Saturday, March 13, 2010

Entertainers Who Try Too Hard; Crime Yarn

•Cirque du Soleil, originally from Quebec, may be trying too hard to seem New Yorky with their new show based here: flappers, jazz dance, Vaudeville, urban motifs — and it’s called
Banana Shpeel.

•George Lucas just had to go and “improve” his original Star Wars trilogy with various digital enhancements and lame prequels — but, despite his billions of dollars, he has paid some small price in lost fan loyalty, as exemplified by this trailer for the impending documentary The People vs. George Lucas.

•In other remake-related news, I only just learned that the classic David Bowie-Bing Crosby duet of “Little Drummer Boy” was later covered on The Daily Show Holiday Spectacular by Bob Mould (composer of the Daily Show theme, now performed by They Might Be Giants) and (then Daily Show host) Craig Kilborn. This may be one of those cases where historians will need diagrams to explain why this is funny. Maybe we already do.

•Strong aesthetic convictions do not give you the right to vandalize or otherwise alter private property without permission — but might knitting tiny sweaters and covertly covering pieces of public property in New Jersey with them be forgivable? I did paste some event flyers onto Post Office mailboxes many years ago, convincing the left-anarchist with whom I was doing it that this was more acceptable than putting them on private property. While we pasted, he chatted, no joke, about going to some poorly-organized anarchist events and sometimes wishing there were a Stalinist to take charge.

P.S. Speaking of knitting and Bowie, I see tomorrow 2pm at Knitting Factory (now located on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg) brings a singalong to The Muppet Movie, one of the best films of all time, hosted by my acquaintance Jerm Pollet. I associate this event with Bowie only because it will likely be a reminder to any millennials who attend that Gen Xers’ favorite singalong Muppet movie — THE Muppet Movie — is better than theirs, namely Labyrinth.

3 comments:

William O. B'Livion said...

Hanging sweaters in trees and whatever is the function equivalent of spray-painting a sheet of (really thin) plywood and then leaning against a wall.

It’s at most littering.

Marc S. said...

If you haven’t already, check out Patton Oswalt’s bit “At Midnight I Will Kill George Lucas With A Shovel”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDCjIjsZp_Y

Todd Seavey said...

I have loved that since Nybakken first told me about it.

Speaking of anti-Lucas sentiment: it’s interesting that he did pay some actual financial price for Menace sucking so hard, though he can never be an object of pity. I notice that (adjusted for inflation), Menace racked up around $600m (largely out of anticipation and decades of good will) whereas the next two prequels (even though they were better, especially _Revenge of the Sith_) fell to closer to $400m, a huge drop-off, surely because many people decided to stop giving him the benefit of the doubt.

_Avatar_, no great shakes itself, has overtaken all three prequels and _Return of the Jedi_ and now sits at #14 on the all-time domestic box office countdown, just behind _Ben-Hur_ and _The Empire Strikes Back_.