Day 80: Ze Frank TED

Today I watched a crappy TED talk with "internet humorist" ze Frank. The whole thing made me embarrassed for the internet.

I don't know who Ze Frank is. Apparently he got really popular in the early 00's for a dance video he made that got a bunch of hits. So he became an internet phenom and started sharing his views on the future and possibilities of the internet. Considering he got famous by accident, I wouldn't put a lot of weight behind what he says. It'd be like asking for stock market advice from a guy who won the lottery.

He basically just did standup the whole time. He's got a weird, awkward presence that I didn't really get into. Remember how Jim Carey used to be on 'In Living Color?' It was like that- really spazzy, lots of smirking, lots of weird voices. I'd say only about 2/3rds of his jokes got a laugh.

ah, the subtle comedic genius of Jim Carey

So I guess he was invited to TED because he was on the cutting edge of internet memes. This was back in 2004 before Facebook, youtube, twitter, and just about anything else cool online. I think all they had back then was email and homestar runner. I guess it was still a novel idea to think the internet could do more than just share numbers and letters and watch porn. 

As someone heavily obsessed with internet humor, I feel almost nothing towards this guy. I'm sure I should feel some level of reverence, a "respect your elders" mentality, but I don't. Same with how I feel about people like Thomas Edison and Ben Franklin; their achievements, however grand they were, occurred so long ago it's difficult for me to put them in the same category as recent heroes like Bill Clinton or Steve Jobs. Ze Frank might have been pushing some envelopes 8 years ago but I don't think he's got what it takes to stand the test of time online. The shelf life of an online entertainer is razor thin, and you have to be able to adapt before your audience even realize they are getting sick of you. 

This is, of course, just my opinion. The dude has a wildly successful webseries (that he recently brought back) that's probably made him a millionaire. But I wasn't on that bandwagon when it started, and after watching this talk I'm making no plans to jump on. 

Also, the dude made jokes about being embarrassed about his age AND about having 'relationship' talks with significant others. In 2005! Those jokes tasted old 20 years ago on 'Mad About You!" You can't expect to be a comedy vanguard and cough up old stuff like that. 

Anyway you can watch it here. 

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Day 69: Lovely Monster

What a piece of crap! "Lovely Monster'" has earned the award for worst documentary I've watched all year!

First of all it's not a documentary, it's a short film. I saw it posted on several different sites listed as a 'doc' and thought, "I'll like anything about monsters!" Oh how wrong I was.

The description is as follows; '"Lovely Monster" tells the true story of Sophia, a young woman dealing with a rare and very dangerous condition." 


Okay so spoiler alert- it's just a weird monster in  her chest. A poorly CGI'd monster that you see for like 3 secs after sitting through a very slow 5 minutes of people talking about how messed up she is. You meet the girl's parents and boyfriend, and there's narration from Sophia about how isolated and alone she feels. If you only watched the first 4 and a half minutes it could be a story about anyone trying to survive being a teenager- awkwardness, uncertainty, low self esteem.  I think the point was to be purposefully vague to create an air of mystery, but all it did for me was build a sense of "okay this is boring."

I wish it had been about the monster inside the dude from Total Recall. I'd watch a movie about him. Does he have to be fed? What does he eat? Does he ever have to go to the bathroom? Does he wear clothes?

He should wear a tiny hat, like a bowler or something

If you want to watch it, it's on vimeo. One thing I thought was interesting was the difference in comments from vimeo and youtube. The comments on vimeo seemed mainly positive, with a lot of focus on how it was shot and less about the plot. Youtubers were much more critical, making fun of how low budget the alien monster thing was. 

Lovely Monster

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Day 47: Strange Sex (Episode 2)

Friday, Feb. 17th.

Because I got so much disgusting pleasure from Strange Sex yesterday, I thought I'd try my luck and watch another episode. Turns out I had reached my fill of terrible body malfunctions.

The episode seemed oddly similar to the one I watched yesterday; we meet a husband and wife who are no longer having sex because everytime they tried the wife accidentally peed all over her husband. I'm no statistician but the amount of people suffering from this affliction cannot be high enough to warrant two episodes, can it? Aren't there other sexual disorders waiting in the wings?

What this story did offer that was missing from yesterday's was a vivid, graphic description of the sensations the woman experienced during sex. This woman must write poetry in her free time or something because she had an uncanny talent for finding the perfect words to make my skin crawl and my stomach turn.

I should preface this by stating two things: I'm a germaphobe and because of that I think the human body is a disgusting, nasty thing. Or maybe I'm a germaphobe because the human body is so gross; it's hard to say. I've never understood people who marvel at the complex intricacies of the human body. To me it's just a giant pooping, burping, decaying pile of skin and farts.  Every time I clip my fingernails or clean my ears I can't help but wonder why, of all the millions and billions of designs the human body could have taken, we landed on what we got.

AKA: A diagram of disgusting

So when I hear stories of human bodies malfunctioning, I'm rarely surprised. They are already gross, so why shouldn't they be poorly wired too? At the same time I'm obsessively fascinated by disorders; they cover a spectrum of symptoms and ailments, from the minor to the fatal. It's amazing all the things that can go wrong. 

Anyway, so this lady starts getting really graphic with her descriptions. After about 5 mins I decide I can't take anymore and have to turn it off. It's the first doc of the year I haven't been able to finish all the way, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it. 

Day 29: Wamego

Happy Kansas Day! My first ever K-day away from Kansas and it's bittersweet. I love Chicago to death, but for its opportunities and not its people. Kansas really has the best people.

To celebrate KDay I really wanted to watch a doc. about Kansas/the Midwest. The obvious choice was "What's the Matter With Kansas" but I decided against it for two reasons: 1. I'd seen it before. 2. It really didn't paint KS in the best light. They picked a handful of nut jobs, on both sides of the political spectrum, and let them speak for an entire state.

So I continued my search. After some digging I came across this amazing, heartbreaking trailer. The film is called 'Manhattan, KS':

Though not directly about KS it's set there, and looks like it does so with respect. 

Well long story short I never found a place to watch it online, but while I was looking I came across 'Wamego'; another doc. made in KS by Kansans. Without watching the trailer I started it. It turned out to be the worst documentary I've watched all year, hands down. 

'Wamego' tells (or tries to tell) the story of a family working together to create a feature length film inspired by an actual crime committed in the area of Wamego, KS. The sister acts, the dad is the producer and the son is the brains behind the operation; writer, director, casting agent, and publicist.  The rest of the film is just glorified home movies and the wunderkind director tooting his own horn.

As a true Midwestern, I constantly worry about appearing boastful. Kansans are taught from any early age that pride is the ugliest color you could wear, so we've learned to take a good deal of joy in being humble. Kansans are competitively modest. 

Any worries that I was a blowhard were erased after watching this guy fly his own flags for 2 hours. He thinks he's God's gift to cinema. Really, it was like something out of a Ricky Gervais series: he went to Cal-Arts for film, dropped out after 'he felt he learned enough' and came back to KS where he produced his first film, a dark comedy about school shootings. He blames the film's poor reception on Columbine, which happened the following year. Yes- surely that was the saddest consequence of a national tragedy, and totally the reason your shitty movie didn't sell. 

The boasting reached an incredulous peak as he was casting his new movie. He looked into the camera and with a straight face told us he was debating between Kathy Bates or Jodie Foster for the lead role. Madonna was a 'maybe'. 

Here's the trailer for his last film:

This makes "The Room" look like 'Schindler's List', and he thought he was going to get the biggest names in Hollywood to be in his picture. (Ultimately, he decided to cast a bunch of unkowns instead, in order to stay true to his artistic vision. I'm sure Madonna was crushed.)

Honestly after that I checked out. I remember them worrying a lot about funding, and an unbelievably long scene about them painting wagons for props (seriously, like 6 minutes about painting wagons), but other than that I didn't pull anything from it. 

After the movie I scanned the web to see what scathing reviews I could find of his work. What I found instead, was a pleasant, even positive review from Roger Ebert, and a list of impressive awards the films had racked up at international film festivals. 

Which brings us back to the mindset of the average Midwesterner; the only thing I hate more than a boastful person is a person gaining undeserved attention. Maybe instead of working so hard of eradicating cockiness from our emotional vocabulary, Kansans like myself should focus on pettiness? 

You can watch Wamego online. Because I am not completely over being petty, I won't post the link. Consider it me doing you a favor. 

Day 24: Nature's Deadliest Brazil

Ugh, I hate to follow such an awesome doc as yesterday's with a dull episode of ND. But I didn't have time to watch a full length doc today so I had to pick something short.

I watched one of these eps last week and was less than impressed (still trying to figure out what being the 'driest place on Earth' really means), and thought the other episodes would be better. I was wrong; this one was even worse. The same cheesy graphics, overly dramatic narrator, and weird, unsettling re-enactments.  The scenes of people being bit and attacked were just a little too real for my taste. It felt less like a nature doc and more like a snuff film.

What I learned: Snakes are mean, watch out for bees, and don't trust sharks.

What I liked: Well no matter how bad a film is, it can't stop me from loving nature. Even when it's painted as a villain I'm still in awe over it's power and complexity.

What I didn't like: Man, the re-enactment scenes. I hate to harp on them, but I've never seen scenes that made me so uncomfortable. The people are just supposed to be stand-ins, props to be used at the animal's discretion to show off their might and power. But they purposefully picked the saddest most pitiful examples of people to be attacked. For the segment about Africanized killer bees, they picked a little kid, innocently walking through the woods. Sorry dude, I'm out. I'm not gonna sit here and watch a kid get stung to death by a swarm of killer bees. This is a nature documentary not an Eli Roth movie.

You could watch this on Netflix, or you could watch this 10 second clip about bees and probably learn about as much:

Prof. Cage on the perils of bees.

Day 8: Nature's Deadliest Australia

After Hot Coffee I knew I needed to watch something that could calm me down, so I picked a series about the world's deadliest animals.

This wasn't a good documentary. I'll be frank. It was one step above watching "When Animals Attack" on Fox. It was sensational, flashy, and extremely repetitive. It felt like they took 20 mins of footage and stretched into a 45 min episode. Every other line of dialogue was 'when we return we'll...'. Sidenote- the narrator stated that Australia is the driest place on Earth? What the hell does that mean? Like dry air? How can a place be more dry than other places? To quote Seinfeld, "dry is dry".

What I learned: Australia is a scary, scary place where lots of people die terrible deaths. That's what the episode would lead you to believe anyway. What I REALLY learned was about species of sharks, snakes and spiders that haunt the island and use their specific skills and venom to catch their prey. Sharks never stop smelling and 2/3 of its brain is devoted to smelling. A snake's tongue is forked for the same reason we have two ears- to give it a sense of direction. The redback spider can kill prey 50 times its own size.

What I liked: Basically what I learned. There was some good footage of animals, especially sharks and spiders.

What I didn't like: Imagine if Spike Tv got into the documentary business. That'd be this one. The film only had two clear goals: 1. Make everyone afraid to ever leave their house, let alone visit Australia. 2. to give work to a group of shitty actors who possess only enough talent to play hapless surfers and hikers, doomed to a slow poisonous death. I've never seen such poor acting in all my life. It might seem petty to pick on re-enactment actors, but if you saw this film you'd be cheering for the snakes and sharks by the end of it. A good nature documentary leaves you with feelings of awe and majesty at the splendors of the nature world. This one made me think "damn nature, you scary!"

Maybe I've become a documentary snob? Too many David Attenborough narratives ruined me? Or maybe I just have standards higher than what a 40 min presentation on "the driest continent" has to offer.

Anyway, I'll probably watch the other episodes. They are all currently on netflix.

Here's the rough equivalent, via The Simpsons: