Jan01

Twitter In Focus: Ravengregory

by tonyd on January 1, 2009 at 1:34 am

Bros, the media is like a snake eating its own tail.  It’s stupid and it’s very, very hungry.  So ravenous in fact, that we here at the Frat House decided that we had to get in front of this media train or get run over by it.  That’s right bros.  Myspace is dead.  Facebook is the new myspace and soon, facebook will be myspace.  But right now, Twitter is the new myspace.  A piece of media designed to appeal to our ever-shrinking attention spans.  I know, I lost you already because blogging is so 2006.  So let’s get to it before you click on more Asian porn.  It’s time to over-analyze this new media because no one else has and we just happen to be friends with one of the funniest guys you could ever meet: Raven Gregory.

Ravengregory, however, is on twitter.  Fifty years ago, getting on the airwaves and spewing these streams of consciousness would’ve gotten you a one-way trip to the looney bin, but today, for the 52 seconds it takes you to read this, Raven is famous.

Dec. 23, 2008, 10:41 pm:  “I just had high school sex with my wife. It took ever ounce of imaginations on both our parts but it was so worth it. Getting old blows.”

Here, Raven undermines the one cool thing that happened to him on the 23rd.  But to him, it’s not about the sex, it’s a statement onthe human condition.  Struggling against the inevitable!

Dec. 23, 2008, 11:08 pm: “And I binged today. Gained back 6 fucking pounds in one day. I am weak willed. Should be overfed like someone in a Fincher film.”

Raven eats alot.  I’ve seen him order two full meals, with sides and chow down.  But note the self-loathing.  He feels bad about it.  Then he mentions “a Fincher film” as if Fincher had made only movies like Se7en.  I guess that’s just the one Raven has seen or likes.  I mean, he also made Fight Club.  Do these guys look overfed?

Dec. 24, 2008, 10:39 am: “@TonyDiGerolamo Ah, young grasshopper. You are not yet in years to understand the complexitity of long term married life.”

My bro, Raven, always looking out for me.

Dec. 24, 2008, 10:22 pm: “Less than four hours and Santa is getting his ass jacked and I’m coming up on a brand new flat screen 42 screen tv. Yup.”

What’s crazier in this sentence?  That Raven wants to mug the most generous fictional character ever created, that he thinks the same said character can carry a sack full of 42″ TV’s or that he has a specific time to mug him?

Dec. 27, 2008, 4:39 am: “Another sign of getting old. Was watching some drive by porn. Saw the deco in the background and thought, hey, I like the interior design.”

This is definitely a 4am post.  What the Hell is “drive by porn”?  Did he drive by another person’s house who was watching porn and watch that?

Dec. 27, 2008, 6:07 pm: “Just in Beranek was found overdosed on hemophrodite midgit porn wearing granny panties stolen from garage sale in Hollwood. May have crabs”

There is a porn theme running here.  14 hours later and he’s still talking about porn.  Who really overdosed on hermophrodite midgit porn, Raven?  Hmm?

Dec. 27, 2008, 8:57 pm:  “Just got done shaving my mangina bald. Will now paint elephant ears near the top to sell the illusion of my massive trunk.”

And now the train leaves the tracks and we get some really primo Ravengregory twitter.  This is what thousands of years of civilization and technology has led us: so that Ravengregory can talk to the world about shaving his junk.

Dec. 30, 2008, 3:55 am:  “Had a horrible dream last night. I dreamed I awoke in an alternative dimension and all the people were clones of Christina Beranek. + I was an underage Thai-girl that didn’t understand that “blow job” had nuthin to do with the vasaline soaked candles held in their hands.”

Here’s the amazing thing about Raven.  He’s a writer, yet, he’ll still write something like “vasaline soaked” at 4am.  You can’t soak candles in vaseline, but Raven’s not one of those anal-retentive, grammar Nazis that will let something like the physics of sticking a solid candle into the jelly center of a jar of Vaseline stop him from twittering.

Dec. 31, 2008, 3:22 am:  “Spent the night getting beat up by an eight year old at wrestling. Video games are no longer for me.”

Poor Raven, he’s getting old.  But not too old that he can’t type on his mobile phone about whatever he’s doing.

All right, so how do we review Raven’s twittering?  Let’s break it down like this:  We’ll rate everyone for their Style, how much Insanity they bring to the airwaves, the “Mustness” of their posts (ie how badly you have to read them) and, finally, an overall average representing, from 1 to 10 just how badly they are contributing to the degredation of human communication.

(Raven, pictured above.  Don’t forget to check out his comics at Zenescope.)

Keeping in mind, I am friends with Raven, I have to give him a 7 on Style (because he can be kinda crude), a 9 for Insanity (well, just go back and read), a 10 for Mustness (I’m totally hooked), which gives him an overall Twitter in Focus rating of  8.67.

If you have someone to nominate for Twitter in Focus, twitter TonyDiGerolamo

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Dec29

Tony D Update

by tonyd on December 29, 2008 at 11:43 pm

Hey bros:

Yours truly doesn’t normally make excuses for missing a post, but—  Between the holidays, catching the flu and buying a new house, I missed today’s post.  I do, however, have a new house.  Me and the missus closed today after six hour ordeal.  Many thanks to cousin Jennifer at the title agency and Betsy our realtor.  I am officially moving out of the boondocks and back to the civilized suburbs where I belong.

Don’t miss the final Dick Masterson strip this week and more strips and post to follow.  But today, just this once…I sleep!

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Dec27

Frat Boy At the Movies: Valkyrie

by tonyd on December 27, 2008 at 3:42 pm

I’ll admit that I went into Valkyrie expecting to have to hold my sides from laughing so hard at Tom Cruise with an eye patch.  I mean, look at that.  Rumor has it the test audiences were laughing at the trailer and that director Bryan Singer went back and added scenes before Col. Von Cruise loses his eye.

That being said, Valkyrie isn’t all that bad and most of what’s bad isn’t Cruise’s fault.  The character he is playing is Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the man that came damned close to assassinating Hitler.  He’s a fascinating figure and shares a lot in common with Tom Cruise, so you can see why he wanted to play him.  Stauffenberg was strikingly handsome, a talented guy, an alpha male and like Cruise, who is part of the Hollywood aristocracy, was a German Count.  Cruise actually resembles the real guy.

But the movie goes wrong almost from the get-go.  (Spoilers)  In the opening scene, Cruise as Stauffenberg, is writing a letter and the voice over is in German.  It sounds like Cruise doing the accent and it’s decent.  Cruise strikes me as the kind of actor that would spend eight months speaking nothing but German if he had to, to get down his accent.  But almost immediately, it dissolves into English.  And even though Cruise is a really talented actor, Cruise in English just sounds like Tom Cruise and from then on its hard to see him as anything else than a guy in a costume.  One of the scenes in the movie that’s actually true is when Stauffenberg tells his new assistant that he’s in the midst of committing high treason.  Point blank he asks him to join him and he does.  This actually happened, but with Tom Cruise delivering the lines it feels more like a “Cruisism”.  Some needless bravado added to make the actor look cool.  Most audiences are not going to get the feeling that Stauffenberg was actually that ballsy.

In Singer’s defense, the movie doesn’t suffer from lags or get over embroiled in details.  I guess what it suffers from is the lack of details.  Characters that were eliminated from the plot include Stauffenberg’s two brothers and the Grey Fox, Erwin Rommel.  The latter of whom was given the choice of drinking poison or having he and his family executed.  Rommel didn’t actually participate in the plot, but knew about it and never warned Hitler.  Hitler tightened his grip on the German government after that, replacing all the key military posts with Nazi loyalists.

But even if you add all that, you don’t get a real sense of why the Germans followed Hitler up to this point.  Part of the problem is, in most movies Nazis are nothing but moving targets for our heroes.  In this movie, it’s crucial that we learn more about Stauffenberg and why he followed Hitler as long as he did.  Read this encyclopedia entry for Stauffenberg.   Interesting stuff, but most of it is not in the movie.  Instead, Singer focuses on the events around the assassination attempt, which weren’t all that interesting.  Basically, Stauffenberg waltzed in, left a bomb in a briefcase and got out before it exploded.  Hitler was saved because he was crazy and crazy ol’ Hitler moved the meeting out of the bunker because it was hot.  Had the bomb exploded in the bunker, the air pressure would’ve killed everyone.  Had Stauffenberg placed the bomb on the opposite side of the large oak table Hitler was standing next to, it would’ve killed him.  And, had Stauffenberg managed to get the second bomb in place, it probably would’ve killed him.

But big deal.  We know going into it, Hitler doesn’t die from the assassination.  What we need to know is how did Stauffenberg, a guy with balls of steel, manage to almost pull it off.   What drove him to defy, as a German officer, Hitler during the height of his power?  Also, you don’t get much of a sense of what Hitler did to guys who resisted.  I guess Singer assumes most people will just remember that Nazis are really bad.  But, if he’s relying on his audience’s memories of Nazis, most of them are movie memories.  And movie Nazis are, for the most part, heartless, evil tools of oppression for Indiana Jones to foil and shoot.  What we needed to see is how the Nazis were the German people in power, not the entire German people.  I think it would’ve been a better movie had it centered around the life of Stauffenberg, the rise of the Nazis, his eventual downfall and less on Count Von Cruise shouting orders to other actors.

I give this movie 5 kegs out of 10.

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Dec22

Frat Boy At the Movies: Slumdog Millionaire

by tonyd on December 22, 2008 at 10:05 am

Director Danny Boyle who has given us 28 Days Later and Trainspotting returns with this epic movie about love in Mumbai India.  The movie is just about to go out of arthouse film theaters and I say, get there before it does.

I think movies and stories work best when they teach you something about the world where it takes place.  This movie teaches you something about India.  I’ve never been to India, but watching the main character’s life over 10 years or so, I felt like I had.    When you compare this movie to say, The Day the Earth Stood Still, you see the former for the lumbering, special-effects filled lummox it is.  Slumdog has heart, story, passion and fun.  TDTESS feels like everyone was just rushing to collect a good pay day.

(minor spoilers ahead)  Without trying to give the entire movie away, Slumdog centers around Jamal.  He and his brother Salim grow up in the most impoverished section of Mumbai, with only their mother to protect them.  But in present day, Jamal is being tortured by the cops because they think he cheated on India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.  But some of the answers came to Jamal because of events that happened in his life and there’s a more important reason he’s on the show.

In flashback, we follow Jamal and Salim’s life on the streets.  They eventually meet up with Latika and Jamal falls in love with her.  But, as kids, Salim is jealous and prevents Latika from following them after a particularly harrowing experience with Indian gangsters.  As the years grind on, Jamal gets a job, but his brother becomes a gangster and it all comes to a head in classic fashion

And just like all Indian movies, there’s a dance number at the end, but its at the credits so it doesn’t interupt the story.

I got hooked on this movie.  It goes from two kids litterally living in a pile of trash to the heights of fame and fortune in India.  There’s also a great sequence at the Taj Mahal too.  Maybe if you’re an expert on India or lived in India for a long time, this movie might not ring totally true, I don’t know.  But it worked for me and I felt a real sense of what people, especially poor Muslims, must have to go through to live there.

Overall, a really solid movie to take a chick to see and you won’t be bored either bros.  (Salim does kick some ass.)  I give this movie 9 kegs out of 10.

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