The Garab Chronicles

While You Were Out Living Your Life...

This happened:

 

And Then, I Squealed Like a Little Girl

My Patronus is a big, beautiful - I feel so weird saying penis to register my excitement over a PG-13 movie, so...cock. I know this because I have seen it. It makes its presence known whenever I'm feeling down, or, more importantly, when dementors are in the immediate vacinity.

I could go on for seven volumes, and split the last one in two parts, but fear of overkill and Death Eaters prevents me. Look what they did to poor Mad Eye...or you will, come November 19th.

 

The Crazies

Either I've completely lost what was left of my ever loving mind, or The Crazies is really, really fucking good. It's more than likely that both are true, but I haven't been this pleasantly surprised in a movie theatre since Book of Eli. To be sure, I walked into both movies with my expectations in the sub basement, so the only place things could have possibly gone was up. Still though, halfway through the remake of the 1973 George Romero classic (and this one is also produced by Romero), I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, this must be how Simon Cowell felt when Susan Boyle opened her gob and started singing." 

And then I realized that I just compared myself to Simon Cowell and had to take a shower.

Take a friend, you're gonna need to grab somebody when you're curled up in the fetal position trying not to look at the screen. You're also guaranteed more than a few jumps, and if you're like me, you may scream like a girl even if you're not one.

Also, the guy playing the Sheriff's Deputy is really hot.

Grade: HMCD (Hold Me Closer Deputy)

Legion

Holy unmerciful god, it's worse than Daybreakers. If you really want trapped in a diner in the middle of nowhere with monsters on the loose outside goodness, do yourself a favor and Netflix Tremors:

The Book of Eli

I thought the Hughes Brothers were long gone after From Hell, which actually was the movie from, well, you get the picture. Nine years on, and that Johnny Depp/ Heather Graham monstrosity still haunts me in the least flattering way possible. To be perfectly honest, had I looked up the credits on The Book of Eli before I headed out to the theatre tonight, I might just have stayed home. Lucky for me, I didn't.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the heavy religious overtones in this thing - and trust me, they hit you over the head with them enough times that you'll be looking to confess something, anything, to anyone...Perhaps that you walked into the screening thinking it was a re-release of 2007's I Am Legend. But unlike that piece of post-Apocalyptic zombie graphic novel crap, this post-Apocalyptic Wild Western manages to take itself seriously enough to use cannibalism as a punch line, and gives life to an array of supporting characters you actually care about.

Mila Kunis does her Mila Kunis thing, skulking and seductive with a heart that's 50% cotton and 50% synthetic mystery textile. Jennifer Beals - yes, Jennifer Beals - is radiant, in ways you won't fully appreciate til the last 5 minutes, and Gary Oldman reprises his role as ruthless madman/carnival barker, and even does that yell thing that's still the most memorable moment from The Professional. The filmmakers also have the good sense to cast Ray Stevenson (R.I.P. Rome) as number one henchman and potential convert to the light. And then, of course, there are Frances de la Tour and Michael Gambon, who end up with the best lines and the most memorable scenes in the movie - as well they should. 

There's a nondenominational nod along the way that comes off as an afterthought, while enshrining the main villain's point of view that monotheism, in particular, is the key to mankind's salvation despite the film's own painstaking allusions to the contrary. But, no matter, there are enough fights, chases, guns, and highway mischief to make this feel more like a Summer blockbuster than a hard boiled existential romp through the end of days.

At the end of this day, The Book of Eli may find itself atop the same under-appreciated heap that The Road languished in last holiday season. They're very different movies, to be sure, but they do share one unfortunate handicap, as they may have resonated with potential audiences as too timely. In an actual world where movie-goers have to think long and hard about whether or not they can afford popcorn, spending two hours in an imaginary one where cat meat is a rare delicacy and the neighbors in the vast wasteland you call home are dying to eat you, a third viewing of a lush Avatar world may prove more tempting. And probably much easier on the stomach.

Pray for Eli, he's worth more than a rental.

Daybreakers: The Full, Unabridged, Thought Out, Cinefile Review

I've had diarrhea that was more artistically expressive. That's all.

Mommy, What's an Addendum?

These two movies are so good that they get their own post, rather than getting tagged on the tail end of an end of year list that you probably won't get to the end of anyway because you're glad that last year has finally come to an end and you're starting to look forward to the end of the first week of the new year while wondering when this sentence will finally come to a merciful...conclusion.

1) A Single Man - Sadly, this movie was only available in very limited release so it never stood a chance of reaching a larger audience against the studio behemoths that came out around the holidays. And like "The Road", it's not the type of movie that leaves you singing humanity's praises on the way out of the theatre. You will, however, leave singing Colin Firth's praises while wondering why the hell Julianne Moore doesn't show up in more comedies. And Tom Ford (yes, the guy that designed the Gucci something or other you lusted after and probably couldn't afford til three seasons later) does such a beautiful job telling a story that could have, in less capable hands, ended up as a Lifetime movie of the week, that movie-making that costs under 30 bizzillion dollars may yet have a chance in this world...unless, of course, the fruits of such labor continue getting tossed in front of the bad distribution bus.

Grade: A.M. (Aaaah.Mazing)

2) Broken Embraces - There are people in the world who love Almodovar's movies, and then there are people that I want to have nothing to do with. Yes, there are subtitles (gasp!), and no, it's not so linear that you can stop and check your twitter account and not miss something very, very important. If you're okay with that, then you're in for a very satisfying ride that you may want to get right back on after the credits have rolled and you've had a chance to download the truly gorgeous soundtrack (legally, please).

Grade: There are things in this world that I'm not worthy of grading, as in anything Almodovar touches.

Mommy, What's a Garab? (Part: A Year Without Television)

This year, The Garab decided to live without the box, which is technically a rectangle, and now comes standard with HD-transmitting goodness, costs what I take home in two (good) weeks or could be paying Visa back for the rest of my natural life, and has generally been known to eat years of my life away without having the decency to put out. For the last 365 days, I went against everything I was lovingly taught since birth and did what may well force a Best Buy executive somewhere to give up and jump out of his corner office window during lunch while cursing my minimalist name: I went without a television.

I found a small apartment close to work with the hardwood floors and natural light I’d been dreaming of since moving to Los Angeles nine years ago. The kitchen was small – converted walk-in closet small – and the bathroom door was next to the stove that someone had jammed into the corner to make room for the industrious bit of counter space built around a stained porcelain sink that actually offered little in the way of a counter while taking up too much space. On what had been, at some point in the 1920’s, a set of drawers placed low enough to cause life-long back pain, sat a small refrigerator that hummed all day and all night. If humming induced seizures, this was the sound that emanated from this little cherub of a machine that kept my food either frozen beyond consumption or tepid enough to subtract ten days from the expiration date of many a well-intentioned yogurt container’s best efforts at perpetual freshness.

The ceiling was high, but that only meant that I couldn’t reach it with a standard sized broom handle while reclining under the graceful serenade of an upstairs neighbor who was either jumping rope 24-7, or knocking boots with some hapless thing that never let out so much as a whimper while he jackhammered into him, or her, or it. The gas heater that had been built into the wall by someone who obviously lived on the East Coast during the winter months, kept the place toasty enough to fry an egg on one’s chest in dry weather, and humid enough to make the apartment double as a sauna if I made the mistake of self-love while luxuriously showering past the 5 minute mark when there was hot water.

The natural light came by way of the parking garage just beyond my window, and my neighbors loved to spend their jobless weekdays making improvements to the rotting wood on their garage door when the underpaid gardeners weren’t using power tools to blow dirt from one end of the grassless pavement to the other so they’d have reason to come back two days later and do it all over again.

Beyond the kitchen lived an old man who wore the same hat every day and thick glasses that must have affected his hearing because he blared his own television at volumes that could wake the dead, and then bore them back to oblivion with the news coverage that he apparently couldn’t live without. On the other side of my one-room slice of heaven lived a couple that looked like the twins from Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland” if they chain smoked by day and spent the night hacking their lungs up while blasting the volume on their own oversized TV set, this one tuned to a video game full of unimaginable carnage and screaming destruction that no doubt brought them much satisfaction while causing me immeasurable nausea and the discovery that claustrophobia is spelled e-a-r-p-l-u-g-s.

But, the price was right, the utilities were included, the toilet flushed properly, and I finally had my beloved hardwood floors. I’d arrived, and I would use this place – my place – to live, write, cook, meditate, fall in love, and, when out of love, to love myself by the light of my neighbor’s outdoor flood lamp pointed directly at my window and set to a motion sensor.

I painted, and I was careful to toss or give away anything that might have otherwise cluttered my noisy little den of zen. I went with a light green for the main room, for that delightful calming sensation one gets after a decent massage or the passage of a toe-curling orgasm with someone you don’t want to kick out and meditate out of memory. The kitchen got a manly earth tone, though my attempt to contrast with a lavender coat on the cabinets made it look like a baby had projectile vomited after downing a pint of Pepto Bismol, so I covered that up quickly, with three coats of expensive semi-gloss, and then tried to meditate the image out of memory only to realize that some colors, once part of your experience, are with you forever. I tried the lavender again in the bathroom – because that was the most overpriced custom-made can of paint I’ve ever purchased from a Home Depot sales clerk because he had eyes that I wanted to go skinny dipping in, in my whole entire life – and got the same result: baby. throw. up...Projectile.

I quickly switched to the baby blue I selected before undergoing hot-Homo-Depot-guy-hypnosis, and once again found peace. I would gaze lovingly at the beautiful blue walls while being intimate with myself and scrubbing the day away under the luke-warm spray of a water-saver spout that blasted scalding water whenever someone in an adjacent unit flushed the unwanted remnants of their lives away. This was how I learned that the little window next to the tub that I kept open to ventilate an apartment built by an idiot who decided that putting a furnace in a room in the middle of the desert was more important than equipping it with an exhaust fan to make sure the occupant didn’t suffocate, should be closed when I decided to multitask, lest I risk saluting a peeping neighbor or his gardener with my manhood while attempting to jump away from a surge of 300 degree water.  

But when I wasn’t doing things that would make my mother blush or writing about them for all of creation to read, I was creating a space that was a reflection of me. I was determined to make sure that everything that went into this apartment was something that I chose to put there. If I wasn’t sure what color curtains I needed, or I couldn’t afford that perfect rug that may finally absorb some of the sounds being broadcast through the walls, I’d go without until I found the right fit and could actually pay for it.

That also meant, no television. If I had one of those contraptions mounted to the wall – and let’s be honest, I’m the kind of homo that would have mounted the thing to the wall, made sure it was off center so it didn’t look too obvious, and then set about decorating around it to justify its existence before charging an XBox on my American Express for all those travel points I’ll never get to use and stocking up on games where I could channel my frustration with the neighbors by pretending they were zombies and I was rescuing mankind from their noisy indifference with a run on sentence…There could be no television in this apartment!

I carved out a space to be brilliant, without distraction, and focus on me. If I wanted to watch something, rather than mindless channel surfing, I would choose a program and watch it on my sleek, efficient, unobtrusive, space-saving laptop computer. It was a Mac after all, the thing could do everything but perform fellatio. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

No dice. Writing is a solitary occupation, and I’m not one of those people that relish sitting alone in a tiny room, hacking away at the Great American Blog. Music’s great, but when the light changes and the world goes dark, you’re reminded that you just spent an entire day alone, and the internet porn you watched during pee breaks is, in the end, an ill-suited companion, regardless of the breakneck stream speeds or jaw-dropping variety. Thankfully, there was a coffee shop nearby where I got to join all the other writers who might otherwise be home masturbating and wondering if they should go ahead and buy curtains since the white blinds that came with the place may or may not be preventing perfect strangers  from finding out what my favorite position is on Tuesdays.

Also, nobody wants to come to your house when you don’t have a television…or a couch…or any of the other things that normal people spend billions of dollars on every year to avoid having to look at one another and have an actual conversation. I had a sorta boyfriend for part of 2009. He came over once and I made dinner. It was really, really good, because I’m a damn good cook. But there was no television, so he broke up with me. If there was no television to watch together, and we couldn’t talk about the shows we’d watched, then what the hell was the point of having a relationship? What sort of foundation could you possibly lay for a partnership if you weren’t living vicariously, as a couple, through the dysfunctional lives of couples you were watching on a very large screen?

And another thing: If you’re a pop culture whore like I am, there’s no such thing as a life free of distraction. This whole notion of squatting all day in constant bliss without the benefit of knowing that someone, somewhere, is more miserable and frustrated than yourself is just so…frustrating. We need to watch other people try and fail at relationships, it takes the sting out of our own failures when we think we’re the only idiots on earth that could possibly fall for one complete idiot after another even more moronic than ourselves. Where would I be without my “Sex and the City”, my “Queer as Folk”, my taste in my own mouth?

Television is a window - and they’re building the things to look more and more like them these days – into a world that you may want to use up those travel miles to get to, even when you know there are much, much cheaper ways to get there. It’s a little bit of inspiration and a whole lot of crap, but it’s also a way to communicate with the rest of the world when we’re stuck in a Hollywood apartment hating the neighbors and wiping the sweat puddle off the sheets while wishing it got there as a result of something other than a radiator that won’t quit even when you’ve turned the damned thing off.

I miss television, and this year I’m getting a place big enough that having one makes sense…and then I’m gonna make it fabulous.

Here then, in no particular order, is your 2009 movie wrap up – aka what I spent all of my disposable income on last year to have an excuse to get out of the house (TV props, via HULU, to GLEE, Battlestar Galactica, and by consensus since I didn’t get to watch them myself: Madmen and Dexter):

1) Up - Once again, Pixar has me weeping within the first 5 minutes. Gorgeous, funny, heart-breaking, and well worth owning because you’ll want to watch it over and over again.

2) Up In the Air - Simple, elegant, much more understated than I could ever hope to be, and does it while reaffirming the notion that falling in love is well worth the heartache that often follows.

3) Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - Reviled by hard core fans that wanted more of the 9 million page book crammed into the three hour movie, this installment delivers on many levels, especially visually. It did, however, leave me less satisfied than the last three movies in the series…like that would ever stop me from watching the thing another 6 or 7 times.

4) Precious - Just watch it. There isn’t a thing I could say to add to the hype, other than it warrants every bit of it.

5) Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Eye candy; didn't suck.

6) Ninja Assassin: Eye candy (the main ninja); sucked, big time.

7) Inglorious Basterds - Oohmazing! And Brad Pitt isn’t in it enough to distract from the story, or the fantastic performance by the nastiest villain imaginable, doing the nastiest things conceivable. Makes you hate Nazis all over again, and the scene in the basement pub will have you on the edge of your seat from the word go.

8) 500 Days of Summer - Ever watch a movie and go “holy shit, that's my life”, and then realize halfway through watching it “holy shit, that means I’m about to get dumped”? Yeah, but so long as Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s on the market, you won’t mind being single.

9) Fantastic Mr. Fox - Did what “Where the Wild Things Are” didn’t. Took a beloved story, made it with all the enthusiasm of a 12 year old, and reminded us why we loved stories like these in the first place.

10) The Hangover - You laugh your ass off the first time you watch it while gasping for breath so you don’t miss any of the jokes, and you laugh your ass off the second time watching the audience around you experience it for the first time. And, it’s the best detective story, like ever.

11) District 9 - One of the most unexpected, touching, frighteningly inventive movies that came out last year. Peter Jackson stamp of approval and all.

12) The Lovely Bones - Not nearly as lovely as I'd have loved it to be. Peter Jackson stamp of approval, what hast thou wrought?

13) I Love You, Man - Reason #3,454,624 I love Paul Rudd. I love you man, indeed.

14) Star Trek - Chris Pine. 4 times in the movie theatre. Chris Pine. Best Star Trek movie ever and made me care about this franchise for the first time in a really, really long time. Chris Pine

15) Brothers: I really wanted to hate this movie, and I did…for the first 20 minutes. But then it grabs you by the throat and you can’t stop watching the quiet horror of a story as heartfelt as it is timely.

16) Julie and Julia - File under shameless guilty pleasures and the impulse to go gourmet, no matter the cost to your wallet or your dignity. 

17) Zombieland - Meh.

18) Avatar - Hands down, the best thing that came out this year. Hokey? Hardly. Unoriginal? Sure, if you were watching a different movie than I was. Worth all the hoopla about the 3-D? You bet your blue, ten-foot ass.

19) Terminator: Salvation - So Long Christian Bale, hello Sam Avatar Worthington.

20) Wolverine - Can we have the guy that directed "The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men movies back now? These other guys are ruining my childhood.

21) Away We Go - That dude from "The Office" is really pretty.

22) This Is It - In The Garab Chronicles’ Top 5 this year…stop holding for a punch line, I’m serious. Whatever you think of the man, there has never been, and there will never be another Michael Jackson. This movie is a thrilling reminder of everything that was great about the legendary performer, made even more bittersweet with the knowledge that we’ll never get to see him do it again.

23) Bruno - Can take a copy of Borat and use it to screw himself.

24) 2012 - Yes I saw it, yes it's absolutely awful, and yes I'll probably watch it again

25) New Moon - I am now a Twilight fan, Mormon sexual repression and all.

26) The Road - Most depressing post-apocalyptic movie you'll probably ever see, and an absolutely fantastic movie that went under the radar because what happens in it is beyond horrifying, and it was released on Thanksgiving Day.

27) ?*

Did I miss one? Or 10? Add your favorites, or what you thought were complete and utter disasters to the list.

Rule #1: It has to be a movie that was theatrically released in 2009

Rule #2: It can’t be porn.

*27) Via Holly M., Sherlock Holmes - easy to forget, but only because it came on the very tail end of 2009. Robert Downet Jr. shirtless, and Jude Law actually having fun. If you love Richie's stuff, a la "Lock Stock..." and "Snatch", then this is definitely for you. If you don't, then what's wrong with you?

 

Ho x 3

Merry Christmas, everybody.

It's been an amazing year, full of challenges that have restored my faith in, if nothing else, the knowledge that whatever's out there, and whatever you want to call it, it has a wicked sense of humor and a profound sense of irony.

At every turn, I have been reminded that all the horrors we've collectively witnessed over the last twelve months are tempered with little glimpses of pure beauty, and moments of jaw-dropping inspiration that this little Garab is eternally grateful for.

Exhibits A:

And B:

And most of all, I m grateful to all of you for reading.

Happy Holidays.

Now This Is How You Clear a Room

Dinnerjacket spoke at the United Nations this evening, at which point everybody left:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

My guess is they all went home to watch Glee (also known as the best thing on television right now):