MattMaroon.com

I don’t claim to know much. I really don’t know for sure whether or not there’s a god. I don’t claim to know what we should do in Iraq, or whether or not we should attack Iran. I strongly suspect that the people in charge don’t really have much more idea than I do, but I’m not sure whether that’s due to their incompetence, or the fact that chaos theory would make the correct answer unknowable. Most likely both.

But there is one thing I’m positive of. In my 27 years, it’s the only thing I’ve decided that I know for sure. And it’s a bombshell. Ready?

Star Wars sucks.

Not a little. A lot. And I don’t mean the latest ones, which are, in fact, far better than the originals. I mean the very first. Episode IV, A New Hope. And every one thereafter. They’re all just terrible movies.

I know, it’s shocking. It shocked me when I realized it. I was that guy who went to see all of the rereleases and sequels the day they came out. I stood outside grilling and playing games with friends all night to get tickets to Episode 1. I even have a little plastic Yoda that I bought lying somewhere around here.

But really, they’re just not good movies. I’m sorry, it’s true. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I feel you have a right to know.

Fans always complain about the newer ones. Common gripes are “the plot is slow and goes nowhere” or “the acting is terrible.” Makes me wonder if the people voicing those opinions ever even saw the originals.

I can sum up the entire plot of each of them succinctly in two sentences. And the acting is one of the greatest abominations in modern film history. Want empirical proof? They were the most ridiculously popular movies of all time when they came out. They broke every box office record known to man, were the original summer blockbusters, and are the reason opening weekend gross is now the most important metric in the industry. And none of the main characters but Harrison Ford managed to have a significant career afterward, except maybe one guy who did some voiceovers.

I think the mythos surrounding Star Wars is due to originalism, the belief that things are better when they are (or at least were) unique. And the Star Wars franchise was most certainly that. It broke the mold as far as special effects go. But beyond that they’re all completely vacuous.

When you watch the movies through the lens of the child seeing them for the first time, they’re quite special. Same from the viewpoint of the person who sees them only now but has been told all of their lives just how special they are. But if you could live your life in a bubble devoid of hype, what you’d find is a few movies with excellent special effects for their time, very little plot development, cookie cutter, black and white characterization, and the worst acting up until Gigli.

Really, they are just awful movies. And the only reason people complain about the new ones is that enough time has passed that they’ve come to realize they’ve been bamboozled by the most efficient marketing machine in the history of Hollywood and quite possibly the universe. The new movies were a lot of things, but it was impossible for them to be unique. They could, at best, be the same thing but with better special effects and better acting (and they were). But because the intervening decades forced people to judge them on their merits, rather than their originality, there was no shot that they’d measure up because not even the originals could.

And the reason is clear. George Lucas is a brilliant marketer, and he makes brilliant use of technology. But he’s a sucky film-maker. Thanks to years of fond memories of action figures and Pepsi commercials, people were expecting Akira Kurosowa, or at least Steven Spielberg. Originalism and marketing had, in their minds, elevated him to that status. But what they got was Michael Bay with a beard which, in reality, is all he ever was.

There you have it. Feel free to shoot the messenger in the comments.

Cool, brief article on Wired about Motley Crue’s latest track selling almost 5 times as many copies through Rock Band as it did through iTunes. I find it easy to believe. The Guitar Hero effect is powerful.

I’ve never actually purchased a song due to jamming to it on a video game, but I will say that if you told me two years ago that I would ever stumble across a song by Kansas and not change the station, I might have punched you in the nose. Yet just today, I heard Carry On My Wayward Son, and instead of flipping faster than John Kerry talking about Iraq, as I would have before GH2, I instead rocked out on the tiny plastic guitar in my head.

I just pray they don’t add anything by Linkin Park into the next version, because if I start liking them I may have to neuter myself for the sake of humanity.

I’ve mentioned before how annoying I find it the human tendency to eulogize others, so this particular one really pissed me off. I found it in Rolling Stone (I know, but I get it for free and Matt Taibbi is a really good writer) and it’s about Heath Ledger.

“the oscar that eluded him for Brokeback Mountain could be his posthumously. Small comfort for his family. But a fitting tribute to an actor who never settled for less than extraordinary.”

Really? How can you call yourself a film critic and say that? That’s like a wine critic saying “Ernest Gallo did more to increase the quality of wine than anyone who ever lived”. When I read that, I threw up in my mouth a little.

Don’t get me wrong, he might have finally had a good role in a good movie, and he died before it even got released. That’s a bad beat. But let’s take a good solid look at his IMDB page, and see if we can’t just find something less than extraordinary that he settled for. Here’s some of what we find, with IMDB rankings (on 10 scale) after the movie title.

First we have 10 Things I Hate About You (6.7), a cheesy teenage Taming of the Shrew. Then his big break in The Patriot (6.8). If you consider that movie extraordinary, please do your country a favor and don’t have children. Then, even better, we have A Knights Tale (6.5), which is the result of some Hollywood meeting where an executive said “how can we make a Mel Gibson movie but without Mel Gibson?”

Then we have Lords of Dogtown (6.8), which I’ve never had the privilege of seeing, but I don’t think has ever been called extraordinary by anyone. An even bigger flop than that was The Brothers Grimm (5.9). Thought he hit rock bottom with that one? I guess you didn’t see The Order (4.7). Judging from the rating and the fact that I’ve never heard of it, it may have gone straight to DVD.

He picked it back up again with Ned Kelly (6.3), another movie nobody has ever remarked about. He was in Monster’s Ball (7.2), which was a good movie, though I can’t remember him in it.

I guess I have to give you Brokeback Mountain (7.8). I found that to be the most overrated movie of all time. It was basically two hours of my life wasted that could have been saved if someone just told me “it’s tough being a gay cowboy.” That movie survived on shock value alone. It was basically The DaVinci Code but with good cinematography.

I was going to say that the only good thing he ever did was one line about high school girls in Dazed and Confused, but then I remembered that that was, in fact, Matthew McConaughey (though it was definitely the only good thing he ever did).

IMDB Rankings (out of ten)

6.7

6.8

6.5

6.8

5.9

4.7

6.3

7.2

7.8

Average: 6.3

It would seem that his entire career was mediocre at best. There were at least 6 movies made last year (No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Juno, Ratatouille, Atonement, and The Bourne Ultimatum) that were better, according to IMDB, than anything he ever did.

I know it’s scary when someone younger than us dies, as it reminds us of our own mortality. But let’s not let that cloud our judgment. His career wasn’t one gem after another. It was a dog turd with a couple quarters in it. There were some parts that had some value in it, but on the whole it was best left lying on the sidewalk.

Every year I make it a point to watch the movies that do well in the Oscar nominations. This year I got an early jump on it, watching a number of them in the last month or so. I have to say that overall it was a good year for movies. Here are my thoughts, ordered by number of nominations, along with my rankings.

1. No Country For Old Men (9/10, 8 nods): Best movie I’ve seen in a long time, and a return to form for the Coen Brothers, who seem to have done mostly comedies since Fargo. I might even call this their second best picture, behind The Big Lebowski. The acting is great, especially Javier Bardem’s performance as Anton Chigurh. Nominated for 8 Oscars, I’ll take a guess and say it will win 6, including Best Picture, Cinematography, and Supporting Actor. It might have some competition for Adapted Screenplay from the next movie on the list. It’s in 2 sound categories, and remains to be seen whether the extremely minimalist soundtrack will go over well. It definitely did with critics so the movie could take home quite a few.

2. There Will Be Blood (8/10, 8 nods): The only one I saw in the theater. Probably would win a nice chunk in any other year, but is up against No Country For Old Men in 6 categories. The Academy likes to award people for their careers as much as their nominated movie, and I think the Coen Brothers win on both fronts. Anderson got ripped off on Magnolia though (which ran into American Beauty) so maybe he’ll get 3, but I’d guess 1 or 2. If I had to set an over/under, it would be 2.

3. Atonement (7/10 7 nods): Mostly good movie with what I thought was a terrible, cheesy ending. Going to have a rough time in the categories where it’s against the first two on the list, but Original Score and Costume Design might be easy. I can’t guess with any certainty because I haven’t seen the competition.

4. Juno (6/10, 4 nods): Unlike most, I found the writing to be pretty subpar. It just sounded too much like an adult trying to write through a teenager’s voice. The acting was a little hokey, the dialogue tried too hard to be witty and often failed, and the soundtrack made me long for deafness’s sweet embrace. It wasn’t a terrible movie, and it might take the original screenplay category (I haven’t seen any of it’ competition there) but it seems a longshot to win more than one.

5. Bourne Ultimatum (7.5/10, 3 nods): About as good as action movies really get. Lots of fast paced punches and explosions, acting that isn’t laughably bad, coherent plot exposed at just the right times. It’s basically a relative 10 in its genre, but that doesn’t count for much with the voters. Still it has a good shot in the categories it’s up for (Film Editing, Sound Editing and Mixing) so I’ll be surprised if it goes home empty handed.

6.Transformers (3/10, 3 nods): For my thoughts on that movie, here’s a snippet from a conversation I had with my friend Keith, who couldn’t believe I hated it:

Me: It was like watching someone ass-rape my childhood.

Keith: They brought your childhood to life.

Me: Yeah, and then they ass-raped it.

Still it’s probably going to be tough to beat for Visual Effects.

American Gangster (0/10, 2 nods): In fairness I watched this movie for about 20 seconds until I realized Denzel was in it, then I stopped and deleted it. Every movie he does is hacky, cliché, overacted, and makes me cry about the two hours of my life wasted on it. So it’s a knee-jerk 0/10, but one I’m sticking by.

I still haven’t seen Ratatouille (and won’t) but it’s up for 5 and it’s by Pixar so it must be a shoe-in for at least Best Animated. And I haven’t seen Michael Clayton but probably should since it’s up for 7 in big categories. But barring any surprises I think the Coens will finally have the year they deserve, and a few other movies will duke it out for a distant second.

 

Every now and then someone unexpectedly gets it. It’s taken the TV industry a very long time, but it’s finally happened. I guess it’s no surprise that it was The Daily Show, since they have a long history of getting it where others don’t.

Their new site is finally taking television to the web the right way. You can view every show ever broadcast. You can search by guest. You can embed clips.
Here’s Demetri Martin on the ViaCom/YouTube suit, which I posted long ago on YouTube only to be removed:

Without a doubt the best movie ever. Ninja Cheerleaders.

See you there.

I caught the finale of The Sopranos Sunday night. Eh. About what I expected. This whole season has been long and boring, and the finale didn’t break the streak. Like the last four seasons, it was overhyped and failed to live up to expectations. And like the last four seasons, I watched it anyway.

I think I know why they ended it the way they did. David Chase loves to defy expectations and throw curveballs at viewers. Everyone who watched the show had an expectation. The most common was Tony getting whacked, followed closely by Phil Leotardo getting whacked and Tony resuming life as usual, and either way that would pretty much wrap it up. There were a few more (Tony ending up in jail) but what nobody expected, other than me, was for there to be no real resolution at all. Nobody thought they might do that because, well, it would be retarded. And it was. That’s precisely why I saw it coming.

Still, for some reason, though it was obviously left vague by design, everyone tries to ascribe meaning to the ending. The most common theory is that it harkened back to Tony’s previous conversation with Bobby, in which they said “you probably never hear it coming” or something like that, and therefore conclude that Tony dies at the end. Still other people said that the guy who went into the bathroom was just staring at Tony the way any random guy would stare at someone who was regularly pointed out as a mob boss on the evening news.

Me personally, I’m just angry. I was watching it on my Xbox courtesy of the newest beta of Transcode 360, and I’d already had a few technical difficulties. I thought the screen going black was just something wrong with Media Center. John said “what just happened there?” and we both agreed it must have been a bad file or something, because there was no way the show’s writers could be that dumb. After a brief search on Digg we found out we were wrong, they were.

So just to be part of the gang, and despite the fact that it was intentionally left unresolved, I’ll give my account of what probably happened at the end.

The thugs who came in towards the end put some Jay-Z on the jukebox, probably the song 99 Problems. The strange guy comes out of the bathroom wielding a gun and pointing it at Tony. Unbeknownst to him, AJ, who had taken ninja-therapy at the hospital he was recuperating in, has a katana sheathed on his side. He pulls it out and slices the guys forearm clean off, which, along with the gun, clatters to the floor. The guy collapses, crying and looking at his bloody stump, in a pool of his own blood.

Meadow shrieks when she sees it happen, but then suddenly Eva Longoria comes in and consoles her with a very long, very hot make-out session. Tony has a heart attack and collapses into some lasagna, but nobody notices because there are two hot chicks getting it on and obviously nobody is going to be looking at a fat guy with that stuff happening. Also, a law is passed that makes old people stop being allowed to drive.

That’s my dream ending. What’s yours?

Once before I asked you guys for some television recommendations and you really came through for me. Someone said to watch Arrested Development, and that it was “far better than anything that’s on TV now and I liked it as much, if not more, than Seinfeld.” I watched all three seasons. I don’t think I’m ready to put it on par with Seinfeld, but it was pretty great. Certainly too good for television.

Another person said The Office and My Name is Earl were “both quality new programs”. Yes, and yes. The Office proves what I’ve been saying for way too long, which is that Steve Carrell is maybe the best comedic actor around. The 40 Year Old Virgin might have sucked, but it would have sucked far worse with anyone else in that role. Same with Little Miss Sunshine. I can’t really think of anyone who could pull off Michael Scott as perfectly as he does.

And my name is Earl is definitely one of the best shows on television. Every time someone mentions karma I find myself saying “oh, you must be a Carson Daly fan too.” Lame, I know.

I got a ton of recommendations from friends for House, which I find to be pretty much the worst show on television. But then, I don’t watch much TV. It’s just the same bland, broadly drawn characters in hokey situations, just like every drama. It’s basically season 872 of Law and Order, but in a hospital.

Ooh, a guy who’s kind of good and kind of bad at the same time, but at the end of the day you just have to love him because he helps people. Never seen that before. He’s like John C McGinley’s character in Scrubs, but not funny.

I tried watching 24, and got bored pretty quickly. Yet another show aimed at society’s lowest common denominator. Same with Grey’s Anatomy. I’m checking out Lost but don’t expect much better.

That show quickly became one of my favorites too. The last season was a little off I thought, but there were a few great ones in there. I’m usually hyper-critical of anything set in a hospital too, since it’s so cliché, but they do a good job of not being just like every other medical show, mainly by being hilarious.

So I guess what I’ve discovered is that I prefer one-camera sitcoms with no laugh track. That’s not surprising I guess, given my low tolerance for repetition, and perhaps the fact that the more creative film makers seem to be drawn to that format these days.

Still I’m open to any format. I’ll even watch reality TV, though very skeptically. I need something to fill the hour or so before I go to bed at night, and spending so much time on the internet has made me unable to read anything more than 150 words long, unless I wrote it. So, any more suggestions?

I saw The Breakup yesterday. That was the most ripped off I’ve ever felt outside of a car dealership in my entire life. Let me explain.

A while back I was flipping channels and I saw Jennifer Aniston on Letterman or Conan or something like that, and she had a skirt on so I stopped. And I’ll admit, as with any time I’ve seen legs like those, most of the words were lost on me, but a few got through, and the made me think the movie might be pretty good.

She was asked to describe the movie and said it was a comedy in which a couple breaks up but both love their apartment so much that they refuse to move out. They fight over the place and hilarity presumably ensues. I was sure it would be a little on the sappy side, but figured Vince Vaughn has been in some hilarious movies, so it just might funny enough to be tolerable. I still was far from sold though.

And then the interviewer asked her what it was like to do a nude scene. I missed what she said because I ran to my computer and put it in my Netflix queue. I’m a guy, sorry.

So today we downlo… err… rented the movie, and I was all excited. I thought I was going to see a funny Vince Vaughn movie with Jennifer Aniston’s boobies. I figured those two things are like chocolate and peanut butter. They’re both pretty good individually but the combo is out of this world. That was a whole that I thought would surely be greater than the sum of its parts.

But I still don’t know if that’s true because there are neither! The movie isn’t about people fighting over an apartment. It’s about a girl who looks like Jennifer Aniston but is also kind, intelligent, and does pretty much everything for her boyfriend (a species scientists have yet to find in the wild or, as far as I know, create in a lab) who in turn treats her poorly. So she breaks up with him in the hopes of it being a wakeup call, but he’s a guy and obviously has no idea what she’s doing, so he tries to be a total tool and make her move out. Boooooooooooring.

It was bad enough that there were maybe two funny parts in the entire movie, both courtesy of a morbidly obese Jon Favreau (seriously guy, you’re an actor. Purge if you need to, but get it fixed). But then the nude scene was blocked out by Vince Vaughn’s head. I knew it was too good to be true. Jennifer Aniston is way too successful to do that sort of stuff without an obstruction.

And to top it all off the ending was sad and they broke up. Note that I didn’t put a spoiler alert there because if you haven’t seen this movie, I just want to make sure you keep it that way. Normally I’d be all for a sad ending, but if you’re a guy and you watched this movie, you probably did so with a woman. And the unhappy ending probably left her as upset as the boobless nude scene left you, meaning there is no frontal nudity in your near future at all. I might have even spared you some tissue box holding duty. I did you a favor.

If I could I would give this unfunny, safe for work, romantic non-comedy zero stars. Even though it probably was better than a lot of movies, I expected, from Jennifer’s interview, something of quality perhaps equal to The Godfather. So while I’d normally perhaps give it three stars, I’m deducting one for the missing hilarity, and one for each absent boob.

I’ve been to my fair share of concerts and have probably listened to at least one album from just about every rock band known to man. That’s how I was able to come up with my first law of rock and roll, which is that any band named for a geographical region sucks, and the extent to which they suck is directly proportional to the population of that region.

Today I was trying to get my friends hyped about the impending delivery of Guitar Hero 2 for the Xbox 360 to my house (that game is harder to get than a Nintendo Wii) and was IMing them stuff like “are you ready to rock Cleveland?” when the second law of rock and roll occurred to me.

Maroon’s Second Law of Rock and Roll

 

A bands recent success is inversely proportional to the number of times they say the name of the city they are in during a concert.

 

I saw Green Day a couple weeks after they won 872 (well-deserved) Grammys for American Idiot and I think they mentioned Cleveland once. Long before that I also saw a Poison, Whitesnake, and Enuff Z’nuff concert (it was free and there was a girl involved, but yes, I am appropriately ashamed) and each of those bands said “Cleveland” at least once after every song. I felt so bad that I didn’t even have the heart to tell them that they were in Cuyahoga Falls.