Tobias Fünke clip courtesy of Insert Me Anywhere.

Combining two of my favorite things into one of my favorite new podcasts. Sensing that some of their former guests (though entertaining and knowledgeable) had been far too sober given its namesake, for my appearance this week, I took it upon myself to lower my inhibitions, articulation, grammatical skill, and possibly good judgment by way of some very strong beer before, during, and after the recording. Did I pick a fight or get gropey with their sisters? Break down in blubbering, sniveling tears? You’ll just have to listen for yourself.

I can tell you that we covered lots of ground, both writerly and musical, including discussion of the jawbone as an instrument, the rise of transgressive fiction, performing cover songs, genre-hopping, and lapsed Catholicism. You’ll want to bookmark this site, as other/future guests include horror legend Jack Ketchum (The Girl Next Door), Lidia Yuknavitch (The Chronology of Water), and Patrick Wensink (Broken Piano for President), among so many talented others.

Thanks so much to the wonderful hosts Renee Asher Pickup, Dakota Taylor, and Jessica Taylor for having me on and carrying my inebriated ass out to that taxi, and a special fist-bump to the LitReactor community for helping put it together.

UPDATE: 382 listens … not bad!

My current pieces:

“NC-17: Sex, Drugs, and Rigged Ratings”

“F.U. in D.C.: House of Cards”

“Tony Scott: In Memoriam”

“Warrior Seoul: A Korean Cinema Primer”

ManArchy is a men’s magazine about topics from booze to body art, fashion to fiction. It was recently re-launched under new management, and I couldn’t say no when the offer came in. (Seriously, the editor blackmailed me.) Even so, the collective talent assembled is diverse and insightful. They certainly have their ways with words. In fact, nearly everyone on the contributing staff is someone I’ve either previously published alongside, workshopped with, or split bar tabs with. Many are all three, and include alumni from such online collectives as LitReactor, The Velvet, and Write Club.

Be sure to like ManArchy on Facebook and share the articles you enjoy.

Somewhere in between readings by Phil Jourdan, Caleb J Ross, Hollie Hayes, Hampton Stevens and Brandon Tietz, here’s what I had to say. First up, an experimental meta piece, then some microfiction, and finally my short story “Fry Girl.”

To see the other authors’ readings, check out my YouTube playlist for the event. Tell you what, I’m gonna go ahead and embed Caleb’s below, just because it was really funny.

Thanks to Chad Cogdill Photography and Brandon Tietz for the pics. Videos courtesy of myself.

I keep an occasional eye on the weekly ratings, discouraged that none of the shows I watch, be they broadcast or cable, are even in the top 20 (except for NFL when in season). If you limit this to the 18-45 demographic, I watch two or three at the ass end of the top 20, and several of the most-popular DVRed shows on cable (to me, this implies intelligent viewership). Half of this is explained by my oft-documented disdain for reality television. Still, as this resident of the #32 market counted his five crisp one-dollar bills as payola and began logging the paper diary (not the cool set-top box that some households get), I learned a few things about myself.

I’m a commercial-skipping DVR fiend (you must document both the watched and original times). Over 90% of my time spent in front of the tube is done commercial-free. If I’m unbusy when an HBO series is on, I’ll often watch it at its original broadcast time, recording it anyway, just in case. (I subscribe to HBO strictly for their excellent original series, as nearly any movie I care about has already been Netflixed well before then.) But network and cable programming, even if I want to watch it the same night, I always time-shift it a little. I wait until at least seven minutes past its airtime to “play” a sitcom, or quarter-after for an hourlong drama, which means by the time I catch up with real-time, I’ve been able to FF through the commercials. NFL Sundays, I’ll skip the first hour of a game to get some other tasks done, then restart and power through it in two hours. (I recently read that an average football game contains 11 minutes of snap-to-whistle action; wow.) And not one single minute of local or national news/weather programming was logged.

While I take pride in this efficiency of tube-time, I still watched 18 hours this week. That’s more than I thought, and doesn’t count the two Blu-Rays I rented. And it seemed a fairly typical balance of shows that are in and out of season. As predicted, there were only a few instances of “channel surfing,” though I perhaps did even less than usual because I found myself not wanting to have to log them.

In the end, I doubt my eyeball lobbying for Caprica, Community, Archer, or Big Love will give them even a sniff at the top 20. But you know what they say: if you don’t vote, you can’t complain.

The usual disclaimers apply. Though I’ve seen nearly 100 new movies this year, mostly on home video (so a few of these are late ’08), a number of the year’s notables have thus far escaped me, like Avatar, The Informant!, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Bronson, The Hurt Locker, Kick Ass, and maybe a few others that some deem worthy. I also do my best to avoid watching bad films, so everything’s on a curve of sorts, catered to my personal tastes.

And now . . . let the wild rumpus start!

FUNNIEST DUDE
Zack Galifianakis, The Hangover
Sacha Baron Cohen, Brüno

FUNNIEST FEMME
Kristen Bell, Fanboys
Rinko Kikuchi, The Brothers Bloom

Weak sauce. Good for some supporting laughs, sure, but where are all the gut-busting female roles?

FILM THAT MADE ME SNARF SODA OUT MY NOSE
The Hangover
(500) Days of Summer

FILM NOT TO WATCH IN THE DARK
Martyrs
Grace

I wasn’t in love with either of these, but they’re the most category-appropriate of this year’s offerings I’ve seen. I’d suggest a double-feature of Trick ‘R Treat and Drag Me to Hell if you prefer your seat-jumping moments balanced with a dose of camp.

MOST WELL-DOCUMENTED
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Food, Inc.

DRAMA KING
Sam Rockwell, Moon
Viggo Mortensen, The Road

DRAMA QUEEN
Julianne Moore, Blindness
Alison Lohman, Drag Me to Hell

It ain’t Shakespeare, but not exactly comedy either, and I loved Alison’s casting in this role. Not to mention being a good sport with all of Sam Raimi’s trademark actorly tortures. Apologies; I didn’t see many female-driven dramas this year, most notably The Blind Side or Julie & Julia.

BADDEST-ASS BADASS
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Minase Yashiro, The Machine Girl

SEXIEST STARLET
Kim Ok-bin, Thirst
Thandie Newton, RocknRolla

Why was this so hard to pick this year? Sure, Megan Fox was cartoonishly smokin in that piece of Transformers dreck, but I hated the way Michael Bay’s lens objectified her, and the bimbo from My Bloody Valentine 3D had to have been buck naked for what seemed five solid minutes, but that was more brave than sexy. I didn’t see that Jessica Biel movie. Meanwhile Zooey Deschanel was hypnotically adorable in (500) Days, but sexy‘s a stretch. Might need to rethink this category next year.

SURPRISE PERFORMANCE
Maya Rudolph, Away We Go
James Gandolfini, Where the Wild Things Are

BEST CAMEO
Harrison Ford, Brüno
William Shatner, Fanboys

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST
The Brothers Bloom
Star Trek

HARDEST ASS KICKED
Crank 2: High Voltage
Star Trek

Though I will confess the Paris sequence in G.I. Joe rocked, as did Watchmen‘s stunning recreations, and the realistic shootouts in Public Enemies.

MOST EFFED-UP TWIST
Thirst
Martyrs

CLEVEREST DIALOGUE
(500) Days of Summer
Inglourious Basterds

HIGHEST SCORING MUSIC
Clint Mansell, Moon
Michael Giacchino, Up

Where the Wild Things Are had one of my favorite scores of the year, as did Drag Me to Hell‘s gothic stylings, however I gave a nod to Giacchino partly because he also scored Star Trek.

COOLEST VISUAL STYLE
Watchmen
District 9

Can’t believe I haven’t found a place for Coraline yet, and it’s especially deserving here, as is Blindness for its set design and highly-stylized and reflective compositions. Still, Watchmen brought a much-beloved and nearly-unfilmable graphic novel world to life more faithfully than anyone could imagine, and District 9‘s verité stylings are so convincing you forget it’s half CG.

WANTED TO HATE, BUT DIDN’T MIND SO MUCH
My Bloody Valentine 3D
Angels & Demons

UNDER-THE-RADAR SURPRISE
Trick ‘R Treat
Redbelt

BEST IMPORT
Thirst
Tell No One

GEEKIEST BD/DVD EXTRAS
Star Trek
Watchmen

BEST MUSIC BD/DVD
Jeff Beck Live at Ronnie Scott’s
Stevie Wonder Live at Last

WORTHY FILMS THAT DON’T FIT ELSEWHERE
Adventureland
Religulous
Invictus

WORST WAY TO SPEND $9.25
Inkheart
G.I. Joe

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT
Up
Killshot

Don’t get me wrong, Up is nowhere near a bad film, a solid B even, it just didn’t spark that Pixar magic within me that I’ve come to expect. Killshot‘s reviews prepared me for its dreadfulness, but how do you fuck up good material this badly given such a cast? Maybe we should ask The Informers. . . Another dishonorable mention to JCVD, which wouldn’t normally even be on my radar, but friends made it sound like Van Damme was reinventing the genre. No, he just played himself with a little more vulnerability.

BEST FILM
District 9
The Road

With apologies to (500) Days of Summer, Moon, and several others listed above.

Note: I also saw Son of Rambow this year, too old for this list, but it would’ve swept a few categories last year when I was oblivious, so check it out if you haven’t.

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• the toilet-cam point of view as an interrogated face is dunked into it

• establishing a crime scene by tracking the unspooling of yellow police tape

• cutting to the defendant flinching as the judge’s gavel cracks. See also: flinching mourners at a 21-gun salute

• bolting upright into camera after coming out of a nightmare

• a train approaching and passing over the camera for no apparent reason

• the final-second resignation on a bad-guy’s face just before a bomb blows him to pieces

• closing a dead compatriot’s eyes with a hand

• the awkward elevator ride with cheesy muzak as a moment of comic relief during an action sequence

• full-screen “access granted” computer terminal graphics

• the (unrealistic) black matte for binoculars point of view. See also: in softcore, the voyeur watching through their video camera will somehow see a scene assembled from coverage of wide, medium, and close shots.

• pan to the fireplace and defocus as the stars make love on the bed. Ironically, this can be called “going soft.”

• macro-focusing to the barrel of a gun pointed at camera

• sliding someone down the length of a bar in a fight, taking out all manners of glassware in their path

• refrigerator point of view as someone rummages through it. See also: medicine cabinets. Guess I just hate POV shots in general unless they represent a person.

• a room whose light level remains nearly the same once the lights are turned out. Now it’s just blue.

Toss your dog in your purse and text your publicist on the way to the dress fitting . . . it’s time to raise the sails for my third annual windbaggery about the year in cinema – at least the approximately 120 new films that I saw – hyperbolic, symbolic, and gastronomic. I’ve spread the acclaim out over as many worthy films as possible.

Exceptions aside, 2008 was dominated by mediocre offerings, notably lacking in strong female roles. Fair warning as usual: I haven’t yet seen some of the late-year entries that often dominate awards season, including: Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler, and Doubt.

And now, live except on the west coast, this year’s winners and runners up. . .

FUNNIEST DUDE
Danny McBride, The Foot Fist Way
Robert Downey, Jr., Tropic Thunder

FUNNIEST FEMME
Elizabeth Banks, Zak and Miri Make a Porno
Catherine Keener, Hamlet 2

FILM THAT MADE ME SNARF SODA OUT MY NOSE
Hamlet 2
Sex and Death 101

FILM NOT TO WATCH IN THE DARK
[REC]
The Orphanage

FILM THAT OPENED MY MIND
Towelhead
Man on Wire

DRAMA KING
Jamie Bell, Mister Foe
Clint Eastwood, Gran Torino

DRAMA QUEEN
Catinca Untaru, The Fall
Laura Linney, The Savages

BADDEST-ASS BADASS
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Ralph Fiennes, In Bruges

SURPRISE PERFORMANCE
Stephen Dorff, Felon
Ryan Reynolds, Definitely, Maybe

SEXIEST STARLET
Marisa Tomei, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Jess Weixler, Teeth

ADRENALINE WITHOUT CHEESE
The Dark Knight
Quantum of Solace

MOST EFFED-UP TWIST
Synecdoche, New York
Stuck

SNAPPIEST DIALOGUE
Gran Torino
Choke

BEST ENSEMBLE CAST
Tropic Thunder
Be Kind Rewind

BEST MUSIC
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Slumdog Millionaire

COOLEST VISUAL STYLE
The Fall
Slumdog Millionaire

WANTED TO HATE, BUT DIDN’T
Smart People
[REC]

UNDER-THE-RADAR SURPRISE
Let the Right One In
In Bruges

BEST TV SHOW ON DISC
Battlestar Galactica
Spaced

ILLEST DISC EXTRAS
Blade Runner: Final Cut
WALL•E

BEST IMPORT
Let the Right One In
The Orphanage

WORTHY FILMS THAT DON’T FIT ELSEWHERE
Iron Man
Starting Out in the Evening

WORST WAY TO SPEND $9.25
Revolver
Speed Racer

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT
Burn After Reading
The X-Files: I Want to Believe

BEST FUCKIN’ FILM
WALL•E
The Dark Knight

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Other theaters already offer similar amenities, such as Texas’s Alamo Drafthouse, or even our own Cinemark Plaza VIP Room, but they don’t have AMC’s nationwide presence.

An entire wing of the property is devoted to this experience – twelve screens total – eight of which are Fork and Screen, which offers casual dining. There are also three Cinema Suites with a more upscale menu, reservation options, and no kids. In the wing’s lobby is MacGuffins (get it?), an expansive bar and lounge area.

I arrived just as the previews spooled up, hit the service button on the railing in front of me, and a waiter appeared seatside to take my order on a handheld touchscreen that sent the selections wirelessly to the kitchen. It’s typical diverse pub fare with appetizers, salads, entree platters, etc. (many with fresh, local ingredients), and priced only slightly higher than you’d find in the neighborhood chains. I had fish and chips with a pint of Fat Tire for $17 including tax – a good deal when you consider the markup on standard concessions (available as well). Many of the entress are around nine bucks, and beer was something like $3.50 to $4.75. My food arrived just before the feature, and I simply rang the waiter again when ready to pay.

Leather rocking seats are spaced in groups of two or four, with plenty of privacy and legroom. The subtly-lit counter sits just out of reach, so you have to edge up on your seat, but this minor annoyance made sense once I was finished eating and didn’t want it crowding my lap for the rest of the flick. Currently, the films in this wing are a mixture of tentpoles and indies (I often choose this particular complex as an alternative to the arthouse), and AMC claims they intend to make it available for events as well. Hopefully they’ll expand to your town soon, as it’s very convenient (especially if you hit twilight shows straight from work or a matinée), with much-improved food at a fair price.