I don’t know how I missed these! V. just sent me a link to A Site Called Fred’s “Holiday Havoc” page. They have 6 years worth of exclusive Venture Brothers Holiday songs conveniently linked on one page. I’m super-easily amused so I particularly love Dr. Girlfriend and the Monarch as Bing Crosby and David Bowie doing “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy.“
If you live under a rock and don’t know the original, it’s here:
Venture Aid 2006 is pretty great, too. You need to look up the source for that one, you’re on your own. I try not to expose my computer to that kinda thing.
The Tim Burton exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art was lots of fun, although it was clausterphobically crowded. It took a fair amount of determination and patience to see every piece in the show, but it was worth it. It’s 5 or 6 rooms crammed with sketches, storyboards, notes, character studies, maquettes, props and other goodies.
At one point I got hemmed into a corner, although to be fair it was a good corner – filled with storyboards from Nightmare Before Christmas. I’m quite intimately familiar with those sketches now.
After I escaped that corner, I almost immediately found myself wedged in next to one of the fantastic scarecrows from Sleepy Hollow. It’s probably my favorite Tim Buron movie so I was okay with that. It was also an excellent vantage point to watch the reactions of the Tim-Wannabee Boys as they randomly encountered one another.
The carefully coiffed and dyed guys in their Tim Circa-1993 uniforms looked like they’d escaped from a casting call. They’d be bouncing around, clutching their sketchbooks tightly and trying to look cool even though this was the moment they’d been waiting their whole 25 or 30 years for. Then, something awful would happen. The crowd would surge hither or yon and they’d suddenly find themselves nose to nose with another Tim-Wannabee Art Skool Boy.
You know how Siamese Fighting Fish placed next to one another in their little bowls get all puffed up and agitated? The same thing happens when you place Tim-Wannabee Art Skool Boys together. I tried not to laugh at them. I probably looked like I was intentionally rocking the Helena Bonham Carter in Sweeney Todd look, they don’t know I always look like that in the morning.
Here’s the website for the exhibit. This sketch made me laugh the most. (I’d swear it was labelled as a collaboration but the website doesn’t give any indication of that).
Tim Burton, Blind Man with Permanent Seeing Eye Dogs
[Because most of the sites I wanted to link to use flash and iphones and flash are mortal enemies, this post got scrambled on Monday so I’ve edited it to add links and images and reposted it.]
A few weeks before Christmas our Tivo, Overlord 2, sucked up an old Martha Stewart Christmas special. These prime time chestnuts are ripe for mocking so I turned it on while Husband was finishing dinner. I’m not normally susceptible to Martha-induced craziness, but at one point Martha looked into the camera and commanded, “If you’ve never seen the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center you simply must go.” My head whipped around and I heard myself intone, “Must…see…The Tree.”
Remember the Smile Time episode of Angel? It was like that, only Martha must have finished sucking the life-force out of all the children and moved on to me.
I’ve been obsessed with The Tree ever since. At any given moment, 5% of my brain is whirring away thinking about the tree.
Despite all of that scheming, there was just no way to get to New York before Christmas. Fortunately, the tree is up until January 7th and it’s ridiculously cheap to visit New York right now so we booked a room by The Tree (and, bonus, MoMa). This is good because I haven’t been feeling very well so I’m not sure how much I’ll really get to do once we get there.
On a related note, this was one of my favorite Anya moments on Buffy:
ANYA: Martha Stewart isn’t a demon. (to Buffy) She’s a witch.
XANDER: Please, she- (pauses) Really?
ANYA: Of course. Nobody could do that much decoupage without calling on the powers of darkness. (Ep. 6.09, “Wrecked”)
Here’s the Smile Time trailer. It still makes me laugh:
In 2007, Unsuk Chin’s opera, Alice in Wonderland, was released on DVD. I was so excited I put every available version of Alice in Wonderland onto our netflix queue and then promptly forgot I’d done it. A few weeks ago, they started showing up in the mail. As obsessions go, this was a pretty minor one, but it’s now it’s oh-so-painfully hip in light of Tim Burton’s forthcoming adaptation, which stars Johnny Depp as Alice.
Yes, I know Depp isn’t playing Alice, but Tim Burton devotees seem to have no sense of humor whatsoever and it’s amusing to watch them work themselves into a lather over comments like that. I like Tim Burton. I think he’s squandered more talent on movies like that Planet of the Apes remake than most people possess. But I digress…
There have been lots of adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s work, but Disney’s 1951 cartoon might still be the standard bearer. We rewatched it recently and marveled at how well it’s aged.
French New Wave cinema was a clear influence on the 1966 production of an episode of a BBC series called “The Wednesday Play.” The movie stars, among others, Sir John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave & Peter Sellers. Ravi Shankar composed the soundtrack.
The movie is simultaneously exceptionally dull and hypnotically engrossing.
Alice communicates almost entirely in voiceover (even her dialogue) and never makes eye contact with the other characters. I don’t know if this is a pedantic representation of Carroll’s biting commentary on Victorian childhood or if the kid just couldn’t act so the director worked around it. Whatever the reason, it works well. I found the tea party scene on youtube, it shows much better than I can tell:
As if the movie doesn’t feel enough like a Calvin Klein Obsession commercial put through the Monty Python blender, Eric Idle, not yet famous enough to even warrant a credit, zooms past in an early scene as a participant in the caucus race.
Just for fun, here’s some Obsession ads from the 80s:
I was going to post the great SNL parody, Compulsion, but I can’t find it online.
Next up: The 1985 made-for-tv Alice in Wonderland that’s a 3 1/2 hour musical starring Roddy McDowall, Scott Baio, Sherman Hemsley, Telly Savalas, Ringo Starr, Imogene Coca, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Sally Struthers, John Stamos, Ernest Borgnine, Beau and Lloyd Bridges, Carol Channing, Merv Griffin, and Sammy Davis, Jr, among others. Seriously.
Embedding this video is going to create mayhem with my formatting and tuck the real star – that awesome goat – under a lot of text, but I don’t care because it’s brilliantly hilarious.
[I’ve removed the embedded video because it launches every single time you load the front page of my site and that’s rather irritating.]
