The Purple Pinup Guru Platform

When purple things are pulsating on your mind, I'm the one whose clock you want to clean. Aiding is Sparky, the Astral Plane Zen Pup Dog from his mountain stronghold on the Northernmost Island of the Happy Ninja Island chain, this blog will also act as a journal to my wacky antics at an entertainment company and the progress of my self published comic book, The Deposit Man which only appears when I damn well feel like it. Real Soon Now.

Thursday, September 25, 2003

RIGHT BAGUETTE AT 'CHA

I have to get this out early due to some unexpected emergency that has come up tonight.

A few things has reined in my unbridled attention.

What the fuck is it lately with all these fast food joints constantly shoveling their rancid rat poison and have the mitigated gall to pander it to the unsuspecting guinea pigs of the free world? Burger King is increasingly becoming more of a major nuisance than ever before with the introduction of all these fancy-schmancy gourmet sandwiches.

Yes, the very same Burger King, where every menu item goes through your intestines faster than a Mexican divorce is now ready to introduce to the world their version of what they consider to be healthy food. If the Chicken Caesar Salad Sandwich wasn't bad enough, now comes the all new Santa Fe Fire Grilled Chicken Baguette loaded with only five grams of fat. I like it when they advertise the words 'loaded' and 'fat' in the same sentence- because it sort of presents itself as a paradox. Burger King, along with McDonald's are both notoriously renowned for fanning the flames of lawsuits that deal with the issue of obesity. People could take it the wrong way and may misconstrue that the sandwich may have 5 grams of fat included in the sandwich altogether. And what's up with the baguette? Is that supposed to improve the quality of their inferior ingredients? Baguette? Gimme a fuckin' break! This is the same shoddy marketing campaign that McDonalds employed with their heralded addition of Paul Newman salad dressing to all their salads in a plastic bubble that probably imports all of it's lettuce from Iraq, if the Iraqi children were all lucky to have the privilege to have tasted lettuce to begin with.

No matter how you toss it- McDonald's and Burger King share an alliance in one thing and one thing only: who can give you crippling diarrhea the quickest way possible? It's guaranteed- every time I walk out of their restuarant either in Encino or Westwood, it's a instant thousand yard dash to the nearest men's room facility- and I ain't stupid to use the one already provided for you in the restuarant - I go to a gas station 'cause it would be like stepping in a time capsule of every wino and needle junkie who has leased space before you. I one time had a bowel build up and tried it to beat someone to a men's room one time at a location in Venice Beach - but I happened to stumble upon Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to re-enact a scene from T3 in trying to jam Arianna Huffington's head down the toilet, so I had to save it until I got back to Sherman Oaks. Why do I even bother to eat there, if I hate it so much? Well, one reason is that when it comes to fast food franchises and their advertising- it's just the same as it was back in the fifties drive-ins - it's hypnotic and it's subliminal. Pretty pictures of food make people do foolish things. And you can't have lived life if you haven't tried everything once- despite the stomach pain that will linger in the afterglow.

I wish I could rant further on about this subject- I could literally go on for hours on how much I think McDonald's a detrimental abomination to society as subjecting the world public of the idealogy of slapping together processed American cheese in the middle of your pancakes as they horrendously demonstrate in their breakfast McGriddle sandwiches.

Since I have to rush home and do this errand for a friend- I'm probably not going to be able to check on the progress of the construction of the five Constantine sets. But interestingly enough, a bill from the drapery department stumbled in concerning two mattresses. Looks like there's going to be a exorcism hoedown somewhere in this movie. Of course, with Exorcist: the Prequel on indefinite hold and with Constantine being categorized in the horror genre - someone's gotta make up for the lost time.

I finally got ahold of that Hollywood Reporter article on 'codas'. As I may have mentioned before- codas are little tagged on endings that see in a movie after you've sat through seven to ten minutes of rolling credits. Two weeks ago, a pair of movies Cabin Fever and Once Upon A Time in Mexico both had little codas tacked on- sort of as a reward for wracking your brain over such jargon terminology such as foley Artist , gaffer, or Second Unit Director - In Mexico, there was Depp, bathed in a ring of fire, sauntering towards the audience with his guns raised and poised to fire. In Cabin Fever, there is a reference to an earlier scene within the movie of a Santa Claus white bearded shopkeeper played by Robert Harris who appears to have a racist agenda and spourts off off color epithets faster than a machine gun at a watermelon spitting contest, but is later revealed in the movie that he is more familiar to the black culture than one would expect when he greets a small group of African Americans and knows a lot of their lingo and appears to be down with their mannerisms. In the coda, there is the same shopkeeper sitting on a stool - trying to say 'Ah Word ' in a attempt to master the black street lingo.

The article lists past example of other movies that have had tried this experiment in the past, listing ' Ferris Bueller's Day Off ' and ' Young Sherlock Homes ' as prime example. But in recent months, it seems that today's mainstream movies are applying this technique more and more due to the popularity of DVD Easter eggs. You would be rewarded with the knowledge of the final fate of the monkey at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. How did Bullseye make it through the end of Daredevil? What exactly did happen to Kenneth Branagh's Professor Gilderoy Lockhart's character in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets? All these questions are answered at the very, very end of the movie. And if you missed it, well, the studios are counting on you to shell out money to see it again, because they fucking fooled you as you left along with the rest of the popcorn and soft drink stuffed lemmings- either that or you have to wait to see the DVDs to find out.

The article doesn't mention anything on the Pixer blooper reels that are shown in such films as a Bug's Life and Toy Story or Dreamworks' Shrek. One of my favorite codas were the ones stuck on Howards Stern's Private Parts where Stuttering John was left all abandoned and realizes that he was cut out of the whole movie.

Bottom line: stay through the credits through some of these movies and you may very well be rewarded. I've been doing it ever since I was a little kid, and even then my family thought I was wacko. One time, my stepfather would say to me, 'what the fuck, Cary - you see anybody you know? and then I would use the tired old excuse; ' yeah, you freakin' ignoramus, some of the people who did the storyboards happen to draw for some of the comic books I read' . When all I really wanted to do was listen to the film score. I mean, does anybody really walk out of a Star Wars film without basking in the glory of a John Williams score - until it all fades to black?



~

Coat

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

(I Want the)THE BEST HIGHLIGHTS IN HOLLYWOOD

Summer is now supposedly gone - but you couldn't tell out here by the lingering heat. Come late October, (fall season begins late in Los Angeles) the temperature will be dipping a few degrees and the freon will make the water in the pool unbearable to swim in, as the days become shorter and everyone will have to set their clocks ahead just because a bunch of stupid farmers have to wake up to a sound of a rooster squawking rather than possessing the technical know how in setting up a simple digital alarm clock in order to get up and milk the cows. Words cannot express the massive hatred that aggravates me to no avail when it comes to daylight savings time. There's no scienitific reason or logical explanation as to why we go to such tremendous lengths to keep some hillybilly farmers happy in order to see the sun set exactly at 6 AM.

Now, I'll have to get the windbreakers out of the closet, all the obligatory company embroidered jackets, make sure the windows are shut tight at night and set enough time aside in the morning to blow dry my hair before stepping foot outside the door to work. What is going to really suck total degenerate ass is that all the highlights in my hair that I've accumulated from swimming in the pool and walking in the boiling sun is going to fade from my musty mop and transform into a deep dark shit brown. I need those highlights to remain in place until I've finished with the Las Vegas Comic Book Convention - it's completely for the image, you understand.

The tension mounts.

Alright, time is of the essence tonight as I gotta rush off to fiddle with my VCRs. As some of you may already know, after all the Emmys are given out, that usually signifies the major networks- them being ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, with the minor leaguers the WB and UPN tailing behind are ready to unveil a whole new barrage of shows inept with any inclination of a original idea or concept. Every show this season is a hybrid abomination of the ones that already premiered the previous season. And the ones before that season too. Now the next big thing going around these days are the setting up of franchises to monopolize the prime time schedule- it's nearly impossible not to tune in and see either a show that belongs to the CSI or Law & Order canon. Tonight, CBS has set the CSI premise within our military with the title tongue twister, Navy: NCIS with Mark Harmon and David McCallum investigating real boring crimes that just happen to occur on all our major army and navy bases. And the punished get to peel potatoes in the barracks for the next ten to twenty.

Speaking of major pain in the asses, there's nothing more disparging than the shifting of tv schedules that worked fine for me last year, and it appears once again that the networks don't give a fuck about my feelings when NBC pits the new season of Law & Order: SUV to conflict with another of my favorite shows on ABC (and one of the few that I watch on that Disney owned network), NYPD Blue - and I'm sure there are others, but I can't seem to list them off the top of my head right now. But the television fall season is now upon us, and lord, (or the deity of your choice) if it isn't already fucking addicting.

Work today was interesting on two levels: 1. Once again , a whole mess of Constantine related stuff has come to my attention and I got to see the set construction going on in progress and: 2.) I attended my first mandatory sexual harrassment class on the lot and what made it different from previous classes and seminars I've had to attend to through other corporations is that a major portion of it was performed by actors in several different skits to demonstrate how not to be accused or be the accuser of sexual harrassment.

Believe me, I needed a refresher coarse more than anybody on this subject- just when you think you know all there is to know, something comes along and throws a wrench into your pillar of previous knowledge - outdating every rule and regulation that you once abided by as evident in a incident last year, when a contractor tried to make my life miserable over such a tedious incident. I won't get into the specifics here, but after hearing something that once resonated to me as a form of abuse that I may have been guilty of, I gotta admit, if a major investigation were launched on the basis of her claims, I'm sure after a short while, the imprint of my company's emblem would have been tattooed on my ass as it was being kicked out the security gate.

I learned to be good after that fiasco blew over.

The small actor troupe performed five possible scenerios of what could be coined as sexual abuse in the workplace: a). The joke - what you may think and what others around you may think is funny, may not be funny to one single minority of the group. One such person could make your work environment a living hell, if that person were to declare that joke you just told offensive or completely inappropiate.

Then there is b) 'The Compliment' - it may be okay to say someone looks nice or conservative in a dress or shoes, but it's not okay to say that person looks very fetching in that short mini dress or skirt. Don't try to assume that favorite female co-worker of yours is wearing a thong or a pair of your grandmother's favorite K-Mart Jacklyn Smith 's panties while she is bending down to pick up a No. 2 pencil - or if your male supervisor moonlights as a Chippendale dancer on the side- it will only benefit you in directing you towards the path to Rt 86. Personally, this is really nothing for me to worry about, as there's really nothing for me to look at on the job, since nearly all my co-workers have problems making their peace with their 'weight watchers' gods, or are a couple of years away for making permanent reservations to a one way trip to the old bibby home for the cruel and cankerous- they're at the age where that they even have emergency room doctors added to their Christmas Card lists.

Later, then we were subjected to 'the female admirers' segment which went on to explain that even females can be the sexual harrassment aggressors. This doesn't happen often, I would personally renounce my atheism if a caddy of female co-workers were ever to oogle over me while I was on the clock- but the only stipulation to those conditions would be if all my female co-workers looked like Laura Elena Harding and Naomi Watts . And that is probably why they don't allow me to work on the main lot, I have too many conditions to adhere to, but I'm sure it's in the interest of my self- preservation.

I wish I had a stalker, only then would I truly know the definitive meaning of true attachment.

Another skit performed, and this one certainly struck a nerve, as it dealt with downloading porno on the internet while on company time- which a lot of people in my department are already guilty of whether they admit it or not, as exists some consortium or private network of those who exchange graphic e-mail jokes with each other on a mailing list. I personally didn't sign up for it - but I like to check out singles websites and while there are some that be a little graphic, I have confidence knowing that the female that I've just downloaded is completely obtainable in my neighborhood. I don't like to think what I download as porn, as most of the girls in the pics do try to keep their clothes on and none are depicted in any sexual acts. Downloading porn on the job is messing around with fantasy geekdom. Checking out what saucy wench you can actually set up a date with within the hour is mucking around with reality and could be construed as having to run an errand on your way home from work - but to be on the safe side, maybe I should quit while I'm ahead.

The fifth skit was boring, as it pertained to looking out or giving the heads up to each other in preventing ways to sexually harass one another (i.e; verbal warnings), so I'll jump on what stuff I have on Constantine tonight-

A) Bills are coming in on the set construction phase: gallons of latex and flamable paint are coming in by the truckload and they are going out by the truckload. Sticks, brushes, rollers, paintrags, you name it- it's all getting ordered.

B) A Script dept supervisor was giving me details on a few drafts of the script that he edited (but he wasn't familar with the original source material) and what I could ascertain from our conversation is that there are two major plotlines to follow in the movie and one is that one of Garth Ennis's famous storylines on his run of the book is depicted on the subject of John Constantine being diagnosed with cancer, the other I will not devulge right this moment as I do a little background check in my own Hellblazer collection.

C) After the the sexual orientation got let out, I strolled over to the set (make that sets! Plural, my friend, PLURAL as Ian Anderson would say. )today and watched a little construction. I happened to speak to one of the set construction foremans and he told me something that totally exceeded my expectations of how many soundstages it's going to take to get through this production: They are erecting five, count 'em five huge stages to shoot this movie- something that hasn't been done for a single movie in years on my favorite movie lot.

Well, gotta split to tape these new fall premiere shows.

~

Coat