So I missed Fashion Wednesday, and hence the finale of America's Next Top Model, because I had to go to a screening tonight. Who won? The show's site hasn't been updated, and neither has Bravo's. Was it any good? I haven't cared much about the show this season, apart from waiting to see how long Fatima's blend of bitchiness, cattiness, playing drama queen to the cameras, and weeping on cue would play before she got booted. I never thought she'd win, but I figured she'd make it to the finals, and that she was being crafty as hell about being absolutely everything the producers want in a contestant. But now I realize that I really am curious about who came out on top, and whether the finale was any fun.

Now that I think about it, I missed the finale last cycle, too. I was off on my birthday California travel adventure.

I'm-a feelin': curious

• So… a sequel to Donnie Darko is going into production this weekend. The original writer-director, Richard Kelly, says he's "150% not involved" and that he doesn't have rights over the characters. The director is the man behind Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders. There is so much WTF involved here, I don't know where to begin, but maybe it could start with the way the studio tried to throttle the movie upon first release. And now that it's a cult hit anyway, there's a cheapie sequel in the works? FREAKY.
  
  
• That "promoter's ordinance" that would have required local performance venues to have massive insurance and pay potentially prohibitive fees has been tabled for now thanks to community response. It's back in committee for "fine-tuning." Go all you people who spoke out against it. Hope you'll still be up for fighting it when it inevitably comes back again.
  
  
• Last night, catechism proclaimed that her friends are smart and have many varied skills, and would therefore survive any coming zombie apocalypse. She and I and Chris and inediblebuddha subsequently sketched out our survival plan, which includes one hard-and-fast rule: Anybody who gets zombie-bit is honor-bound to tell everyone about it, and not hide it until they turn zombie and kill someone, like some moron seems to do in virtually every zombie film. Unfortunately, while our cunning plan seems to suggest that we'll all end up in a well-defended compound somewhere with plenty of food, water, ammo, weaponry, survival gear, and a nice note from Chris's mom instructing him to drive safely, we're also destined to lose catechism and inediblebuddha early because they're jumpy, impatient people who will say "Fuck this, we're smart, we'll be fine," and charge out amid the zombies while the rest of us are still planning. She has nonetheless threatened to write a bunch of fic about her friends and the zombie apocalypse. I think we should do whatever is necessary to encourage this.

I'm-a feelin': busy

I just started looking at the transcript of my interview with Tarsem, director of The Fall.

13,376 words.

A full-page A.V. Club interview is 2,000 words.

A really, really long, three-page interview online is 5,000 words.

I think my personal record is 10,000 words for the Alan Moore interview, and we ran that over the course of two days.

So. Much. Interview. Editing this thing is going to be three different bastards in a bastard-sack.

I'm-a feelin': horrified

[Background: An anime company sent me a large, glossy pink lollipop as a promo for an upcoming series. Editor Josh noticed it on one of his frequent strolls past my desk.]

Me: Want a giant lollipop?

Josh: Oh, the things I could do with that.

Me: Do them. I don't want it.

Josh: [Picks up the lollipop and paddles his own ass with it.] Oh, crap, my ass broke your lollipop.

Me: Your ass breaks many things.

Josh: Hearts, mostly.

---

Josh: Okay, everybody. I just want to point out that five minutes after I emailed Weird Al about [secret project], I got a response from him saying "Sounds cool. I'm totally in."

Me: Awesome.

Josh: But mostly, I just want everybody to know that I GOT EMAIL FROM WEIRD AL.

Me: You're my hero. I wish I was you.

Josh: I am totally my own hero right now. I wish *I* was me.

[Which is a lot less entertainingly sexually-harrassy than most of the things he says, but does sort of sum up the fact that we have surprisingly cool jobs where we get to interact with interesting people and call it work. In other news, I'm supposed to meet and interview Brendan Fraser in person later this week. So I get to be my own hero too.]

I'm-a feelin': cheerful

Our Internet is out at home; our Internet carrier, AT&T, claims our modem number no longer matches the number they have on file. WTF? This meant I didn't get much work done over the weekend, but it also kept me from killing excessive time online, so I finally started the back-yard garden (tomatoes, three kinds of basil, rosemary, two kinds of peapods) and did some heavy-duty cleaning.

And on Saturday, Cass and Chris and asparas and kneelbeforezod and I drove over to the Cascade Drive-In for Iron Man and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Well, really for Iron Man. The extra movie was just kind of a bonus.

It was colder than I would have liked; we brought blankets and folding chairs and started the evening under the stars, but the speaker nearest us was on the fritz and even huddling under a blanket couldn't dispel the cold wind in my face, so three-fourths of the way through Iron Man, I gave up and retreated into the car. Even so, I enjoyed the movie a lot, possibly because I've never read an Iron Man comic and know nothing about the character, so while I wasn't getting the in-jokes that made Chris comment that he could hear distant fanboy squeeing across the land, I also wasn't comparing the film to umptiddily jillion previous versions of the story, and wondering why I was sitting through it again. Also, the suit design was Teh Hot.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall, on the other hand… scott_tobias says I have "an Apatow block," which may in a way be true; I just refuse to get on the crowded Judd Apatow bandwagon with all the other A.V. Clubbers. I thought The 40-Year-Old Virgin was pretty damn funny, and that's been about it for me and Apatow getting along. I never saw Anchorman or Walk Hard. I thought Knocked Up was poisonous and hateful. I was indifferent to Superbad. I have negative-no (sometimes rendered as No-minus) interest in You Don't Mess With The Zohan. Everybody around me seems to find films by Apatow and his circle of friends warm and hilarious and true-to-life. I just find them annoying.

And talking about it with Scott, I realized why; I just don't find immaturity funny or sweet. And all Apatow-related films at their core are pretty much about little kids in big kids' bodies. Sometimes they're trying hard to grow up and get over themselves, sometimes they're reveling and wallowing, but either way… I just don't care. I didn't find the plight of the protagonist in Sarah Marshall interesting. His ultra-hot, successful girlfriend of five years has dumped him for being a pathetic sad sack who spends an entire week at home in sweatpants, eating gigantic mixing bowls full of cereal and leaving his socks draped over lamps. And now he can't stop crying and stalking her. And he spends the whole movie getting over her to the point where he can literally scream at her that she's the devil and that his cock doesn't want to be near her any more. Which he does with the help of another ultra-hot woman who inexplicably decides she likes him in spite of his binge crying and overall patheticness.

I'm not offended by any of this the way I was over Knocked Up. It just didn't do anything for me as a story, because I couldn't sympathize with the protagonist or his all-his-fault plight, and I found the movie's obvious sympathy for him pretty cloying.

Realizing WHY, though, has made me pretty happy, because now I have a unified theory that explains why I don't like the films of Mike Myers and Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler, either. Thing is, I was a really serious child. Even as a little kid, I liked hanging out with adults and doing adult things and trying to talk to adults. So why, 30 years later, I'd want to spend a bunch of time watching grown men act more like bratty, whiny children than I did when I was a child, I don't know. At this point, I picture Judd Apatow as a man who has a bed shaped like a sports car and still wears footy pajamas. I don't wish him any ill. But I'm not joining him and his peeps on any more of these little self-congratulory kiddie sleepovers they call movies, either.

I'm-a feelin': satisfied

Just when I thought my writing career couldn't get any weirder…

I wrote a movie review for the Chicago Tribune. It was reprinted in the Los Angeles Times. From there, it was just picked up and reprinted in The China Post. In Taiwan.

How utterly random.

I'm-a feelin': awake

On the way to House On The Rock:

Tara: Oh my God, we're lost forever and we're going to die.

Me: I know exactly where we are. See the street sign over there?

Tara: What's the point of reading that? It isn't going to say "You're lost forever and you're going to die!" They don't make "You are lost" street signs, because they don't want you to know that!

---

Tara: Are we there yet?

Me: Sort of. I've decided that instead of driving for three hours, we're just going to go into the Tiffany lamp store. House On The Rock is exactly like that, times a billon.

Tara: Awwwwwwwww, math? I don't want to do math! I'm on vacation!

---

Man, it's a long trip up to The House On The Rock— three and a half hours from our place — but I enjoyed it; I like road trips, and I like the lulling effect of driving, and how conducive long trips are to conversation. So it was no big deal for me. My sister is considerably less fond of cars and being on the road, but she seemed to like it once we got there. As before, I discovered that the ultra-dim lighting makes it impossible to photograph any entire room or area, so I just focused on faces: particularly creepy or well-done dolls and puppets and statues and whatnot. Unfortunately, my camera battery failed halfway through the house, so I didn't manage to get a photo of the scariest puppet ever. Or the life-sized carousel statue of a naked woman with a unicorn's head. Or the doll-carousel centaur-creature that seemed to be a dwarf's head sticking directly out of a horse's shoulders. And so many other horrible things. I still need to download the photos I DID take, and see what all came out.

I noticed that the tour pamphlet said we might notice it was dim in the house, but that it was okay, because it had been "artfully designed to present our exhibits in the best manner, and to create a deliberate effect," or some such. Which for me, amounted to "we noticed that much of this glittery, garish, dusty crap looks pretty cheap in full light, but if you can barely see it, it's kind of charming."

But whatever. I've been to the House before, and was along for the ride; most of the fun was in watching my sister take it all in and provide a wry, hilarious running commentary. I enjoyed the first four hours of that very much. Around hour five, my feet started hurting and every new thing was just another shrug. Also, the House was closing, and there was a woman with a walkie-talkie right behind us, loudly announcing through the static that the Dollhouse Room was clear, the Crown Jewels Room was clear, the Weapons Room was clear, and so forth. We were clearly the last ones there.

And then there was a bunch more driving back, and now I have a trucker's sunburn on my arm and a cat trying to get into my lap for the first time all week, because Tara has gone home and isn't here sucking up all the feline cuddles. And now I'm back to work, amid piles of laundry that need to be done and piles of projects that need to be tackled on both the professional and domestic fronts. I miss her already.

I'm-a feelin': nostalgic

My interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor is online. SCORE!

My sister goes home today. LAME!

I'm working a half-day from home today after I drop her off at the airport. SCORE!

My vacation ends in mere hours. LAME!

I will spend her last hour in my home writing a film review for the Trib (SCORE!) that I didn't get done earlier (LAME!) because we've been running around like nitwits all week. SCORELAME!

Speaking of which, I should get the hell on that.

I'm-a feelin': busy

Me: [At 4 p.m.] Man, I'm hungry. With one thing and another, I haven't eaten today. Let's go somewhere where there's food.

My sister Tara: There's a McDonalds right there. They have things that people eat.

Me: Perhaps you didn't hear me. I said I wanted food.

Tara: There's McDonalds! They have objects that you can put in your mouth and ch