Tag: Woody Allen

Geekly Speaking About… “Happy Birthday to Us!”

Late birthday cake is better than no birthday cake at all!

It’s the end of another calendar year, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity for me to start working on the podcasts again, starting with some episodes that slipped through the cracks. This was recorded towards the end of May and marked the anniversary of this site being up; hence, the name of the episode.

There’s not much more I can say about this, so let’s get to the show notes, hmm?

  • To start, I think this episode was recorded on Jill’s phone and I have to say the audio quality isn’t that bad. It’s not the best, but it’s not terrible, either.
  • Our birthday contest went very well, with Toronto, Canada writer D.C. McMillen winning the grand prize. You can read McMillen’s other works here, and do some stalking via Twitter as well.
  • Sadly, I haven’t gotten back onto the writing horse on any of the projects I have on the back burner; however, I am very proud of the flashback chapter I contributed to the “Dengler & Butts” fanfic which by itself raised $100 and as part of the entire story raised $1,000 for the Child’s Play Charity during the Desert Bus for Hope Internet telethon. (‘Netathon? Intelethon? We really need a better descriptor for what DBFH is.)
    Midnight in Paris really is that amazing; just re-read my review if you need some convincing. I’m not sure if Owen Wilson will be nominated for an Oscar on the basis of his acting work in it, but I’d give a statue to Kathy Bates for her supporting role as Gertrude Stein. The fruit-named movie that Jill was thinking about was Bananas.
  • How is it that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype only became codified in 2008?
  • If you’ve never seen The Room and would like to attend a screening, check out this list.
  • Now that John Rogers is back to updating his blog with posts about “Leverage,” I need to finally sit down and watch the season four episodes I missed.
  • According to this article from May 12, Stephanie Krikorian wrote in The Wall Street Journal that an executive producer revealed that many of the voters for American Idol are girls, but also their mothers, too. So I’m calling that a partial win for my argument.
  • It was the blind auditions like Beverly McClellan’s which made me love watching “The Voice” at first. (I lost interest right around the time that my boyfriend and I finally started moving in together.) The fact that both Adam Levine and Christina Aguilera wanted to work with her reaches out and touches that part of me which feels really strongly that truly talented people will always win out over what is superficially attractive. Call it the egalitarian socialist in me.
  • Because YouTube/Google is really lock-stepped with NBC’s copyright lawyers, here’s the Nico Nico version of the Voice battle between Vicci Martinez and Nikki Douglas. Best iTunes money I spent this summer. If the official site still had the video on it, I’d link there but…
  • For current events and historical archives purposes only, I am linking to the Wikipedia article on Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster who believed that the world was going to end first on May 21 and later on October 21 in 2011. Because otherwise, I wouldn’t have remembered why I made that joke about the Rapture.
  • It’s almost as if The Guardian knew we’d be finally putting up this podcast this weekend. Check out Nick Cowen’s recent interview with developer Ken Levine about Bioshock Infinite, which will be released some time next year. As for the game’s official website, it’s a little buggy, but can be accessed here (after you verify you’re a legal adult, that is).
  • Seriously, the catalog of games available for purchase at Good Old Games is staggering, and the price is just about right as well.
  • If you haven’t seen the footage of the new Lara Croft in the reboot of Tomb Raider, all you need to do is click here, courtesy of IGN’s YouTube channel. Normally, I’d link to the game’s official website, too, but for some reason it doesn’t want to play nicely with my version Firefox and I can’t even select my language. Also, this is the Topless Robot article I’m referencing, written by a former co-worker of mine, the wonderful Rob Bricken.
  • No, I still haven’t finished Mass Effect, let alone started working on a male Commander Shepard playthrough. This crystal-infused leather isn’t going to skin itself, you know…

And that’s another episode in the can! Next up will hopefully be more interviews from the New York Comic Con as well as a special interview that we’re recording this week on Wednesday. If you have any feedback or questions about anything we talked about, please let us know in the comments.

Trisha’s Take: Midnight in Paris review

Midnight in Paris

Directed (and written) by Woody Allen
Starring Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Rachel McAdams, and more
Rated PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking

When I revealed earlier in the evening that I’d never seen an entire Woody Allen film, no less than five different people from all across the country (and Puerto Rico) and spanning in ages from younger than me to older than me were in shock. How is it that I, as a transplanted New Yorker, have never seen Annie Hall? Or Hannah and Her Sisters? Or even Mighty Aphrodite or Deconstructing Harry?

Believe me, I’ve wanted to. Back when I first moved to the East Coast, I rented Annie Hall on Netflix, and couldn’t finish it. My reaction at the time was this:

How am I supposed to cheer for Alvy Singer, a neurotic man who constantly puts down his lovers? He’s upset with his second wife for being so into intellectuals, and yet tries to get Annie to take college courses to become one.

However, I am not one to let one bad impression of a movie that came out the same year I was born keep me from seeing what writer/director Woody Allen brought with him to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And unlike L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan (whose review I accessed yesterday but is dated with today’s date) who deliberately was coy with the details of the plot, I’m afraid I have to let loose with a ton of spoilers.

Midnight in Paris could be called a love letter to the capital of France, and it’s the same kind of letter I could have written, as I have also loved the idea of Paris ever since I was a teen in Madame Hornacek’s first year French class. The letter-writer in this case is Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) a successful Hollywood screenwriter of dubious quality who is working on his first novel. He and his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) have tagged along with her parents who are on a business trip. Neither Inez nor her parents seem to really like France all that much, but Gil is in love with the city, and specifically the idea that the best time to be alive was Paris in the 1920s.

Unsurprisingly, in a Somewhere in Time-style twist, Gil finds himself whisked away to 1920s Paris, courtesy of a vintage Peugeot which takes him to a wild and rockin’ party where he just so happens to run into F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife Zelda (Alison Pill). And from there and over subsequent nights, he meets other such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) who all in their own way reinforce the idea in Gil’s mind that he is not living the life that he needs to be living.

Other critics have remarked that as the surrogate “Woody Allen” character, Wilson’s Gil is not as neurotic or frantic as Allen himself would have portrayed him, and perhaps that’s what I liked about Wilson’s portrayal. At the same time, for someone who is experiencing something which a more normal person would call a hallucination, Gil is perhaps a bit too eager to throw himself wholeheartedly into the delusion. It doesn’t hurt that Inez, her conservative parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), and the former college crush (Michael Sheen) who just happens to be in Paris at the same time are portrayed in such a way as to make you wonder why Gil proposed to Inez in the first place or why he ever thought that he would be accepted by her family and friends. It’s a poor love match to start with, and even if their characters were hateful, McAdams, Fuller, Kennedy, and Sheen were such great antagonists that it makes it easier for Gil and the audience to want the magical fantasy to be real.

Other than that misstep in logic, the movie was written very well and conveyed its themes very clearly. I must warn you that it wouldn’t hurt you to bone up on who the cultural elite of the day were; otherwise, just as it was in the theater I was in, as people are introduced and names get dropped, you will not understand why the rest of the audience is laughing. Perhaps the best parts of the performances by Stoll, Bates, Brody, and more is that Allen lets them bite into their historical roles with relish, and by the time they’re done, there is very little scenery left. I was also pleased with the direction of the romance between Gil and Adriana (Marion Cotillard) because though it was predictable to start with, the way it resolved itself was more true to the story.

Above all, this movie is about not settling for what is easy and conventional, which is pretty easy for one to do if you have the kind of money Gil Pender or his fiance’s family has. For the rest of us who can’t afford to jet off to France for weeks on end, just watching this movie will have to suffice for now.


Midnight in Paris which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival over a week ago is currently only in Los Angeles and New York starting today. Whether or not it will come to a theater near you depends on how much people in your state (or country) like neurotic Americans in Paris.


RIP: Stuart E. Hample, cartoonist and humorist

Last Sunday, a humorist and cartoonist named Stuart Hample died. He was 84, and according to the obituary that ran in the New York Times, it was due to cancer.

Perusing the obituary, the thing that jumped out at me the most is that Hample collaborated with famed New York director Woody Allen on a comics strip:

From 1976 to 1984 [Hample] wrote and illustrated the syndicated comic strip “Inside Woody Allen,” a series of panels that purported to reveal the mind of that famous comedian and film director in all its self-analytical, overly worried, oversexed, death-obsessed glory. (Early on he used the pen name Joe Marthen.) Mr. Allen gave his permission for the strip and consulted with Mr. Hample frequently. A collection of selected strips was published as a book, Dread & Superficiality, last fall.

I know of Hample’s work through his son Zack who runs a writer’s group in New York City which has a roving meeting location. And all at once, I am saddened that I didn’t know about Stuart Hample’s work sooner. It makes me wonder about all the other cartoonists and “lost” projects out there which didn’t get to be seen by a wider audience or enjoy the kind of fame which comes from having a celebrity tie-in.

A more in-depth explanation of his comics-cred can be found via the Comics Reporter obit.

In any case, rest in peace, Mr. Hample, and my thoughts are with your family right now.