Karma Cola

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

I was sent an article the other day by Rain Li’s boyfriend, Forest Liu.  I think Forest is fantastic, and hope that, if or when Rain is done with him, she’ll pass him along to me.  There aren’t many leftover dumplings I would eat from Rain Li’s dim sum brunch, but Forest is definitely one of them.

The New York Times article is about its author going to Cheyenne, Wyoming to meet his friend and former colleague, reformed gay activist Michael Glatze, now an ex-Ghey evangelical.  It’s a long piece, so I’ll let you read it here at your leisure.

Michael Glatze in more miserable times (left) with his boyfriend, and now happy as a clam with a new companion, the Bible. You'll be back, baby. You'll be back.

In a nut’s shell, because such things are completely nutty, Glatze has abandoned cock worship for Bible worship, which says everything about religion right there, in a nutshell. 

Here Comes Santa Claus

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

The moment I fell in love with my creative partner Rain Li was in the café of the Tate Britain museum when we were doing a location scout for our film Losing Her.  We were talking about The Business and she said, in that eminently imitable Chinese version of a cockney accent, “I don’t know why everyone take film so seriously, yeah?”

Little cartoon hearts could be seen exploding around my head.

Now that PFC is so cozy with Ohlalamag.com, the images of bare-chested hunks will come fast and furious. Here is my buddy, Israeli actor Michael Lewis, whom I cast to replace Channing Tatum in "Hatter," front and back. No relationship to this article, of course.

In between takes on the set the other day, I was reminded by an actor of one of my great lessons about ego and humility in The Business.  It goes without saying that filmmaking is where the big boys play, the high rollers table at the casino, the ones ready to lose millions on a roll of the dice, and probably will.  I often compare it to thoroughbred horseracing.  The stakes are high, the divas are nutty, the horses are extra skittish, and the mafia is all over the joint.

Gay Men Running With Pink Diamonds

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

Tomorrow is the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, the Olympic Games of film, as I like to call it, except the participants in the real Olympics don’t drink and drug nearly as much as they do at Cannes — well, not with fun drugs, at least.  I have it on good authority that Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin is absolutely brilliant and the one to beat.  Based on a Lionel Shriver book that was so harrowing I couldn’t finish it, Kevin features a score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, and is about a teen who massacres a bunch of students and teachers at his high school, as seen through the eyes of his mother.

I know, at first glance "Kevin" looks like a chatty Sundance Festival comedy, but trust me, it isn't.

The mother is played by Tilda Swinton, whom I met for the first time a few years ago at the sixtieth anniversary of the festival.  I can’t imagine better casting for that role.  The person who gave me the sneak review about Kevin said he felt like taking a shower afterwards, always a good sign that a grisly film has hit its mark.  I loved both of Ramsay’s earlier films, Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar.  A former photographer, Ramsay has a way with composition and silence that is worthy of a Roger Ebert adjective like “electrifying.”

Alice Up The Rabbit’s Hole

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEWS

by James Killough

I have a good friend who sits on the opposite end of the filmmaking process from me.  I simmer up to my neck with scalding brimstone in the deepest malebolge of development hell, while he, as the owner of an entertainment advertising firm, strums a harp strung with cash in marketing heaven, where desperate studios heap clouds of money in an attempt to polish their turds and dupe the public.  This sensible friend once observed, “Nobody ever sets out to make a shitty film.”  And yet so many are made.

The Chemical Brothers and epileptic seizure-inducing lighting follow Hanna-as-Alice as she escapes to less-than-Wonderland.

With regard to Joe Wright’s Hanna, I wholeheartedly agree with Rex Reed’s review in the New York Observer.  It’s a “pretentious mess,” which I suppose isn’t so surprising given who made it.  I’ll add my own observations to Reed’s from a more technical point of view in a bit, but not without taking this occasion to name drop and somehow tie Hanna into my own experience.

Preening Seals on the Beach

I promised you a gratuitously assonant title to make up for all of the wanton alliteration the past few days, so there you have it.  I know you’ve been waiting for it like my nieces on Christmas Eve, peeking at my blog every so often trying to guess what sort of untrustworthy grammatical presents I have wrapped here.

Colin Farrell and his ex, Alicja, in "Ondine," Neil Jordan's film about a drug mule pseudo-selkie. (A selkie is a seal person, like a mermaid with a bark.) Do you think Colin and Alicja's hair had sex with each other when they were sleeping?

How do I really feel about alliteration, you ask, leaning forward with your journalist’s tape recorder to capture my every opinion?  Honestly, I feel it looks great on me, cheap on others.  Seriously, though, I’m not a fan of using alliteration even in my work, unless it’s cheesy Dr. Suess tongue-in-cheek titles, the way I’ve used it so far in the blog titles.  Alliteration is too easy for a writer to fall into; it’s puerile and lazy in a way.  Puerile because it can make a piece sound like an adolescent balancing an eel on his nose to impress a cheerleader.

The Frolic Room, LA's premiere dive bar around the corner form me in Hollywood. But I don't go because I stopped drinking, and lost 12 pounds as a result.

I went to a reading at Book Soup in West Hollywood once, the first time the guest author had read her book out loud.  It was a guidebook to dive bars in LA, so we’re not talking about a Cormac McCarthy reading, here.  I went because I wanted to buy a local high-functioning alcoholic friend of mine the book as a present.  Midway through, the author stopped herself and commented on how stunned she was that she used so many alliterations.  You could tell she was a little embarrassed.  Alliteration is just too Disney to be cool.

Assonance, however, can be the swooning cello reverberating cocoonishly beneath all great prose poetry.  Well, probably poetry in general.

The magical marker Tristan Eaton having a quick doodle on a wall, an experiment in Krink.

My friend, colleague and muse Tristan Eaton started a blog the very same day I did, which is eerie because I consider him to be my spiritual younger brother.  Tristan just dazzles me with his prolificacy, how he can seem to be several places all over the world at once like some character out of Harry Potter, painting murals, sculpting toys, illustrating brands.  I would like to say that Tristan is to images what I am to words in terms of output, but that would be an audacious claim even for this seasoned braggart.

I’m not the only one who thinks Tristan and I are similar.  When I tried to hook him up with my creative partner Rain Li, she said in her mockney Beijing accent, “Why I want to date him fo’?  He look like you.  That would be just too weird, dah-ling.”

I just wish I had Tristan’s hair.