shaun

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“Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.”
— Jim Henson

Blog

Blog content presented as-is. The majority of these posts are at mininum five years old. I may also start posting here again more frequently. Or I may not. Since 2011, Tumblr has gotten more of my blogging attention. You should try me over there instead.

Cloverfield

Though he neither wrote nor directed it, producer J.J. Abrams’s stamp is all over Cloverfield, the newest entry in the monster movie annals. From the brilliant trailer and advertising campaign that began, simply, with 1-18-08, Abrams has fashioned Cloverfield as a near-perfect example of what he calls “The Mystery Box.”

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Shuffled No.2

I’m back for a second installment of Shuffled, an idea which I’m basically stealing from the Onion’s AV Club has this great and their almost-weekly feature called Random Rules in which they ask some actor/musician/hyphenate to put their iPod on shuffle and see what comes up. It benefits from the interview structure a little, but I’m going to try and go it alone and see what happens. The following is a completely random selection of 13 tracks from my iPod (which currently holds 14,228 songs), followed by my comments.

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Is this really happening?

The following is a true story.

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No Country for Old Men

Wendell bites back a smile. Sheriff Bell gazes at him over his glasses for a long beat, deadpan. “...That’s all right. I laugh myself sometimes.” He goes back to the paper. “...There ain’t a whole lot else you can do.”

This scene, from No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ best film since Fargo, struck me as the perfect description for this brilliant, bleak, violent, challenging movie based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. In its own little way, this scene, and that line by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the best metaphor for a story of inexplicable and endless violence. How are we supposed to cope? Sometimes, as I often hear myself saying, in the face of such inhumanity, laughter is your only defense.

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Shuffled No.1

One of my favorite pop culture websites, the Onion’s AV Club has this great almost-weekly feature called Random Rules in which they ask some actor/musician/hyphenate to put their iPod on shuffle and see what comes up. It benefits from the interview structure a little, but I’m going to try and go it alone and see what happens. The following is a completely random selection of 13 tracks from my iPod (which currently holds 14,228 songs), followed by my comments.

Continue →