To get in the way back machine, think about The Truman Show. I saw it at a screening before it came out, and it was more or less pre-internet, and somehow I STILL knew a little bit about it going in, and wish I hadn’t.

To my mind, the way that movie would been more successful (successful creative enterprise, not successful in terms of mo’ money) is if you could have just told people “Look, we are not going to show you a trailer, or review the movie, or anything, but trust us it’s pretty good, Jim Carrey is a big star, right?”

Of course you can’t really do that, and at the screening w/the director, he pretty much agreed that he hated the idea of marketing his movie and simultaneously partially spoiling it, but didn’t see a way around it.

The takeaway here is, I totally saw The Truman Show before all of you, so there.

I mostly agree, but I like the lead cop character so much that it mostly outweighs the “wait, everything just wrapped itself up 40 pages earlier than I figured it might” reaction I had.

Did you read Crooked Little Vein? That book is totally nuts (and also doesn’t really have an ending).

Oblivion has made it kind of impossible for me to read the Pale King. Yes, absolutely, how does he do it, but at the same time…

There’s can be a temptation, when you learn more (say, a LOT more) about an author’s life, to just try to map his/her life onto the fiction. Of course in many cases, that’s a load of bollocks, but in the case of Oblivion, the urge to succumb to that temptation is for me, quite strong.

So if one does, the stories seem to tell me something about what DFW must have been dealing with through most of his adult life. And not just “Good Old Neon”- while Oblivion is, overall, a masterful collection of stories, it’s also potentially a window into the life of a very sad man, and it’s kept The Pale King on the shelf, just staring at me.

I know this is about Halloween costumes and everything, but Gabe is really on to something with the whole “why do they keep saying Silver Linings” thing.

I mean, you had to title your movie something, yes, and obviously some movies would be exempt from this (Argo fuck yourself indeed), but i really hate when they do this. Why it was just 17 years ago that (spoiler alert) the dramatic closing scene of Mike Leigh’s “Secrets and Lies” was sort of ruined for me by Timothy Spall making a dramatic speech about how we’re all so wrapped up. In our SECRETS….and LIES.

Ugh.

I am surprised that as someone who should not care even a little, I was kind of offended by the Djesus sketch? I mean not really, and IANA(Christian), but I was weirded out by it..

Also, Tippy goes right into the hopper with Gilly and that other Kristin Wiig one-upswomanship character for me, so dislike. And of course Regine. Booooooo to you, Regine.

Wasn’t there some Fred Armisen sketch a million years ago where he and someone were off-putting characters because they lived in a stark white apartment and liked cutting edge art and such? They could bring that back, if they need an off-putting Fred Armisen character.

On a positive note, Alabama Shakes and the aforementioned Kate McKinnon update thing were great!

My birthday is sometimes on Thanksgiving (like last year).

It’s not generally a problem, and as a small child there was a pretty epic birthday party game of “pin the feathers on the turkey”. That turkey is the only thing I’ve known my dad to ever draw, other than a circuit diagram. It has to be somewhere in my parent’s house still (because holy hoarders episode) and it’s a 4 foot square turkey, in crayon, on a giant piece of brown cardboard.

I had some focus group 6 months ago where we were shown some 85 minute version of the pilot, about which I was kind of “meh”, and then I didn’t watch it when it premiered, and so good story.

However I did have a direct criticism that probably made the rest of the people in the room think I was a weirdo, which was, if you are going to have a dramatic music montage scene in the first episode of your TV show about how things are So 80s, YOU CAN’T deploy [mildest of spoilers]

your Phil Collins-Miami Vice song that early. It’s the epitome of crappy 80′s action montage songs, thanks to Michael Mann. Using it so early is more than a little on the nose for a show that wants to be all reference-y. It could also be that I was being unreasonable and literally nobody else thinks that.

I think we probably have to wait an episode to see if that’s the case. It’s my hope that this episode was playing up the whole

“people are going to be totally watching to see if it’s different, so let’s make it obviously different to poke fun at folks’ obsessiveness, and then we can dial it back and make episodes of Community again” thing

If that’s a thing. I’m going to hope it’s a thing.

Also, I would have ALMOST have preferred a straight up soap-opera recast of Fred Willard into the Pierce role, rather than just having him in Abed’s brain.

And also, since when are Community Colleges 4 year institutions anyway? Aren’t they getting Associates Degrees? What is this world coming to?

You guys are missing the most important part which is that George Saunders has a new book out and it is AMAZING. And, but, however, if you are feeling a little bit sad about the week, and want to relax with a good book, perhaps this is not the week for that book?

I mean buy it, because George Saunders is a genius, but do not read it for a pick me up!

He must have rejected the title “Further Disturbing Stories by Me that are about a version of this world we live in that is tilted like 11 degrees to one side and somehow depicts some sort of weird hyper-reality that touches my readers more directly than some glum Joyce Carol Oates stories ever could or whatever”.

Apologies to Joyce Carol Oates, and also, TGIF, can’t wait for the hand-crafted ceramic whiskey jug art show opening and whiskey tasting tonight, woohoo!

There is this fascinating thing about Carver, in that his editor Gordon Lish is VERY MUCH the reason he’s regarded as a sparse super minimalist. Lish cut the total word count in those stories by 40% to 70% ! And then the “restored” version was released a couple years ago so depending on how much of a project you want to make it, reading the alternate versions could be interesting. Here is one of the one million articles about the whole thing.

http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/its-all-right-to-cry-restoring-raymond-carvers-voice.html

Also I don’t have a dog, but I love bassets. There is a fun “benched’ dog show in Chicago coming up in February. This means you can wander around “backstage” and meet all the great dogs. I live vicariously through other people’s dogs a little bit.

Six maybe? Upvoted anyway.

That’s DEFINITELY what I logged out of facebook to log in here to post, and I DEFINITELY would have screwed up the whole including the image thing. So. Good job saving me actually finding the picture.

Guys, guys, I was TOTALLY in a musical. This is a little something called “He’s Packing His Trunk”.