Judd Apatow is like a clumsy cartoon elephant, laughing at his own flatulence & drunk to the point of being painfully sentimental, trampling over piles of money he's made. Though he doesn't necessarily know it, Mike Judge is like this elephant's put-upon zookeeper, trying to explain why the beast behaves like he does. Both are 'poets of contemporary America,' if we understand that the America in question involves endless strip malls, traffic jams, prolonged adolescence, dismal wage (and salary) slavery, needless sexual frustration, McMansions, Mom's basement, and a constant casual interface between folks who do illegal drugs, folks who do legal drugs & folks who say they don't touch either.
Site Seeing
- A Girl and a Gun
- A Placid Island of Ignorance
- A Threadless Way
- About to Combust
- Ads Without Products
- Adventures in Modern (Re)Collection
- American Stranger
- An Orchestra of Awesome
- An Uncommonplace Book
- Art or Love
- As perfect as it can be ...
- Beyond the Valley of the Cinephiles
- Big Media Vandal
- Cerebral Mastication
- Chained to the Cinematheque
- Cinebeats
- Cinecultures
- Cinemasparagus
- Coffee Coffee and More Coffee
- Concentrated Nonsense
- Critic After Dark
- Culturemonkey
- D-Kaz
- Daniel's Weblog
- Dave Kehr
- Digital Poetics
- Donal Foreman
- Dr. Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope
- Drifiting: A Director's Log
- Empire Burlesque
- Esoteric Rabbit
- Esotika Erotica Psychotica
- Ferdy on Films, etc.
- Fetch Me My Axe
- Flip Flopping Joy
- Football Is Fixed
- Fragments, or:
- Fred Camper
- From the Clouds to the Resistance
- Girish
- Give It to the Soft Boys
- Goodbye 20th Century
- Hell on Frisco Bay
- Hilobrow
- History Is a Weapon
- hmmn
- House of Mirth and Movies
- Idiocentrism
- If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger ...
- Infinite Thought
- Invisible Cinema
- J'sais pas quoi faire!
- Jamais Vu
- Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!
- Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Jump Cut
- Kino Slang
- Landscape Suicide
- Le Colonel Chabert
- Lenin's Tomb
- Limited, Inc.
- Limitless Cinema
- Long Pauses
- Lost in the Frame
- Louis Proyect
- Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire
- Ludic Despair
- Marxists.org
- Memories of the Future
- Mirror/Stage
- mono no aware
- More Than Meets the Mogwai
- Motion Picture, It's Called
- Motion Within Motion
- My Gleanings
- Observations on film art and Film Art
- One Way Street
- Only the Cinema
- Pilgrim Akimbo
- Pullquote
- Qlipoth
- Radical Closure
- Renegade Evolution
- Renegade Eye
- Rigorous Intuition
- Scanners
- Self-Styled Siren
- Serge Daney in English
- Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule
- Shadowplay
- Sihir Perempuan
- Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy
- Situationist International Online
- Six Martinis and the Seventh Art
- Slant Magazine
- Sounds, Images
- Strictly Film School
- Supposed Aura
- Tabula Rasa
- Talking a Lot Without Ever Really Saying Anything
- Teleport City
- Thanks for the Use of the Hall
- The Academic Hack
- The Accursed Share
- The Angry Arab
- The Art of Memory
- The Chutry Experiment
- The Cinematic Art
- The Dancing Image
- The Exploding Kinetoscope
- The Fortunes of the Dialectic
- The Hands of Bresson
- The House Next Door
- The Primary Contradiction
- The Rabbit Eater
- The Screengrab
- The Stranger Song
- The Unsung Joe
- Thinking Screens
- Tout va bien
- Tuwa's Shanty
- Uncommitted Crime
- Varieties of Unreligious Experience
- Videoarcadia
- Vijay Prashad (ZNet)
- Vinyl Is Heavy
- Waggish
- Ways of Seeing
- When Canses Were Classeled
- William Bowles
- wood s lot
- World Picture
- Zach Barocas Blogs Here
- Zero for Conduct
6 comments:
Granted, but you only defined "America" and not "poet," because I saw EXTRACT and there ain't much poetry there.
True sir, I agree - insofar as the movie isn't particularly good. (And 'poetic' only in the most facetious of ways.) Idiocracy was even a bit of a challenge to defend (over its dumping on video, that is) because it wasn't nearly as fine a film as it should have been. But I nevertheless have a persistent affection for Mike Judge at this point.
"the America in question involves endless strip malls, traffic jams, prolonged adolescence, dismal wage (and salary) slavery, needless sexual frustration, McMansions, Mom's basement, and a constant casual interface between folks who do illegal drugs, folks who do legal drugs & folks who say they don't touch either."
I just watched Cassavetes' Husbands for the first time, and can't Husbands be equally well described by this sentence? Certainly the prolonged adolescence part.
Alex - quite possibly, been a while since I've seen it; though Husbands (aside from being much greater than the Judge & Apatow oeuvres) belongs to a different moment--the thing that I think characterizes films like Judge's and Apatow's (in their objects, esp. Judge, and in their assumptions, esp. Apatow), and that I was trying to pinpoint, is a matter of 'the way we live now.'
But that's an interesting road to go down - yet another hat for Cassavetes: observer of the idiocracy.
Mike Judge! Still waiting to see Extract. I hope it's half as funny as this post.
Office Space > anything by the Coen Brothers. Right?
Better than anything by the Coens? I dunno - that depends on how I'm feeling about them on any given day (it varies wildly) ... but I just took another look at Office Space a few weeks ago, and it's a film that holds up quite well over time and repeated viewings.
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