Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

People are weird.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

You cannot shame the shameless.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

So many bastards, so little time.

When we show up, we win.

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92Comments

  6. 6.

    cleek

    the Anderson/Murray/Wilson axis is great. but you gotta be in the right frame of mind. you have to be willing to do a little of the lifting.

    Rushmore is in my top 5 3 movies, ever.

  7. 7.

    Batocchio

    I don’t like him doing the ads either, but you do know Anderson and Owen Wilson have a big film coming out this Wednesday, don’t you? Perhaps delaying judgment until after seeing it would be wise…

  8. 8.

    calling all toasters

    If semi-adorable quirkiness were a great virtue in a work of art, they’d be awesome.

    It isn’t. They aren’t.

  9. 9.

    DougJ

    Perhaps delaying judgment until after seeing it would be wise…

    I remember all those those ads that Robert DeNiro did for McDonald’s the week before Raging Bull opened.

  10. 10.

    Mick VV

    You lose me on this post. “Big failure.” Are you kidding? They’ve made several absolutely terrific movies and have careers still in front of them. That’s more than most of us will do in our lives.

  12. 12.

    dougie

    In that at&t ad it looked like his sharply square jaw has been replaced by pillowy pre-jowls. Lay off the ice cream, Luke.

  13. 13.

    Michael

    Yes, but the AT&T/Verizon ad battles should be most entertaining through the holidays.

    Verizon: “Hah! Our 3G rulez!”
    AT&T: “Shut up! We’ve got 3G, too. Kinda.”
    Verizon: “Loser!”
    AT&T: “Oh, yeah, and we’ve got iPhone! (for at least a few months, yet)… and you can talk and surf at the same time on ours… sorta… Oh, and we’re faster, too! …in a few places…”
    Verizon: (just laughs and sticks out tongue)
    AT&T: “And… and we’ve got cheap new ads that make us look really good! sorta… kinda… maybe…”

  15. 15.

    dougie

    @calling all toasters:
    As for their movies, semi-adorable quirkiness tickles my happy place. Their movies all look like they had sex with another movie the night before. So I love them, but probably rank them in exact chronological order — starting with the great Bottle Rocket which is what Anderson can achieve when he doesn’t overindulge, and ending with Darjeeling Ltd that I just could not give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I need to watch it a second time, but what the fuck.

  16. 16.

    DougJ

    Not blonde enough be his brother, not cute enough to be Jake Gyllenhaal or Tobey Maguire or whomever.

    I like Owen and I think he may ultimately redeem the whole enterprise. But only time will tell.

  17. 17.

    R-Jud

    @dougie:

    ending with Darjeeling Ltd that I just could not give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I need to watch it a second time, but what the fuck.

    I walked out. I have a very low Jason Schwartzman tolerance (Rushmore being the exception).

  19. 19.

    Existenz

    @R-Jud:

    Oh I know plenty of girls who think Luke Wilson is cuter than those guys. Or at least, Tenenbaums/Old School era Luke Wilson.

    I think Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and Tenenbaums were great movies. I hated Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited. Anderson spent too much time with Sofia Coppola and the Cool Kids and his movies became pretentious crap.

    But I just saw “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and really enjoyed it. It’s a fun little film and worth seeing.

  21. 21.

    R-Jud

    @Existenz: I was speaking for Hollywood– I’d probably like to work out in the gym with Tobey Maguire, but if I were a single lady and wanted to canoodle with someone in that group, I’d pick Luke.

    From what I hear, Jake Gyllenhaal wouldn’t be interested in me.

    I also agree with you about Sofia Coppola. Legacy directors! Ugh.

  22. 22.

    freelancer

    @RedKitten:

    Yes, this.

    Joe Bowers wasn’t a challenging role, but Wilson’s deadpan blandness carried us through as a straight man largely reacting to the world around him.

    Critique is kinda harsh for a writer with a tag that says “Bring on the Brawndo!”

  23. 23.

    j

    All of Anderson’s movies, and every copy of them, should be destroyed. No living creature should be subjected to them, and their very creation is an indictment of our species. Terrible movies, all of them.

  25. 25.

    SarahLoving

    I kind of hate Wes Anderson’s stuff. I could deal with Rushmore because Billy Murray is awesome but most of his stuff just reeks of… self-satisfaction or resting on clever and quirky vs actually telling an interesting story.

  27. 27.

    DougJ

    Dat fella ben fallen on hard times, apparently, him be doin’ da porn like dat.

    Too funny. I guess “dong” is in my spell-checker’s dictionary.

  29. 29.

    John O

    I personally like to cut a lot of slack to people whose siblings have tried to off themselves.

    No one can know Luke’s, nor anyone else’s particular circumstances. Celebrity news is boring to me in the end because they’re just like everyone else when it comes to the crap that rains down on most of us.

    Nobody knows what Luke does in terms of this decision.

  31. 31.

    Yutsano

    @Michael: Heh. part of my work is dealing with all the major cell phone companies. I can tel you who’s decent, who kinda sucks, and who is a major ripoff. I can tell you this much: they can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want cause the regulations are pretty much nil. So all they can’t do is totally lie in their commercials. They just aren’t required to disclose the whole truth.

  33. 33.

    Mr. Poppinfresh

    I used to be a moderate fan of Anderson’s, but learning he signed the fucking Polanski letter has made me vow to avoid his work.

    I mean, he is entitled to support a rapist all the live-long day, but I’m hardly going to support him financially.

  34. 34.

    Joshers

    What’s the problem with doing a commercial? Is Jeff Bridges a failure for doing the voice work for the effin’ Hyundai commercials??

    And what does Luke Wilson doing AT&T commercials have to do with Wes Anderson? Sell-out by association?? Lazy.

  36. 36.

    DougJ

    Is Jeff Bridges a failure for doing the voice work for the effin’ Hyundai commercials??

    Voice work, voice work. Did he tool around in a Hyundai telling us how great it was? Did he take us out to Glendale for a real nice meal? No.

  38. 38.

    MikeJ

    And to repeat something I said in the middle of the important thread:

    Vya is the only vermouth.

    This is very, very important. And go Ducks.

  39. 39.

    Martin

    @John O:

    They all suck. Here’s an example.

    AT&T really does have shitty coverage, but at least they don’t nickel and dime you as much as Verizon does. Apple can’t stand AT&T and wants to get out of exclusivity as soon as possible – the relationship is hurting the iPhone quite a lot.

    Things might improve next year when LTE rolls out – both Verizon and AT&T will use it, and that should change the nature of things a fair bit. CDMA is just poison to the US market – fucking stupid-ass country can’t seem to regulate a standard forcing consumers to pay for multiple overlapping (and therefore half-assed) infrastructures.

  40. 40.

    Violet

    @R-Jud:

    I also agree with you about Sofia Coppola. Legacy directors! Ugh.

    I love “Lost in Translation.” Bill Murray was amazing in that film. I’m sorry he didn’t get the Oscar that year.

    I like Wes Anderson okay, but I think his films have gone downhill. Wasn’t a big fan of The Life Aquatic and didn’t even bother to see Darjeeling.

  41. 41.

    MikeJ

    @Violet: Lost in Translation is great, but not as great as the Virgin Suicides.

    Anyone who doesn’t like Sophia can suck my dick. She r0xx0rs.

  42. 42.

    Nicole

    Note to self- never attempt to post to Balloon Juice while riding in a cab after 2 hours of an open bar karaoke. Second try:

    Which one is Luke WIlson, again? I can never tell them apart. Was he the one in that really bad Uma THurman superhreo movie?

    Shit. I’m +7. Forgive atheo spelleing. ig vie up.

  46. 46.

    Nicole

    Thanks. F or the record, I’m nto talking about Batman & Robin. I realize Uma Thurman has been in two really bad superhero movies. just wanted to clarify.

  48. 48.

    The Bobs

    Trivia for the Luke Wilson fans, he has two brothers. Luke is the youngest and the oldest (Andrew) played “Beef Supreme” in “Idiocracy.”

    And yeah, Luke is the one who did that stupid movie with Uma, but who cares after the great Idiocracy, as was pointed out above.

  49. 49.

    Violet

    @The Bobs:
    Is Idiocracy really that good? I haven’t seen it, although I thought about watching it on a plane when I saw it was an option. But I figured if it was good I’d rather watch it uncensored for airplane viewers.

  51. 51.

    Yutsano

    @Martin: I have to deal with the customer service departments of the cell carriers constantly. It goes from nightmare to new levels of Dante’s hell. What really scares me is T-Mobile scores highest in CS, but every time I have to deal with them they have no clue what their phones actually do, much less how to solve the customer’s problem. That’s of course assuming you can get through to anyone, TracFone will routinely hang up on you unless you call JUST RIGHT. Not to mention their rates are beyond rip-off compared to all the others.

  55. 55.

    Martin

    @Violet:

    It really needs to be watched, not because it’s a great movie (it isn’t), just that someone actually had the stones to make it and put it out there. It’s Office Space on a larger scale.

  56. 56.

    Martin

    @Yutsano:

    I’m wondering who is going to step into the cell space and focus on customer service – it’s hard to imagine an industry being this bad at it for so long. Google has an MVNO option in their Clearwire investment – hook Google Voice and a Skype client to a LTE network, and they can roll out as a pure data MVNO using your Google Voice number. Google has all the pieces except for the most important one – customer service, but that’s going to have to come eventually anyway.

  57. 57.

    asiangrrlMN

    @phoebes-in-santa fe: I really enjoyed this movie, much to my surprise.

    As for Luke Wilson, I saw the commercial for the first time tonight (muted, of course), and I couldn’t believe it was him. Then again, Dennis Haysbert does those All State commercials, so who knows?

  58. 58.

    Yutsano

    @Martin: It’s not hard to understand if you realize that cell phone users have really nowhere else to go. One of the things my company did was to totally revamp their CS area (good thing or I’d be unemployed!) and our improvement in customer relations jumped up amazingly high. We still have our issues, but we’re working on making it better and better.

    Oh and if Google ever did get a CS department I’d be interviewing with them like yesterday.

  59. 59.

    Kevin Phillips Bong

    @Violet: It’s a great only moderately well executed. The fact that it’s rapidly becoming a documentary is making it that much more relevant.

  61. 61.

    Kevin Phillips Bong

    @Violet: Lost in Translation is one of my litmus test movies. It seems like the people who don’t respond to that film are missing something in their personal makeup.

  62. 62.

    Steeplejack

    I’m much too tired to argue this with the ferocity I would normally bring to the table, but, no, the Anderson/Wilson juggernaut is not a failure. Even if they crater tomorrow and never do anything else, they’ve put some small gems on the shelf: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited. Not to mention that American Express commercial.

    Okay, maybe nothing that’s going to have Citizen Kane shaking in its boots, but they have done at least as much as anyone else to stem the tide of pointless bullshit epics–[cough] 2012 [cough] Michael Bay [cough]–that is the (bland) meat and potatoes junk food and carbs diet of contemporary American cinema. The Royal Tenenbaums is the closest thing I have seen to a J.D. Salinger story on the screen, and all the other movies have moments of sublime greatness in them. Brazilian guy doing David Bowie songs? Check. Argument in a closet surrounded by every popular board game of the last 50 years? Check. And Margaret Yang flying her RC airplane and Dirk Cameron waiting to take dictation, for chrissake. Heartbreaking.

    Quirky? Yeah. But I’m okay with quirky. Especially when the main alternative going is vacuous roller-coaster rides with no plot, no characters and no evidence of any brains on the case.

  64. 64.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    And if you’re not down with Wes Anderson, try some Whit Stillman: Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco. Three tight little movies that are overlooked and underestimated. Why can this guy not get funding for whatever the fuck he wants to do?!

  65. 65.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    And, P.S., the John Cusack who was in <Grosse Pointe Blank and <Say Anything, not to mention The Grifters and Eight Men Out, should be ashamed to be in 2012. That is all.

    Okay, maybe not the John Cusack who was in Con Air [shudder]. But still.

  66. 66.

    Kevin Phillips Bong

    @Steeplejack: Bottle Rocket is a good effort but definitely has the raw feel of an early film, Rushmore is hard to find any fault with, truly great. Tenenbaums is a slight step down from that. Zissou and Darjeeling just sort of disappeared up their own ass, Anderson’s insular little world became almost suffocating. You can see some of the early brilliance try and come out only to be smothered by Anderson’s diminishing ability to rein himself in.

    I like Stillman’s filmmaking but man, do I want to punch some of his airless, upper East Side characters in the neck.

  67. 67.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    That should be: “The John Cusack who was in Grosse Pointe Blank and Say Anything, not to mention . . .”

    FYWP.

    And FTFY, wherever they are, sitting at home watching reruns of their World Series victory.

  68. 68.

    Yutsano

    @Steeplejack: Heh. The way I knew 2012 was a skip was when a friend of my brother’s insisted I HAD to watch it. Knowing his taste and my initial indifference I of course demurred.

  69. 69.

    Steeplejack

    @Kevin Phillips Bong:

    Not saying Anderson isn’t self-indulgent, and I would like to see him taken into the care of an empathetic but dominatrix-harsh woman producer. I guess I’m saying I would rather watch him be self-indulgent than Michael Bay or J.J. Abrams.

    When I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums in the theater I was sorely disappointed, because I thought it didn’t hold a candle to Rushmore, but every time I run across it on cable I realize it’s pretty good and my expectations were just too high coming off Rushmore, which was like a big glug of water after crossing a desert. And I always get sucked into watching Tenenbaum all the way through, which is my great-movie-on-TV litmus test. (Cf. GoodFellas.)

  70. 70.

    Steeplejack

    @Kevin Phillips Bong:

    Metropolitan is a little Upper-East-Sidey, but I was amazed that the movie even got made. Barcelona really turned that inside out, with the airless American guys being exposed to the Spanish girls, and it really holds up well. Hmm, haven’t seen The Last Days of Disco since it first came out. Maybe add to Netflix queue.

  72. 72.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    Godsdamnit, my HTML-fu is funked up tonight. It can’t be the +17 after working two long shifts with little sleep in between. Nah, that’s crazy talk. Shnnrrgglle . . . zzz, drool, snort! “No, Mom, it’s not a school day.” Wait, what?

    Steep out.

  73. 73.

    Kevin Phillips Bong

    @Steeplejack: You’re pretty generous, I don’t even include Michael Bay in the filmmaker Venn diagram. More like a feature length car or beer commercial. And even though Anderson’s recent stuff (haven’t seen Mr. Fox yet) is self-indulgent I’ll still watch them just for the good parts. I think there’s something to be said for a limited budget and a smidgen of self doubt, remove fiscal constraints and start to believe your own press and Rushmore turns into Life Aquatic.

    I thought Barcelona was the best of the bunch too. The Spanish setting and girls really showed the Americans what might happen if they unclenched a little bit.

  74. 74.

    Batocchio

    @DougJ:

    Good line, but again, apparently Luke isn’t in this one. And again, it’s pretty silly to trash a director when his new flick is coming out in just a few days, has gotten some good early reviews, and (unless you’re holding out on us) you haven’t seen it. After you’ve seen it, if you don’t like it, okay. Or if it was Scooby-Doo 25, okay.

    DeNiro might be a bad example, too. He’s still one of my favorite actors, but starting about a decade ago he started showing up on set without knowing his lines and has done a boatland of crap. However, he’s also used some of that money to fund the Tribeca Film Festival and other worthy causes, and plenty of actors and directors do big commercial flicks – or commercials – to allow them to do more interesting work. (Funding the Arts in the U.S. much more wouldn’t hurt, either.) Still, when has either Wilson ever resembled DeNiro, or Wes Anderson resembled Scorsese?

    On other hand, there’s always keeping on drinking and imagining your perfect movie in your head. That works, too. Cheers!

  75. 75.

    NobodySpecial

    I just can’t get into the whole ‘fanboy/girl’ thing about actors and directors, I’m sorry. I go to watch a movie for one of two reasons: To tickle my brain stem or to put it to sleep for a while. I have a good idea walking into a theatre what each movie was going to do.

    Oh, and go find a copy of Moon until it comes out on DVD. That one’s gonna win a LOT of awards this year if there is justice.

  77. 77.

    calipygian

    Some day, in the not too distant future, “Idiocracy” will be known as the “Citizen Kane” of “how the fuck did we get here, performing near slave labor for our Chinese overlords” historiography.

  78. 78.

    Tokyokie

    I’m not going to bash any actor for doing commercials. Eli Wallach’s done voiceover on countless ads, and James Whitmore’s was still the voice saying, “Come to where the flavor is, Marlboro country,” in Japan long after cigarette TV ads had been banned in the U.S. (Lots of prominent American actors have done ads in Japan, including Madonna and Sly Stallone.) Hell, even Henry Fonda flogged GAF Viewmaster back in the day. It’s work, and you take it when you can get it. Of course, if say John Cusack were to show up in an ad extolling the virtues of Xe Services, I might have to re-evaluate things.

  80. 80.

    Steeplejack

    @Kevin Phillips Bong:

    You’re pretty generous, I don’t even include Michael Bay in the filmmaker Venn diagram.

    Touché. I used him because he’s the flavor of the month for wretched Hollywooden excess. And, from what I have seen and read, he combines leaden pretentiousness with unshakable self-regard into a zesty package of egosticial bullshit. Which would be okay if it led to great movies. But it doesn’t. Shorter me: he makes awful movies. I hope the people who made the FIOS commercial were laughing at him the whole time. (But, sadly, they probably wanted to be him.)

    And even though Anderson’s recent stuff [. . .] is self-indulgent I’ll still watch them just for the good parts.

    Amen. I’m not defending him as the greatest director of his generation or anything like that. I just think the bulk of American film is a big, bland but very narrow diet–sort of like the ’50s, when for most Americans “Italian food” was spaghetti and pizza. So when I see somebody that breaks that mold–and successfully, not just as a one-hit film festival sensation–I take notice and I cut him some slack.

    I think there’s something to be said for a limited budget and a smidgen of self-doubt, remove fiscal constraints and start to believe your own press and Rushmore turns into Life Aquatic.

    Amen to that. As I said before, I think that ideally he needs an understanding but harsh woman producer to pull in the choke-chain a bit and reduce the indulgent “boys with toys” element that creeps into his movies.

  81. 81.

    Steeplejack

    Have now read the whole thread in the clear light of day. Will add one thing:

    If I were an actor needing to make a “rent move”–i.e., gotta pay the bills or lose the beach house in Malibu–I would much rather get paid sacks of money to do a commercial that’s going to be gone in a year or so than get paid sacks of money to be in a really bad movie that potentially could linger as a stink on my résumé for decades.

    The problem, of course, is that you can’t always tell going in if a movie is going to be bad. My point is that doing commercials would allow you to be more selective in which movies to take on.

  82. 82.

    Paul (Jvstin)

    My point is that doing commercials would allow you to be more selective in which movies to take on.

    And, until YouTube, doing commercials was generally an easier way to have your bill-paying gig hit the memory hole and be forgotten. Although, as I recall, Orson Welles managed to have his own commercials remembered forever.

  83. 83.

    Kevin Phillips Bong

    And let’s not lump all commercials together into the naked, shameless moneygrubbing bin. If I were Peter Stormare I’d be pretty happy to have the “Unpimp ze auto” VW ads on my reel.

  84. 84.

    Steeplejack

    @Paul (Jvstin), @Kevin Phillips Bong:

    No shame in being in a commercial. And, if you’re a good actor, you’re going to be remembered for whatever you do. Which is why we still have Orson Welles’s commercials.

    I’m just saying that a commercial is what it is and doesn’t aspire to be anything else. If it’s really good and memorable, that’s great. If it’s bad, so what? A movie should aspire to be something a little more, even if the aspiration is as slight as “original twist on teen sex comedy.” So a really bad movie hurts a little bit, in a way that a bad commercial never could.

  85. 85.

    Phoebe

    Big failure? What? A whole series of things that made me happy now = big failure, retroactively, because of a tv commercial? Wrongness!

    Look, here’s the secret: don’t care about the crap they do for money, just be happy with what they do that is good. Do you think this is the first crap thing Luke Wilson has done? If you are consistent in this view then you will be unable to enjoy a huge percentage of the enjoyable stuff out there.

    And yes, it wasn’t a Wes Anderson movie, but Luke Wilson was just perfect in Idiocracy. If he had not played it so beautifully sweet and earnest and straight it would have been in fact a big [if well-meaning] failure. Props forever and ever for that alone.

    Darjeeling Express was very beautiful to look at [for those of you who appreciate beauty] and had some cool and funny parts. But if you’re anything like me you will have to do whatever you have to do to put up with the repellent Adrien Brody.

    Jason Schwartzman is fab, and was completely hilarious and perfect in Shopgirl.

  86. 86.

    Steeplejack

    @Phoebe:

    A whole series of things that made me happy now = big failure, retroactively, because of a tv commercial? Wrongness!
    __
    Look, here’s the secret: don’t care about the crap they do for money, just be happy with what they do that is good.

    Agreed.

  88. 88.

    Will

    Can we all now agree that the whole Anderson/Wilson juggernaut was a big failure?

    Bottle Rocket alone compels me to respond, “Just back off, Doug”.

  89. 89.

    oh really

    Can we all now agree that the whole Anderson/Wilson juggernaut was a big failure?

    No.

    Two Words.

    Bottle

    Rocket

    The world is a better place because it exists. How can you call that failure?

  90. 90.

    Stefan

    and ending with Darjeeling Ltd that I just could not give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I need to watch it a second time, but what the fuck.

    Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody should have switched roles for that movie. The beginning Paris hotel sequence with Natalie Portman would have been devastating if Brody had played it, but with Schwartzman it was just kind of limp and sad. Brody’s just a much more powerful actor, but he really didn’t have enough to do with his part.

    Though his “I didn’t save mine” line was wrenching.

  91. 91.

    Stefan

    Voice work, voice work. Did he tool around in a Hyundai telling us how great it was? Did he take us out to Glendale for a real nice meal? No.

    Hey, George Clooney does car and coffee machine commercials where he appears as himself — though they only air overseas. Does that mean he’s a failure too?

  92. 92.

    Sum Gui

    @Yutsano: Funny. TF was recognized for great CS by JD Power.

    As for its “rip-off” rates, it’s designed for low usage, so it’s still the cheapest way to own a cell phone in America.

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