Things I Like

It's a slow day around my "office" (read: dorm room) and I notice things have been kind of slow around the Tartar Sauce. So here are some things that have pleased me in the past couple of hours: Trailers. Movie trailers are really kind of an interesting subspecies of movie in their own right. A really good trailer is a thing of beauty, conveying all of the awesome of the movie without giving away too many plot details. Case study: Brick. (This is probably one of my favorite movies, for so many reasons. The dude who wrote/produced/directed it, Rian Johnson, was a young guy, about our age when he first wrote the script, and then raised funding to do the entire thing himself. That's really cool and makes me like the movie even more, but even the product on its own is amazing. Film noir set in high school, really good film noir at that, more Raymond Chandler than Mellvile, and also amazingly beautiful to look at. And the dialogue is superb, straight up thirties slang. I'm starting to lose it explanation-wise, so just rent it). Challenge is, the trailer tells a story of its own right, one that's a little faster paced than the movie, but no less good, and still manages to not reveal any of the major plot details (and plot is a key feature to "Brick"). But then there are trailers that tell a better story than the movie, that promise way too much and lead only to disappointment when the actual film is watched. Case study: the Wacknes, specifically the redband trailer. This sets up all that is/was wonderful about that movie: the nostalgia for the 90's, the good hip-hop, the drug dealing, the relationships, in a mere two minutes and nine seconds. The actual movie is considerably longer and gets bogged down trying to deal with everything that the trailer brings up. But in trailer form, it's a near-perfect story, because trailers carry no expectation of anything more than tastes. And the hypothetical tastes are often just as good as the movie. Which begs the question, why need a movie? Enter the "Grindhouse" boys and their wonderful fake trailers, which showcase the finest and most badass moments of trashy exploitation flicks without forcing the viewer to deal with all the irritations of "plot" and "development" and "story arc." The highlight fake trailer, in my opinion, was Rob Rodriguez's Machete. Explosions, great one-liners, just enough development for the story to be pleasurably implausible, boobs, Cheech, what more could you want? A bomb trailer deserves more appreciation for being a bomb trailer than I believe they get. So long semi-intellectual tangent for a minor point, but check out Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox trailer. This looks like a whole lot of awesome, all the best of Wes Anderson and Claymation without seeming either creepy or weird (both have a tendency towards uncomfortable at times). I never read the book, but that trailer makes the movie look so damn fun that I can't wait to catch it. Hopefully there will be no disappointment. And the other thing that I like? Squid. Squids are so fucking cool and alien that they absolutely fascinate me; watching TV and there's a squid documentary on? Game over. The bigger the squid the better: giant and colossal squid rock my world like no other. So of course I was floored when the aggressive, inquisitive, intelligent and up to six-foot long Humbolt Squid (el Diablo Rojo) was reported to be colonizing the waters off San Diego, probably due to some climate shit. But most importantly? Divers have been posting footage on the internets. Here's a pretty baller well-edited squid montage, complete with odd music. How fucking cool is that? And how terrifying would it be to be diving and see like six coming out of the murk towards you? More facts about Humbolt Squid: they're known as Red Devils because they are mad aggressive, and apparently they're breeding very quickly. Their tentacles have hooked beaks on them, so they're very capable of fucking divers up. Possibly curious instead of overtly hostile sometimes, but nonetheless when these dudes attack they grab with their tentacles and drag. Downwards. With a fuck of a lot of force. Basically they don't mess around. I'm too incoherent with what I have and haven't told you to go further into squid knowledge (of which I can drop a lot, after a very productive day of Wikipedia at work yesterday), but I think you get the picture. Enough for more videos: squid attack and a pretty good squid documentary from PBS. Oh, and they're being exported for foreign calamari. Cool shit. Ok, I'm finished. Enjoy your now hopefully vastly unproductive and squid-appreciative/fearing days.