Your Event Has Been Cancelled

This was, unfortunately, the title of an email I was forward today.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have some regrettable news regarding the FALL FORMAL.  As you might know, these past two weeks have been the worst of my life.  To those contributing tribute RECords re: my brother dan, you have my deepest gratitude.

I’m eager to get back to work, but I also feel like I’ve just had an arm chopped off and so I’m finding myself less than capable these days.

I’ve considered various possibilities on how to make the show happen another way – the Town Hall Theater has been so accommodating in figuring this out with us.  But in the end, I just don’t feel up to it right now and have decided to cancel the show.

If it’s any consolation, we hitRECorders can take heart in knowing that our production was on-track to selling all 1500 tickets – a victory in itself well worthy of ice cream.

Chin up, there’s still much to do and a bright future ahead.
Thanks again...
<3 J

JGL posted this on the Hitrecord site today. Unfortunately, due to his brother's untimely and sudden passing, he's not feeling up to putting on this show that I was so looking forward to. (He says this, obviously, but I will say it again for emphasis.)

I'm sad that the show was cancelled, but I can't imagine being in his position right now. If my sister died, I don't know what I'd do, but I definitely wouldn't want to get happy and perform for a bunch of people, either, not so soon after.

We'll all get over it, one of these days.

Allegra in "The Case of the Really Cool Show That She Will Obsess About Going to For Many, Many Weeks Until She Ends Up Not Even Going"

So as you may or may not know, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (star of Inception, 500 Days of Summer, Brick, etc.) is one of my favorite people. 25% of the reason for this is due to his ability to make hilarious facial expressions (as seen in my avatar), another 25% is due to his acting ability, and the remaining half is because he seems like a really nice, creative, sincere guy.

He runs a cool site called hitrecord.org (sort of rhyme-y) where people can collaborate with each other to make videos. I'm not a part of this site because I just don't participate in things. But I support it as much as I can! (Which, admittedly, is not too much. But I'm telling you about it right now, aren't I?) And one way we can all support it is by attending the surely-to-be-amazing HITRECORD.ORG FALL FORMAL, on October 28th.



HOW AMAZING DOES THAT SOUND? Very. It sounds like a heckuva lot of fun, plus you get to be in the same airspace as JGL and potentially several other really cool famous people. I want to buy a ticket SO BADLY. But guess how much they cost? $50.

If you know me in person, which you probably do, then you know I'm a big miser. I have so much money saved I could probably go buy about 3 PS3s right now and still have money left over. So obviously I have $50. But I'm so committed to not spending my money that I don't know how I'll ever be able to buy a ticket.

Please, someone coerce me. I really want to go. REALLY BADLY. For once in my life I should go to an event that I want to go to without letting money or something else get in the way.

Will Allegra ever make it to the Hitrecord.org Fall Formal, hosted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Find out in the next installment of Fonzie Was Six Four!

...or not. Maybe.

Relevant Things Going On in My Life Right Now #4

I have no clue who that chick on the left is. So don't ask.

Have you guys ever seen The Dish on Style Network? Oh, that's right, I forgot. You guys actually have better things to do than watch reruns of Clean House all day long.Well, basically the show just rips-off The Soup but is more woman-centric. Thus, it is also less funny. YOOOOW! It's hosted by Topanga from Boy Meets World, who is the large woman in the picture. She's gotten, well, quite large over the years.

But that's not all!:

• 10 Things I Hate About You: The movie used to be one of my least favorites EVER, but in my quest to become the Coolest Joseph Gordon-Levitt Fan in History or something moronic and pointless like that it was necessary to give it another chance. I still think it's a terrible movie. It doesn't age well - it's INCREDIBLY 90s. That being said, it was tolerable. Heath Ledger, JGL, and David Krumholtz all gave fun performances and their characters made me trudge through the movie. Although JGL played the irritating and dull archetype of the Loser-ish Kid Pining For Inexplicably Attractive Vapid Valley Girl, he did it with STYLE! (When I hear anyone say "with style!" I think of Buzz Lightyear instantly. Oh, Toy Story. You're my best friend.) SO. While I can't recommend this movie, if I ever find myself at your house and you put it on, I will only whine for one hour as opposed to three. 
Smart Guy: There's some new channel called Centric that was airing a Smart Guy marathon today. Man, I love that show. Really! I also love Sister, Sister, which, if it was ever remade, I could DEFINITELY star in. It's about biracial twins! I can play that in my sleep! But anyway, Smart Guy has a cool premise that is executed in a stupid-but-hilarious way. T.J. is the bomb, as is his brother Marcus. MARCUS. And then Marcus' friend! I can't remember his name but I think he used to be my favorite character. And T.J.'s dad is so nice! His sister I couldn't care less about, though. Do you guys like T.J. Mowry or Tia and Tamara Mowry better? I can't choose :(
Weekend Box Office: Excitement! The excellent blog that you guys should follow The Playlist reports that Inception came in first this weekend with $60 million. This was expected, although it is perhaps even a tad higher than initial projections. I'm really happy! I hope that the drop-down percentage is slow and this movie will make back its budget multiple times due to strong word-of-mouth. (Read my mini-review for the movie here.) Other new release The Sorcerer's Apprentice opened in a VERY weak third. Read the post I linked for some really good reasoning as to why that is. It's too bad, really, because I like Jay Baruchel and I wish him ETERNAL HAPPINESS. But he'll be okay.
Cheap Trick: I'm just randomly listening to them over and over again today. My favorites are, very boringly, "Surrender," "Hello There," and my number one favorite is "I Want You to Want Me." They're actually a pretty awesome band - not that I doubted otherwise! But Robin Zander has a really good voice - singing AND speaking! SOMEONE RECOMMEND ME MORE CHEAP TRICK SONGS. NOW.
K.K. Slider: He's the adorable singing dog from Animal Crossing! That game is one of my favorites of all zee times. It's just so nice. I played the GameCube one for HOURS. Possibly over 100 hours in fact. I'll never know for sure. My favorite part of the game was being serenaded by K.K. on Saturday night and then getting a bootleg of the song to play in your house. My two favorite K.K. songs are "K.K. Rock" and "K.K. Parade." Unfortunately, the bootleg of "Parade" really sucks. Only K.K. himself does it justice. "Rock" is one of my favorite songs ever, no joke. It really is. It's been stuck in my head every single day of the last week. Here it is in video form (fast-forward a little to :30-ish):
 
Lisa Simpson: Lisa Simpson is my favorite Simpson, followed by Bart. This review of "Moaning Lisa" paints her, however, as a lovable but fun-killing kid. I agree that she is the most human of the family, but there are TONS of moments where you see her acting like a crazy kid like everyone else. She does like Itchy and Scratchy after all. Read the comments as people talk about how they can (or can't) relate to Lisa and why. It's interesting. And since it's the AV Club, it's also funny. 

I think it's pretty cool that I managed to avoid doing one of these for the first 2 weeks of this month. Last month I did two of these! But I enjoy my Relevant Things series since it gives me more to talk about. It's kind of redundant to say "in my life" though because I never think about anything else than pop culture-type stuff, anyway.

P.S. Still working on the Bieber story...you'll get to read it, eventually.

Inception Mini-Review

Whoa. Just saw Inception. You know it, obviously - it's been hyped by pretty much everyone you know for the last YEAR, since that very first teaser trailer came out. But now that it's out, we all have to wonder - does it live up to the hype?

Well, yes, I'd say so. For the most part.

This is a mini-review. I don't think we (okay, I) here at FWSF have ever done one of those. EXPLANATION TIME WHOO: Basically I'm going to sum up everything in bullet points. It's easier and you're more likely to read it without getting bored! (Hopefully.) Think of it as my notes. WARNING FOR POSSIBLE SPOILERS. I'll try to be a little vague.

• The acting was awesome - for me the standouts were Leo, JGL, Ellen Page, and I guess Tom Hardy. Leo played the tortured married man/dream thief - his usual trope, obviously. But darnit if he's not one of the best guys acting today at playing a tortured soul. 
• I'm conflicted as to whether I'd consider Cillian Murphy's acting to be good; his character, although written multi-dimensionally, it seemed, did not seem to feel. He cried at one point, but I didn't get a good sense for who he was because the acting was cold. It was hard to connect with him.
• On that note - this movie is really one without a clear villain. It may seem like it from the beginning, but eventually the villains become friends. For a movie like this, a thriller, a heist, it seems like there -must- be a villain, but somehow it works without one. Perhaps because there are always people shooting at each other.
• The awesome scenes with JGL being thrown around in the hallway, floating around (they're seen in the trailers, you know what I'm talking about) - so cool. I love trying to figure out how that stuff works. It really amazes me. I know that it was done with sets - but how the heck could they have them floating in the air? That's something I'll be thinking about until I buy the Blu-ray and watch the special features that will hopefully cover the Making Of.   
• Ellen Page was a college student in FRANCE. Why did she have a Nova Scotian accent? Was she French-Canadian? It's a nitpick but IT BUGS ME. P.S. Michael Caine rules, bye

OKAY THESE ARE ALL SPOILERS NOW:

• The last third of the movie was the weakest. Once they got into that third dream, on that snowy mountain, it started to get complicated. The premise of this movie alone seems complicated, but it's well-explained. However, the third dream was not. It was unclear to me what the real goal was, and since everyone and everything was covered in white, it was hard to see who was who. When Tom Hardy was attacking someone, it was hard to be sure that it was not actually the other way around. 
• Limbo - the concept should make sense but Chris Nolan complicated it. At least, for me. Also in that limbo part it was incredibly infuriating that there was SO MUCH TALKING. The snappy dialogue is what sets the movie apart from your typical summer action film, but in this scene I just kept wishing that Leo would punch Marion Cotillard in the face.
• On that note - MARION COTILLARD. Her character was so stinking irritating. Maybe that was the point? She was a psychotic witch who was torturing Leo. If that was the goal then she succeeded. But I really dreaded seeing her on screen once it was revealed she was dead. She was cool when she was trying to kill everyone. 
• Her childhood home - it seemed like they were going to explain her childhood, why it was so important. They were setting things up for a BIG SCENE OF EXPLANATION AND LOTS OF FLASHBACKS but nothing ever came. It was a red herring and annoying at that. 
• JGL and Ellen Page - well, actually, Ariadne and Arthur. (Aren't those names adorable by the way?) I'm sure there's going to be tons of fanfiction about them now. I went into this movie thinking that they were going to avoid romance, but obviously they didn't. Although it was brief, anyway. But I think that scene made everyone love Arthur a little more.
• The ending. If you've seen the movie, let's discuss it in the comments. Mark for spoilers. My personal opinion is that the totem falls down, and that it's NOT a dream. But maybe I'm optimistic. God, I hope not. It better all be real! But the callback to the beginning (I actually love frame narratives even though they're done WAY too frequently) was confusing. Obviously Ken Watanabe had been there for a long time, since he was an old guy with lots and lots of makeup. But Leo? What about him? Do we all have our own limbos? But Leo told Ariadne that he had to go find Ken. How did he know that he was even dead? It couldn't have taken THAT long to find him, because he woke up before the flight was over. But Ken Watanabe had grown so old. That's the problem. That's the case against my opinion. That's why most people will say that the ending was a dream. WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DO THIS CHRIS NOLAN WHY

SPOILERS ARE OVER PEOPLE STOP FREAKING OUT NOW

So, while the movie has some missteps, it's something that I think most people will not forget anytime soon. It leaves a lot of unanswered questions that I know I'll be thinking about for a long, long time. Maybe it didn't live up to all of that insurmountable hype, but nothing does. (Except, maybe, The Dark Knight.) It'll probably make you angry - but in a good way. The movie that makes you feel something is the movie that succeeds.

Also, Leo has a really big, squishy head in it. And everyone wears snazzy suits. So you kind of have to see it for that. (Yes, I'm aware that Leo's head is ALWAYS squishy. But it's especially squishy when he's wearing a suit.)

Inception gets 4 and a half Joseph Gordon-Levitt's being mocked by Tom Hardy's out of 5.

"Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I've got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you."

I just watched Brick with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Well, I mean, not with him, although that would be cool. He stars in it, I mean.

It's this neo-noir film; that's what I'd call it. Anyone who's seen a film noir should know what I mean when I say that it was so unrealistic that it didn't even matter anymore, because the dialogue was so snappy. Snappy!

Brick is about teenage detective Brendan, although he's not the kind of teenage detective you would think. He's no Shinichi Kudo. Although that would be awesome. Anyway, Brendan, being the hyper-intelligent teen he so happens to be, takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of who killed his ex-girlfriend.

While I'd seen the last half an hour or so before, I thought it was necessary to see the movie from the beginning. And it was. Everything made sense. Everything paid off nicely. Certain parts that may have seemed unnecessary came back to prove their importance. Lines that made little sense to my actually teen-aged ears ended up making a lot more sense later on. I liked that a lot.

I found myself liking the movie more and more as it went on. At the beginning, I actively disliked it; it was completely unbelievable, Emily (the dead ex) was INCREDIBLY irritating (hate on me for saying this but thank goodness she died at the beginning, even though the circumstances and reasoning were horrible), and the acting of some of the characters (Laura at first and OH MY GOD DODE UGH) was awful and hard to bear. But JGL really sold it. He inhabited that character and he made the movie that much more enjoyable. Once we had a likable, believable main character (although his characterization was slightly confusing; was he cold? Did he love too much? Was he a smart aleck? It was hard to tell) everything fell into place.

The movie, despite its extreme violence (the body count was quite possibly in the double digits; remember, these are high school kids), had some hilarious moments. Kara and the Pin were particularly hilarious. The Pin was our main antagonist, but when you saw him eating a cookie at the breakfast table with Brendan and kissing his mom, sitting on the beach talking about his love for The Hobbit, he was hard not to love. Kara's character was largely pointless but she was so full of herself and fake, dishing out freshmen at every moment who were at her beck and call for everything, I had to laugh. Especially with her Kabuki makeup on.

Brendan's best friend, the Brain, didn't get to do too much on camera, but with his little jacket and his thick glasses, he ended up being one of my favorite characters. He was the loyal best friend we all want to have.

This movie is both extremely violent and very sad, with some funnier moments. JGL pulls in his best performance in any movie not called 500 Days of Summer (even if you didn't like that movie, which thanks to its obnoxious teenage fanbase you very well might not, you have to agree he was good). Well, actually, I haven't seen Mysterious Skin yet. That's supposed to be good. But Manic wasn't worth it (he wasn't, but it's hard to call his performance great when that movie was just so not good), so the award goes to this. The story is fun to follow and while it's not something you can watch mindlessly it won't hit you over the head too much so it's pretty easy to get. Crazy film noir dialogue aside, of course.

Brick gets 4 JGLs running away at insane speeds from "The Lug" out of 5.

MADE From Bad to Worse

Today I watched a lot of MADE. I was bored, okay?

Two of the three episodes were about cheerleading. The first one was actually not completely horrible. The second one was, though! Why are cheerleaders so whiny?

Was that horribly vague? Good.

The last episode I watched, which was a premiere, was by far the worst, though. Absolute crud. It was about some crazy anime fan who gives all anime fans a bad name. (Here is a video. Thanks, MTV, for not letting me stinking embed. You are so sensible and fair.)

"Amanda," whose name will be in quotes because she's practically a TV character herself, is an insanely awkward, overweight MySpace user (and this is in a post-Facebook world, mind you!) who claims to have no friends or social skills. She wants to be an "independent woman." In her spare time, she likes to make MySpace accounts where she role plays as Sonic the Hedgehog and some really plain-looking moe girl. The latter's profile pic is of the girl lying on her back, pulling her shirt up and probably not wearing underwear.

Moving on.

Despite how awful I'm making her sound, "Amanda" didn't seem that bad, as far as weeaboos go. Sure, she doesn't know squat about any anime that hasn't been on Adult Swim or butchered by 4Kids, but most people haven't, sadly. But then she started crying. Over and over and over again. She would never, ever stop crying.

Her MADE coach was this really obnoxious girl named Julie who would make "Amanda" do all of these idiotic exercises to make her like herself. She also made "Amanda" wear makeup and the hottest fashions one can buy on the cheap from the 2003 store. Okay, whatever. Julie, however, also made her stand on a street corner in Times Square like a cheap prostitute holding a sign reading, "I Have Self-Esteem Problems. Compliment Me." Yes, Julie, that's definitely going to raise her confidence. The stupid girl stood in the middle of the busiest, brightest stinking spot of the loudest city this side of Beijing wearing some ugly sweater and crying her eyes out for the fifth hour straight. It was really pathetic. It would have been sad if I didn't hate this whiny brat so much.

Later on in the show, "Amanda" asked Julie if she could go to Mokucon, which is some stupid anime convention in Rutgers of all nasty places to hold a convention that doesn't even have a website or anything. She wants to go because Vic Mignogna (seen at right) was going to be there. That's when I knew this girl sucked. I love FMA, too, babycakes (sorry, I say that sometimes), but anyone who knows squat about Vic Mig knows he's an borderline insane Evangelical Christian. And I mean, I love Evangelical Christians as much as the next girl, but...wait, actually, no, I HATE EVAGELICAL CHRISTIANS. (No offense to any Evangelicals reading this? Not that there'd be any.)

So, after being denied, "Amanda" starts - guess what? - crying. AGAIN. "I wanna meet Vic, waaaaah, he loves me, I love him, I wanna go to Rutgers and spend $60 so I can touch his perfect effeminate face, maybe he'll kiss me and give me his cowboy hat and spew his pure Christian ideals that I usually pretend to not know about onto my antisocial cheeks!" That's a paraphrase, obviously, but you know.

But GUESS WHAT? Because Julie is soooo "cool" (a word the coach on the okay cheerleading episode used to death, ugh), she gets Vic to go out to dinner with "Amanda"! And the entire time, Vic says, "Sweetie, no, yer beautiful! SwEEEtie!" and then he laughs obnoxiously. "Amanda," after embracing Vic for what has to be the eightieth time during their dinner (which consists of huge and numerous plates of fried meats), tells him about her lifelong dream. You guessed it! She wants to be a VOICE ACTOR. Because that's ENTIRELY POSSIBLE.

And from then on the episode spirals from being an irritating but not completely intolerable romp in the land of Weeaboo-nia to be a nightmareish rollercoaster ride through someone's unfortunate life. She begins pursuing acceptance into the New York Film Academy's acting program. Obviously, she's terrible at voice acting, regular acting, speaking in a voice that isn't annoying (and trust me, I know and am a master of annoying voices), but people keep leading her on, telling her that she's awesome. One particularly saddening part is when her dad is talking about how expensive the school will be: "But if there's anyone who's gonna get dat der talent scholarship, it's 'Amanda!'" And then we see her acting. It's awful.

In the end, though, she gets into the bloody school. The bloody school where my man Joseph Gordon-Levitt once lectured. It's...it just doesn't make sense. At all.

There was more that I just skipped over, but they were stupid and not worth mentioning. (Parties, pssh, who cares? Visiting Stony Brook of all cruddy places? Boring.) MADE isn't known for being, you know, very realistic or anything less than annoying, but I don't usually find myself so bothered by what I'm watching at the end of the episode. So, thank you, "Amanda," for making it my first time.