Showing posts with label Brandon Wainerdi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brandon Wainerdi. Show all posts
In this modern world of quick downloads and Netflix Instant Streaming, it’s becoming less and less frequent that I’ll go out and see a movie in the theaters. I have found my attention span growing noticeably shorter and shorter over the past year, requiring now that I have my trusty cell phone in one hand and my well-used laptop in the other as I sit down in front of my television to watch something, whether it be a rerun of Friends (guilty) or Pulp Fiction (as was the most recent case.)
So that’s why it was so surprising that, two nights ago, I was able to sit through two hours of the yet-to-be-released comedy film Take Me Home Tonight, complete with an in-person introduction from the film’s star Topher Grace, of That 70’s Show fame, and actually enjoy it (albeit the much-touted intro was only two minutes long and ended with a now very-grown-up Eric Forman screaming to the audience, “NOW MAKE SOME NOISE IF YOU JUST LIKE TO PARTY YOUR F***ING FACE OFF!”)
In any case, Take Me Home Tonight takes place, for the most part, during a crazy Labor Day party in 1988, and follows the story of recent MIT grad Matt Franklin (played by Mr. Grace) and his best friend Barry (played by Fanboys star and personal favorite Dan Fogler) as they deal with life decisions, love, high school relationships, and gratuitous amounts of hard drugs. Yeah.
Along the way, and as blatantly set up in the film’s trailer above, Matt lies to Tori, his high school crush, about where he is in life (hint: not working at Suncoast Video), which leads him to a Beverly Hills stock broker’s house party and on “the adventure of a lifetime” yada yada yada. Matt’s sister and her boyfriend have a sort of separate subplot running through the film, acting as a kind of foil to the burgeoning relationship of Matt and Tori.
Despite it’s predictability, Take Me Home Tonight is a surprisingly very entertaining movie. The jokes and physical comedy actually work well, for the most part, and the supporting cast is very strong, headed by Anna Faris, who is Matt’s twin sister, and a wheelchair-bound Demetri Martin, who steals all three of the scenes he is in. Plus, it has a soundtrack filled to the brim of legendary 80’s songs (except, inexplicably, the title Eddie Money track), which bring an automatic smile to my face and making me want to sing along in the seat (as the grizzled lady sitting next to me was gracious enough to do throughout the screening.)
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| Grace and Fogler as they appear in Take Me Home Tonight, after stealing a car. Of course. |
And amid its raunchiness and f-bombs, Take Me Home Tonight has a heart…somewhere. In his brief intro, Topher Grace compared the flick to a John Hughes fare (director of classics such as The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles.) And, while it is impossible to put it on that high of a pedestal, it easily runs in the well-defined footsteps of Ferris Bueller, detailing the underdog story that we are all so familiar with through modern cinema.
If I have any complaints about the movie, it is just two, very minor flaws.
1.) SPOILER ALERT: it is set in the 1980’s. And, again, another SPOILER ALERT: I was not alive during the 1980’s. It seems to me, though, that this movie could have been set in 2011 or 1977 without any major disturbance to the plot. The only things in this movie that define it as “an eighties film” are skinny ties and Guns ‘N Roses albums in the background. Costumes and soundtracks do not an eighties movie make. I guess you could argue that it was supposed to be as if the film was actually produced during that time period. But I’m not buying it.
2.) And the other, as I’ve mentioned previously, is the absence of the sweet strains of “Take Me Home Tonight” by Eddie Money blasting over the credits or a well-cut montage. I was ready to bust out the trusty old air guitar at a moment’s notice throughout the film, to no avail.
So do I recommend this movie? Yes I really do. When it comes out in two months (ah, the wonders of an advanced screening) definitely go see it to have a very good time at the movie theater. Prepare to laugh and watch some of Hollywood’s “Next Big Things” (specifically Fogler and Martin) work their magic on the screen, all set to the sweet melodies of some eighties power ballads. You can’t really ask for anything more.
-Brandon Wainerdi, don't stop me now
-Brandon Wainerdi, don't stop me now
Christmas shopping is very overrated.
Half of my December afternoon has been spent with me wandering aimlessly through the aisles of Barnes and Noble, past the shelves of marked-up paperbacks and gift-sets, trying to find just two books. In any other circumstance, this would not be a difficult task: I would just have to grab a couple random bestsellers, slap down some cash, and storm out.
But today was different: I had to buy books for my two little brothers. They were to be presents from me, the older and wiser college sibling that they respect and adore and yada yada yada. They both know how much books have affected my life, how important the pages that I pored over when I was their age have been since the middle school days. I have thrown copies of J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and even post-apocalyptic George Orwell at them so they can, in turn, learn from the same teachers as I did.
Unfortunately, they, like so many of their classmates, have turned to cheap fiction in my college-fueled absence, the Middle-Earth-plagiarized fantasy series which run a predictable plot, with empty “twists”, and stock characters. They are almost impossible to read, with the unpronounceable cities dotting the ever-present-in-fold map and the copied creatures scurrying about the chapters, boring me with the Luke Skywalker/Frodo Baggins/Peter Parker/Eragon Whateverhislastnamewas protagonist who inevitably transforms from a whiney teenager to a war-hardened hero.
So to counteract the base spells and murmurings of their 700 page fantasy tomes, I have picked up the early works of Orson Scott Card, specifically for the eldest of the two. I remember the impact that the final pages of Ender’s Game had on a fourteen-year-old me, as the vast expanses of space were relegated to a small box of war games, leaving a shroud of melancholy hope to the final pages. It’s pretty tough stuff for a young teenager. He’ll just have to deal with it.
For the other brother, it’s more of a challenge. He’s younger and can’t handle the darkness of Ender’s world let alone the dystopian futures of George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. For a long time, I was intent on giving him half of my Calvin and Hobbes collection, some of the most important words I read when I was his age. I was intent on marking up the several soft volumes with important quotes and textbook-like highlighting, detailing his life-plan from the antics of a five-year-old and his stuffed tiger. But that was too much work and, if I’ve learned anything in college, it’s not to try so hard.
So, after two hours strolling through the book store, I admitted defeat; when I was eleven, my reading regiment was relegated to only Star Wars books (a fact that I am unapologetic for; Timothy Zahn is one of the finest writers of his generation.) I was all out of non-Jedi ideas. So I called my mother to see if she had any hidden reconnaissance. And so that’s how I anti-climactically finished my Christmas shopping because, while I was initially adverse to purchasing The Alchemist by Michael Scott (no joke), I found myself wrapped up in its story, after only a few pages, staying at Barnes and Noble for an extra half hour, quietly reading. I guess I shouldn’t have doubted the literary taste of my youngest brother.
After all, he was taught by the best.
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“For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere...”
-Yoda
I am a director. Or, at least, I like to think of me as a director, small time in the corner of my dorm room, splicing together low definition cuts with cheap software.
I’ve been technically making movies since I was four years old, roughly moving the plastic limbs of my stormtroopers, jerkily stopping the camera to create a strange illusion of motion. And as I would attach thin threads of floss to heavy starships (to make them fly on film), I discovered very early in my life that there is something graceful about being “behind the scenes,” that there is nothing more frustrating or humbling than sitting at a computer, trying to edit down a sequence of scenes to utter exactness.
You lose track of all time as you try to breathe life and believability into frames of digital captures. I’ve learned about patience and humility from these quiet hours, slowly mastering the art of OCD-fueled cutting, editing, perfecting.
When other kids were growing up, they idolized quarterbacks and goalies, hung up posters of Michael Jordan and Troy Aikman in their rooms, living vicariously through their hard-court buzzer-beaters, their game-winning touchdown passes. But I was that one weird little kid, who enjoyed the bonus features at the end of the movies, who read every single “Making Of” book that the small public library had to offer, who wanted to someday be like George Lucas or Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson, my idols.
And today one of my idols died: Irvin Kershner. This name is probably not familiar to most, filed out of the saga history books by the media mogol of his supervisor, Mr. George Beard Lucas. But Mr. Kershner was the director of, not only my favorite Star Wars movie, but easily my favorite film of all time: The Empire Strikes Back. This was the movie, with its snow battles and duels, that ignited my love for storytelling, my love for creating new somethings. (And it even happened on the very day I was about to mail him a replica clapboard from to autograph, which will now sit in front of me forever, unsigned, acting as a motivator for my future: my future writing, my future directing, my future being.
I had the honor of hearing him giving a talk a few years ago, hearing him gently remembering how he created the latex puppets and steaming vents, hearing him making the audience laugh and reminiscence with him, taking them on one final journey back down the film strip.
He was speaking about the importance of inquisitiveness to a child, another four-year-old stop-motion-God-in-the-making when he said:
"Good. You keep asking those questions. Don't ever think that something isn't important enough to ask your dad about, son. That's how you learn. That's how we all learn. Maybe your dad won't have all the answers, but those questions you can figure out together."
So today I will watch his movie as a bittersweet homage , mouthing the words to every memorized line with a pathetically teary grin, answering some of these questions with him, and sending him off to the all-surrounding, all-binding Force with some style.
Rest In Peace, Kersh.
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[Written originally for this website and then transposed using some fancy time-stamp-cheating onto my own blog, which needs to be updated and updated and updated: http://dontstopmedontstopme.blogspot.com]
For whatever reason tonight, I have decided to just walk around campus. I’ve been doing it much too often lately: letting the night sky climb up and the buildings grow dark, so I can plod down the cracking sidewalks with my headphones in my ears. The darkness masks my wild air guitar and hides the hilarity of me mouthing the words to every song, the lawn’s itchy grass quietly watching whispering along.
There isn’t much to read from this, no manifestations of manic depression: it is just a quiet excuse to avoid the small room and the quiet whirring of the laptop and the mapping out of next semester’s schedules, and bask in something other than my room’s sole flickering lightbulb.
All the same, the leaves continue to gossip behind my back, as they stroll along with the surprisingly-warm November air, the clouds above them silent, wordlessly condemning the freefalls below them.
I gaze up. Acting like an under-paid tour guide, my scuffed headphones begin to screech explanations for the stretching, private art gallery, adding commentary to the panorama. The Beatles chime in together, their haunting strains of static classics pointing out the stars above.
The music fades for the briefest of moments and I find myself holding my breath, waiting for the next song to escape from the confines of the sky. And, finally, “All You Need is Love” starts triumphantly.
I remember the first time I heard this song, my small hands gripping the scuffed jewel case, as I rode in our old car’s leather back seat, staring at the four tie-dyed visages on the back cover, letting the waves of my father’s childhood wash over me. It’s pretty easy to map the exact beginning of my love for music: I was seven years old and I had heard The Beatles.
As I grew up, my relationship with the Fab Four also matured, as I moved from their light, chart-climbing hits crooning simplicity and love, to their later years, the unexplainable voyages to below the surface of the ocean and across the sky. With two-hundred Lennon/McCartney tracks listed perfectly in order on my iTunes library, they are definitely the most-collected, if not the most-listened to, band/group/musical obsession of my life.
The greatest thing about the group is their timelessness. It’s incredible to imagine that, almost fifty years ago, my father was buying their vinyl records, singing along to the radio, succumbing to a slight strain of Beatle-mania, surely just a passing fad. And now, earlier today, I was on iTunes filling in the gaps of my collection, digitally and seamlessly, waiting for the mp3 to buffer so I could sing along with my Macbook Speakers.
A lot has changed since that first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. I watched that set for the first time a few weeks ago, beaming because of the joy that the young men from Liverpool contagiously showed, their knees bobbing and ankles twirling, softly singing while seemingly-thousands of (mostly) girls screamed their names.
A line from the otherwise-forgettable movie Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist really sums up this generation-spanning love for Love:
“Look, other bands, they want to make it about sex or pain, but you know, The Beatles, they had it all figured out, okay? "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The first single. It's effing brilliant, right?...That's what everybody wants, Nicky. They don't want a twenty-four-hour hump sesh, they don't want to be married to you for a hundred years. They just want to hold your hand.”
So I am still watching as the Man in the Moon rises into the evening sky, Mr. Kite passing directly under his cratered nose, listening to the same song that my dad once grew up to, feeling closer to him that I ever have before.
[Partially written many months ago and, today, revisited again. I can’t stress how great it is to have a library of material to cull from:
That is why Skyping people is so great, I guess. I love seeing friends that are millions of miles away, in other cities, in other worlds, through the time-and-space-traveling DeLorean of my MacBook Pro. And it’s slightly sad, watch them living new lives, making and replacing friends, moving slowly away from memories of me and times spent together. But we're all on the same journey, the same road to a new life.
“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”
Prophetically uttered by Christopher Lloyd at the end of the first Back to the Future movie, his time-machine blasting into the blue sky, this classic line has become more than just a quote from a cult eighties sci-fi movie for me. It’s become a sense of purpose, of how to conduct myself in my everyday actions, of how to force myself to be the best person I could be.
But, perhaps, I’m reading too much into it. Thanks Robert Zemeckis.
When I was seven years old, my dad brought home a torn-up VHS copy of the movie from Blockbuster, put it into our grainy old television, and made me and my little brother sit down and watch it. By the end of the movie, I was at a loss for words: I had never seen something so imaginative and fun, a quick joyride that my seven-year-old brain could barely understand. And that last line of the movie stuck with me, inviting me to spread my imagination past the physical familiarities of the world around me. It taught me to pretend wildly and carelessly, letting myself explore new worlds and new adventures.
And then, it slowly evolved to teach me to try to run from this fast-approaching hold of a sense of vastly-overrated maturity. Recently, I composed a list of ways to escape these binds of maturity, which should be helpful in the future to explain personal reasonings:
· 1. Walking around a Science Fiction convention is a surefire way to appear more mature than you actually are. Maturity may seem inevitable but the key to avoiding maturity is to never be in a situation where you are the most mature. You have nothing on the obese thirty-year-old man painted in all green dragging a stroller around with a baby in a Klingon costume.
· 2. Continue to play with toys. Or, at least, buy toys in mint condition and never open them, storing them in your closet back home where they slowly collect dust in a sad state of semi-existence.
· 2.1. Internet shopping with the plastic debit card your parents gave you is a good way to get back at them for not getting the toys you wanted as a kid. Not surprisingly, eBay is a seeming treasure trove of late 90’s memorabilia.
· 3. Do not be afraid to live out childhood fantasies, like piloting the Millennium Falcon with a Wookiee co-pilot. Feel free to substitute a mini-stuffed animal version of Chewbacca and your dad’s 2005 Toyota Avalon, going twenty-over at 1:30 in the morning in a homemade, albeit very screen-accurate, costume for the desired results.
· 4. Girls are still hard to figure out. That never changes, no matter how mature you think you are.
But as I grew older, and with each yearly repeat of the movie, the end quote slowly evolved from this beckoning towards imagination and immaturity into something else completely. It became a reminder that there will be a time, far from now, when none of these cement pavements, none of these physical realities, physical things, Darth Vader action figures from eBay or otherwise, will matter because, one day, we will not be here in this world of responsibilities, repressions, and roads.
So now the quote serves, not as an call towards a life of make-believe, immaturity, and naïve joy, but rather as a reminder to focus on the important, existential things in life like relationships, familial and spiritual, because, one day that I cannot and will not be able to predict, Doc Brown is going to show up at my front door in his time-traveling DeLorean and take me away from all that I know, forever.
I’m pretty sure that’s how this whole “life” thing works, anyway. But, don’t worry, I’m only a Skype call (and a recently-purchased Christopher-Lloyd-autographed Back to the Future poster) away.
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[This post has been culled, combined, and edited together from two different, and mostly unrelated, blog entries: liii and c from my personal site http://dontstopmedontstopme.blogspot.com. But it still should make a decent amount of sense.]
Right off the bat: I cannot, and will not, talk about underground rap labels or Downtown slam poetry bars or a sculpture exhibit in someone’s home. I have no business talking about these things. It's not that I have a problem with these pieces of art and performance and soul, I just experience a different type, as I newly walk around this state-university campus, attempting to retain some sense of uniqueness amid a system that’s just trying to assign me a number and push me further into educational obscurity.
My art is a little less…pronounced. I’m only a secret poet, scrawling my words into new notebooks on windy Sunday mornings, publishing daily thoughts on my own, barely-read blog. And I wouldn’t know much at all, I wouldn’t have much to store away in these spirals, if it were not for the books by my bed, neatly stacked alongside each other, whispering words of advice and criticism, as I type this sprawled on my narrow dorm bed.
When I began to pack for my freshman year in college, a faraway two months ago, I easily spent the most time out of this process picking out books to take with me. I viewed them as a necessity to collegiate survival, at least more of a necessity than the “mandatory” supplies of clothes or food or bed sheets. Each hardcover volume was neatly shoved into the cardboard corners of foldable boxes, closed with the cheap masking tape that I found in our garage.
And the book that has influenced me the most, the hardcover coffee-table volume that was proudly laid on top of the cardboard stack two months ago, on top of Gatsby and Flannery O’Connor and Billy Shakes' Hamlet, the one that is a Bible for my daily philosophizing and actions, laying on the desk next to me as I type every word in this article: The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes.
Yeah, I know.
But, bear with me, Bill Watterson, the creator of the strip is a genius. He has crafted a character in Calvin that both undermines and defines the generation that’s now being sent through college, putting labels on the previously un-labelable social rulings and ideals, creating a world that is already in everyone's minds.
Calvin: “When I grow up, I'm not going to read the newspaper and I'm not going to follow complex issues and I'm not going to vote. That way I can complain when the government doesn't represent me. Then, when everything goes down the tubes, I can say the system doesn't work and justify my further lack of participation.”
Hobbes: “An ingeniously self-fulfilling plan.”
Calvin: “It's a lot more fun to blame things than to fix them.”
In himself, Calvin represents all that you should not be, for the most part, save for an unquenchable desire for truth and a limitless imagination. As an aspiring writer, of sorts, these two principles are key to any successful story, article, or blog post. I used this quote from Mr. Calvin as one of the introductory quotes in the “About Me” section of my personal blog:
“People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.”
I unabashedly consider myself to be an immature person, still holding on to unopened action figures and childhood fads, refusing to conform to the social pretenses of a certain taste in movies, how to talk to girls, or what to wear on a daily bases. I managed to “get away” with this way of thinking in high school; my class was comprised of almost the same group forty boys for eight years, wearing starched-white polos and loafers. And, nearly every trip to the school’s small library was met with another Calvin and Hobbes pick-up, another boost to both the self-confidence factor and the imagination. Watterson is both hilarious and incredibly deep, dealing with Transgmorgrifier Machines and death in the same collection.
“The only skills I have the patience to learn are those that have no real application in life.”
And now college has presented a new challenge of reintroducing myself to a whole new set of people, who do not know that I go to comic conventions or that I’m terrible at sports, or that I write poetry. And, for a second, I’m scared. I’m scared about not being accepted for who I am, for not fitting in, for not making friends easily. But then Calvin, oh so joyfully, reminds me and our stuffed tiger friend in the last line of the last strip, as we sled down the hill of adulthood, the end impossible to see through the quick flurries in front of us:
“It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy...Let's go exploring!"
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[And, hey, check out my personal blog, http://dontstopmedontstopme.blogspot.com. This is a shameless plug, I know, but, as Calvin once said, "What's the point of wearing your favorite rocket ship underwear if no one asks to see 'em?" This blog is my rocket ship underwear.]
[And, hey, check out my personal blog, http://dontstopmedontstopme.blogspot.com. This is a shameless plug, I know, but, as Calvin once said, "What's the point of wearing your favorite rocket ship underwear if no one asks to see 'em?" This blog is my rocket ship underwear.]
