Relaxed Focus: "Which is nonsense!"

Thursday, September 18, 2014

"Which is nonsense!"

Some days...

Kevin Smith Embraces 'Tusk's' Weirdness, Reveals Secret of Casting Johnny Depp - Spinoff Online - TV, Film, and Entertainment News: "So I’ve known him through the kids, and I texted him. I was like, “Dude – hi. You know, I never wanted to be this guy, but I’m going to be this guy, man.” And I said, “I’m making a movie, and boy, there’s a part you’d be great at.” And so I said, “Before you fucking turn your phone of, here’s the blog that I wrote about it” – because I had just written about it – “I’m going to make this walrus picture. I’m going to move forward.” So he read it...

I remember sitting there trying to text him and being like, “Don’t be that guy. Everyone does this to him.” But I was like, “You know what, man? He’ll say no. If he wants to say no, he’s such a class act, he’ll say no in a way that makes you think, he could have done it, but he just can’t because of his schedule.” So I was like “You’ll be able to see him again in public. It won’t be weird and shit like that. I’m sure he gets asked all the time.” So I felt like, all right. fucking based on that, let me just go for it. Let me just chase the whimsy because he would love this, I think. And sure enough, when he read it, he fell in love with Guy LaPointe so he called me right away. He was like, “I’ve always wanted to do a French Canadian accent – I have an internal dimmer, and I can dial it up or as low as you want!” And I said “Dial it to comedic.” And he was like, “Gotcha.” So we set cameras on him, and off he went...

And so we shot 15 days in North Carolina, and then three months later, we shot two days in California with Johnny. All the Johnny stuff is two days. He’s just that good a fucking performer. We blew through like 30 pages of dialogue in two days. Now, he’s sitting in one place, so you’re not doing a lot of camera movement and stuff, but my lord, it was fun. That’s the thing. He came to set – your job’s easy. You don’t direct that day because you just make sure, like zoom, focus. Here we go. There’s nothing to do. He’s a genius. He does it all. So he brought like a performance that – our budget was under $3 million – it was like, $2.7, $2.8 movie. Everyone got scale. This was a guy who gave us the same performance he’d give a $20 million, $25 million dollar movie where he was getting paid $20 million bucks. A $100 million performance in a fucking under-budget movie about a guy who turns another guy into a walrus. And so he came to play, and he had such a good time. So much so that he lent us his daughter, and we put her in the movie. And that spawned the movie that we’re all working on now."

"Fast forward some more, June 16th 20seventy-four..."

So much fail, so many levels. CIA to Obama: We Already Did Your Dumb Plan And It's 'Doomed to Failure' - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A top CIA official told HuffPost that opinions among agency analysts range from "ambivalence to outright opposition." And they have good reason to hold those opinions—the CIA is already covertly arming the Syrian rebels, a strategy that has already been show to have failed, in no small part because the rebels are unreliable and the equipment eventually finds its way to ISIS."

The World War III Project by The Americans for Whatever Barack Obama Wants, Did you Know He's Friends With Jay-Z? Truest thing you'll see today. "A $25 dollar donation will get you a piece of rubble from a war-torn Middle Eastern country kissed by Senator Lindsay Graham." 'World War III Is a Very Important, Very Progressive War' - Hit & Run : Reason.com: ""Help Obama Kickstart World War III!" is a darling little video made by improvisational comedy titans Second City. I was introduced to it today via Twitter, but the video was made and released in 2013, during President Obama's push to use force against the Assad regime in Syria. Perhaps it has new relevance now that the U.S. House has voted to train and arm Syrian rebels in support of Obama's advertures in ISIS-slaying. Enjoy!"