Category Archives: Celebs and Media

Where Deadrobot brushes up against celebrities

Katamari – The Movie!

Celebs and Media

kingcosmosThat’s right! I’m penning the script for the live action version of this runaway hit! Here’s the synopsis:

The movie opens with dawn over LA. A typical LA family are rising and having breakfast when suddenly, on the TV behind them, a news flash. A prominent scientist (played by Daniel Craig) has irrefutable proof that the big earthquake is going to finally come to California. He has graphs. The reason for this impending disaster?

The TV screen goes fuzzy and suddenly (with some great cinéma vérité hand-held video effects) we see a human over 110 stories tall, walking carelessly across Hollywood and Vine. He’s clad in tights, cape and has his head stuck in a brightly coloured tube, lengthwise, so his face sticks out the side. He is, the scientist tells us, The King Of Cosmos (played by Christopher Walken). Behind him, equally large, is his queen, in a light blue gown and similar head gear (Gwenneth Paltrow). They’re making a mess of things. Crap everywhere. Buildings are coming down and as they do, people’s everyday items fall to earth like rain (great anti-consumerism visuals here, in keeping with Disney’s Wall•E/BuyNLarge meme). The King of Cosmos isn’t too concerned with the damage he’s reaping, but he certainly is enamoured.

Sample Dialogue:

King of Cosmos: These. Things. They’re all. Over this. Place.
Queen: Oh do be careful!
KoC: I’m trying honey! This world certainly is. Full. Of things.

LA, San Francisco and Seattle are devastated. The King of Cosmos shows little remorse as he sits on the Rockies to rest from his careless rampage. Long shot of a single white crane flying high, higher, highest up to the face of the King. He sees the beauty of this bird and decides to put things right. Off into space he flies and on a distant world, commands his son, The Prince (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to roll up the damage on earth, but doesn’t reveal he’s the culprit for such destruction. He entrusts The Prince with The Katamari Damancy, a powerful ball of cosmos dust that can set right anything it touches (I figure at this point the whole “pick things up as you roll” angle is pretty stupid for a movie and should be cut).

That’s as far as I got. I know there’s potential for character development (he befriends a slovenly slacker played by Tobey McGuire), blazingly amazingly great CGI and some great comedy bits too! Oh and a montage.

Sample Dialogue:

The Prince: My god! What whackjob did this?
Random Person (Played by George Lopez): (over EMT vehicles and general carnage sounds) Your dad!
The Prince: Yes. That’s right. I AM “rad”! Thank you!
Random Person: No you dick! YOUR DAD!
The Prince: My Dad is rad!

So Hollywood. Let’s do lunch!

So Many Ways To Sleep Badly

Celebs and Media, Distractions

So Many Ways To Sleep Badly

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Author’s Blog
City Lights Books

A MiniBook Expo review (go get yours today!)

sleep_badly_coverDo you like your books to be complete, tidy, well laid out journeys? Do you like your story to unfold like releasing a master class origami swan with a hidden message tucked neatly inside the folds of paper? Do you like a dramatic or comedic build and then have all the pieces fall neatly into place 5 pages before the end?

Fuck off. Go get a Grisham.

So Many Ways To Sleep Badly is a memoir (Autobio? Loveletter? Suicide note?) to the sub-gay scene in San Francisco over a period of three years from 2001, when America went on the “offensive”. When I say “sub-gay” I’m lumping in several non-Will And Grace style homo categories, such as subversive queer punks that protest the homogeneity of Gay Pride Parades, stinky closeted Craigslist trolls, gender flipping transsexuals and sex trade workers with fibromyalgia.

Our hero(ine), our star, our beauty queen, the gender/race-fucking Mattilda, weaves a typical year in her(his) life through a barrage of stream of consciousness style writing that is so resonate, so vivid and yet at moments very ethereal, that there is no question that the cock (s)he is sucking does smell like disappointment and unfulfillable desire. SMWtSB is written with a delicate hand that within a sentence, will backhand you into a miserable sex hookup. So those with a weak constitution/morals system should be prepared to be appalled at her/his behaviour. Those who are more freer with their sensibilities will find a good laugh per page (and may identify with some situations). Mattilda will jump from describing a delicious dish (s)he rises in the middle of the night to eat, to a sexual exploit that had me spitting Dr Pepper through my nose:

I decide to come on my food – Jeremy never did it for me. It’s 3 a.m. pasta, and I’m on the phone sex line, whoops, I got disconnected. Over to the other one, and this guy can’t do it right, but I’m playing anyway. I shoot right into the pasta while it’s sitting demurely in the sink: scallions, string beans, bean sprouts, cilantro, lemon, tamari, rice vinegar – and come. I can’t really taste it.

Behind the outrageousness, there is tidbits of a darker Mattilda that peeks through, but, in my opinion, not enough for my liking. With fragmented memories and dreams dropped between yoga class descriptions, we get glimpses of child abuse and a romance that approaches respectable, making her the self made superstar she is in the book (I’m sticking with the feminine from here on in). But with no resolution, no closure to her “worn on her sleeve” pain, I’m left kind of empty – like cruising Craigslist at 4 a.m. I guess if she had supplied closure that would be conforming to a comfortable idea of a “novel”, something SMWtSP isn’t. SMWtSB reads more like a blog entries written without accepting the idea of the “last post” (and where art imitates life, her blog continues in the same vein but with more cohesive posts).

SMWtSB isn’t for the feint of heart. It’s explicit and hard to follow and makes as much sense as that guy wearing plastic bags on the subway you sat beside this morning. But if you don’t read it, you will miss out on some beautiful imagery, some hilarious social commentary and the possibility your horizons won’t be expanded.

Wrestling With My Sister

Celebs and Media

rourke_hairYou all have heard by now that Mickey Rourke is cool again with his amazing performance in The Wrestler. It’s nice to see him back, even though he looks like he’s been dragged 1000 kilometres over gravel and straight through a hair dresser’s apprentice convention.

Back in the 90s my sister had moved and based herself out in Calgary and her visits back to Ontario were sporadic but when she did return, the visits were packed with dense conversation. Until one visit. We were talking about secret shames and she revealed that she loved professional wrestling.

Like the Olympics?

No. The WWF.

Pause. Blink. Pause.

Here’s a woman who is university educated, highly intelligent and articulate who admits to enjoying watching men manhandle each other in clumsy, yet painful choreography. Okay I get the (homo/hetero) erotic aspect of it: oiled musclemen in shorts, the coiffed hair, the buxom wives cheering from the side. I admit that as I write this I have a Stone Cold Steve Austin and Bill Goldberg action figures sitting over my computer but I couldn’t make the connection between my sister’s obvious upwardly mobile class and this “sport’s” base common denominator appeal.

Then I started to pay attention a little more closely. Behind the moves, behind the sweat and “folded chair to the head” bloodbaths, there was a drama being played out. The backstage drama was just as important as the physicality in the ring. And that action in the dressing rooms was utterly camp: adultery, career machinations, homoerotic longing, smack talk… Perfect for the gay world. I’m actually baffled as to why more gay men don’t enjoy wrestling. Well maybe they do and don’t admit it.

I’m kind of jazzed to see this movie. A few years back while camping in Southern Ontario, SharkBoy and a few friends went off to Ingersol for their annual summer fair. We discovered that the midway had a wrestling ring and bleachers set up and we stayed to watch a few rounds. We were entertained by some real “grass roots” wrestlers: a feisty woman who knocked the crap out of some skinny kid by actually throwing him off the top of the bleachers, an “evil” manager in a cheap suit and luchador mask and the crowd-pleasing hunk with the standard long shoulder length hair. It was entertaining, to say the least, especially to see SharkBoy start screaming when the wrestlers broke the “fourth wall” and jumped into the stands to tear each other apart. I get a sense that the “comeback” Rourke achieves lifts him from similar rings and into a shot at the big time.

I certainly hope so. The stain of those awful slew of movies during the 90s need to be washed from his hair.