If you haven’t done so already: You need need need need need to watch Cloverfield – not so much because of the massive viral marketing hype that accompanied its pre-release phase (there even was a signature drink that almost gave it its name), but because it is pure popcorn-crunching fun. I am not good at watching horror movies, I am particularly wary of films where victims get locked up in the dark with an unknown number of ghouls – but I kind of fancy skyscraper-tall monsters that make the ground move!

Ok, there is a bit of creepy crawly action going on once the survivors enter the tunnel – amazing to what kind of thrilling use one can put night-vision in a camera! A log line for Cloverfield: Godzilla meets Blair Witch meets Alien (the face-hugger) meets 28 Days Later. I won’t even try to provide a plot summary – you don’t need to know more than that. Narrative doesn’t matter, just enjoy what you see and feel.

A friend of mine once said anybody who didn’t like Brokeback Mountain had not heart (which applies to me, apparently) – and if you don’t like Cloverfield, you may have brains, but they are certainly not well connected to your guts and primal fears.

P.S.: The trailer on cloverfielmovie.com is odd – they added some distortion afterwards to give it more of that video tape appeal.

Minutes before going to bed I read that Heath “BrokeBack Mountain” Ledger died – devastating!

Perez Hilton writes:

At 3:31 p.m., a masseuse arrived at Apartment 5A in the building for an appointment with Mr. Ledger, police said.

The masseuse was let in to the home by a housekeeper, who then knocked on the door of Mr. Ledger’s bedroom. When no one answered, the housekeeper and the masseuse opened the bedroom and found Mr. Ledger unconscious.

They shook him, but he did not respond. They immediately called the authorities. The police said they did not suspect foul play and said they found pills near the body.

Read the Google News on his tragic death. He was only 28 – 5 years my junior! It’s been a while that Academy Award winners died that young.

So Arthur Miller gave the world The Crucible, thank you. He divorced his wife Mary to be able to marry Marilyn Monroe the same month (June 1956), what ever. Happens all over the place. They filmed The Misfits together – I’ve not in any other MM movie seen the camera treat her with such disrespect. The scene where she plays with this ping pong toy (I have no name for it) and where the camera zooms in on nothing but her wiggling bum while (macsuline-voiced) bystanders cheer her on – enraging. Oh well. If Arthur Miller or Norman Mailer or Henry Miller do it, it’s art. Miller himself declared that shooting this film was the lowest point of his life – how is that for a good-bye present to MM whom he divorced before the premiere? MM OD’ed a year later. Not his fault or responsibility, of course.

Yet the thing that eventually makes me want to STRANGLE him if he weren’t dead already is that he had his son Daniel, born in 1966 with Down Syndrome, put in a home immediately and permanently straight after his birth. Arthur Miller is said to be the one who insisted – shame on the mother Inge Morath for agreeing to that as well. Daniel was excluded from their lives entirely – how’s that for a private witch hunt?

According to the Daily Mail, Daniel Day-Lewis, the husband of their daughter Rebecca, made him reunite with Daniel when his son had already turned 40 – although I am not quite sure how that would have worked out, as Daniel Miller turned 40 in 2006 and Arthur Miller died in 2005. In any case, if he saw him at all, it was pretty close to his own death.

By the way, another douchebag who exluded his son from his life is Desmond Dekker, the singer of “The Israelites”. I know because Lenina and I celebrated Christmas with his son Desmond, called Desy, in 2000. Desy is a musician and DJ who needs a wheelchair and the help of a personal assistant to help him get around – seemingly too much for Desmond Snr to cope with. He looks very much like his father who died in 2006. This might be his Myspace-Profile – at least he looks like Desy. Dr Lenina, please advice!

It’s too bad that one cannot embed videos Brightcove TV: That’s were the videos for the SPEECHLESS WITHOUT WRITERS campaign are hosted. EDIT: They’re also on Youtube – this one here is my favourite one

Other things that have been going on: I really, really, really like my new job:-) I like it so much that not even the 2 hour commute can get me down.

Have you ever heard of Toño, the devil on wheels (el diablo sobre ruedas)? I stumbled upon his performance via this blog. I understand absolutely no Spanish (due to this lowest-possible-challenge Spanish course I took a year ago where the teacher was so afraid that we’d feel threatened by the grammar and leave the course – I almost left it because I didn’t learn anything, not even possessive pronouns!) yet would love to understand this. And what’s the business with those ants in the desk? It seems as if he is looking for work in this skit: Busco trabajo.

Evelyn Hamann at Wikipedia

From now on I’ll refer you to the man Perez Hilton for all your Britney-watching needs. He covers it all.

A Los Angeles judge on Monday took away Britney Spears‘ custody of her two children, Tater Tot and Small Fry.

The former pop star, who the court labeled a frequent and habitual user of drugs and alcohol, must turn over custody of her kids to Kevin Federline by Wednesday.

The children will stay with K-Fed indefinitely, as he has been granted 100% full physical custody of the boys.

Read: Britney Loses Custody Of Her Kids!!! | Now That She’s Lost Custody Of Her Babies…

So I am currently in the process of reading many many job ads, applying for some, dismissing the most and generally in the process of developing a grudge against capitalism. I don’t think I’d be happy in any of the jobs that I have had a look at so far if it were full time and I getting a acute sense of what ALIENATION really means. Who, seriously, can develop a passion for direct marketing? I am deliberatly choosing this topic because I used to work in direct marketing and customer relationship management – and one part of me thinks that I could do it again and probably even enjoy it. But the other part thinks that I could only do that if I SOLD MY SOUL another time. It’s so annoying: to think that you would have to buy into capitalism first before being able to work in the majority of office jobs that are available. Who could ever be passionate about selling things? Who could be passionate about working in advertising – of course it is VERY easy to be VERY passionate about advertising, at the very moment that you realize the POWER that advertising (and as such: YOU) has over people. But it’s alienating, alienating, alienating.

Český sen (Czech dream) is a fantastic movie from the alienation department: It’s the final year project of two Czech film students. Together with an advertising agency they developed a campaing to market a new supermarket – that actually doesn’t exist. They interview families,pretending to be looking for the Český sen family, and it’s painful to see people confess in front of the camera what shopping means to them. The bit below shows the final 10 minutes: The public is invited to a grand opening, only to find that the supermarket itself is well a kilometre away from the parking lot where they have convened. So they’re already grumpy when approaching the supermarket – only to find out, once arrived, that it’s nothing but a facade. Fantastic!

Here are some of the trailers for the fake supermarket that were broadcast on Czech TV:

It’s probably a bit unfair towards the Indian actress, but I realized recently that Kareena Kapoor and Paris Hilton have a lot in common, feature-wise. Also, both come from well-known, affluent families. The Hilton clan is well known for their trade, the hotel industry, and have also produced minor celebrity Nicky Hilton (Paris’ sister), while the Kapoor clan has produced some fine Bollywood actors, including the probably biggest star ever (I think), Raj Kapoor. Kareena actually looks a lot like him, but he might as well be Paris’ father. And they’re practically the same age, Kareena been born in September 1980 and Paris in February 1981.

In the film that meant her breakthough, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Kareena played a spoiled brat reminiscent of Paris in the first part of the film, but then her character bethought herself of traditions and spirituality and became a decent (if particularly fashionable) housewife in the end.

Regarding Paris, she was said to have marketed her own private photographs and videos in a clumsy guerrilla warfare strategy recently. The idea was to try to make people believe that Paris wasn’t able to pay her storage unit bill, that her stuff was auctioned off and that ‘they’, i.e. the makers of a site named Paris Exposed, had bought it. Access was granted for $ 49. Here is a link to the trailer video of that same website (which seems to be down now). The video is boring, hence no inclusion into my post, but if you ever wanted to catch a glimpse of Paris’ nipples (yawn), go watch it.

Apart from that, Paris Hilton was received with major ennui in Austria when she appeared at the Vienna opera ball this year. Her appearance first attracted major media interest, but the unanimous verdict was that she wasn’t worth a penny of the alleged € 300.000 she received for attending the ball. For most of the evening, she sat in construction magnate Lugner’s VIP box, looking bored, checking either her looks in a hand-mirror or her cell phone for new messages. Neither was she seen on the dance floor nor seen socializing with the Viennese haute volée. The general assumption was that she had expected more attention – but the Vienna opera ball is certainly not the place where an American heiress who’s good at aprés ski or exposing her undergarments would make much of an impression. Those people have seen worse in their own circles, but at least they know how to be cultivated.

While mentioning Paris’ cellphone addiction: Kareena Kapoor apparently spent most of her time on the set of Asoka with her cellphone glued to her ear, only putting it down when being called by the director;-)

But all in all, the clear winner of this comparison is Kareena – even though I think that her eyes, like Paris’, are too close to each other. At least she has never lowered herself to crotch shots or published homemade sex videos, nor to marketing such material through dodgy websites.

Some films featuring Kareena (all for which she received awards):
Don (2006, Cameo, but hot!)
Omkara (2006)
Dev (2004)
Chameli (2004)
Kabhi Khushi KabhieGham (2001)
Asoka (2001)
Refugee (2000)

Some ‘films’ featuring Paris:
House of Wax (2005, Teen Choice award for Best Scream)
1 Night in Paris (2004, the infamous sex tape her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon released; she received directorial credit for the video which won the Adult Video News award for Best Selling Video; just a note on the side: she also looked bored in that video)
The Simple Life (2003-, TV)

I’ve got some thoughts on my mind about the relation between the consumerist mindset, the popularity of wellness products and services and the ever spreading belief of some people that they should ‘learn to do something for themselves’, relating furthermore to a certain tendency with some to assess friendship on the basis of its ‘what one gets out it’ value. But before I formulate this any clearer, I’d like to wait for a response from Jetsam on my response to his most recent Baudrillard post (don’t feel pushed into anything though!).

While that thought keeps fermenting, I’d simply like to juxtapose two films featuring scenes from the battlefield – the upcoming film 300, directed by Zach Snyder and based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller on the one hand and the already mentioned Asoka on the other, directed by Santosh Sivan, featuring Shahrukh Khan, and loosely based on the life and times of the Indian emperor Ashoka who embraced Buddhism after realizing the cruelties of the wars he had waged.

While the former aspires to a hitherto unseen, graphic, formally aesthetic depiction of the fights on the battlefield, the latter eschews graphic detail, in spite of the numerous fighting scenes. The former relies heavily on the bluescreen, the latter on costume and physical abilities. The former is graphic eyecandy, the second a family movie and vehicle for SRK.

I didn’t manage to dig up a fighting scene from Asoka, so you’ll have to make do with the trailer. Please appreciate the suggestions of bloodshed which can be found throughout the movie, for instances splashes of red water against the sea shore. But for most of the time, choreography hides the bodily part where the wound is afflicted.

The piece from 300 was heralded as the ‘most violent scene in the entire film’. Please appreciate in particular the achievements of the Foley artists, in particular the sound of blood gushing out of the fresh wounds. Sounds pretty much like a bathroom party to me;-)

I don’t know how you feel about 300, but I am no more interested in watching it. According to Jetsam’s review, the images are stunning, but the characters contrived and uninteresting. Judging from the footage and screens I have seen, you can expect a photorealistic trying to be surrealistic image overflow – but I’ve already grown tired of CGI, to be honest.

On the other hand, the swords and armament in Asoka resemble the equipment of toy soldiers all too often – neither is the story the most intriguing ever told, but hey: it’s got SRK in it. I am afraid to sound too fanatic or naive – but SRK is definitely the best reason for watching the film. If anybody has the magic aura of a star, then him – goofy nose, warts and all. You just don’t want to take your eyes of him – from the blood feast in 300, I do happily want to avert my eyes.