about literature shortly after being beaten to a pulp by Ron Hogan in a backalley brawl last April, had long been targeted by the Final Three: Sarah Weinman, Jessa Crispin and Newton.
Mr. Champion’s hair has been shaven off and his limbs have been replaced by QWERTY keyboards connected to Google News. Newton and her gang plan to use Mr. Champion as either a modular bookshelf or a footstool.
Hogan, however, has not declared any firm loyalties to Newton. Independent sources report that Hogan has been conspiring with Mark Sarvas and the disgraced Terry Teachout (fired from his Wall Street Journal and Commentary gigs shortly after OGIC defected over to the Weinman camp).
Crispin remains a formidable force. Shortly after having TFMTML’s liver for dinner last week, she announced that Sam Jones would be her World Domination Consultant.
Despite Ms. Weinman’s clear lead among the Final Three, there are rumors that
Laila Lalami is planning a coup with Nathalie Chica and the Old Hag.
Robert Birnbaum remains missing. Newton’s camp has claimed responsibility.
(via Rake)
Weirdass Cinema Review #2
The Longest Yard (1974): I can just envision the studio execs sitting in the boardroom:
“Hey, man, there’s this great Bill Lancaster script called The Bad News Bears in development. A comedy about this losing Little League team coached by Walter Matthau.”
“Sounds great, but isn’t that Burt Lancaster’s son?”
“Yes, but screw the nepotism. We think this script will sell like gangbusters.”
“Needs another angle.”
“Well, Chuck, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“What’s Bob Aldrich been up to? I was having lunch with him the other day and he’s looking for another project.”
“Well, not much since The Dirty Dozen.”
“Wait a minute.”
“What’s that?”
“What if we took the Dirty Dozen formula and crossed it with this Bad News Bears thing?”
“Burt would know.”
“Not if we cast another Burt in the role.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Hey, my wife subscribes to Cosmopolitan. I just read it for the articles.”
“That Burt Reynolds is something, isn’t he?”
“Well, if he’s hot stuff with the ladies, this will give us the cross-demographic appeal we need.”
Or something like that. It’s safe to say that The Longest Yard has one of the silliest premises I’ve ever heard of. Burt Reynolds plays a former pro football quarterback who beats the tar out of his girlfriend (the nature of the relationship is nebulous at best, but it’s safe to say Burt won’t be sending her a box of chocolates anytime soon) and then decides to go on a drunken joy ride in her Mazerati, empty glass of bourbon near the stick shift, getting into a car chase with the police. He dumps the car in the harbor and then gets into a bar brawl with police officers.
Before you can say Cool Hand Luke, Burt’s in the joint in an unspecified area of the South. He’s working detail, dealing with racist but apparently good-hearted guards. He rolls in the mud with one fellow prisoner. Another inmate has a crush on him, performing one-armed push-ups and various other exercises in an effort to get Burt swooning. The prison warden then cuts Burt a deal to QB a football game between the inmates and the guards. Burt is free to pick the teammates he wants and apparently train them without a single guard in close proximity.
One character, The Caretaker, is taken on as team manager. The Caretaker, a fat-faced man with little in the way of screen charisma, is apparently so skillful at acquiring contraband goods that he’s able to get joints, liquor, deluxe fruity foods, prison team helmets, and a 15-minute “pesonal services” visit with (really, I couldn’t make this up) an uber-beehived, pre-Pennies from Heaven Bernadette Peters. Peters is not only the warden’s secretary, but she apparently learned a few tricks in Tallahassee.
As absurd as this all sounds, believe it or not, The Longest Yard is a fairly enjoyable film, even with the “modern film effects” provided by Steve Orfanos. (These “modern” effects are hastily cut split-screen effects for the climactic football game. They’re mercifully brief, somewhere between the heights of Brian De Palma at his best and the lows of More American Graffiti and Woodstock.) Lest we forget, the Prison Movie and the Football Movie have pretty much operated on the same basic formula. Get a bunch of rough-and-tumble guys, have the audience root for their inevitable victory, and keep the movie going with some general, but crowd-pleasing narrative arcs. It makes perfect sense to conjoin the two genres. In The Longest Yard‘s case, that means at least a few deaths, a couple of token scuffles, the obligatory gentle giant, a few 1970s “Ebony and Ivory” moments, and even a mentally disabled man, who reacts to Burt’s invitation to play football by throwing large bales of hay into the air.
The silly formula doesn’t preclude The Longest Yard from espousing a few subtextual points about honor. There is, however, one disastrous turn in which Burt offers a fabricated story about his father.
The unfortunate thing is that Adam Sandler is set to remake this movie with Anger Management director Peter Segal, scheduled for release next year. The Longest Yard is hardly a movie that calls out to be remade. I can’t imagine how the Sandler-Segal combo will recreate the original, particularly since prisons are hardly as innocuous today (in image, at least) as they were back in 1974.