The Factual Opinion

Most Choking Deaths Per Household Wins.

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This week on Travis Bickle on the Riviera, we have special guest Morgan Jeske (who can be found on twitter and tumblr), to talk about movies, movies, and movies.

0:00:00 - 0:14:06 - HOMEWORK - Morgan's homework was Big Night (1996), directed by Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, starring Tucci, Scott, Tony Shaloub, Isabella Rossellini, Marc Anthony, Ian Holm, Liev Schrieber, Allison Janney, and Minnie Driver.

0:14:07 - 0:25:21 - HOMEWORK - Sean's homework was Animal Kingdom (2010), directed by David Michod, starring James Frenchville, Joel Edgerton, Jacki Weaver, Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn.

0:25:22 - 0:35:10 - Morgan watched Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), directed by JJ Abrams, starring the Tremor Brother who lives, Heroes, Columbiana, Shaun of the Dead, Sherlock Holmes, Harold and Kumar, The Great Paris, and Bruce Greenwood.

0:35:11 - 1:02:10 - Sean watched Upstream Color (2013), written and directed by Shane Carruth, starring Amy Seimetz and Carruth.

 

1:02:11 - 1:05:45 - Morgan watched Wanderlust (2012), directed by David Wain, written by Wain and Ken Marino, starring Paul Rudd, Jennifer Anniston, Justin Theroux, Marino, Michaela Watkins, Jordan Peele, Malin Akerman, and Joe Lo Truglio.

1:05:46 - 1:11:54 - Morgan watched The Squid and the Whale (2005), starring Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Anna Paquin, and William Baldwin.

1:11:55 - 1:16:40 - Sean watched A Shot In The Dark (1964), directed by Blake Edwards, starring Peter Sellers, Elke Sommer, Herbert Lom, George Sanders, Tracy Reed, and Burt Kwouk.

1:16:41 -1:25:52 - And more on the endless discussion of De Palma - Sean watched Obsession (1976), directed by Brian De Palma, starring Cliff Robertson, Genevieve Bujold, and John Lithgow. And Morgan watched Snake Eyes (1998), directed by De Palma, starring Nicholas Cage, Gary Sinise, Carla Gugino, Luis Guizman, and Stan Shaw.

NEXT WEEK - GUH?

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This week, David Brothers and Sean Witzke talked about Brian De Palma and Airplane!, and there isn't an easier sell than that. You can also keep up with Sean's De Palma studies over here, and I'd recommend you do.

Then there was a comic book podcast with the whole quartet on hand. We got into the meat and guts of Good Riddance, which is a thing we all had read. The subject demanded it!

I was pretty obsessed with movies this week, but can you blame me when Blind Detective sounds as good as it does? When there's a maritime disaster flick featuring Robert Redford all by himself doing his best Tom Hanks impersonation? A cannibal redneck freakshow? Actually that last one might be too much for me. Barf.

I also read this about Bad Boys 2 and liked it quite a bit, especially the part where Will Smith gets called a sociopathic lothario. That's a great phrase. Bad Boys 2 is way more fun to talk about than it is to watch--it's actually pretty obnoxious and tough to sit through more than once. It's a good movie to play on a large screen television alongside AEon Flux and Speed Racer if you're a drug dealer or a shitty photographer. And even then, there's probably a bunch of stuff that's way more contemporary and exhilirating. 

Joe's write-ups at TCJ are an all time favorite of mine, and they have been in every incarnation they've ever had, but this one in particular is aimed right at my midsection, and now my midsection has been ripped in half.

Okay, that's all for now.   

Good Riddance: A Thing Indeed!

On this episode, your comic book team talks about Good Riddance: An Illustrated Memoir of Divorce, by Cynthia Copeland. And that's it! That's the only thing they talk about! I forget to edit the end. It's just gonna trail off, really weirdly. ENJOY!

 

Download GOOD RIDDANCE

 

It's a big building with patients.

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00:00 - 02:21 - This week on Travis Bickle on the Riviera, we have another guest episode. Returning guest David Brothers came to talk about movies, but more importantly to talk about the collapse of a certain major comics news site from an insider's perspective. This is an in-depth expose that you won't get anywhere else!

 

02:22 - 18:30 - HOMEWORK - David's homework this week was The Fury (1978), directed by Brian De Palma, starring Amy Irving, Kirk Douglas, John Cassavettes, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning, Fiona Lewis, Andrew Stevens, and William Finley.

De Palma was originally going to adapt Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, and the book is a simlar cat and mouse psychic manhunt, and Body Double later ended up incorporating some story points from it as well.

Also mentioned in this section: Carrie (both the original and the new version), Mean Girls, Akira (and Otomo's other psychic warfare books Domu and Fireball), Scanners, the X-Men movies, Gantz, The Good Son, Children of the Corn, Chronicle, Bruce Willis vs Tom Cruise, Women directing horror movies, and found footage movies.

18:31 - 27:58 - HOMEWORK - Sean's homework this week was Election (2005), directed by Johnnie To, starring Simon Yam, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Louis Ko, Nick Cheung, Cheung Siu-Fai, Lam Suet, Lam Ka-Tun, Maggie Shiu, David Chiang, too may people.

Also mentioned in this section: Takashi Miike, Mad Detective and the trailer for Blind Detective, the Godfather films, Life Without Principle, and the styles of Hong Kong action films.

27:59 - 42:58 - David watched Half Baked (1998), directed by Tamara Davis, written by Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan, starring Chappelle, Jim Bruer, Guillermo Diaz, Harland Williams, Laura Silverman, and Stephen Wright. He also watched Airplane (1980), directed and written by Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker, starring Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Neilsen, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, Stephen Stucker, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Barbara Billingsley, James Hong, David Lesiure, like 900 other people.

Also mentioned in this section - Chappelle's Show, Adult Swim, CB4, 30 Rock, Scary Movie 2, Mad Magazine, guys dicking around on walkie talkie scenes, Zucker/Abrams/Zucker, John Landis, Louie, Key & Peele, Carlos Mencia, Daniel Tosh, Workaholics, Pitch Perfect, Nick Swardson, Creepshow, Ted, A Touch of Cloth, A Haunted House, and Airplane 2.

42:59 - 55:59 - Sean, kept up with his De Palma marathon, and watched Scarface (1983), directed by Brian De Palma, written by Oliver Stone, starring Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, F. Murry Abraham, Harris Yulin; and Carlito's Way (1993), directed by Brian De Palma, writen by David Koepp starring Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Penelope Ann Miller, John Leguizamo, Luis Guzman, Viggo Mortensen.

Also mentioned in this section: The Boondocks, Throne of Blood, exasperation as the best emotion, Spawn, Casualties of War, also listen to my voice break as I try to say "F Murray Abraham" twice in one sentence.

1:00:00 - 1:09:13 - And finally, David watched Alphaville (1965), directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon, Akim Tamirof.

Also mentioned in this section: Ron Wimberly's riff on Alphaville, I Am Legend, Pierrot Le Fou, Blade Runner, language, philosophy, geography, the other Lemmy Caution films, black and white vs color in Godard, Manhattan, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the hero's journey format, and Europa.

NEXT WEEK - SOMETHING!

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Woodshed: We'll Always Have Your Back, Issues of Hustler

Here's a movie podcast on Slayground, Sorcerer, Michael Bay's Pain and Gain...man. Lots of movies on this one. Then we got together and did an Iron Man show! It was a busy time for Sean Witzke and I. I'm listening to Neil Young as I write this sentence. I'm pretty sure that's not my favorite thing to do. Go figure! Then Tim O'Neil wrote up Iron Man and I wished I had read it first so I could have stolen some of his thoughts. But not his thoughts on my precious Guy Pearce! His thoughts on precious Guy Pearce are all incorrect! Did you know Guy Pearce was a bodybuilding champion in the skinny guy division? He was. Read between the lines, you son of a bitch!

This was basically the Joe and Tucker make Chris listen to us excitedly describe our fondest things. Call it purloined joy, if you would. Then Matt returned and I left and they talked about that Uno Moralez guy and Leiji Matsumoto and then Chris brought up RASL and I like to imagine that it was around this moment that the guys realized they'd all forgotten what sharing was because you couldn't get any more specific to each individual then those three topics. If I'd been on that episode I would have made them listen to me talk about Sweet Meats.

Here's the Comics of the Weak, after an unexpected week off. Abhay covered the news of a dead nun, I tried my Norm McDonald hat on. Nate Bulmer was there. Then, this week was a brief riff on Mignola, Deforge and the Samnee/Waid Daredevil.

I greatly enjoyed this brief article on Tom Cruise and authenticity porn. I didn't realize until I went back to it that Tom Gauld had done the little illustration at the top.

Geoff Klock made this mash-up video of quotes from Hamlet, I dug it.

The consistently wonderful writer on film Ignatiy Vishnevetsky turned up over at the AV Club, writing a brief "why I like this" thing on Michael Mann's Miami Vice. I'm a little older than Vishnevetsky, and I remember walking out of Miami Vice feeling like Mann had lost a step, a feeling that Public Enemies did little to dissuade. But due to another article (on the AV Club, actually), I gave Vice another chance last year, and it won me back over. Everything Ignatiy says about it is true, but it's the purity of certain portions of it--Jamie Foxx's merciless, muscular pursuit of the men who took his girl down to the simple movements of a yanked mask and a smoothly placed hand on the small of a woman's back--that struck me more than the digital immediacy that seems to fascinate others. I like seeing people write about it, and I'm glad I gave it another chance.

This guy Joan Cornella--okay, now that's exciting. When I started reading his stuff, I was immediately won over, and 10 minutes in, I was feeling the same way I felt when I first saw Deforge, Lisa Hanawalt or Joe Daly. These are the exact kind of comics I want to read.

I like David Bordwell's blog in part because it's so unlike every other blog I read in that nearly everything written there takes a solid block of uninterrupted reading time to digest. I was pleasantly surprised to see him toss up this small piece on Calvin and Hobbes, which was written in response to Dear Mr. Watterson, a documentary on the strip and its influence. It is a dream to get a chance to write for Comics Journal, and I don't regret any of the time I spent writing for comiXology, but seeing short pieces like this reminded me how excited it always made me to read offhand observations about comics and cartooning from smart people with only a passing interest in the subject, especially when it would show up in non-traditional venues. I wish there was more like this out there, or at least, that I was better able to find examples of it on a consistent basis.

Tessa Strain dealt with Gatsby. I could read her all day, on anything, but when it's movies and books at the same time, it's a total fish in a barrel scenario. She's the best.

Community Bookstore is taking over Babbo's Books over on Prospect Park West--if you don't live in Brooklyn, this will mean nothing to you--and turning it into their second store, Terrace Books. I liked Babbo's, I love Community, and therefore couldn't be happier if you stapled a puppy to a balloon shaped like a pony. (Both of those things are adorable!)

Koyama is going to publish the third issue of Ryan Cecil Smith's SF--I don't have a link for that, but I'm not sure why you would need one. All the information is right there.

Powerhouse Pepper? Why, He Got His Start Right Here, In These Rooms!

Comic Books Are Burning In Hell is pleased to offer the latest in its top-ranked continuing education seminars.

Our main session concerns FRONTIER, HOTT NEW PUBLISHER NEW NEW COMIC collecting **UNO MORALEZ**

Breakout sessions follow.

JOE discusses BENNY BREAKIRON, nEEEw release from SMURFS CREATOR PEYO!!!

MATT discusses COSMOSHIP YAMATO, 1,000% AUTHENTIC (i.e. untranslated) MANGA from LEIJI MATSUMOTO --not a Daft Punk tie-in --

CHRIS discusses RASL, ALL JEFF SMITH, SOON IN COLOR.

This combined program counts for 4 continuing education credits and 0 ethics credits. Please turn in two copies of your carbon forms as you exit. "We love you!"

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There Is A Third Iron Man Movie

On this episode, your hosts discuss only one film, and thus there is no need for notes. Please to enjoy.

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Easy As ABC

On this episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell, Joe, Chris and Tucker yak it up about Gengoroh Tagame, the latest from Michael Deforge, ABC Warriors and...so much more. Fatty Arbuckle's murderous liasons! A dog that climbs ladders! Free comics! It's a veritable thrill ride.

Here's some of what Joe and Tucker are talking about when they're talking about ABC Warriors

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