The Garab Chronicles

They Do Come True...

Who You Calling a Hoe, Thundercat?

Somewhere, a studio development exec whimpers for the dream that was...

Garab Chronicles Contest: January 2009!

THE RULES (BEFORE YOU HIT PLAY!!)

What you'll need: a)pen and paper, or some sort of word processing program open when you start the video below. b) a stop watch

2) Jot down your name, the time, and the date before you hit play.

3) Hit play.

4) Hit pause the moment you realize what you're watching.

5) Do the math. How long did it take you to come to above realization?

6) Write down your answer in bold, black ink and take a picture.

7) Email your answer, or send it to the comments section below. The Garab Chronicles will post all results, and the winner will get a free Apple* product just like the one featured in the video(I'm dead serious!)**

Ready? Go!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

*=Apple, its employees, agents, and representatives have and want nothing to do with this charade, and explicitly deny any affiliation with this contest or anything that smells like it.

**=no, I'm not.

Read Me The One About Benny Button, The Defiant Wrestler On Revolutionary Road Who Doubted He Could Milk a Seven Pound Valkyrie Because He was a Slumdog When the Earth Stood Still

Here it is kids, your awards season movie roundup - Bizzilions of marketing dollars and golden statue fantasies crammed down our collective throats, digested over a four week period, and reduced to this:

1) The Reader - Proof after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that Kate Winslet can do no wrong. Bear with the interminable hetero grope fest, my homo brethren. This Mrs. Robinson delivers a one-two emotional gut punch for anyone who's loved and lost, and the immobile scenery is to die for. What passes off a a broken down shack of a 2nd story walk up in Post-War Germany will leave the little interior decorator inside you spinning for days. Grade: AB(Achtung, Baby)

2) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -  Never have I been so disappointed for having wanted to hate a movie so badly and then winded up so thoroughly enjoying it. For weeks, I'd been telling people that I'm ticklish in my Benjamin Button, pointing out the airbrushed botox in bus stop posters throughout the city. I lamented the three hour running time and gave a knowing smile when my sage friend Ray Ray pointed out that the movie looked so much like a Forrest Gump knock off because it was made by the same people who made "run, Forrest, run" so ubiquitous in post 1994 America. But then, under the unusual circumstances of a cold LA evening I settled in for the sapfest myself. There, like a programmed drone, I cried myself silly on cue, a stringed puppet dancing for its unseen master. I wept into my popcorn, and I thanked the epic on screen fantasy for its earnest appeal to the Beaches lover in me...That, and they managed to simultaneously make Brad Pitt look as young as he did in Thelma and Louise and make me feel like a dirty old man.  Grade: AC(Awww, Cynicism)

3) Defiance - Never have I been so disappointed for having wanted to love a movie so much and then winded up so thoroughly detesting it. This shit was worse than 300, and left me wondering out loud, "How the hell do you fuck up a Holocaust movie?" Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, Liev Shreiber, and most of the cast are great, but the material they're handed is so dirivitive, so hit you over the head melodramatic, and just so utterly vapid that you'll wish you were watching a focus group tester, and not the final cut.

Stay home and Netflix Uprising. Better yet, get a copy of Escape From Sobibor, and that way you'll just hate the Nazis, not the filmmakers as well. Grade: FYHHEZ (Fuck Your Heavy Handedness Edward Zwick)

4) The Wrestler - There are people that will write volumes about just how brilliant this movie about a washed up, broken man with no time for a second chance is. Cathartic weaping will take place in aisles across American movie theatres as Mickey Rourke's long suffering agent breathes a sigh of relief that his client may yet be able to pay him back the five bucks he borrowed back in 1997. Blonde 20-something star fuckers in sleek Armani gowns they didn't buy will twitter that they caught a glimpse of the man that became the comeback story of the decade as they claw through crowds at red carpet ceremonies for a photo opportunity that might land them in US Weekly next to the legend who became famous making movies before they were even born. I, on the other hand, have clearly been sipping from a different batch of Kool-aid. Grade: eh

5) Revolutionary Road - is fucking brilliant. Grade: see previous sentence.

6) Doubt - I wouldn't wish Catholic guilt on my worst enemy. Jesus fucking Christ on a cross, I thought Muslim guilt was bad, but this! Be forewarned, there are no action sequences in this movie...unless you count Meryl Streep using John Patrick Shanley's dialogue to pop a can of whoop ass on Philip Seymour Hoffman for an hour and a half. Like the guy sitting next to me at the screening I attended, I contemplated taking a big nap about half way through the movie. Converting quiet stage plays to quiet movies is a treacherous business likely to produce a quiet multiplex in most cases, and like many of the people who hurried to their cars as the credits rolled that night, I knew that the dirty priest had done a dirty thing and got exactly what he desreved from saintly harsh Sister Meryl. But then I started talking to other people who'd seen the movie and I was left doubtful - not enough to go sit under a barren tree in a snowy convent and weep quietly in my apron, mind you, but just enough to give the whole thing a second thought, and a second viewing. Maybe even a third. Grade: H&M (Hail Meryl)

7) MILK - At the risk of impropiety, I'll say this out loud: I want to marry Dustin Lance Black! Before he was gunned down by a homicidal dingleberry on a sugar rush who eventually offed himself anyway, Harvey Milk stood up for himself. He stood up for all of us and gave us hope that beyond the isolation of the families and churches that would seek to hide us away and pretend that we didn't exist, there was a place for us past fear and rejection. He said to gay kids everywhere who'd been told by the people closest to them that they are deviant by their very nature, that they are beautiful and perfect exactly as they are. He told us what we should have already known, but were too bullied and scared to see - that we're flawless.
575 Castro St. from FilmInFocus on Vimeo.

I'm not aware of a more fitting tribute to the man* who'd given so much to so many so many, including this Garab, by simply having the profound courage to state who he was. That MILK has, and continues to resonate with so many audiences around the world could have only been sweeter had the man himself lived to see it. Grade: The Gold Standard 

*(though do look up The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and The Harvey Milk Show (1996) for more)

8) Seven Pounds - Topping the list of movies I had zero ambition to see this year, and almost walked into Defiance a second time to avoid, comes this winner of a film that I can't say much about without spoiling. I'm well aware of the now bi-annual Will Smith pilgrimage dictated by the release of sure fire blockbusters, once in the dead of summer, and then alternately in the dead of the very lively movie going cold season. To my credit I did avoid Hancock, and by all accounts that was one of my wiser moves in 2008.

Seven Pounds is one of those flicks that will be great as a rental on a cold rainy night when you're broke and you've lost all faith in humanity's capacity for good. Viewing will likely be followed by various exclamations of "holy crap, why didn't we go see this when it came out two years ago?", or "why do you hate me so much?" Then again, you could just drive to the multiplex and check this one out now and save yourself the ensuing therapy. Grade: I'd tell ya, but then I'd have to kill ya.

9) Valkyrie - Tom Cruise. Eye patch. Taught Bryan Singer thriller with pretty boy German extras. Twists, turns. Tom Cruise. Eye patch. Grade: NABAYH (German for "Not As Bad As You've Heard")

10) Slumdog Millionaire - Suspend your disbelief at the door and make sure the lady next to you doesn't have a Blackberry that she'll be texting on for the duration of the film. Easily one of the best things released in the past year, as stunning visually as anything else. If there's one movie that you pay to see this year, go see MILK. If you're gonna see two, make it a Slumdog. Grade: RDWt(Run, Don't Walk(to))

11) The Day the Earth Stood Still - My mother always told me that if I didn't have anything nice to say, then I should shut the fuck up before she beat the ever loving crap out of me. Color me speechless. Grade: RDWaf (Run, Don't Walk(away from))