Monthly Archives: December 2008

In my endless research (read: internet dickaround time) I’ve come across another, albeit significantly darker, Augie Rios Christmas song called Ol’ Fatso.

Yeah… here’s the song:

Augie Rios – Ol’ Fatso.mp3

Check the lyrics, yo:

CHORUS:
Don’t care who you are Ol’ Fatso
Get those reindeer off the roof
Don’t care who you are Ol’ Fatso
Get those reindeer off the roof
No you can’t fool me because
There ain’t no Santa Claus
There ain’t no Santa Claus And I got proof.

There was a little fellow
Who just wouldn’t believe
There really was a Santa Claus
Even on Christmas Eve
And when one Christmas Eve he heard
A clatter overhead
He opened up his window wide
And this what he said:

[CHORUS]

Though Santa Claus had brought him
A big bag full of toys
Enough of Christmas presents
For a dozen little boys
Some choo choo trains and cowboys
And a whole Apache tribe
The boy looked up and said,
Oh no! I ain’t taking no bribes

[CHORUS]

Well next year Santa came around
And brought a favourite toy
To everybody but a certain
Unbelieving boy
The moral of this story
Is very sad but true
If you don’t believe in Santa Claus
He won’t believe in you

Don’t care who you are young fellow
Keep those reindeer on the roof
Don’t care who you are young fellow
Keep those reindeer on the roof
Oh you fool no-one because
There is a Santa Claus
There is a Santa Claus
And I got proof.

Yes, there is a Santa Claus
And I got proof.

Surprised this wasn’t quite the hit that Donde Esta Santa Claus was?

(Found via PopArchives)

Dear friends, two years ago I lost the fight against Christmas music. I realized that resistance is futile and began collecting weird and unique versions of classic Christmas songs. Well, now I’ve created my own.

I just completed a cover of the classic mexploitation hit Donde Esta Santa Claus?, made famous by Augie Rios. Not to be a genre whore or anything, but the cover has elements of Yé-yé, lounge, dancehall reggae, punk, hip hop, and death metal. But yet, I try and stay true to Augie’s vision.

It’s a free download, so click this link to listen or right/ctrl-click to save:

Donde Esta Santa Claus?

Here’s the original if you are unfortunate enough not to know this classic:

Hope you enjoy it and Snappy Holidays!

P.S. extra points to anyone who spots the Herbie Goes Bananas reference!

As long as I’m in rant-mode, I might as well rant about a pro-environmental subject, just to, ya know, be fair and balanced and everything.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. named ” Wall-E,” Disney/Pixar’s animated film about a little robot who falls in love, the best film of 2008 on Tuesday afternoon.

Yay.

You notice I didn’t say “Yay!“. I’m not exactly gunning for Wall-E for the Best Picture Oscar or anything, but it’s just so nice to see it win a major award, and I do hope it gets nominated in the Best Picture category in the Oscars. I know it probably won’t win the top award, but here are my thoughts on why it should be considered:

Ok, so it’s probably going to go to Milk, for a couple reasons. One, the Academy loves Sean Penn. Two, the Academy loves biopics. Three, the Academy wants to make up for its egregious snub of Brokeback Mountain in 2006, which was obviously politically motivated and, frankly, homophobic. (Btw, Crash? Really??) I haven’t seen Milk (The Times of Harvey Milk was good though), but word around the campfire is that it is very well-made, and very Oscary. Milk FTW.

But Wall-E deserves to be in the running. The other likely Best Pic nods – Milk, Frost/Nixon, possibly The Dark Knight – are all based on nonfiction or preexisting stories. Wall-E is a genuinely original story – despite the fact that he really looks like Johnny 5 – which is something sorely lacking in film today (see my recent post on film remakes). Pixar – who I’m not usually a fan of, for the record – came up with a completely original story, not based on tired Hollywood stereotypical plot-lines (see Finding Nemo and Cars), and set it against a sharply socially-critical background. Wall-E wasn’t afraid to piss some people off, and it wasn’t afraid to be overtly sentimental. To me, that is the essence of courage in art. The story was built around environmental themes, they weren’t added into the mix during production, and these themes were unspoken but apparent. The humans in the story were both hero and villain and – much like Hayao Miyazaki’s anti-villains – they contained the capacity for good and evil inside them, Wall-E was just the unwitting catalyst of this internal struggle.

Above all, the film lacked a sense of regret. There was never a sense that the humans in the story deserved punishment for their past digressions. They came to the realization that they had fucked themselves over, and they began to build their world anew, with the added knowledge of what the consequences of said digressions are. I think it is one of the best environmental films of all time, and a great example of social activism and art in a successful fusion.

Don’t you miss that golden age of film when all movies had a heaping helping of thinly-veiled upper-middle class guilt? Of course you do. Well, it looks like those days are back:

When the alien Klaatu stepped off his spaceship the first time, in 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, he had come to warn us that man’s constant warring against itself had become a threat to other civilizations and we had better stop it — or else.

In director Scott Derrickson’s respectful, perfunctory remake, Klaatu once again comes to visit us with a warning, although he’s apparently been hanging out with Al Gore, since it’s what we’re doing to the environment that now has the extra-terrestrials wringing their hands (tentacles? pods? suction cups?)

Guh… Do we really want the days of this to come back?

(Btw, am I the only one who had a thing for Linka?)

This kinda shit ruined the ending of The Abyss, it probably ruined this (although probably already dead in the water) remake, and it will ruin countless more works of art by promoting the mandatory fusion of social responsibility and art. Fuck that. Social activism and art can coexist, but forcing your art to be activist or forcing your activism to be artsy usually creates sucky art and ineffective activism.

And PS, has anyone else noticed that this guilt-in-art trend always tends to coincide with economic recession? Interesting.

From Imeem.com:

Travis Barker’s “Jockin’ Jay-Z” remix is rumored to be the last project he worked on before surviving a tragic plane crash back in September. The end result is a monster remix with huge drums and grungy electric guitars. Put this on your playlist today.

Wait, what? “The last project he worked on before surviving a tragic plane crash”?? Who in the world gives a fuck about that? I mean, I get that they are milking his near-death experience, but is this gonna be a thing now? Shia Lebouf acted out this scene from his latest John Grisham adaption just before he almost drank a glassful of spoiled milk? Tina Yuthers did this infomercial just before almost opening the driver door of her Geo Prism to oncoming traffic?

Senate Abandons Auto Bailout. Sigh. Ok, I get why we wouldn’t want to bail them out. They absolutely do not deserve it. But, where in the holy Jesus was this level of scrutiny when we were deciding to bail out the financial industry, for nearly a trillion dollars?? They denied the auto industry 14 billion! What in the holy hell is going on here? I will never really understand it, I guess, it’s all so complicated, but does this make any sense to anyone? It doesn’t even really seem like the “experts” in charge understand what in the world is going on? Guh. Fuck it. This scene is dead anyway.

Newsflash! Mafoo’s blog official Stupidest Website of 2007, Blackle, is in fact full of shit:

LCD screens … are lit via fluorescent tube lights located above or behind the LCD screen. The screen scatters the light, creating the picture. When an LCD screen is on, the lights are also on. “Black is not created by the absence of electricity or by turning off the light,” explains Gray. “In a lot of cases, a black screen looks purple because the colors are created by mixing the right pixel elements in the LCD together at the same time

Look, I may be somewhat of a nihilist, but I don’t really wish the planet any ill. I think protecting the environment is a wonderful thing. But the recent “green” trend nauseates me, to be honest. It is just such a fad. People get caught up in the vanity of making themselves appear as “green” as possible by using Blackle and talking about their “carbon footprint” and shit. Fuck that. You know how I save the earth? I turn off my lights when I’m not using them, because I’m poor as shit and I don’t want a large electric bill. There is simply no way Americans are going to willingly inconvenience themselves on a mass scale to save anything. There will have to be some profit in it. Let’s hope Obama’s plan to invest in environmental jobs does something for the environment and the economy. Who knows though, because there seems to be a very large appetite for bullshit environmental solutions – maybe he’ll just give the public what it wants and appoint Ty Pennington the head of the National Greenwash Department.

Meow.

Why excessively, of course.

Den of Geeks lists the 55 movie remakes currently in the works, including:

The Karate Kid

They Live

The Incredible Shrinking Man (with Eddie Murphy attached, shudder…)

Meatballs

Metropolis

The Dirty Dozen

Conan

Clash of the Titans

Akira

Death Wish

Footloose

The Taking of Pelham 123 (which recently filmed in my neighborhood!)

The Last House on the Left

Oldboy

Poltergeist

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Short Circuit (!)

The Birds

Logan’s Run

The Thing

Westworld

Barbarella

My Fair Lady

and a whole bunch more…

I used to think that film remakes were a relatively recent thing – a facet of Hollywood’s depleted imagination, but apparently they’ve been around since pretty much the dawn of film. Still, it seems it used to be done much more tastefully. For example, Howard Hawks’ classic His Girl Friday is a remake of The Front Page from ’31, but it is done so originally and tastefully. It’s hard to think of recent remakes that actually do something new and unique.

Here are a few successful remakes IMO:

Rintaro’s anime version of Metropolis (2001): a beautifully unique departure from Fritz Lang’s original masterpiece. It creates a wonderful new world that’s based more on the shadow of the original than the actual story. Contains the best apocalyptic scene in film, set to the music of Ray Charles.

The Fly (1986): I mean, I’m of the opinion that Cronenberg can really do no wrong. He embeds this mediocre classic with his own themes of transmogrification, bodily intrusion, moral decay and somehow makes it very entertaining to watch. All hail DC!

Scarface (1983): DePalma imbibes the early Hawks classic with the rampant greed of the 80s, while retaining the grittiness of the 70s contemporary gangster classics. I’ve always thought this was more of an homage to Scorsese than Hawks, just as The Untouchables was his homage to Coppola. He severed any connection to the original’s Al Capone references, as well as its grace, favoring a lowbrow Cuban immigrant as its antihero over the legendary gangster.
(Not the trailer, but just as good)

Ocean’s Eleven (2001): I don’t want to like this one, if only to discourage Soderbergh from doing anymore remakes (Solaris? Really??), but it’s very entertaining. He placed himself comfortably within the mainstream by making a tight, clean, beautiful big-budget Hollywood film. And it works. The scene at the end with the fountains and Clair de Lune is legendary, providing a nice antithesis to the Hollywood trend of the thin fleeting gratification of a crime well done. It’s one of the best heist films period.

So, what do y’all think? Any additions to my very small list of successful remakes? I can probably think of a few more, once I’ve had a few more cups of coffee…

Josh Martinez – Rainy Day

It’s a fan-made video, but actually not bad, just a bunch of stock-footage of rain.

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Jon Stewart is smokin’ in this interview. I must say though, despite the wrong-headedness and subtle facism of his viewpoint, I still have to give it up to Huckabee for being one of the few calm, reasonable socially-conservative voices out there. The man knows how to have a respectful debate. Watching these two men talk makes me wish all left/right debates had this much class.