Vinha no New York Times anteontem, só vi hoje: um perfil do Paul Feig. Criador do Freaks and Geeks (no meu top 10 de séries favoritas de sempre, certamente) e o maior/melhor falhado de sempre. Grande, grande, muito grande. Cheio de ideias, cheio de falhanços, cheio de desilusões. A comédia dos falhados, dos perdedores, dos feios, dos gordos, dos incompreendidos, dos que gostam demasiado de coisas pouco fixes. Em suma, o meu herói.
domingo, setembro 28, 2008
quarta-feira, setembro 24, 2008
Love Lockdown #2
O que não quer, de todo, dizer que espero que o 808s and Heartbreak seja todo assim, mas espero que tenha TR-808s e corações partidos e, se não fosse pedir demasiado, rap (ele pode ser um mau rapper, mas é melhor rapper que cantor, e o auto-tune cansa imenso, alguém alguma vez ouviu um disco do T-Pain até ao fim, para além dele?). Kanye triste vale sempre.
Love Lockdown
Que se foda: "Love Lockdown" é malha. Auto-tune, batida do coração, piano, refrão, vale. Mas também, como o próprio diz: "I could stand there in a fucking Speedo and still look like a fuckin' hero."
sábado, setembro 20, 2008
Alguém
Alguém oscarize o Tom Cruise e ponha a banda a tocar o "Low" do Flo-Rida com o T-Pain se ele se alongar nos agradecimentos ao L. Ron.
quarta-feira, setembro 17, 2008
Melhor site de todo o sempre
Porque todas as canções do mundo, por muito boas que sejam, seriam sempre melhores com um bocadinho de cowbell e um bocadinho de Christopher Walken. A sério. Experimentem com qualquer uma. Este é o site e com ele qualquer canção pode ficar com o som de dinamite que o Bruce Dickinson ("yes, the Bruce Dickinson") deu a "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". Antes havia canções que podiam ser melhores. Agora não. Exemplo (já passaram oito anos [pronto, nove no caso da malha] e o sketch e a malha continuam míticos, para sempre, comédia e música para sempre):
| Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj | ||
quinta-feira, setembro 11, 2008
This is how I live, Russell
Uma "entrevista" estupenda, uma conversa entre o Russell Brand e o Morrissey (e a mãe do Russell Brand). Achava o Russell Brand irritante, por causa do cabelo, a voz, etc., mas passei a gostar dele algures durante este ano, não faço ideia porquê. O ego enorme, a constante necessidade de atenção, as partes auto-depreciativas não justificáveis, etc. Tem muito em comum com a pessoa com quem fala aqui, o homem mais bonito do mundo e o maior de sempre. "There's nothing else to be obsessed with but the self", diz Brand. "Is there anything that you're not? Because you seem to claim you're everything", diz Morrissey. Ambos têm uma extrema necessidade de serem amados e de lhes darem atenção. E ambos têm muita piada. E divertem-se. É bom.
quarta-feira, setembro 10, 2008
Um dos meus grandes desgostos na vida
O Ol' Dirty Bastard nunca ter gravado um disco de standards. Ou de canções de natal. Seria incrível. Era a voz de um anjo. O Mark Ronson aproveitou-a para fazer magia. O Gregg Gillis (Girl Talk) pegou nela e pô-la em cima de "Autumn Sweater" dos Yo La Tengo e fez muito bem, mas aí não estava a cantar. Se existissem mais gravações dele a cantar o mundo seria um sítio bem mais bonito. Muito melhor que o Sid Vicious a cantar "My Way" seria o Ol' Dirty Bastard a fazê-lo. Alguém o ressuscite para cantar os songbook de Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers e Hart? Meu Deus, até Bacharach e David. Seria incrível. E canções de natal? "Jingle Bells"? "White Christmas"? OK, teríamos de atirar um ou outro "oh nigga I'm burnin' up" ou um "I'll fuck yo' ass up" no meio, mas seria bestial.
Melhor nome de sempre?
O novo disco do Kanye West, diz-se, vai-se chamar 808s and Heartbreak. Melhor nome de sempre?
quarta-feira, setembro 03, 2008
Alec
O Alec Baldwin é o meu herói. Narrou um dos meus filmes preferidos e é basicamente o maior do mundo no 30 Rock, uma sitcom bestial. Não é só a voz dele, é também o porte e a pinta – ninguém tem mais pinta que ele no mundo inteiro. Este perfil da New Yorker mostra-o como um homem desiludido, chateado com as voltas que a vida deu, sem grande amor-próprio e com muitos desgostos. Ou seja, fá-lo parecer ainda mais fixe.
He is very conscious of what is lacking in his life—a spouse, for example, and a film career something like Jack Nicholson’s, and the governorship of New York—and his rhetoric can sometimes bring to mind a scene from “30 Rock” in which Baldwin, in his role as Jack Donaghy, a shameless but astute TV executive, stares at an equestrian painting by Stubbs and, in a growled whisper of longing, says, “I wish I were a horse—strong, free, my chestnut haunches glistening in the sun.” According to Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live” and an executive producer of “30 Rock,” Baldwin “guards against enjoyment.” (Michaels is a friend of Baldwin’s and was a model for the Donaghy character.) “I’ll say, ‘Alec, you have one of the best writers in television’ ”—Tina Fey—“ ‘writing this part for you. It’s shot in New York, where you chose to live. You work three days a week, you get paid a lot of money, you’re getting awards. It’s a great time in your life. It’s an all-good thing. And, if you were capable of enjoying it, it would be even better.’ ” Or, as William Baldwin, one of Alec’s three younger brothers, said recently, “There’s always something for him to fucking whine about.”
–
“Do you want to know the truth?” Baldwin said to me not long ago. “I don’t think I really have a talent for movie acting. I’m not bad at it, but I don’t think I really have a talent for it.” He described the film actor’s need to project strength and weakness simultaneously. “Nicholson’s my idol this way. Pacino. There’s a mix you have to have where the character is vulnerable, the character is up against it, but there’s still a glimmer of resourcefulness in his eye—you look at him and the character is telegraphing to you this is not going to last very long. ‘I’m down’—Randle McMurphy, Serpico, whatever it is—‘but it’s not going to last, I’m still going to figure my way out of this.’ ” In contrast, he referred to Orson Welles. “Welles was a powerful actor, but he wasn’t always a great actor,” Baldwin said, with, perhaps, a faint nod to his own career. “Even when Welles was lost, he was arrogant.”
–
I recently asked Marci Klein, one of Baldwin’s closest friends, if she had tried to discourage Baldwin from writing the book about his legal battle with Kim Basinger. “Oh, yes,” she said. Klein is a senior producer on “Saturday Night Live” and an executive producer on “30 Rock”; she has known Baldwin since he was first on “S.N.L.” She told me, “I said, ‘Do not write this book. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear about your divorce anymore.’ ” She laughed. “He goes, ‘You bitch!’ I go, ‘You loser!’ We work well together.”
Baldwin and Klein—who is forty-one and married, with young children—chaperone each other to award shows or sit at home and order takeout. “He’s happiest eating Lupe’s Mexican food and watching a movie,” Klein said. “I like to ask him, ‘Who fucked you up? Which girl in sixth grade?’ ” Baldwin often jokes about how they should have married. “But we’re friends,” she said. “And also I feel like I’m his mother, even though I’m a lot younger than him. I feel like I take care of him.” She added, “Marriage is very important to him. He didn’t want to get divorced. He wanted to make it work. He was very committed. With men, it’s not the first thing—‘I want to get married, I want to have kids’—but Alec is a different kind of guy. And therefore having it not work, for whatever reasons, was very difficult for him.”
–
In late 2004, when Fey—then the head writer for “Saturday Night Live”—began to devise “30 Rock,” it was in the hope, but not the expectation, that Baldwin would play the boss of Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, who is the head writer for a show something like “Saturday Night Live.” As Lorne Michaels said recently, “We were looking for a foil for Tina’s character—someone who was right just often enough to be infuriating.” Baldwin was wary. It was a sitcom, and he had played Macbeth and Stanley Kowalski on the New York stage. His mind turned to the example of Conrad Bain, the actor with a fine theatrical background who came to be Philip Drummond, the white father of two adopted African-American boys, on “Diff’rent Strokes.” Embroidering on this thought, Baldwin imagined an actor who signs up for the quick money of a sitcom pilot quite confident that the show will never be commissioned: “The agent’s saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s the biggest piece of shit in the history of show business.’ Cut to six years later: you’re in your dressing room, you’re in season five, and on the wall are posters of you from the New York Shakespeare Festival—these achingly beautiful posters on the wall. By that point, you’re making a hundred and seventy-five thousand a week, you’ve got a house in East Hampton, you’re getting laid constantly, you’ve got closets of beautiful Italian suits, and you’ve got three cars in the garage and you’re paying alimony to your ex-wife who’s living down in Florida. And you’re doing the same jokes, again and again and again.”
Baldwin, who admires Fey—“She’s so bright you’re always wondering if you’re boring her,” he says—agreed to be in the pilot, but on the understanding that, if the show worked out, he would appear in no more than six episodes a season, for six seasons. The pilot was made. NBC saw it, and offered to take the show only if Baldwin was in all twenty-one episodes of the first season. It was a fair judgment: Baldwin’s Donaghy—too smart and too perverse to be a standard business blowhard—was an obvious asset. Although originally conceived as a bullying antagonist to Liz Lemon, by the time of the pilot the character had already begun to expand into a fellow-protagonist, a cynic who guides a neurotic. Unpunished for saying aloud what he should not even be thinking (“Don’t ever make me talk to a woman that old again”), Donaghy became a kind of mentor to the writers and performers under him. In Baldwin’s mind, “Jack Donaghy is Lorne, first and foremost. ‘What am I, a farmer?’ That is Lorne. I think he said that. Lorne’s got a tuxedo in the glove compartment of his car. Lorne is a big-ticket A-list New York water buffalo. He’s big on the Serengeti. Lorne is a person who seduces you into thinking that if you take his advice and play your cards right you’re going to end up with his life.”
–
He bought a coffee at Starbucks, where a young woman said something nice about “30 Rock.” “I do feel I’m entering that Clinton phase,” he said after we left. “I’m fifty. There are women who’ll go up to a young movie star and they’ll look at him, like, ‘There are certain things I really want to do with you, and it’s pretty plain to anyone why I’d want to do them with you.’ And then there are people who look at me now, at my age, and they’ll look at me and the look is ‘I can’t explain why, because it’s kind of strange . . .’ It confounds and perplexes even them. ‘In spite of the fact that you don’t look like a young leading man anymore, I’d quite like to throw you down on this blanket right now.’ A bit of that.”
He is very conscious of what is lacking in his life—a spouse, for example, and a film career something like Jack Nicholson’s, and the governorship of New York—and his rhetoric can sometimes bring to mind a scene from “30 Rock” in which Baldwin, in his role as Jack Donaghy, a shameless but astute TV executive, stares at an equestrian painting by Stubbs and, in a growled whisper of longing, says, “I wish I were a horse—strong, free, my chestnut haunches glistening in the sun.” According to Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live” and an executive producer of “30 Rock,” Baldwin “guards against enjoyment.” (Michaels is a friend of Baldwin’s and was a model for the Donaghy character.) “I’ll say, ‘Alec, you have one of the best writers in television’ ”—Tina Fey—“ ‘writing this part for you. It’s shot in New York, where you chose to live. You work three days a week, you get paid a lot of money, you’re getting awards. It’s a great time in your life. It’s an all-good thing. And, if you were capable of enjoying it, it would be even better.’ ” Or, as William Baldwin, one of Alec’s three younger brothers, said recently, “There’s always something for him to fucking whine about.”
–
“Do you want to know the truth?” Baldwin said to me not long ago. “I don’t think I really have a talent for movie acting. I’m not bad at it, but I don’t think I really have a talent for it.” He described the film actor’s need to project strength and weakness simultaneously. “Nicholson’s my idol this way. Pacino. There’s a mix you have to have where the character is vulnerable, the character is up against it, but there’s still a glimmer of resourcefulness in his eye—you look at him and the character is telegraphing to you this is not going to last very long. ‘I’m down’—Randle McMurphy, Serpico, whatever it is—‘but it’s not going to last, I’m still going to figure my way out of this.’ ” In contrast, he referred to Orson Welles. “Welles was a powerful actor, but he wasn’t always a great actor,” Baldwin said, with, perhaps, a faint nod to his own career. “Even when Welles was lost, he was arrogant.”
–
I recently asked Marci Klein, one of Baldwin’s closest friends, if she had tried to discourage Baldwin from writing the book about his legal battle with Kim Basinger. “Oh, yes,” she said. Klein is a senior producer on “Saturday Night Live” and an executive producer on “30 Rock”; she has known Baldwin since he was first on “S.N.L.” She told me, “I said, ‘Do not write this book. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear about your divorce anymore.’ ” She laughed. “He goes, ‘You bitch!’ I go, ‘You loser!’ We work well together.”
Baldwin and Klein—who is forty-one and married, with young children—chaperone each other to award shows or sit at home and order takeout. “He’s happiest eating Lupe’s Mexican food and watching a movie,” Klein said. “I like to ask him, ‘Who fucked you up? Which girl in sixth grade?’ ” Baldwin often jokes about how they should have married. “But we’re friends,” she said. “And also I feel like I’m his mother, even though I’m a lot younger than him. I feel like I take care of him.” She added, “Marriage is very important to him. He didn’t want to get divorced. He wanted to make it work. He was very committed. With men, it’s not the first thing—‘I want to get married, I want to have kids’—but Alec is a different kind of guy. And therefore having it not work, for whatever reasons, was very difficult for him.”
–
In late 2004, when Fey—then the head writer for “Saturday Night Live”—began to devise “30 Rock,” it was in the hope, but not the expectation, that Baldwin would play the boss of Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, who is the head writer for a show something like “Saturday Night Live.” As Lorne Michaels said recently, “We were looking for a foil for Tina’s character—someone who was right just often enough to be infuriating.” Baldwin was wary. It was a sitcom, and he had played Macbeth and Stanley Kowalski on the New York stage. His mind turned to the example of Conrad Bain, the actor with a fine theatrical background who came to be Philip Drummond, the white father of two adopted African-American boys, on “Diff’rent Strokes.” Embroidering on this thought, Baldwin imagined an actor who signs up for the quick money of a sitcom pilot quite confident that the show will never be commissioned: “The agent’s saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s the biggest piece of shit in the history of show business.’ Cut to six years later: you’re in your dressing room, you’re in season five, and on the wall are posters of you from the New York Shakespeare Festival—these achingly beautiful posters on the wall. By that point, you’re making a hundred and seventy-five thousand a week, you’ve got a house in East Hampton, you’re getting laid constantly, you’ve got closets of beautiful Italian suits, and you’ve got three cars in the garage and you’re paying alimony to your ex-wife who’s living down in Florida. And you’re doing the same jokes, again and again and again.”
Baldwin, who admires Fey—“She’s so bright you’re always wondering if you’re boring her,” he says—agreed to be in the pilot, but on the understanding that, if the show worked out, he would appear in no more than six episodes a season, for six seasons. The pilot was made. NBC saw it, and offered to take the show only if Baldwin was in all twenty-one episodes of the first season. It was a fair judgment: Baldwin’s Donaghy—too smart and too perverse to be a standard business blowhard—was an obvious asset. Although originally conceived as a bullying antagonist to Liz Lemon, by the time of the pilot the character had already begun to expand into a fellow-protagonist, a cynic who guides a neurotic. Unpunished for saying aloud what he should not even be thinking (“Don’t ever make me talk to a woman that old again”), Donaghy became a kind of mentor to the writers and performers under him. In Baldwin’s mind, “Jack Donaghy is Lorne, first and foremost. ‘What am I, a farmer?’ That is Lorne. I think he said that. Lorne’s got a tuxedo in the glove compartment of his car. Lorne is a big-ticket A-list New York water buffalo. He’s big on the Serengeti. Lorne is a person who seduces you into thinking that if you take his advice and play your cards right you’re going to end up with his life.”
–
He bought a coffee at Starbucks, where a young woman said something nice about “30 Rock.” “I do feel I’m entering that Clinton phase,” he said after we left. “I’m fifty. There are women who’ll go up to a young movie star and they’ll look at him, like, ‘There are certain things I really want to do with you, and it’s pretty plain to anyone why I’d want to do them with you.’ And then there are people who look at me now, at my age, and they’ll look at me and the look is ‘I can’t explain why, because it’s kind of strange . . .’ It confounds and perplexes even them. ‘In spite of the fact that you don’t look like a young leading man anymore, I’d quite like to throw you down on this blanket right now.’ A bit of that.”
quarta-feira, agosto 27, 2008
sexta-feira, agosto 22, 2008
Spaced
Não me consigo cansar de ler entrevistas com o Edgar Wright, o Simon Pegg e a Jessica Hynes (antes Stevenson) sobre o lançamento do Spaced em DVD nos Estados Unidos (é uma pena eu ter a versão inglesa do DVD, sem o documentário e sem os comentários de luxo: Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Patton Oswalt, Bill Hader e o embuste que é a Diablo Cody). Esta, do Ain't it Cool News, foi feita há três semanas na Comic Con. E são três génios a falar sobre uma série incrível, óptimas pessoas com quem se quer passar muito, muito tempo. Vem aí um filme escrito pelo Simon Pegg e o Nick Frost que não é realizado pelo Wright, mas sim pelo Greg Mottola. Isso e o This Side of the Truth do Ricky Gervais, cujo blog também não me canso de ler, são algumas das melhores coisas que aí vêm.
segunda-feira, agosto 11, 2008
Rindo da tragédia
O Expresso fez-me rir da morte do Isaac Hayes. Traduziram "treadmill" como "moinho", quando "treadmill" é uma passadeira de exercício. Sim, sim, a música e tal, Shaft, milhentas outras coisas, génio absoluto, mas terá sempre lugar no meu coração como Asneeze, pai de Ahchoo, num filme que vi demasiadas vezes quando era pequeno (e que, a par do South Park, mostra que Hayes, apesar da loucura induzida pela cientologista, era um comediante muito melhor do que um certo senhor de cor que morreu ontem, com o devido respeito pela sua morte).
segunda-feira, julho 21, 2008
Outras falhas
"Come Close", Common com Mary J. Blige. Está aqui. Vi este vídeo no MTV New (quando era apresentado por uma americana qualquer) algures em 2003, ela dzia que era o equivalente alternativo do dueto do Nelly com a Kelly Rowland ("Dilemma"). Na altura pareceu-me bem (sou parcial, nunca resisto à voz do Pharrell e aqui ouve-se lá ao fundo, por baixo da da Mary J. Blige), tinha decidido há pouco tempo que não gostava do Common, mas gostei. "It's just a fly love song", diz ele no início, citando o Q-Tip numa canção que não era, de todo, uma "fly love song".
Melhor cena de sempre?
Uma lição incrível sobre a pop do final dos anos 90 e dos anos 2000. Tirem uma tarde ou uma noite para absorver isto. São 50 e tal clássicos. Falta uma das minhas favoritas, contudo: "The Art of Noise" de um Cee-Lo Green pré-Gnarls Barkley. E também tem tiros ao lado (pergunto-me se existe alguma coisa no mundo pior que "Allure" do Jay-Z), para além de um erro factual (segundo consta, o Pharrell escreveu uma das estrofes do "Rump Shaker" dos Wreckx-N-Effect, não foi trabalho de produção, o que é estranhíssimo tendo em conta que ele é péssimo com as palavras).
terça-feira, maio 13, 2008
Roots
Os Roots têm um membro que toca sousafone. Chama-se Tuba Gooding Jr. Como é que é possível, assim, o Rising Down não ser óptimo? Também há outros factores claro. O afro e a barba do ?uestlove. E a bateria dele, claro. E aquela cantiga com o Wale e a Chrisette Michele. E começar com o Mos Def a rimar e não a cantar. E aqui não é só por causa dos 75 compassos sem o Blackthought parar para respirar.
quinta-feira, maio 01, 2008
Algumas ideias/dúvidas
A descoberta do rock pela Santi White (Santogold) foi das maiores tragédias deste século e é por isso que Santogold não é assim tão bom ("Creator" continua a ser melhor-de-sempre, obviamente). O novo álbum do Common vai ter um verso dela. Da Billboard:
Cee-Lo and The Neptunes' pop group, Chester French, guest on the album, but Common says singer-MC Santogold is "one of my favorite artists right now" and adds that he's awaiting a verse from her for the track "Runaway," which draws its guitar riff from Pat Benatar's 'Love Is A Battlefield."
E se for como quando ela se mete no rock? Será menos mau do que quando ele se mete no rock (Electric Circus tem canções muito boas, mas também tem outras muito, muito más)? Será que "electro-tinged" é parecido com o Common a rimar por cima de beats do Switch ou do Diplo? Será que isso é tão mau na prática como em teoria?
Cee-Lo and The Neptunes' pop group, Chester French, guest on the album, but Common says singer-MC Santogold is "one of my favorite artists right now" and adds that he's awaiting a verse from her for the track "Runaway," which draws its guitar riff from Pat Benatar's 'Love Is A Battlefield."
E se for como quando ela se mete no rock? Será menos mau do que quando ele se mete no rock (Electric Circus tem canções muito boas, mas também tem outras muito, muito más)? Será que "electro-tinged" é parecido com o Common a rimar por cima de beats do Switch ou do Diplo? Será que isso é tão mau na prática como em teoria?
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