Tag Archives: celebrity gossip addiction

Dear Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader, You’re Famous, WTF Are You Doing on Kickstarter

17 May

I do love that tagline: “It’s not the Hills…” Hahahaha!

At first I saw that Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader were making a movie together and I was all, Yessssssssssssssssss.

Then I processed the fact that they’re doing a Kickstarter project to fund it. Something about “creative control BLAH BLAH BLAH, not relying on the industry or a studio WANK WANK WANK.”

GUYS. Kickstarter is for people who are not Bret Easton Ellis or Paul Schrader. Kickstarter is for us poor suckers who want to someday be Bret Easton Ellis or Paul Schrader.

“A kind of DIY mentality, shooting with friends, shooting on low-cost equipment, then it moves to setting up a website, going on Facebook, and the next step is you’re going on Let It Cast to start casting, next step is you’re all of a sudden going on Kickstarter to bring in an audience base….and it’s all part of a new way– I mean, I personally think that films, right now, are sort of where they were 100 years ago, they’re being reinvented right in front of our eyes.” — Paul Schrader

OH MY GOD. Paul Schrader, we have a DIY mentality and we shoot with friends and shoot on low-cost equipment because we have no other options. Because we don’t have access to studios, or expensive equipment. And we’re hoping and praying and selling our souls that one of our “friends” turns out to be the next Bret Easton Ellis, we are not actually working with Bret Easton Ellis. 

You made it! You don’t have to do this crap anymore! You’re being nostalgic for when you were young and broke and poor and no one knew your names. That is the worst kind of indulgent, narcissistic, amnesia-fueled midlife crisis there is. If you really want to do a Kickstarter project, you should all be required to eat nothing but cereal and Top Ramen for the duration of the project, and you should have to beg your parents to keep paying your cell phone bills and also ask if maybe you can use their garage for a shooting location if you promise, promise, promise to clean up?

Look, I get that with the advent of the Internet, making art has become a free-for-all. How can “real” comedians be expected to survive when any jackass with a Twitter can make jokes all day long now? How can “real” authors survive when anyone can self-publish? But as Richard Russo points out, in a Seattle Times interview about Amazon publishing, all this technology isn’t bad for people who have “name recognition. And for brand-new writers who are having a hard time breaking in, Amazon is good for writers like us who have name recognition. And for brand-new writers who are having a hard time breaking in, they provide an outlet. It’s the mid-list literary writer who gets squeezed out when the market contracts.” 

We can worry about the mid-list artists, yes. But Kickstarter is for those having a hard time breaking in. Special report to Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis: you have name recognition.

Just look at what they’re promising to funders— For $5,000, “Bret Easton Ellis will read and review your novel and have that review appear on an international blog or website” (cue angry, drug-fueled white boys coming in their pants). For $5,001, “Have your script covered by Paul Schrader– Notes to be delivered in person (NY or LA) or skype” (cue film majors vomiting on their own feet). 

They’re ruining it for the rest of us. How do we stand a chance against that?!? Sure, I can offer to read your script and deliver notes in person, but unless that comes with a sexual favor, I don’t think you’re going to care.  

Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader, you should be funding Kickstarter projects, not pitching them. I’m sorry if you don’t like being famous, but that’s just too bad. Maybe you can make an angsty commerical about it. Look, I get that you two aren’t Tom Cruise and Michael Bay, but you’re certainly not that college kid with a video camera and a skateboard for a tracking shot. You shouldn’t be trying to recreate your lost days of obscurity and despair that the world might not let you do what you loved. 

You should be in the process of giving back by giving some young unknowns a chance, the way somebody once gave you one. You’re siphoning our dream gasoline! Step away from the straw. It’s too skinny and there’s too little fuel for all of us to get a hit as it is.

I hope this is a hoax. Internet, would you do some research and get back to me? I’ve got to go burn all my hopes and dreams.

MM

Dear Kindle Readers

9 Aug

Dear Kindle Readers,

How am I supposed to know what you’re reading?  And therefore, how am I supposed to know if you’re smart?  Or shallow?  How am I supposed to strike up a conversation without being able to say, “Oh, I read that”?

(I guess I could try it anyway.  And then try to bullshit my way through it when you say in response: “Oh, really?  You read Everything You Need to Know About Elephants and Your 18th Century British Trading Company?”)

How am I supposed to know if you’re someone I want to date?

I mean, come on, I already can’t see you walking down the street and judge you by the music on your boombox.  Further into our relationship, I can’t walk into your apartment and check out your record collection, or even your cassette tapes, or your cds.

And now I can’t judge you by your book cover?!?  This. is. tragic.  This is a catastrophe for the modern world.

I mean, yes, you probably wouldn’t have spent $189.00 on a digital reading device if you aren’t a so-called “reader.”  And yes, with a Kindle, I too could avoid being judged when I want to read trash in public.  (And sometimes a girl needs to read a little trash. Why else do you think we get haircuts so often and it takes us so long?)

But what about when I’m reading something smart?  How will you know I’m intellectual and hip if you can’t see that I’ve got a sustainable food narrative in my hands?  That I’m scholarly and literary if you can’t see the frayed edges of my well-loved Aeneid?  That I’m sensitive and artistic if Collected Poems isn’t typeset across my book cover?

I mean, seriously, what’s next?  Do I have to judge you based solely on whether or not you have a fixed-gear bicycle? What’s going to happen to all the New Yorker readers when it stops printing hard copies?  Will they have to wear name tags to identify themselves to one another as being fit for cultural conversation?

Will we all stop wearing clothing so I won’t even be able to judge you by the stitching on your jeans pockets???

Say it ain’t so,

MM

Dear New Moon

7 Dec

Dear New Moon,

Let’s do some quick math. There are approximately 8 young men among your characters. Five in the wolfpack, Emmett the vampire, and of course of course the eminently prominent Jacob* and Edward (aka RobPat**). Of those, 7 at one point or another remove their shirts.

Your running time is 2 hrs 1 min, or 121 min. Divided by 7, divided by total time spent by each of those boys on screen, minus the extreme lowness of RobPat’s pants during that one scene (I mean seriously, I wasn’t sure he was wearing pants for a while– do they let him film in the nude in order to get him on set?), plus the amount of time K.Stew spent biting her own lip while looking at the shirtless boys, multiplied by the slope of Taylor Lautner’s neck muscles…

…equals about 92.3% shirtless boy time out of total movie time.

This isn’t a complaint.

WHO AM I KIDDING? I LOVED THIS MOVIE. I laughed and sighed and said, “OH HIGH SCHOOL” more than once. I totally know what it feels like to have a best friend you don’t want to lose who feels more strongly about you than you do him. I totally know what it feels like to wear ugly sweaters and giant raincoats to math class (grew up in Seattle, people. Not that far from Forks). I totally know what it feels like to have go dashing off to Rome at a moment’s notice to save my vampire boyfriend from committing suicide, effectively choosing him over my wolf boyfriend who was finally trying to kiss me and hopefully will not transfigure too close to my face or I will die, and of course they are natural enemies but they both love me even though I am a basically lame girl who is supposedly not that pretty (probably designated as so due to the fact that I have brown hair) and who has no personality whatsoever. I TOTALLY GET IT.

[Ok, on a side note, I actually have heard of grown women leaving their husbands after reading Twilight. Because their marriages didn't measure up to the standard of love presented . (Which is what? The "I would die for you but I can't because I'm immortal" standard? Yeah. That one.) As one trained mental health specialist put it, "I would say they have larger issues than Twilight. I would also question this designation of them as 'grown.'"]

But seriously. Pure trashy fun. Perfect after you have turned in your final, revised poetry portfolios for your first semester in an MFA program***. Entertaining to the ninth degree. And did I mention the shirtlessness?

Yeah. That.

MM

*aka Boy Taylor who is dating Girl Taylor– Swift, that is. We don’t even have to come up with a stupid nickname for them ala Bennifer or Brangelina. They come with it built-in. No batteries necessary.

**aka international heartthrob of girls who like pasty white boys, aka boy who may or may not be dating/doing Kristen Stewart but sweet hell don’t ask the insensitivity of you people always asking questions like she’s a celebrity and this is an interview or something.

***Hello. My name is Margaret Michelle. I am currently getting my MFA in poetry. I also like Twilight. [The views presented here are not condoned by and not in any way shape or form representative of the management, the network, my employers, my professors, my classmates, my friends, my parents, my books, and/or anything that I ever may have touched or spoken to.]

Dear Half-Shaved (Female) Heads

16 Jul

Dear Half-Shaved (Female) Heads,

So at least 2 of my friends went through stages wherein they wanted to shave their (female) heads, and I was…not supportive. I mean, their heads and hair grows back and all that, but overall there’s no way to pretend that I was encouraging. Or even neutral.

However. When you’re a celebrity and exempt from normal people issues (like feeling weird at the grocery store without hair or having a bad no-hair day or finding out you have a bumpy head or really awkward features when they are not framed by hair which is probably most of us, it’s nothing to feel ashamed about…or really mostly just me having to hear about those things) and you kind of have mythical creature status because you’re a rockstar/model and the only times I ever see you, you look pretty hot because you’ve been styled out the kazoo and you’re prepped for photogs…then you get to do things like shave your head.

Kind of hot, no? (image from missbehavemag.com)

Kind of hot, no? (image from missbehavemag.com)

And surprise me when I find it oddly hot in a very retro punk kind of way. Which we all know is the best kind of way to be hot right now. For those of us who can pull it off, which is not me. (I’m getting my haircut today and I’m trying to maintain a firm grip on reality. Which is to say not only am I not shaving half my head, I am also trying to remember that I do not have straight, fine hair and should not ask to look like people who do). The point is, “Cassie” as a “singer” can pull it off and so can Alice Dellal as a model over here.

Alice Dellal doesn’t get quotes because she has a real name, with a first one and a space in between and then a last one. Cassie, on the other hand, missed the essential part of becoming a one-name sensation, which is to choose something kind of unusual so when I talk about her, people don’t think I’m referring to my old writing teacher or the neighbor’s dog or that girl in my class who once got chewing gum in her hair. Which, come to think of it, might be why “Cassie” now has a half-shaved head.

And then! I saw some girl walking around the outdoor mall the other day with SHORT hair and a half-shaved head and it was CUTE. And she was wearing a sheath dress and sandals, like she had just been working at J.Crew or good old Banaaaana Republic. So real life, not so punk rockstar, more working preppy shopgirl with a half-shaved head. So a High Five for her.

Really, no, I’m not tempted, just surprised and admiring, and actually, I like the short-hair twist on things better. Especially of us real people. Probably this will pass in a month or so.

My approval, if not the trend. Trends so rarely end when I think they should.

With just a little bit! of punk envy,

MM

Dear Britney Spears

6 Mar

Dear Britney Spears,

Things you (almost) never hear people say:

1. Ugh, I can’t believe I was such a good mother to my children and raised them so well.

2. What was I doing, being sober and wearing shoes in gas station bathrooms all those years?!?

3. I’m really glad I married that asshat Kevin Federline.

Glad to see you’re (maybe?) on the road to recovery. Or at least that whoever you are letting run your life now is doing a better job.

I wouldn’t, if I were you– and I say this in the nicest way possible– marry anybody else. For a while. Just take a break.

Best wishes,

MM

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