Superhero films, books, and games will exist until the end of time. With that thought you should settle down, and watch the 2007 documentary called “Confessions of a Superhero”. This film chronicles the lives of three mortal men and one mortal woman who make their living working as superhero characters on Hollywood Boulevard.
Superman (Chris Dennis) is a Los Angeles orphan, but claims to be the son of Oscar/Tony-winning actress Sandy Dennis, though the family denies that she had any children. Wonder Woman (Jennifer Wenger) was a Midwestern homecoming queen, who actually is the most successful of the actors. The Hulk (Joe McQueen) sold his Super Nintendo for a bus ticket to Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots and was homeless for four years before becoming the Hulk, and achieves some success, winning a small role in Justin Lin’s “Finishing the Game.” Batman (Maxwell Allen) claims to be a former mobster with a murderous past, though his wife casts doubts on his stories in the film. This deeply personal view into their daily routines reveals their hardships and triumphs as they pursue and achieve their own kind of fame.
The line that gave everyone the first clue that “Lost” wasn’t your average every day television drama. Sure, it started out looking like a typical TV show as a man woke up in a jungle, not knowing exactly what happened, and as he wanders through the trees and brush, he discovers that the plane he was riding on just minutes before had crash landed on an island He rushes to the scene to see all of his fellow passengers terrified of what they’ve just endured, and he immediately starts to help and lead those hurt and injured away from the burning debris.
In that moment, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Jeffrey Lieber had captured an audience and many of those same people would follow the tragedy and triumph of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 as they found themselves on an island that was anything but a normal tropical paradise for the next six years.
First, I’m going to take you back—all the way back to the not-so-halcyon days of 2003. Reality TV was just starting to become a truly viable market. Its tropes and clichés were already well worn. Into this scene steps a little show with grand artistic ambitions: Spike TV’s “reality parody”, The Joe Schmo Show.
The Joe Schmo Show was entirely fake, save for one aspect. Each cast member (all of whom were up-and-coming improv comedians, including a pre-SNL Kristen Wiig) played a stereotypical reality TV contestant type (the catty gay man, the house slut, the grizzled former military guy). The “schmo” of the title was Matt Kennedy Gould, an average person who believed he was part of an actual reality show called Lap of Luxury. Gould didn’t find out the truth until the last episode. He was, understandably, shocked and pleaded with the rest of the cast, “What is going on?!?”
Your Grandma ain’t got squat on this break dancing granny! Check out the video above to see Grandma Tracy breakdancing at Mad Decent NYC block party, fanny pack and all. It’s safe to say that this 60-something Grandma shows us all that there’s more to aging than prunes and crosswords. YOU GO GRANNY! (via: baratunde.com)
If you had told me in the early 2000s — when I was still in high school and saving my summer job money to buy new CDs — that indie bands would one day pay fans to listen to their music, I would have thought you were crazy. Bands make music, and we spend our hard-earned scratch to listen to it, not the other way around … right?
Well, it’s 2010, and artists are so desperate to squeeze their product through the ear buds of trendy scene influencers that they’re actually paying the cool kids to check out their new tracks. A UK pop duo called The Reclusive Barclay Brothers has put their first single “We Could Be Lonely Together” on iTunes, and downloading it enters you to win £27. That’s like 40 bucks (or two and a half CDs, if you’re a high school-er in the year 2000).
It’s an age-old question, which isn’t to say that it has been around for a very long time, but rather it is to say that it is more a question of our age, the era in which we live. The question, I should add, isn’t actually a question, it’s more a scenario and it goes a-little something like this:
You (yes, you, the reader, with the hair and the clothes, assuming you have both of those things) like a work of art. Could be a band, a movie, a book, whatever. You like it and therefore you tell your friends that you like it and they should listen to/watch/read this work so you can all appreciate it in a grand adventure of shared cultural experiences (not entirely unlike the plot of The Goonies).
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