Category: Journal

Pitchfork

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The light on Mississippi Avenue was a pleasing yellow that flattered everyone who wasn’t sweating, and the air was just this side of too hot, occasionally lifted by little breezes. The kind of weather where you have to decide if it’s a perfect late spring day, and have a Good Time, or whether summer is coming too soon and it’s Too Hot (Bad). Five degrees in either direction would make the decision for you.

I was sweating before I left the air conditioning in my car. I thought I was going to be very late for a book reading, so I was rushing and worked up. I managed to find parking near a (very Portland) landromat/bar (EAT. DRINK. LAUNDRY.) and rushed over to Beacon Sound, where Jessica Hopper, editor for Pitchfork, was going to be reading from her new book The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic.

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When I walked into the store, there were chairs set up, but no one there. I realized that I had the time wrong, and had a half an hour to kill. I thought about killing time in the store, but it’s one of those Apple Store-inspired spaces: not in the sterile, modernist furniture sense, but in the lots of space, we only sell 50 items sense. It’s an all vinyl (and a few cassettes) store, and all of the new releases from the indie blogs were up on the wall, but otherwise a really small selection.

These types of setups provoke strong reactions and counter-reactions in me, mirroring my ambivalence towards hipsterdom and my own participation in hipsterdom (and, yes, I should probably find some new words). Part of me understands it’s a different business model, curation rather than breadth, expertise rather than serendipity, becoming the best music store to a narrow channel of tastes rather than a better-than-average music store for everyone. Serendipity does matter to me, though. Heterophony is a beautiful thing. And when I’m in there, I can’t get past the idea that the music store of the future might have less selection than a Sam Goody, a Hot Topic for a different set.

I decide to walk down the street to the Asian minimart to buy some cigarettes. The mouthwatering smell of the fresh waffle cones at Ruby Jewel’s make my stomach do an ecstatic flip for joy. There’s a man playing a musical saw in front of Little Big Burger. He’s not that good, but I’m happy that he’s here. A couple of blocks down, I overhear a late 20’s bropack making fun of the guy, imagining asking him questions like, “How long did it take for you to become a master of the saw? Did you ever consider picking up sledgehammer.” I flash with disdain and hate, then think about whether the kinder thing to do would be to not lose sight of their individual interior lives, and how we say things just to make conversations, before deciding that hopefully there are other people in the world that love them and it’s all right for me to just think that they are douchebags.

When I got back to the record store, it was already starting to fill up. I chose a spot near the front, and started playing on my phone and tried to tamp down the shitty inner voice that gets insecure when I’m at events by myself. I started to look around to people watch. There were some 30’s power hipster women, which in my mind is defined by a look that mashes up traditional femme costume (floral prints, retro dress shapes, lipstick, jewelry) with edgier bodies (interesting hair, tattoos, retro men’s eyewear, severe eyebrow shaping, unapologetic curves). There were some cool kids: incredibly thin and slight young women in band shirts and mesh hats with shit I don’t understand printed on it, young men dressed like Vampire Weekend circa 2006. I ended up sitting next to a good looking tall skinny boy wearing a Breton striped shirt, looking like the one that the housewife has an affair with in a Goddard film. He smelled bad, and I had a brief internal debate about how open I was to being somebody that is attracted to boys that smell bad, whether a bad smell is an unfortunate byproduct of poor hygiene or a valid lifestyle accessory, before letting it go because it didn’t matter.

It took Jessica Hopper forever to get on. Finally, the owner of the bookstore that was presenting the reading walks up and gives a droning anti-charismatic introduction, and she walks into the room. I’m actually not that familiar with Hopper’s work: I mostly showed up for the Pitchfork connection, and because the name of the book intrigued me. I wasn’t prepared for the star power of her arch-coolness. She looks amazing. Like others that started with a more aggressive style that has tempered with age and power and position, each element–the denim jacket over a band T shirt, the dark Wayfarers–is perfect and necessary, a continuity of the style but signaling put-togetheredness as well.

It was fascinating to hear her talk. Critics, especially the good ones, have a very difficult job. There is so much romanticism required to be a critic. You have to believe that music matters enough to care about whether its bad or good. You have to believe that people are going to read your shit and maybe change their minds and that that whole exchange is worth something. You have to take real, primal responses (like, hate, don’t care) and somehow express that in a way that doesn’t stray too far from consensus and with enough intellectual justification that someone can’t just accuse you of being a fan (the worst). At the same time, a critic is also a gatekeeper, and being a gatekeeper inevitably turns people into assholes. George Clinton gave an interview on staying cool forever: “You pay attention to the ones that are just getting ready to kick you out. If you can pay attention to them, you’ll learn what’s getting ready to happen. So you can stay there. You can’t hate on them. Cause the minute you hate on them, you actually make them more popular.” That’s a really hard thing to do when “hating on” is part of your job.

I’m glad I went. I had a good time.  It’s so easy for it to become a circlejerk, just name drop after name drop and snark after snark. And I’m a snarky and name droppy person! I am a total hypocrite. It’s been a while since I’ve had so strong a feeling of being the least cool person in the room, so I’ll be thinking about that experience for a little while.

Replacements

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On a Thursday

I started my day running late, pissed at myself for setting my alarms too early. At work, I’m able to keep mostly to myself. There are a lot of new staff in the building, like rain on parched earth, but it’s been  so long since we’ve been adequately staffed that I have to try and remember what I do when it’s like this. During my lunch break, I go on a run to Walgreen’s to pick up some new pens (my all time favorite are these Pentel EnerGels, but I’ve been making do with Pilot Precise V5s).

During the workday, I was mostly fine and focused on the day at hand. I’ve been doing Planet Earth based activities for 4th and 5th graders on Thursdays, so that meant I had some time to learn about deserts in the morning.

While I was cleaning up in my room, I listened to an On Being interview with Maria Popova from Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is one of those things that is new to me as of this year that has really enriched my life. It gives me a little hope that I’m not the only weirdo that has this well of deep questioning and radical sincerity that I can’t get rid of yet can’t figure out how to do anything with yet, like a Superfund site. Popova on success:

I am going to side with Thoreau. And he said something like, if the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers, it’s more elastic and more starry and more immortal, that is your success. And for me, that’s pretty much it — waking up and being excited and curiously restless to face the day ahead, and being very present with that day, and then going to bed feeling like it actually happened, that the day was lived. I mean, there’s nothing more than that, really.

The weather was gorgeous in Washington, which meant that we went outside for an hour. I had gotten talked to by my boss about cellphone usage during work (something I’m really not proud of), so I reached back to 2004 and made myself a hipster PDA to use (#pinterestbeforepinterest). While outside, I had some time while the kids were mostly playing by themselves to make a small sketch of the playground:

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I’m not very good or practised at visual art or drawing, but it’s little things like this that keep me going. Taking every micro-opportunity to turn something mundane or some mundane experience into an artwork is a core part of my aspirational values, and I’m always happy when I can live up to that standard.

Later in the day, I ran my crew of 9 to 11 year old junior programmers, as we tried to make a simple game in the MIT kid’s programming language Scratch. They are incredible kids, and there are two boys that have been doing Scratch games and videos for a long time that are so creative and mentally flexible while working on their projects that I feel privileged to be able to be around them and watch them work.

After work, I arrived home while it was still light out. I had been feeling guilty about not doing enough yardwork to the point where it is stressing out one of my roommates. The grass had already been mowed, so I decided to do some of the finish work, cleaning out some of the beds and weeding. It ended up being very relaxing and a nice way to end the day.

After eating, I had a very nice and unexpected long video chat with my sister. If you get me talking long enough, I will eventually circle around to a gibberish of frustration and overflowing of feelings that doesn’t really make sense and is probably pretty boring, an all around not cute display of Young Werther like hysteria*:

Anyway, she was pretty patient and indulged me, and is an allaround Good Egg.

Watched some more Chef’s Table. Still couldn’t fall asleep, so listened to the new album Never Were the Way She Was by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufield. It’s an instrumental album, violin, saxophone, and electronics. It ranges from moody pieces, to incredible reedy noise, to joyful, ecstatic, Steve Reich-like shifting patterns:

I’ve been intrigued by Stetson since New History Warfare: Vol 2, but this is him in just as experimental a mode but with so much more lightness and fun. I’m loving this album.

It didn’t make me fall asleep, though.

I had to cue up the latest Bad Plus album, Inevitable Western.

It kills me that their originals are way more hit or miss for me than their covers. I’ve also been listening a lot to their newly released collaboration, Brand New Day, with the singer Donna Lewis, which is fantastic. I particularly love this cover of the new-to-me David Bowie song “Bring Me the Disco King.”

And, finally, sleep.

*Goethe: “It must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him.”

Chase

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

Prologue

This one is going to be from a place of frustration. I learned today that I didn’t get a job that I really wanted. I thought it would be a good fit, and I was looking forward to that new-thing, this-is-going-to-change-everything feeling. “You only like the beginnings of things,” as Faye Miller tells Don Draper.

So I’m a little busted up about that. Yesterday was a bizarre Waiting For Godot experience while I was waiting to hear, and I think subconsciously I knew that even if I got the job it wasn’t going to be the easy, fairy tale version of that story anyway, and so I feel more tired and empty about it than sad.

All that being said, I’ve had some amazing experiences in the last few days that I haven’t had the time to process or reflect on, so this post is going to be a little raw, a little messy, and a little stream-of-consciousness.

A Stranger Walks Into Town

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A few days ago I got a text that my aunt was coming into town for a job interview. This was the first I had heard that she would be in town, and the first I heard that she might be moving into town. We had a very nice two day visit, in which I got to show off my new city and the things I’ve discovered in it, and she got a chance to get used to me, the “a and not-a;” both the same and different person that left California and knows things and knows things that she doesn’t know sometimes. We had two fantastic meals together, best meals in a long time for both of us.

I have been avoiding being a Salt & Straw person for years, but ever since going with Jesus Christ and his friends a few weeks ago, I’ve been dying to have people in town to visit with. I love their Strawberry/Balsalmic/Cracked Pepper ice cream so much, and its going to be a temptation forever for me to just get the same flavor every time (for example, this time I got an Almond Ganache that was delicious, but I’d rather have had the Strawberry). My aunt was overloaded with consumer choice, and the takes-everything-too-seriously focus on radical quality that is Portland’s stock in trade, but I was pretty amused too. After walking around 23rd, Washington Park, and stopping over at Powell’s, we went to Pok Pok. 

A five minute wait for Pok Pok! Oh, truly the stars were aligned for us. It was delicious as always (I used my aunt being from out of town and married to a guy that hates fish to order the fish sauce wings). Their basil drinking vinegar was super delicious too. I’d never sat in the upstairs area, and it makes me wonder just how nuts people thought Ricker must have been when he remodeled the house that’s under there. We had a delicious dish of spicy fiddlehead ferns that I thought was so cool, both from a produce perspective and conceptually, as northwest fusion food.

Cape Horn-Skye

The headphone jack on my phone is busted, and the road noise in the blue club van is nothing compared to the asthmatic vacuum whine of the engine. Given the choice between peaceful solitude and the unyielding chatter of talk radio and podcasts, I choose the chatter every time. The steady flow of ideas, arguments, and the New takes me away from the stupid waste of my day, from my cheap uniform, from my body completely.

The road to the school I’m visiting is filled with the windy switchbacking roads that remind me of the highway between Santa Paula and Ojai. There, as here in Washington, newcomers pull off as locals whiz by at breakneck speeds. Every turn was a surprise, as the road is enclosed inside the tall cathedral spaces under the pines.

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I drive around one corner of the road and find a view so beautiful that I have to pull over in my rattletrap van to take it in, just for a second. I feel a little foolish, pulling off in my blue exclamation point of a van (LENTS FEED AND SEED, reads the peeling sponsor logo on the side), but I figure that anybody that notices is probably proud that their backyard can create such a reaction. The bruised and brooding sky is all gray light, light gray highlights and dark gray shadows play in the gray clouds and are mirrored on the surface of the gray water. It reminds me of a church, or else it reminds me of Ingmar Bergman reminding me of a church. There are old, stylish concrete pylons holding up the highway above the dramatic drop into the Gorge, and the cliff face is held back from sweeping away the road by rusted chain-link nets.

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The school I was visiting was Canyon Creek Middle School, connected directly to the beautifully named Cape Horn-Skye school (in Skamania County, no less, another great name). I was curious later about the name of the school, because of the hyphenation (both for the spelling of “Skye” rather than “sky,” and also because it was pretty unusual to me that a name would be hyphenated with a place name). When I looked it up later, I found out that  Cape Horn-Skye is the last incarnation of the two Skye Schools, which pioneers organized and built on the leading edge of the American frontier.

Chef’s Table

I’ve been fascinated by the Netflix documentary series Chef’s Table, from the filmmaking team that created Jiro Dreams of Sushi. We live in an incredible age of documentary film. I’m just spitballing, but I imagine that part of the reason it is so good is that:

  1. We are at the end of an incredible growth period as documentarians have borrowed styles and techniques from feature films, and in some ways leaped past them.
  2. There’s an understanding on the part of the subjects that there is a potential for something great to come from the project, meaning that the right team can get very open and vulnerable (and, to be sure, media-savvy) subjects to cooperate.
  3. Digital video equipment has become better and smaller and faster and cheaper, meaning that there is a possibility of getting footage from smaller places, like a kitchen during dinner service.

I’m fascinated by the way that each restaurant, each service, each menu, is conceptual art. Like anything else, most of them do fall into types: fast food, casual Mexican, upscale American bistro. But each restauranteur or chef makes choices about how the kitchen works as a team, about what the relationship to the food is, to how the relationship is with the customer. I love hearing chefs talk about the choices they make.

It makes me think about classical music (I don’t usually, I gave my ears a break after graduating college and ever since it’s something that I know I’ll come back to listening but I don’t think its the kind of music that I want to make). What if each orchestra made unique decisions about the relationship between the conductor and the players, or the orchestra, the venue? What if musical institutions made their brand on reinventing and exploding standards, like Massimo Bottura, or an opportunity to educate towards a better future, like chef Dan Barber?

The other thought I had was about the kitchen brigades of the featured chefs. For (not very hard to understand) reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about work, excellence, and shared purpose. One side effect of the radical second person perspective of these documentaries, in which nobody but the featured chef and one or two others—critics, associates, or family members—is allowed to speak, is that the supporting cooks and chefs that make up the kitchen become silent acolytes, bowing at each station, intoning the mantra of “Yes, chef” (or in Dan Barber’s kitchen, more creepy, a slower and full throated “Yes”).  Even the radical closeups of food and hands means that the people attached to those hands blur into the shadowy background. I kind of get it. Restaurant work has always struck me as the worst kind of repetitive (maybe not the creative side of it, but for sure the cleaning and prepping side of it), but I understand finding yourself in a place where excellence is chased beyond all human proportion and every day is a real opportunity to figure out something new, and never wanting to leave. I was once talking with a friend, a tremendous musician and all around good guy, who had just started at an organic farm. This friend was commuting by bicycle just to get to a transit station where he could get a ride to work, for fairly low pay. He was explaining that one of the couple that owns and runs the farm made lunch every single day and all of the workers ate together, and how that one thing makes him want to stay forever. “It’s the most humane workplace I’ve ever been in,” he told me.

A Stranger Walks into Town, Part II

On our second evening, we went for a late dinner at ClarkLewis, my favorite restaurant in the city. We were one of the last tables seated, and my aunt was Into It. The menu sent her into overload, as she wanted to ask about every ingredient of every dish, appetizer and cocktail. Fortunately, we were matched with the perfect waiter, a thin, ropy man in his ’50s with a city drawl that unfurled at its own pace. He was full of helpful aphorisms. On the tagliatelle: “Pasta…is pasta. As for me, when I go out, I order lamb.” On the delicious looking Pimms and gin cocktail: “You know these kids keep thinking they’ve reinvented the wheel. I’m fifty-four years old. I’ve already lived through the razzle-dazzle. It’s not rocket science—you start with your base spirits, add a nice mixer, then some bitters and a garnish. I’m sure it’s a nice little sipper. But as for me, I like to try the base spirit, and if I like it, I order a shot.” She had lamb, I had a delicious sturgeon. Both were the best thing I’ve ever tasted. We finished up with dessert at Pix, and I had the best frothy cheesecake confection with basil ice cream. I love aromatic food and drinks, herby and delicious.

Solar

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Tuesday

I’ve been having trouble waking up in the morning for a little while. All is change, nothing stays the same way forever, but I thought I had put myself into a little groove where I was out for a late night tea then up again early in the morning. That doesn’t seem to be sticking.

Dream

I had some disturbing dreams. In one, I was driving by a field where a disturbed person that was shooting people and cars with rifles. In the dream-logic, I needed to get out of the car so that I didn’t crash. This led to a very disturbing foot chase, then finally a hand to hand confrontation, where I had to stab him in the hands repeatedly with some old school teacher’s scissors, like these:

shears[I forgot that I was writing about yesterday, these are last night’s dreams. They were disturbing]

The dream transitioned into a social function that I was throwing for friends, family, and former teachers. We were all at my house, but a squalid, transformed, dirty version of my house. It looked like nobody had cleaned, and my guests were uncomfortable in it. I was so sad that all these people showed up in order to be happy for me, and couldn’t. That was what I woke up to this morning.

Back to yesterday.

Work

I made it out of the house fine, and spent the morning working quietly. We had some people interviewing during kid hours, and I had to teach some first graders how to play BINGO (I forget that they don’t know anything sometimes), and that’s the closest I had to anything interesting during the day.

Want

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When I got home, I watched the latest episode of Mad Men with Luke Skywalker. It was incredible, and reminded me of why I like the show so much. That led into a conversation that, while it wasn’t antagonistic, still had a lot of weird energy to it.

One of the reasons why I like Luke so much is that she is ferociously, crazily smart, and also notices and remembers everything. Everything. This makes her an interesting conversation partner, and frequent generator of insights I wouldn’t have seen, but also makes me nervous any time I am worried that I am going to step into her death ray.

Astonishing-x-men-cyclops-2 Over the last month, I’ve had a lot of internal drama about whether I am somebody that’s too hard on others. I’ve yo-yo’d pretty wildly between feeling completely unable to figure out a way to express myself in one situation to being instantly at home and nurtured in others. By happenstance (rando Facebook click, if you must know), I made my way to the corpus of Ask Polly columns in The Awl and New York Magazine. One that meant a lot to me was the letter, “Why are the guys I date so boring?” Here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about:

After digging out my journal from my first year out of college for a column a few weeks ago, I’ve been rereading it here and there, and boy, have I learned a lot about my depressing life back then. I lived with my college boyfriend and spent all of my time with his friends, and let me tell you what, those people were perfectly smart and interesting, but they were not my people. Every single page of that journal is a testament to how out of place I was. I was a radish tossed into a sack of potatoes, trying hard to imitate a potato. “Why do these potatoes act like my bitterness and zing are a pain in the ass?” I’d wonder. “Who doesn’t love the almost-too-sharp taste of a Raphanus sativus? Am I going crazy? Why do they turn their eyes away from my bright-red color, and flinch like I’m not nearly potato-y enough? Why do they roll their eyes and look at each other whenever I get a little radishy?”

Now to be fair, in some ways, I saw potatoes as the rulers of the universe back then. They could just power-down their wild brains and focus on the concrete. They kept things simple. I thought maybe they were stupid or shallow at times, but really they were making a choice, the choice of reasonably happy people with reasonably happy, privileged childhoods who were destined to lead reasonably happy lives — lives that had very little in common with the life I wanted to live. They would simply amble optimistically forward with their careers and continue to do their low-key, easygoing, Grateful Dead–loving, Teva-wearing upper-middle-class professional dude and dudette thing.

And frankly, I myself was a little allergic to radishes! I was a radish with a radish allergy! Radishes were much harder to get along with than potatoes. Even though radishes said “Yes, yes!” when I talked instead of averting their eyes at my non-potato-y ways, they also had so many radishy words coming out of their mouths that they weren’t very good listeners. And they were so oversensitive! It was so easy to piss them off, and they’d TELL you when they got pissed, unlike the potatoes! Radishes wore their hearts on their sleeves, like I did when I was feeling weak, so as a result, they seemed weak to me. I thought I was better than them! I thought it was cooler not to be myself!

But mark my words: A radish cannot pretend among the potatoes forever. As a wise man once said, a radish who chases potatoes around and moves in with potatoes is an unhappy radish.

Learn to get along with men who are very smart and weird and sensitive like you are. And if you’re not already friends with radishy women, you’d better find some of them, too. Maybe do that first. Because what the fuck are you doing with all of these spuds? Why don’t you have a radish friend to tell you, “Dude, he’s a potato. What did you expect?”

It’s true that radishes can be inconvenient, with their complicated feelings and demands. Especially when you’re young. Young radishes are, nine times out of ten, super-taxing and dysfunctional. They see complications everywhere. They will get weird or talk too long about their artistic pursuits or disappear suddenly or advocate for open relationships (which is great if you also love open relationships, but personally, I prefer comfort and predictability over almost everything).

But when a radish meets another radish and they see each other clearly and support and love each other for their sharpness and their bitterness and their incomparable zing (yes, I am beating this metaphor into the ground. That’s what we radishes do!), it’s a beautiful thing. The very best of everything springs forth from that kind of primordial, aching radishy love.

Now, for a person like me, having binary categories like “radish” and “potato” and seeing people the world through that lens can be a huge emotional trap. When I read that column, I immediately thought of the radishes and potatoes in my own life. Just as quickly, I also thought of the times in my life where I had such a narrow idea of what a radish was that I thought everyone else was a potato.

The column feels empowering to me, too. One of the wonderful things my former therapist would hit me over the head with is that, in terms of human development, I’m cruising right into “decide what kind of person you want to be” territory. I really like it. One of my obsessions is the Almodovar movie Todo Sobre mi Madre, which has this monologue from the transsexual (her term) prostitute La Agrado:

They call me La Agrado because I’ve always tried to make people’s lives agreeable. As well as being agreeable, I’m very authentic! Look at this body! All made to measure! … [I]t costs a lot to be authentic, ma’am. And one can’t be stingy with these things…because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed you are.

I love that: “you are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed you are.” It gives me hope that one day I will feel pride in my sharp edges and snaggleteeth, and will one day be able to really believe fuck ’em if they don’t like it. Because what do I want to be? A radish. And wanting is the first step to being.

All of this is to say that Luke is a radish too, and I can take a little zing.

Solar

To end the day, I went to play music with Jesus Christ for what might have been the last time. I have nothing but sadness about that.

Ultron

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Sunday

I woke up on Sunday feeling in fair condition, not quite poor but not altogether good either. I had a really nice Saturday of epic sun and heroic duration, but I had also fallen asleep cranky from a small disagreement with someone near me. I try really hard to be a let not the sun go down upon your wrath person, so I just wanted a tranquil day. I got started on charliework, but then took my friends up on an offer to see the new Avengers movie.

Ultron

Before I go into my thoughts on Avengers: Age of Ultron: Brought to You by Samsung: a Production of the Marvel Superhero Universe (A:AoU:BtYbS:aPotMSU (Ultron)), there are a couple of things we need to stipulate to:

  • There’s nothing stupid about superheroes, but a culture in which only superhero movies can make any money is a stupid culture.
  • The whole cinematic scheme of the superhero movie is to bang the audience over the head with what they are supposed to feel about any given moment, because otherwise there would be no way to tell what the fuck is going on at any one time.
  • There have been so goddamn many of these movies that I no longer believe that we need to keep making them.

I feel old, because I always saw myself as the secret populist, the not a snob. I hated snobby people that wouldn’t watch Batman Begins or whatever because it was a superhero movie. But now I’m one of them and I don’t care anymore. Anyway, here are my thoughts:

  1. There was one joke I laughed at. I don’t remember what it was, but there was definitely one joke I laughed at.
  2. All of the actors are fine, but are terrible because the words they have to say for money are bad. I suspect RDJ and Luke Evens are better than average because they also had bad words but I still liked watching them.
  3. I was very happy to see Andy Serkis.
  4. The low tide drydock location was pretty cool. It was as close as the movie had to a real location. Unfortunately, there was never any time to give any sense of place or location, so nothing ever felt exotic or interesting.
  5. Tony Stark is an interesting Joss Whedon figure. What if the ultimate Gen X dude shows his contempt for institutions and the man by never wearing a suit and always wearing jeans but is also a hyperwealthy arms dealer? The anti-authoritarian stance starts to seem churlish, or at the very least Not Cute. Kind of like the scrappy Hollywood upstart that made his bones by deconstructing and spinning the tropes and banter of banal megamovies trying to use the same bag of tricks while making those movies. I like the guy just fine, but I’d rather have fewer campy jokes and more doing something interesting with the big canvas. Or, for fuck’s sake, even just funnier jokes.
  6. This wasn’t a movie so much as a giant Jenga tower. Remove a single scene and four things fall down. I would rather have watched it fall down.