Woody Allen Movies, In Order Of The Likelihood That Their Titles Will Be Used As Titles For Wu-Tang Clan Songs

43. Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story

42. Everyone Says I Love You

41. Hannah and Her Sisters

40. Husbands and Wives

39. Sounds From a Town I Love

38. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask)

37. Whatever Works

36. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

35. Anything Else

34. Sweet and Lowdown

33. September

32. Hollywood Ending

31. Deconstructing Harry

30. Annie Hall

29. Zelig

28. Radio Days

27. Don’t Drink the Water

26. Alice

25. Broadway Danny Rose

24. Stardust Memories

23. Celebrity

22. Interiors

21. Midnight in Paris

20. Manhattan

19. Scoop

18. Sleeper

17. Bananas

16. Love and Death

15. Manhattan Murder Mystery

14. Cassandra’s Dream

13. Shadows and Fog

12. Melinda and Melinda

11. Take the Money and Run

10. Bullets Over Broadway

9. Oedipus Wrecks

8. Match Point

7. Crimes and Misdemeanors

6. Vicky Cristina Barcelona

5. What’s Up, Tiger Lily?

4. Mighty Aphrodite

3. Small Time Crooks

2. The Purple Rose of Cairo

1. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion

by David Raposa

I am proud to be involved with contemporary American political satire.less than a minute ago via Echofon

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Danny Tripp
DannyTripp60

A few weeks ago, the cast and crew of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” joined Twitter en masse. And it’s not just head writer Matt Albie and multi-talented S60 star Harriet Hayes. Just about everyone involved with the show hopped on board, including producer Danny Tripp, director Cal Shanley, little-used cast member Dylan Killington, staff writer Lucy Kenwright and Albie’s personal assistant Suzanne (no last name). Even former S60 writer Ricky Tahoe, famously cut loose after butting heads with Albie, coincided his Twitter coming-out party with the social-network debut of his former co-workers (though maybe the upcoming premiere of his Fox show “Peripheral Vision Man” had something to do with it). It’s all laid bare in 140-character bits: the bonhomie, the backstage drama, the creative struggles, the 4 a.m. miracles and, every Friday night like clockwork, the live broadcast of the long-running comedy show they all work on. There are just a couple of catches — “Studio 60” is actually a show about that aforementioned long-running comedy show, and it was cancelled four years ago. So why now, and why Twitter?

When NBC chose to debut two series about backstage antics at a comedy show in 2006, the safe bet was that the one from the guy that had the Emmys and “The West Wing” was going to outlast the one from the woman that was an actual actor and head writer on a long-running comedy show. One year later, and audiences showed they prefer their shows about making the funny to actually be funny, giving Aaron Sorkin’s resume its most inauspicious black mark. Creating fake sketches that didn’t revolve around Nic Cage impersonations and Gilbert & Sullivan numbers would’ve helped a bit, but failing to write good jokes was only one of “Studio 60”’s failings. The attempts to portray the art of comedy writing as some sort of noble suffrage were laughably overwrought, as were the show’s soapier elements.

Of course, any TV show is going to have fans that want to continue the stories either untold or unfinished by the show itself, as the “Studio 60” section of fanfiction.net demonstrates. Give Albie/Tripp shippers another couple of years, and they might start to eat into the 25,000+ story lead that “Glee” fans have amassed. That still doesn’t explain why this “Studio 60” “hashfic” — a term for this Twitter-based type of fanfic that I’m really surprised no one else has coined (and that I’m about to trademark) — is happening.

Tuesday afternoon. It’s at this point of the week where we just start building random sets and hope they turn out to be the right ones.less than a minute ago via Twitterrific for Mac

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Cal Shanley
CalShanley60

Making stuff up on Twitter is nothing new; if it were, there wouldn’t be a need for Verified Accounts. Still, folks willing to cop to the charade can get their ya-yas out putting words in other people’s mouths. Sometimes, it even pays off: Just recently, Columbia College journalism professor Dan Sinker was revealed to be the voice behind @MayorEmanuel, the popular Twitter account that blatantly pretended to be the then-mayoral candidate. Sinker was rewarded for his efforts with a book deal collecting his Emanuel tweets, as well as a crapload of publicity (including an appearance on “The Colbert Report” and a meet-and-greet with Emanuel himself). Twitter’s found itself host to a wide range of accounts with people pretending to be actual people from all walks (and eras) of life: everyone’s favorite blockbuster director Michael Bay, music industry pundit/crank Bob Lefetsz, famous 18th century English lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson, and so on.

It’s also host to a wide range of folks pretending to be fictional characters, and not just for semi-promotional purposes, as in the case of author John Wray. Both the “Buffy” and “Firefly” sections of the Whedonverse are alive and well, as are the Marvel and DC universes, with Tweeters using the accounts for these characters as a way to engage in textual LARPing. (There are also outliers that are just out to have their own sort of non-continuity fun: pop-cult musings from @GodDamnBatman, @JJohanJameson’s CAPS-LOCKed work-place rampages, all the “HULK” accounts regarding feminism or literary criticism or personal hygiene, etc.) Even “The West Wing” has inspired its own LARPing subculture, as this list of sixty-three WW accounts compiled by speech writer Elsie Snuffin (cough cough) attests. (So glad to see Mrs. Landingham is doing so well after that fatal car crash!) Still, these accounts are mostly people responding to current events (and each other) in the voices of the characters.

The cold open was flawless. The blood was perfect. Osama’s head wound was massive. The laughter was cathartic. You’re welcome, Americaless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone

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Matt Albie
MattAlbie60

But what this “Studio 60” crew is attempting — coordinating a real-time story told between multiple Twitter accounts — is on a whole different level. For each of the past three weeks, the person(s) behind these fake accounts have put on a show pretending to put on a show. From Monday through Thursday evening, the creators voice their creative frustrations with comedy and with each other. Come Friday, 11 p.m. EST, though, “Studio 60” hits the airwaves, and showrunners (and buddies) Albie and Tripp, along with other members of the S60 family, dutifully detail the dram-com goings-on of a television show (and that show’s after-party) that no one else can see. They’ve even gotten some actual Twitterers in on the act as well; a discussion between Albie and Tripp about getting comedian Chelsea Peretti to replace an outgoing S60 cast member got a response (in the affirmative!) from the flesh-and-blood Peretti. Unfortunately, attempts to get Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim to publicly discuss or explain their S60 short films, or to get a what-what from Ashton Kutcher, haven’t earned any responses.

Despite those minor failures, though, what the mastermind(s) behind this endeavor are accomplishing is pretty impressive. The only thing that comes close, in terms of scale, is last year’s Twitter “retelling” of Home Alone, and that was just a one-off occurrence working from an established script. If these “Studio 60” “writers” are merely doing this out of boredom, then they are some oddly inspired slackers. Thankfully for them, Twitter lends itself to lazy inspiration. The ability to indulge one’s fondness for purple prose is cut off at the ankles by Twitter’s limitations, but as far as getting quick-and-dirty fanfic out the door, there are worse ways. Instead of having to write actual paragraphs describing setting and character, you just write some dialogue that contains signposts of some sort — references to other characters or recurring thematic elements — and post it next to a picture of the character saying these words. Having mentions of “Dolphin Girl” and “walk-and-talks” in a blurb next to a picture of Matthew Perry’s face allows folks that were ever exposed to “Studio 60” to instinctually fill in the gaps that would’ve previously required lines upon lines of text.

However, this S60 hashfic doesn’t seem to be pitched at Sorkin apologists. Whoever’s behind this effort seems to have as much fun skewering the show’s oft-derided pretensions, and Sorkin’s writing tics, as they are making up stuff for these characters to go through. If Sorkin stand-in Albie isn’t continually fretting about his on-again/off-again relationship with Kristin Chenoweth stand-in Hayes, then he’s Twittering about the serious business of comedy and how his latest “Science Schmience” sketch is a pile of garbage. More often than not, a series of Studio 60 tweets read like one-liners “30 Rock” writers scribbled on bar napkins back when they were worried about getting the ax. Hell, the “first week” of Studio 60 tweets ended with the show’s cancellation, which seemed as noble a way to end this experiment as any.

HOW DARE YOU?! THIS IS HISTORIC IMPORTANT TELEVISION!!! TRAITOR!!
RT @escalantedaniel: @MattAlbie60 @DannyTripp60 aaaandd….unfollowless than a minute ago via Echofon

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Danny Tripp
DannyTripp60

Of course, with the death of bin Laden, the fine folks at NBS (Studio 60’s network) just had to bring “Studio 60” back in order to give America a way to fully grapple with the enormity of this historical moment. And of course NBS flew the S60 crew out to Abbottobad to film this important event. With Dakota Fanning and Alison Janney co-hosting because of a double booking mix-up. And the show planning to end with a building explosion that might or might not have been cleared with the proper authorities. And Harriet Hayes flirting with a local cricket player, to the dismay of one Matt Albie. Actually, I take back what I said earlier: given the absurdity and hyper-dramatized nature of the plots detailed in these tweets, maybe the folks behind the Studio 60 accounts are actually the folks behind “Studio 60.”

Still, despite the sarcasm and eye-rolling that seemingly oozes out of almost every batch of text posted by these characters, there’s something oddly endearing about this entire enterprise. In light of the way Sorkin took his licks in his recent “30 Rock” cameo, it’s only right for this take on “Studio 60” to be equally self-mocking. Yet this mockery, even at its most brazen and merciless, seems to come from a place of fondness. I doubt anyone would have the energy to come up with new stuff for these accounts for nearly a month if they didn’t care at least a little bit for what the show was, or what they hoped it would become. And short of someone trying to pay tribute to a stillborn show like “Lone Star

or “Skin,” creating additional stories 140 characters at a time for a one-season show cancelled four years ago is as lost a cause as any.

That said, each ending from the past three weeks has been set up to give whoever’s behind this charade a pretty clear exit strategy, should they choose to pull the plug. In addition to the initial cancellation, and the aforementioned Abbotobad pyrotechnics, this past “episode” ended with all sorts of cliffhangers: in addition to being the season finale, both Hayes and Simon Stiles are leaving the show, and (most importantly) Studio 60 (the studio) blows up. Despite these easy outs, however, this enterprise seems to still be an ongoing concern: no one’s dead, Albie’s written 420 minutes of “good comedy” since the show went on hiatus, and Hayes is already booked to host the 4th episode of next seaon, as well as (according to her Tumblr) (yes, her TUMBLR) hosting her own talk show on Fox. From the responses and growing audience this back-handed tribute has garnered, the show’s “revival” promises to only get bigger and even more elaborate. Depending on where this endeavor goes next, this tweet (from sad-sack S60 staffer Andy Mackinaw) might prove to be this project’s most appropriate epitaph:

Seriously? We’re alive? That’s disappointing.less than a minute ago via web

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Andy Mackinaw
AndyMackinaw60

David Raposa ran a fake Rickey Henderson Twitter account for almost 24 hours, and is this close to writing Terriers hashfic.

by Emily Dickinson

The ass of Pippa Middleton
The secrets it could share
How did it get so pert and tight,
That shapely derriere?

Those supple and rewarding cheeks — 
So perfect for a squeeze — 
Are actually the product of
Regular Pilates

That ass requires weekly class
In flexibility
From muscle tone to breathing tips
They’re all necessity

Her sessions are at morning time
Or sometimes in the eve
But either way it all supports
that majestical cleave

So should you want a butt like hers
No workouts may you shirk
The ass of Pippa Middleton
Requires a lot of work

Miss Dickinson enjoys large rumps, of this she cannot lie. There’s nothing she would rather see below our painted sky.

Pay no attention to that parody post from Esquire; Jerome Corsi’s attack book on President Obama, Where’s the Birth Ceritificate? is still selling strongly, even though we know exactly where the birth certificate is.

Playground next to low-income housing. At night. Modular squares of beaten rubber serve as gridlike, lunar ground. Swoop of a tubular plastic slide. Sag of a miniature plank bridge that joins a pair of raised platforms, one outfitted as nautical helm, the other roofed with a ziggurat. The vast brick cake — apartment complex — beyond. Counterfeit moons in clustered bulbs, the color of scrambled eggs, on poles.

Medicine cabinet mirror ajar. Shelves a mosaic: prescription orange, paradise blue. Twin hairs stuck to the grooved little shelf that should offer soap. Silver faucet a mounted bird’s neck. Raised drain-stopper whose ridge amasses a layer of slime. Damp jeans draped on translucent rod. Tile irrigated with grout that never feels completely dry. A woman, brunette and beautiful and breathing, curled there, asleep on a towel.

Dirt trail etched high in a mountain range, a testament to prison labor. Outer edge a sheer drop close to two thousand feet. Sienna haze conjured by wheels and footfalls, coating teeth and tongues with grit. Rainforest valley a verdant mouth, lush under-sky, into which bikers and buses plummet with the impassive sun. Into which activists were thrown by their abductors, disappeared in the cheapest, cleanest way.

Major rail hub in a foreign city, with bronchial maps that idealize the non-Euclidean lay of tracks. Multiplying levels and sublevels, underground and elevated, enclosed and open-air. Views of a quilted land that bounds to each horizon. Hissing automatic doors and brushed-steel cylinders for trash. Accents throughout a tropical emergency yellow. Alien abbreviations and steadily updating schedule displays. A traffic not of people but dream-faces, -bodies, -limbs.

Stuffy crawlspace of an attic bedroom. A right-triangular tunnel extending into hoarded heat, its lines converging behind the dark. Cobweb rolled into soft pills. Cardboard boxes, crumpled from being stacked in pillars and periodically rummaged through. Dust-sticky volumes in each box: high school yearbooks, paperback classics pressed between trashy covers, dreary nonfiction with dates and birthday wishes spattered across the title page.

Tight bend in a cold shallow river where you once happened to say something cruel. Blistery rope swing that dangles from a dead flaking bough, and over a savage nest of rocks: the anatomy of an accident. Erosion on the mud cliff bank exposes roots, ancient in the calico shade. Trees’ leafy crowns pitch and yaw, receiving one another’s ripples in a manner almost affectionate. Lung-soothing scent of moss. Lullabying water that breaks the sun into colorless webs.

Hotel suite, surfaces glossy if not reflective. Luggage split open on cool black floor, rumpled innards hanging out. A flimsy button-operated umbrella, worse than no umbrella at all, accounts for the puddle in which it lies. An immense window, wiped clear of recent rains. Fog veils the tips of skyscrapers, turning beacons to exotic vapor. Beds so white they seem lacunae, pillows like gaps within gaps. Otherwise, a chamber of pure and teeming mass, more precise than the senses that apprehend it.

Carpet whose patternlessness achieves the aura of purple static. Three gray walls and one of thick, distorted glass (human-approximating forms aflow in the passage opposite). A skinny bald man with copper moustache, clipboard pressed to hollow chest, who regularly clears his throat. Desks that could sit two students apiece, topped with plasticky fake wood grain made clammy under palms laid flush. Nothing on these desks, this not being the sort of detention where one is allowed to do homework.

The pond off a road that leads to a farmhouse. Maddeningly still, bergs of algae greening the surface. A beached canoe that simply doesn’t know what it is — or appears unaware of itself in a way that the silo nearby does not. Or, the setting in sum (there is also the corn field across the road, and the ring of willows around the pond) is ignorant of its being, but each element resides in its own ignorance, and it is the peeling, baked canoe, a missile drawn up among reeds and cattails, that seems most removed from consciousness or, for that matter, doubt.

Deserted parking lot in summer, frail and goosebumped morning hour. The bland three-story corporate slab an island fortress on gray sea. A sculpted bronze logo stands sentinel out front, behind it a length of prosperous hedge. In the fire lane purrs an unmarked van, blocking the dip in the curb for wheelchairs. Maintenance crew trickles from the office, sending up thin cigarette smoke before the ride to wherever’s next. A ghostly mystique to their movements — their neutral aspect — as framed by the unborn day.

One in a modern art museum’s calibrated sequence of rooms. Dim, and large enough to coax loneliness — or enhance it, as the case may be. Bloody maroon and pale lavender paintings, on first blush interchangeably simple, abstract. Backless benches, slight velvety cushions, well-distanced from the major works. The atmosphere splices morgue with oasis. Unexpected absence of echo. A couple stalled at the eastern entrance, deciding whether to skip this part.

Driveway seeps down to a two-car garage, brown with white trim and no cars in it. A squat carpenter bee drills a familiar anecdote, tickling eaves as it lurches in humidity. A boy on the asphalt, volleying a tennis ball against the shingled side of a house and every so often the kitchen window, which rattles sickeningly, causing his shoulders to bunch up. There are moments when life’s vividness leaves him crippled, and other times when it just plain leaves him.

Snow-skinned plaza, spread before a classical dome — colossal, bone and brooding in one of the year’s last afternoons. The blizzard leans weightlessly into the world, streaming by lamp posts like neural fire. The bell tower of a massive cathedral, noded with stone ornament, floating over a hallway of twisted trees. It shimmers against pink sodium heat, a glare pinwheeled by falling crystal. The bottom of this frozen furnace a meadow lousy with ruined angels.

Backseat of a taxi, flying and not yet halfway there. Luxuriant black, stirred by whorls of charged spring air. Evening closes in the wake as if zippered. A sigh being sighed for the nth time and tucked again into its case. Bursts of neon, blank highway, water to the west all chop. The tranquility upon which trauma intrudes. No single impression to speak of when washed in the glow of the ambulance, nor at the hospital bedside, nor while wandering unharmed through this or that place, awaiting the pain of having survived.

Previously: 24 Varieties of Silence

Miles Klee is 26.

Photo by Scott Koch.

“The elevator’s vibrations are resolving themselves in her mind as an aqua-blue cone. Her pen rests in her palm and her grip loosens. It might fall. She shuts out the sound of the super’s breathing, which is a low rumble lilting into a wheeze at the ultimate convexity of his exhalation. That’s noise. The elevator moves. The elevator moves upward in the well, toward the grunting in the machine room, and Lila Mae turns that into a picture, too. The ascension is a red spike circling around the blue cone, which doubles in size and wobbles as the elevator starts climbing. You don’t pick the shapes and their behaviors. Everyone has their own set of genies. Depends on how your brain works.”
 — Twenty-two New Yorkers’ worst nightmare came true this morning when the freight elevator they were riding in fell from the third floor to the basement of a building on 6th Avenue and 19th street in Manhattan. Thankfully, none of the injuries appear to be life-threatening. But NBC News reports that, “The most serious injuries appeared to be neck and back pains.” Yes. Oww. There’s going to be big trouble if the inspector turns out to have been an intuitionist.

Is this the next planking? “A new photography craze known as ‘Rooftopping’ is sweeping across the globe. Those brave enough to give it a try go to the tops of the world’s tallest buildings, shimmy to the edge and then hang off skyscrapers in a bid to capture the perfect shot.” As someone who has recently developed a fear of heights I cannot tell you how terrifying this is.

Photo by squirrel brand, from Flickr.

Will human beings attend movies about inept, slovenly men seeking hot chicks? Hollywood is banking on this breakthrough genre — but only if Kevin James can get the box office this summer for The Zookeeper, which opens July 8th. This movie aims big! It’s an audacious attempt, but does the film also aim too low, painting men as buffoons, with big broad physical comedy and people getting hit in the nuts a lot? Executives in Hollywood were also quietly asking if Kevin James can manage a hit movie career while raising three children.

Thank God Tom McGeveran has found the words to explain how absolutely disgusting today’s New York Post story about the accuser in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case really is, because I am filled with ineffable rage over the whole thing:

The Post touts its cooperation with authorities in not releasing the name of the accuser, and goes to some lengths in its main article on the D.S.K. case today to detail efforts being made by the New York Police Department to “protect” her from offers from influential friends of D.S.K. to drop the case in exchange for favors. But it reveals that she was living in an apartment organized for her by the charity Harlem United, which places people with H.I.V. and AIDS in rent-assisted housing. The sum of the importance of this fact, which does not establish that the alleged victim is H.I.V.-positive, is the suggestion that the accused sex criminal “may have more to worry about than a possible prison sentence” because, “[according] to the federal Centers for Disease Control: ‘It is possible for either partner to become infected with HIV through performing or receiving oral sex.’” This, in the mind of the Post, qualifies as a “shock.”

It is indeed a shock, but probably not in the way the paper intended. “Ugh” and “gah” all around.

I’m going to go around and collect all the Christians’ puppies! Those puppies will never be bored on Sunday mornings again. Yay puppies! What are you going to do on 6:59:59 a.m. on Sunday, May 22nd in the hedonist new world?