Category: The Arts/Media

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Valor’s Kids is awesome!

And not just because I have a tiny role in the movie! (Mind you, it’s an animated film and I’m the voice of Viper Soldier 2, but still…)

Valor’s Kids is being screened on Thursday evening, which means I can’t be there because of school. However, I figure if I promote the movie on here, maybe I can get a couple people to take my place. It’s being done as a fundraiser for The WaZoo! Show, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with this mission statement:

The WaZoo! Show’s mission is to produce original video-based comedy shows for the general public while providing a fun and creative opportunity for members’ professional growth in the areas of writing, directing, editing, acting and post-production.

I’ve been a member for nine or ten years and it’s been a blast, but I don’t want to get off-track here. Part of the reason for the screening is to benefit WaZoo!; tickets are $5 apiece and $2 of that goes directly to the show (i.e., that amount is tax deductible).

And did I mention that the director is 15 years old? Hmmm… nope, doesn’t look like I did, so I’m mentioning it now. Kai Mariah started the project waaaaay back when she was 12 and put on the finishing touches earlier this year. I guess that between ages 12 and 15, you sometimes find things you want to change and/or improve upon. Go figure.

So if you’ve got 93 spare minutes and five bucks for a ticket (they’re only accepting cash) at 7:00pm this Thursday, November 10th, please honor Kai with your presence at the Plaza Maplewood Theater. Here’s the address with a link to Google Maps—you can get specific driving directions from there:

Plaza Maplewood Theater
1847 East Larpenteur
Maplewood, MN 55109

Title: Valor’s Kids
Time: 7:00pm start
Cost: $5 per ticket ($2 tax-deductible)
Why: Because it’s awesome

Oh, and if you’ve got a Facebook account, there’s an event notice that covers pretty much everything I’ve mentioned here. I wish I could see a bunch of you there, but since I’ll be in the middle of class, I hope Kai sees a bunch of you there instead.

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Do not taunt The Social Network

An old SNL sketch (Happy Fun Ball) popped into my head when I started writing this. Watch it and you’ll understand the title.

I watched The Social Network last night because my Accounting professor recommended it during a discussion about common stock. It was a good and somewhat creepy movie. At the end, the guy playing Mark Zuckerberg proclaims, “I’m not the bad guy.” I’m not entirely convinced, in part because he’s the leader of the evil empire commonly known as Facebook.

So as I was having this internal debate about whether Mark Zuckerberg is a major asshole, I decided to log onto the admin page here and look at some stuff. It wouldn’t load. Why not? I hadn’t written anything about his shitty behavior in the movie yet, but he decided to hack the network and preemptively shut down my blog anyway. What an asshole.

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Keep your pencils handy

You may want to use them to puncture your eardrums during parts of this ABC News clip.

It’s a report on the viral phenomenon known as Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” and how people think it may be the worst song ever. I’m not cruel enough to post a link to the actual video—you’ll have to subject yourself to that. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t, but I can pretty much guarantee you’ll never hear the word “Friday” in your head the same way again.

The biggest reason I found the news report interesting is because during the interview, they asked her to sing the first part of the National Anthem. It wasn’t great—she wasn’t always on-key—but at least she got all the words right. (I’m looking at you, Christina Aguilera!)

And when she was singing the anthem, it didn’t feel like she was scraping her vocal fingernails across a chalkboard. I cringed a little when she hit the wrong notes, but I didn’t have to stop partway through the song. (Seriously, I’ve tried watching “Friday” a couple times and I still have no idea how it ends.)

You may be asking yourself, “Why should I care?” Well, there’s really no good reason to care, but I think it’s odd that she intentionally sounds bad. Her voice was fine during the news report, but that grating, nasal tone in the song/video… why?

Did someone convince her to do it because everyone loves a train wreck? Is that going to be her “trademark” that no one will want to copy? Or maybe she just wants to set herself apart from Christina Aguilera. I don’t know, but I recommend you keep a couple pencils nearby for when the inevitable happens: she releases an album.

[She seemed nice during the interview and I don’t want to be a total hater, but I came up with a joke that some of you might like: “Let’s hope the release date is scheduled for 2013 and that the Mayans were right.”]

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Mind Over Matt, post-production party

I’m not sure if that’s the proper title for tonight’s party, but I thought the alliteration sounded cool, so I ran with it. Anyway, it’s now two weeks since we wrapped, so most of us got together to watch ourselves on DVD. (Unfortunately, two people couldn’t make it because they’ve got “higher priorities” like “family”… lame excuses, if you ask me.)

We met up at someone’s apartment in Minneapolis, ate, drank, played games and watched the first Sunday’s performance from start to finish. Minus the breaks between scenes and the intermissions, of course. No one needed 15 minutes to grab food or use the bathroom. Well, sorta didn’t need it for the bathroom—it was out of commission for a while when the toilet got plugged up and there was no plunger in the apartment. Incidentally, if you ever need to borrow a plunger from a neighbor, don’t be surprised if they tell you you don’t need to bring it back.

Turns out that the performance went really well, everyone nailed their lines and they looked good doing it. Okay, I think we looked good doing it. It was a shame that we didn’t have a bigger audience that afternoon, but as the director pointed out when giving her introductory speech, people had to do a lot of shoveling before coming to the show.

The only regret I have about the party? Sure, there’s the sad “I don’t know if or when I’ll see any of these people again with whom I’ve had so much fun” stuff, but during the course of the play, Matt mentions having Cheetos and Sprite in his kitchen. Tonight? No Cheetos or Sprite. I felt so dirty…

So that’s it. We’re wrapped, no more stories about the future of the play. There are a handful of stories I’ve yet to tell due to a lack of blog entries for the last three or four months, but I’ve got until the last day of the year to write stuff—I should be able to fill in one or two blanks during that time. Whether I’ll be able to fill the void that came about due to the lack of Cheetos and Sprite tonight… maybe it’s not that bad and I just need to straighten out my priorities. Maybe all I need to do is spend some time with my “family.”

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“I can’t believe that actually happened.”

A friend of mine, Jason Schumacher, made a movie called “The Telephone Game” that played in a film festival this weekend. The premise of the movie isn’t that awe-inspiring—a bad play from auditions to performance that goes horribly awry in a multitude of ways—but how it was created was pretty impressive: there was no script, just three pages of notes. Aside from a song and a few lines of dialogue, almost all of it was improvised.

Because this was a film festival, there were ballots at the door of the auditorium so people could grab one and vote for “Best Movie”, “Best Cinematography”, etc. Sure, it might have been the only movie I saw, but I was so impressed with The Telephone Game that it got my vote in every category. Including “Best Documentary.”