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April 10, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

The Joy of Stalking

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

Alan Cumming has a new site up dedicated to obsessions, itsasickness.com.  I would say it celebrates passions more than obsessions in the truest sense of the word, and I am hanging on the truest sense because the site does have “sickness” in its title.  And sick obsession reminds of the time I went truly mentally ill and stalked a former lover.

Knowing Alan as I do, he probably means sickness as in the recent colloquialism “That is so sick,” like it’s a really good thing.  In the video up on the site right now, Zoe Kravitz is obsessed with a green dragon plushie costume, with how it makes her feel empowered.  This isn’t my particular experience of people obsessed with plushie.  The plushophiles I’ve met are rather lovable, extreme introverts who like to dress up as cartoon characters and have kinky sex.

Zoe Kravitz vogues plushophile lite in Williamsburg for itsasickness.com.

I had a brush with plushophilia and diaper fetishists back in the early Noughties through a friend, Gene, who also had extreme social anxiety disorder (SAD).  Gene was one of a trio of people who would trigger the mnemonic that gave rise to my play Hatter, the film version of which Alan Cumming has been attached to, just so you follow my meandering train of thought.  Gene had some hilarious stories about “furries”

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By Pure Film Creative
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April 1, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Don't Gentleman Me

BLOGIRADE

by James Killough

Never one to be terribly quick on the uptake, I needed time to think about Tom Ford’s “five easy lessons in how to be a modern gentleman” from Another Magazine, which went surprising viral, namely because of the silliness of the fifth lesson about flip-flops and shorts in the city.  Ford is described in Another as a “fashion powerhouse, film mogul and old school romantic.”  I have decided that the second descriptor, “film mogul,” is tongue-in-cheek, although knowing the fashion press as well as I do, whoever wrote that is either sucking up to Ford or actually believes that because Ford’s one and only film was so well styled and shot it has somehow propelled the designer to the top of the film business.

Too close to home: Colin Firth looks into the blue eyes of a dirty blonde half his age in "A Single Man." I wouldn't date a kid in a pink angora sweater, though. A lime-green hoodie, yes.

I was pleasantly surprised by A Single Man.  No, pleasantly is too mild and a cliché.  I was staggered by how good it was.  Everyone in the Biz had been following Ford’s misadventures trying to get it made with not a small amount of schadenfreude.  How dareth the designing fagelah wander into our rarified climes?

I know both the film business and the fashion world intimately, and there is no question as to which is the more difficult to succeed in.  Fashion people are continuously astounded at how long it takes to make a feature film: nine years on average, no matter who you are.  Even the humblest designer working in some storefront in Williamsburg would have churned out at least eighteen collections by then.  What needs to be taken into account is production on one entire collection costs less than a single day’s shoot on an indie feature film.

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By Pure Film Creative
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March 16, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Matt Damon Gets Religion

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt think they are about to meet God and are appropriately slack-jawed at the prospect, as I would be. Actually, I'd be snickering while pretending to go along with the prank.

I take movies way too seriously.  I don’t mean the business of filmmaking, that’s too much of a surreal farce, like a performance of Ubu Roi in a never-ending loop with Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin and Steven Spielberg alternating in the role of Père Ubu.  I mean the movies themselves.  I’m constantly relating real life to cinematic reality, a sure sign of not-so-latent mental illness.  For instance, I might be in an animated conversation about my landlady, the Wicked Blais, gesticulating like a Roman trying to wiggle out of blame for a traffic accident, and I’ll say something like, “I’m just like Burt Reynolds in that scene in Deliverance when he’s down, his leg is broken, bone jutting out, and the rabid hillbillies are coming after him and he picks up his crossbow and …”  All of this is to say that while I know Matt Damon is only engaged in an extended game of adult Let’s Pretend when he makes a movie, I’m a bit concerned about two of his recent choices, The Adjustment Bureau and Hereafter.

I really loved the first twenty minutes of TAB. And I mean that: I more than enjoyed it, I loved it. I was smiling. I thought, Hmmm, this might shape up to be the intellectual challenge that Inception wasn’t.  Then they brought God into it, and I started fiddling with my Blackberry, itching for a game of poker. (I am way down right now, over a million dollars at the World Series tables, but that’s nothing compared to the fiasco a month ago when the damned thing reset and I lost thirty-one million in a nanosecond.)

Let me jump off the rails a second to talk about Inception.  I was expecting too much from a major summer release, I think.  My expectations were raised even more when I had a brief scene with a showcase Cali couple just outside the Arclight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.

“Are you going to chain your bike right there?” the She of the couple asked.

“Uh, yes, that’s right,” I replied, resisting a retort like, No, I’m just practicing public displays of light bondage with my buddy Schwinn, here.  You know these Germans, so kinky.

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By Pure Film Creative
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March 12, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

The Venerable Johnny Depp

Praise the Lord.  I have seen Johnny Depp’s apotheosis and it is named Rango.  It’s like he’s pulled together all of his work since Edward Scissorhands into one masterpiece symphony in the form of an animated feature.  It all makes sense now.  Rango tips its mottled cowboy hat to Ed Wood, to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but most of all, intentionally or not, to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, the last Jarmusch film I truly enjoyed, as opposed to feeling flattened by enervation.

I don't know why they kept calling Rango a lizard when he was in fact a chameleon. I know, chameleons are lizards, but lizards makes them sound so pedestrian. Maybe the studios felt that American audiences would be too tempted to pronounce the "ch."

If you haven’t heard by now, Rango is truly trippy, brilliantly written, gorgeously animated, superbly voiced, and I have serious doubts it will ever make its real cost back.  If the studio reported a budget of $135 million, it’s bound to be much more than that.  Rango is basically an art film with a big Hollywood finish, which you really don’t mind because the whole journey is so jaw-droppingly audacious and bizarre.  It’s certainly the first time I’ve ever been sexually attracted to a rattlesnake.

One hot motherfucker. If you ignore the fact he is voiced by Bill Nighy, this is the sexiest cartoon character since the Beast in "Beauty and the Beast."

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By Pure Film Creative
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March 3, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

I, Monster

I check my look in the mirror I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face. — Bruce Springsteen, Dancing in the Dark [caption id="attachment_746" align="alignright" width="237" caption="The caption for this photo on the site I poached it from said, "Springsteen made it acceptable for men to wear bandanas around their heads." ...

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By Pure Film Creative
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The Fascist John Galliano
March 1, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Spanking Galliano

Killough remembers the time he caused John Galliano to be spanked.

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by James Killough

Seeing that I will never work with John Galliano, there’s no point in waiting until we get my play Hatter up and going in London later this year to tell my story about how I caused him to be spanked.

For those of you just catching up with this blog, Hatter the play is based on a screenplay of mine, about which one of Galliano’s own people, who I imagine is no longer one of his people, once said, “is the only script ever written that is truly about the fashion business.”

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By Pure Film Creative
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