meerkat products ltd.

John Jay's Real Time Blackberry Movie Trailer Reviews: Last Fifteen Minutes Of 'The Hills Have Eyes' And All Of 'The Lookout'

1:20 p.m.: As a bonus...walked in to last 15 minutes of Hills Have Eyes 2...same movie that I walked out of last Friday.

A friendly Mutant freak is helping the, what I presume are, last 3 remaining members of the Nat'l Guard team.

Acting is terrible. There's a Lindsay Lohan look a like. For people who are trying to sneak around are sure being loud.

Chick's name is Amber.

Bad ass short latino will die soon. He just blew himself up.

"Missy" is getting raped by mutant.

Why do mutants have super strength?

Amber and Missy...and this isn't a soft core flick

She's got a gun. Why not just shoot him instead of elaborate ruse???

Ok Missy had one bullet left and she had it in her pocket.

Off to other theater for The Lookout

Friday Music Cue: Radio Radio

Over Me

Source

You Might Just Make It After All

Check out Eric Gillin’s piece The Bag at Esquire.com. The story about the bike messenger bag he was wearing as he stood near the World Trade Centers on 9/11 makes the moments after the towers collapsed vivid yet again: terrifying, certainly, but Gillin laces the story with surprisingly humorous details(the women in the basement he takes refuge in swapping Valiums and Xanax, his irritation at the post-collapse symphony of car alarms). And the perilous physical and emotional aftermath of being swallowed by the ominous cloud of dust comes to life. Lest the subject matter seem too grim, I suggest choosing the option of listening to Eric read his story; his cheerful, good-natured voice consoles you that he is in fact okay, as the story itself does in the end. This one isn’t about grief, and it's certainly not about self-pity, it’s about expiation.

Eric’s moved over to Esquire from Maxim, and is editing the newly launched Esquire.com, a stand-alone offshoot to the mag. If the Maxim-to-Esquire transition seem an odd, low-to-high jump you probably never read Maxim. The entertainment stuff there-Eric’s domain-was wildly clever, irreverent and intelligent. And Esquire’s not so noble and literary after all-one issue after another features a tarted-up actress on the cover, just like Maxim. Actresses are made to look like hookers on both mag’s covers, they’re just the more fun kind of hookers in Maxim-land. They’re putting out some great stuff at Esquire.com, including the backstory on the Geico Cavemen, an article I wish I’d written. Now I dont' have much of an appetite.

 

Sunday Soul: Are You Sure

The Staple Singers in Soul To Soul, the 1971 documentary about a monster R & B concert in Ghana.  Mavis will be performing at the Apollo May 14 and 15^th in support of her new album, ‘We’ll Never Turn Back’.

I KNOW I Missed Everything.

Brother Ian took my copy of the unfairly dismissed, backlash-injured You Shall Know Our Velocity to a book signing with Dave Eggers. Ian told Eggers it was for me and that I couldn't be there and although the name got a little bungled in the confusion of the moment, I love his inscription.

He’s signed on for the New Voices 2008 Key West Literary Seminar; I look forward to showing this to him and somehow completing this chain. He'll remember that moment, I know he will! Seriously though, fine book, and I love the main character's voice.

Friday's Music Cue: Like A Rolling Stone (Stones/Gondry Version)

Today’s Cue goes out to John Jay. He called from a really, really loud party at the Winter Music Conference last night. Something in his voice made me imagine he was heading towards an evening something like the one a super fine, totally fucked up Patricia Arquette experiences here.

Bellow's Shadow

There’s an invigorating Jonathan Lethem short story in the March 19^th New Yorker (ostensibly and pointlessly designated The Style Issue). ‘Lucky Alan’ brings to mind Saul Bellow, not just for the excited, jumbled rush of adjectives but for the rugged and unexpected camaraderie that his characters feel for one another. Since Bellow died he’s been mentioned a lot; at the Key West Literary Seminar his name came up repeatedly, and Ian McEwan’s introduction page to Saturday features a lengthy quotation from Herzog. In a world of intellectual dissispation and general detachment, Bellow’s feverish, unfettered humanity and reckless erudition is missed. That’s why Lethem’s dense prose is so welcome. It’s not the ‘what’s not there’ school of style, but the ‘cradle your darlings’ school, and it requires commitment--and a dictionary.

There are echoes of Humboldt’s Gift here in the prickly, garrulous relationship between Blondy and Grahame that is part friendship, part mentor/student.  In this passage the central characters--one an underemployed actor, the other a theatre director-have just watched a film together.

“”Ugetsu” astonished me. Discussing it after the two-fifteen matinee, while we looked on Sixth Avenue for a restaurant with a suitable bar, Blondy said that for years he’d felt that two scenes toward the end of the film were reversed from their ideal order-the only flaw, he’d always thought, in a perfect work of art-but that today, sitting at Film Forum, waiting for it, he couldn’t spot the flaw he’d earlier been so certain of. “What’s so pathetic is that I’d presumed to go around all these years sure that I knew better than Mizoguchi! It’s as though I had to defend myself against the film’s perfection.” I was awed, as I maybe was supposed to be, at the scrupulousness with which he dwelled on what he cared for.”

It’s the passion of the art fanboy, a soulful fanaticism that is so refreshing in an era that feels entirely about becoming more distracted, not more focussed.

Got To Give The People, Give The People What They Want.

Typepad blogs list the referring address for visitors, and I’ve discovered that the single biggest tag that drives search engines to Meerkat is 'Joseph Gordon Levitt'. Closely followed by 'Prison Porn'. The combo of Gordon Levitt’s predominantly underage body of work and that factleaves me a little uneasy, but I’m not above exploiting a little light pedophilia for traffic's sake.

The posters for JGL's new film The Lookout caught my eye on the Bowery yesterday. Looks promising, even if the trailer casts it in a way-too backwards narrative light, the most overused trick in the quasi-indie playbook. Director Scott Frank did write Out Of Sight, however, a movie so good that even Jennifer Lopez came off as a credible Fed, as well as delivering the most gorgeously narcotic cinematic pas de deux in recent memory.

JGL looks soulful and raw entirely without cant in this one, as is usual for this anomaly in glossy young Hollywood. Good chin, too.

Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year

Shot from a moving F train on the Williamsburg Bridge this afternoon, using the Nokia N73.