The New Domino's Pizza Recipe: An Extended Taste Test Review From Both Coasts (And an Appreciation of Domino's Exquisite Online User Experience) @4:17 PM
Mary HK Choi: Really quick background question: were you prompted to eat Domino's because of their new ad campaign?
David Cho: Oh for sure, I'd been watching those commercials for the last couple of weeks.
Mary: Me too.
David: They make a really compelling argument!
Mary: Agreed. There's something about contrition that makes me want to throw money at it.
Mary: Was the line "When they said our sauce tasted like ketchup it broke my heart" what got you?
Mary: Because it definitely did me.
David: Not to mention the guarantee.
David: What percentage of people ever actually follow through with something like that, to go to the trouble of saying, "I'M NOT SATISFIED WITH THIS PIZZA, GIMME MY MONEY BACK"?
Mary: So from a business standpoint you respect their G also?
David: Yeah, I just like when brands prey on people's laziness by making promises that seem to mean more than they actually do. READ MORE 96
Zachary Woolfe: Another Long Vampire Weekend @10:50 AM
It’s easy to know that a band is good, and harder to know what they’ll mean for people. In 2006, I knew, as did a bunch of Columbia students and some folks on the Internet, that Vampire Weekend was good. I knew this only because I happened, at the time, to be dating a friend of two of the band’s members. In this capacity I would go to their shows, one of those relationship tasks that would have been pretty annoying if the band didn’t put on really good shows. READ MORE 32
Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: Daybreakers Will Suck Out Your Brain Cells and Smear You With Blood (And Not in a Good Way) @12:00 PM
I like gore. It’s a good equalizer. At the end of the day, we all exist in the same corporeal bodies that can be sliced, hacked, carved, and eviscerated in any number of creative ways. (Oh, I’m sick, you say? Well you’ve been reading Tila Tequlia’s Twitter feed for the past week—so judge me not.) The only problem is that somewhere along the line between The Little Mermaid and Hostel, gore became the new black. Mainstream Hollywood now relies on it, mostly to compensate for garbage scripts and awful acting. “Sorry, no decent concepts or plot lines on the menu today, but we do have a grisly melange of shofar-shaped organs in a bloody reduction, sprinkled with bush-league dialogue.” Which is a shame, because good gore really shouldn’t be wasted on crap movies—it’s like having an Oscar-worthy performance in Cheaper By the Dozen 2. READ MORE 5
"Committed is an unfurling of Gilbert’s profound anxiety about reëntering a legally binding arrangement that she does not really believe in. All this ambivalence, expressed in her high-drama prose, can be a lot to handle. (One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.)"
—Ariel Levy on Elizabeth Gilbert on marriage, which is pretty much all you should need to hear to go a-clicking through. @1:30 PM 17
Flicked Off, with Mary HK Choi: 'Avatar' @3:11 PM
This movie makes me emo. Thinking about it makes my nose do that chloriney thing you get right before you start crying. I am SO GAY for this movie that I can't stand it. And you know what? Having finally seen it, I don't even care what the haters have to say. I am a happy meniscus that your spite sauce slides off of. I'm lifted.
I waited three hours in July San Diego sun to watch 27 minutes of this movie. I had to cross the street from the convention center to where the line serpentined to the water by the Hilton to catch the Cameron panel at Comic Con. I sat ON GRASS next to a very nice but distinctly aromatic 19-year-old quasi Juggalo who worked in human resources at a tech firm and wanted to talk the whole time to get my ass into Hall H and my eyeballs behind some 3D specs and I'll tell you what, it was worth it. READ MORE 84
'Avatar' Part 2, with David Cho: Who Remembers 'District 9'? @2:11 PM
So as not to be confusing: I definitely think you should go see Avatar as soon as you can, if only because of what it does visually by creating a completely new world that is really amazing—especially the 3D, it's all very, very cool and mind blowing! That being said (SORRY LARRY DAVID AND/OR JERRY SEINFELD), when watching Avatar, I was never really invested in any of the characters or emotionally compelled by what was happening on the screen. I walked away thinking that I had never seen anything like that ever in a movie, while at the same time also very reminded of another movie from this year, that did a lot of what I thought Avatar tried to do but with much better results: Neill Blomkamp's District 9. READ MORE 15
Last Night's Company Holiday Party, Reviewed @12:20 PM
This year's ______ holiday party was shocking, groundbreaking. It was—dare it be said—a gamechanging affair. Why? Food. Yes. Food. There was food there. Like, good food. Because whenever you go to a holiday party and get wasted, what do you want? Food! And what always happens? Either A) there's no food, or, B) the food is passed around on trays and you have to elbow your way through packs of people or position yourself by the kitchen entrance in order to accost the servers who emerge from it to get the little mini-eggrolls and then after that whatever other horrid mini-thing (and what the fuck is a mini-egg roll? Like, really. People need to stop making unnecessary mini-things. Just make the big-sized things smaller) comes out of the kitchen that is greasy and typically not so great, but whatever, it's free food, you're gonna eat it because you're trashed and hungry. READ MORE 35
'Avatar' Part 1: How We Deal with Iraq War II, with Seth Colter Walls @11:31 AM
Fun reviews are fun. You know how much fun? Sometimes we start writing them before we see the movie. The other afternoon, I started thinking about an Avatar piece headlined "Avatar Is the Greatest Movie of All Time For People Who Love Wearing Glasses." Right? I had a whole set piece ready about how, during hour 17 of the movie, I got distracted and started wondering if friction from the Costello-grade thickness of the 3D specs was causing a zit on the patch of skin between my skull and left ear. I thought this was fine to conceive ahead of time, because Avatar is obviously just a mass entertainment, and don't get it twisted: let's all have some fun, no? READ MORE 10
Showed Up: 'Elektra' at the Metropolitan Opera @3:50 PM
Seth Colter Walls: Matthew, why is Elektra, currently at the Met, important? Like, The Awl basically never covers operas. Why are we doing this one?
Choire Sicha: Yeah, seriously, what the hell?
Seth: And why have you gone 3 times in the last week, weirdo?
Matthew Gallaway: Elektra is an opera written in 1909 by Richard Strauss, who is one of the most important composers of the 20th Century. In the manner of say, Picasso, he paved the way for the atonal dissonance and 12-tone scales that would come to define progressive music for the next 100 years or more. (Read Alex Ross for more accurate information!) READ MORE 37
We will be telling you much more about this tomorrow—because we think its fair for you to have a chance to see it for yourself, or else what fun is it for all of us?—but here is the Times review, just up now on Avatar: "Mr. Cameron… is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW. Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What's often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance." 13
Flicked Off: "The Road" @3:20 PM
So, as you know, due to all the jokes and stuff about it, The Road was a book about a guy and his kid who are heading south in a hideous post-apocalytpic United States, in the hopes—one sort of gathers—that if there won't be food and maybe some still-living trees there that maybe at least it will be vaguely warm down there. Nuclear (or whatever) winter kills! So do people, who are the only food left, which is why this is a perfect movie for Thanksgiving release. So this very spare book became a movie, and it is very rare that a popular movie can be as equally spare as a spare book, and that is the case with this, where the movie becomes movie-like. It becomes cinematical. This is not all terrible. John Hillcoat, who directed The Proposition, which, it must be remembered, was an pre-apocalyptic nightmare of a film, which is to say, an Australian historical film, that was produced by, among others, Tina Brown's brother Chris, and so he can strike a balance between austerity and exciting movie-ness. Nick Cave wrote that very excellent screenplay for The Proposition, and also did its quite great soundtrack, along with his regular collaborator Warren Ellis, who actually is Australian. Cave and Hillcoat are now at work on a screenplay for The Wettest Country in the World, which is a fictionalized true-life book about bootleggers in Virginia. But, despite their devotion to each other, Nick Cave is where The Road goes terribly wrong. READ MORE 39
Booked Up, with Eric J. Herboth: 'In Search of the Multiverse' @2:30 PM
In May of 2008, Brazil's National Indian Foundation, a government agency, published aerial photos of what was reported to be a tribe of uncontacted peoples living in a remote corner of the Amazonian rainforest. The images depicted several men, painted a bright red and brandishing bows and arrows, ready to attack the mysterious aircraft above. The images were sensational and stirred much controversy, and in an anthropological way pointed out the subtle notion of perspective that lies at the heart of some of the most advanced thinking in theoretical physics. Namely, denied the proper position of reference, can one be cognizant of true isolation? When one can't see the forest for the trees, how can one consider the landscape beyond the woods? For anthropologists, the relation of uncontacted cultures to our own is the big question. For scientists, it is our relation to everything there is, and could be, that brings a feverish curiosity. READ MORE 16
Flicked Off: Alex Pareene and Natasha Vargas-Cooper on 'The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans' @1:40 PM
Natasha: Pareene!
Alex: Natasha!
Natasha: Can we talk about the motherf'ing Bad Lieutenant??
Alex: Yes. Yes we can.
Natasha: Pareene, tell me why this is a great movie.
Alex: Well. I think, first of all, that it is indeed about a Bad Lieutenant. I think that while Abel Ferrara's original movie was about a bad person who happens to be a Lieutenant, Nic Cage, in this film, was just not ever very good at being a Lieutenant. And I admired that, making a police procedural where none of the policing is ever very competent. READ MORE 23
Flicked Off: 'Broken Embraces': "Desire Should Be Acknowledged as the Principal Means to a Better Society" @2:50 PM
You know, I was writing a long thing today about the new Pedro Almodovar movie, trying to explain why you should go see it—and I was being fucking ponderous. So here is the short version. This is a gorgeous, wonderful movie, made by one of the few living masters of the form, starring unbelievably great actors. All of the reviews are talking about it as an homage to cinema, but that's boring. The important point is that there are at least six perfect Almodovar movies: Kika, The Flower of My Secret, All About my Mother, Talk to Her, Volver and now Broken Embraces. I am willing to hear arguments for there being more than six, but not fewer. READ MORE 30
Mary HK Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper on 'New Moon': 'Teenage Female Desire Manifest' @2:01 PM
Mary: Yo. Did you see that mess last night?
Natasha: OMG I saw the shit out of it!
Mary: AND…
Mary: Break it down.
Natasha: Ok, first reaction:
Natasha: SWOOOOOON
Mary: Oh, seriously. Like, we MISSED him.
Natasha: And here's what I figured out. That shit is ABOUT RACE! Earthy hill people with their bare feet versus pale Europeans in robes. IT'S A CULTURE CLASH.
Mary: Dude, velvet robes that OPEN. It's an age-old culture clash. BUT the "cold ones" do have that one dude with dreads.
Natasha: Blacula! READ MORE 42
Flicked Off: 'Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans' @10:02 AM
Of the three important movies opening today, our coverage of one of them will be handled elsewhere, by Mr. Joe MacLeod of the Baltimore City Paper:
Do you like Nicolas Cage? He ate a bug once, for real, in a movie. Do you think Nicolas Cage is a fucking weirdo sellout who maybe used to be an actor who could have done something with his career other than make movies such as Con Air or that piece of shit Ghost Rider? Do you ever find yourself wondering about Nicolas Cage's physical appearance or the provenance of the hair on his head? Remember Nicolas Cage in that remake of Kiss of Death with that red-headed tool who's on one of the C.S.I. shows now? Wasn't Nicolas Cage pretty good in Adaptation and Matchstick Men? Do you think of Nicolas Cage as a has-been? Have you ever found yourself annoyed because there's no "h" in Nicolas Cage's first name?
Flicked Off: '2012' is Awesome and Haters Can Suck It @4:30 PM
You know who I love? I love anyone who hated this movie because I would like to fight them to the death for being wrong as balls. Fuckouttahere. I wanna be on the 2012 thrill park ride, playing 2012 on my Nintendo DS, eating the 2012-branded chocotaco and watching this movie at the same time because I am greedy for this brand of INCREDIBLEBANANASINCREDIBLE. Everyone who says otherwise may as well have written their reviews on their faces in marker because they are obviously batshit crazy and should be ignored. Seriously, will somebody tell me what people expected other than 158 minutes of apocalypse BUKKAKE? Roland Emmerich knows how to destroy himself some world and sure it isn't so much a story but a sprayfest of rapid-fire money shots but what else would it be? And what else would make it THIS AWESOME? It's like the movie has ultra-oxygenated blood and sleeps upside down in a hyperbaric chamber and eats tiger penis like it's its job because it has psycho endurance that feels GREAT in your brain. READ MORE 87
'V' Is That New TV Crack @4:25 PM
There are two types of people in this world, those who cower in the door frames of their homes when the aliens come and those who reach under the floorboard for their trusty Heckler & Koch, grab their Go bags (kept by the front door expressly for this purpose), put on action pants and sprint towards the massive looming spaceship to watch shit get retarded. READ MORE 51
Literary Vices, with Rudolph Delson: Edmund Muskie's 'Journeys' @1:10 PM
To while away the days until the publication of Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue' memoir on November 17th, Rudolph Delson is reviewing the American vice presidential literary canon.
Here is the quintessence of vice-presidential literature.
It is 1972. It was four years ago that President Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek re-election. It was four years ago that Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy dead. It was four years ago that the sitting Vice President, Hubert H. Humphrey, became the Democratic Party's nominee, and it was four years ago that Humphrey chose as his Vice President a dove, an intellectual, a liberal, a native from the distant northern state of Maine: Edmund Sixtus Muskie. And? READ MORE 5
Horror Chick, With Melissa Lafsky: 'Antichrist' Might Give You a Penis-Ache, But That Doesn't Make It Misogynistic @11:09 AM
I don't have to tell you that Antichrist sucks. Plenty of highbrow places like the New York Times and Slate have already done so, their writers leaping to slather disdain on this latest morsel of art-horror crap. Oh, it's so distasteful! And offensive! And (gasp) misogynist! Though that all raises a question: if this audience-chafing, Cannes-enraging glob of rubbish is so irredeemable, why the hell is every publication still in existence racing to write about it, as opposed to, say, The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror (now out on DVD)? The answer is twofold: Antichrist was made by Lars Von Trier, and it's probably the only film ever screened at Cannes that centers entirely on penis mutilation. READ MORE 37
Janet Maslin and Malcolm Gladwell: Whose Side Are You On? @9:20 AM
So in today's Times Janet Maslin tears into Malcolm Gladwell's new greatest hits book collection. It is brutal, because she is endlessly making fun of his sentences and his paragraphs: "He liked to begin by framing some kind of broad question. Then he liked to change subjects abruptly. Let's suddenly talk about Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer." Ha ha, that is funny. For some reason though, this makes me uncomfortable! And when I am uncomfortable with conflict, I ask myself: whose side am I on? After some internal investigation, I realized: I'm not on either of their sides! Why should I be? What horse do I have in that race? I look around, and I see no horse present. Also what would the horses be racing towards? For what? Also here is Malcolm Gladwell in a new interview: "Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school." As they say in the opinion polls: STRONGLY AGREE. 5
"Where the Wild Things Are": Where Is the Place Where They Put the Things? @4:46 PM
Maurice Sendak said it first: "I thought it was never going to end." If you've ever been through family therapy, you've had the same thought. And this is what director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers have reduced Where The Wild Things Are to-a glum ninety-minute session where emotions are projected onto big fuzzy creatures who look like nested Russian dolls bleached of color, blown up and covered in hairy mildew. The creatures serve therapy, not dreams or fantasy. They embody the vexations of a boy named Max, but none of his desires or imagined ecstasies. And if you've read Where The Wild Things Are, you probably think it depicts the work of a fertile young mind trying to escape grownups and their fat, dopey buzz-killing. Jonze and Eggers, in an audacious sidestep, decided to side with the buzzkillers and render Wild Things as a wintry march of afflictions and psychological donkey work done at the expense of children. If this movie represented the reality of juvenile imagination, I would get my kids hooked on drugs as soon as possible, just to spare them the agony of Having Their Own Thoughts, because that seems like a seriously raw deal. READ MORE 33
Flicked Off: "Capitalism: A Love Story" @4:45 PM
At least 180 people were laid off today at Conde Nast, the magazine company with $3.5 billion in revenue last year. More will be laid off as the Christmas season grinds its way towards us. At the height of Tina Brown era, the New Yorker's editorial budget was $30 million a year. If that astounding number were still true, which it certainly is not still that monster, and every magazine there were as insanely expensive, which they are not, then it would cost $510 million a year for editorial on 17 magazines. Triple that (an excessive estimate!) to pay for the business side: congratulations, you are still making $1.5 billion in profit. Oh, wait, let's set aside $500 million in rent? Still all clear, at a billion! Say your advertising income shrinks by 30% across the board. Are you in the red? Only if you keep spending at just above that rate—and you wouldn't, would you now? So what do you do? Yes. You fire people. As many as possible! Stupid fucking people, with their places to live and their constant desire for food. READ MORE 53
Showed Up: Deez Nuts, A Rap Musical @3:00 PM
Musicals are gross and I hate them. People bursting into song in unison and then pointing it at me is maybe the worst thing I can think of, never mind that you have to pay good money to go be yelled/danced at. This is not a sentiment that will be shared by all but when someone told me DEEZ NUTS was a rap play with a prominent musical bent I was a little very afraid. Full disclosure, the playwright, Sacha Jenkins is a friend but that's always the massive risk when you partake of a very creative friend's creative offerings. It can veer extraordinarily deep into the realm of the unfortunate and you can't make eye contact with a bunch of people once- to-thrice removed from said locus. But whatevs it's New York and I barely leave my house! READ MORE 3
Jerkface Finally Gets His Moment In The Sun @11:30 AM
It's a day I never thought I would live long enough to witness, but here we are: The mainstream media—in this case, the august Wall Street Journal—has finally seen fit to cast its gaze on Jerkface. I hope the attention doesn't go to his head. From the article (about how online reviews are not critical enough): "Amazon reviewer Marc Schenker in Vancouver has become a Web-ratings vigilante. For the past several years, he has left nothing but one-star reviews for products. He has called men's magazine Maxim a 'bacchanalia of hedonism,' and described 'The Diary of Anne Frank' as 'very, very, very disappointing.' READ MORE 12
Tuned Out: 'Memoirs of a Perfect Angel' Means Mariah Carey Is A Good Friend @1:01 PM
So remember how we were worried that our dear MC was maybe dunzo 'cause she doesn't/can't sing how she used to? Now, I'm no musical genius but I was always impressed how this halfie could make us all blinky and clean 'cause her mighty voice could slough dead epithelial cells off your face.
READ MORE 7
Terrible Movie Inspires Wonderful Critique @12:16 PM
"The plot of this film: Tucker Max and two of his bros go to a bachelor party, meeting various cum sluts along the way. Whore bitches can't get enough of Tucker Max's bad boy personality, which is probably why so many of these twats want him inside of their vaginas. Tucker fucks a midget stripper and the world loves him for it, the end."
If Pauline Kael weren't already dead, this review would kill her. With envy. 5
The Cinema De Lux Island 16 In Holtsville, New York @4:34 PM
The Cinema De Lux Island 16 is located in Holtsville, NY, near exit 62 of the Long Island Expressway, though it is shielded from the expressway's service road, which typically will house all manner of businesses. The Long Island Expressway itself has 73 exits, with the numbers getting higher as one goes east, and it runs from Manhattan's Midtown Tunnel and terminates suddenly in Riverhead, some five miles from where the eastern end of Long Island forks. So Holtsville is quite nearly halfway between Manhattan and Montauk. And this Cinema De Lux is located near nothing, except for a Residence Inn, and the small roads that get you to it are potholed, and as abandoned as the old industrial buildings nearby. READ MORE 13
Maybe I Will Go See This Idiotic "Funny People" Joint @10:51 AM
The Times cautionary ratings summary indicates much male genitalia. 14
Flicked Off: "Bruno" @3:06 PM
Bruno is a semi-guerilla comedy semi-documentary about an extremely annoying, self-involved, sexually-predatory, sexually-harassing, apolitical Austrian gay man played by a heterosexual British citizen from an Orthodox Jewish family of complicated history.
1.
I do not care if Bruno is good for the gays. You know what is good for the gays? A nice dinner at a very expensive restaurant with exceptional service and a dessert on the house, followed by, most likely at a different location, some good old-fashioned ass-fucking. Also maybe a week-long trip to a tiny island on the eastern side of the Peloponnesus. READ MORE 28
