Mr. Perez Saw a Picture!

listgenerator: SCREAMING POOL Hey there, check out this short I...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 17:13:14 -0500

SCREAMING POOL

Hey there, check out this short I made starring Kurtwood Smith and Jilian Rose Reed. Mike Karnell shot it, Charles Ingram made that rad statue, Rachel Goldenberg produced it and a bunch of other awesome people helped out too!

Great short that no one but Danny Jelinek could have made.

listgenerator: Nick and Charles continue their Captain Planet...

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 05:15:43 -0500

listgenerator:

Nick and Charles continue their Captain Planet series with the one and only Don Cheadle! Stay tuned for more this week!

New CP all week.

Don’t know what this is exactly, but it looks like it...

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:50:50 -0500

Don’t know what this is exactly, but it looks like it might be some of that cool new shit.

At Last, an Excuse to Make a List

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:21:00 -0400

Last week, Sight & Sound magazine released their once-a-decade poll of the world’s greatest films. (In case you missed it, critics ranked Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the best film of all time, directors placed Ozu’s Tokyo Story at the top.) In a world where everyone from AFI to MTV churns out idiotic best-of movie lists, Sight & Sound’s poll is just about the only one worth taking seriously. They poll rarely and they poll the right people- film directors and scholars who don’t treat the task of forming the new canon frivolously.

This all naturally led me to ruminate on what ten films I would choose if I had a say in the matter. (Getting me to make a list is the easiest thing in the world.) However, I realize there’s no way to win at something like this. If my choices are too arcane, I look like a snob. If my choices are too populist, I look like a dullard. So I just tried to be true about what movies I love. If I come off like a philistine, at least I’m an honest philistine.

For what it’s worth, here’s what I like, right now, on an August day in 2012:

Goodfellas (1990, dir: Martin Scorsese)
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worry and Love the Bomb (1964, dir: Stanley Kubrick)
Raising Arizona (1987, dir: Joel and Ethan Coen)
Opening Night (1977, dir: John Cassavetes)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940, dir: John Ford)
Citizen Kane (1941, dir: Orson Welles)
Salesman (1968, dir: Albert and David Maysles)
A Woman Under the Influence (1974, dir: John Cassavetes)
La Grande Illusion (1937, dir: Jean Renoir)
Bringing Out the Dead (1999, dir: Martin Scorsese)

Note: The top eight titles came to me with virtually no struggle. For the last two spots, I broke my brain cycling through dozens of movies, eventually settling on two very personal favorites. But there are probably forty alternates I love just as well. I will not post my illustrious list of runners-up because ten is name of the game, Nancy.

charlesingram: Yo, whatup DAME MAGGIE SMITH. Daaaaaayuuum,...

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:40:45 -0400

charlesingram:

Yo, whatup DAME MAGGIE SMITH.

Daaaaaayuuum, guuuuuuurrrrllll.

scottgairdner: Climp this clump funnyordie: Clip Cup 4 Live:...

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:59:13 -0400

scottgairdner:

Climp this clump

funnyordie:

Clip Cup 4 Live: Campus Climpus

America’s favorite clip show is hitting the road for a college tour! Host Craig Healy clips it up with Loyola Marymount University. Is your school next?

Fresh modes. New stylz. Clip eh de cup.

From the archives: 12/27/08

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:26:00 -0400

Note: I’ve been going through my archives lately and keep coming across odd pieces of writing that never went anywhere. I don’t remember writing this and have trouble imagining any audience that would want to read it. (I think it must have been an attempt at an Onion-style article?) Anyway, here’s one from the archives:

Eartha Kitt and Harold Pinter Go On Date In Heaven

Moments after departing this mortal coil and entering the afterlife, famed playwright Harold Pinter and singer/actress Eartha Kitt met up for a hot dinner date in heaven on Friday. Pinter, author of several highly acclaimed plays including The Homecoming, had always been an admirer of Kitt’s performance as Catwoman on the Batman TV series, but had been too nervous to approach Kitt while living on earth. Likewise, Kitt had been an enthusiastic fan of Pinter’s writing since seeing the 1963 Dirk Bogarde drama The Servant, which Pinter scripted.

Though the two never met while living, Pinter and Kitt died within 24 hours of each other on Christmas Eve, creating perfect timing for a heavenly dinner date. A nearby angel witnessed Pinter and Kitt dining on jelly beans atop of a fluffy cloud while romantic harp music played. Wooing Kitt with dry Pinter-esque witticisms, the playwright was able to get to second base with the singer. After being escorted to their cloud mansions by a band of angels, they made tentative plans for a second date. Kitt serenaded Pinter with a verse from her 1953 Christmas classic Santa Baby and the two deep kissed for several minutes.

This is not the first time two tenuously connected celebrities have rendezvoused in the afterlife. In 1989, a recently dead Bette Davis and Samuel Beckett canoodled at the Pearly Gates. And in August of 1998, Frank Sinatra got a wicked blowjob from Diana, Princess of Whales in the back of his cloud car.

Got to meet my favorite band, Sugar Rush. Check out their new...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:17:19 -0400

Got to meet my favorite band, Sugar Rush. Check out their new Easter song on Funny or Die. (Taken with instagram)

An Alternate Oscar Ballot

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:49:00 -0500

In years past, I’ve usually made a top ten list of my favorite films. It’s a silly annual tradition that the internet has recently allowed me to make embarrassingly public. This year, after pushing through a bottleneck of top ten lists at the end of December, I decided to adopt a different method. Rather than praise the exact same films that were popping up on every critic’s list and nomination ballot, I wanted to illustrate that we had a very fine movie year even if you wiped this current slate of nominees clean. Hence, the idea of the Alternate Oscars.

The rules are simple: I created an alternate Oscar ballot for 8 major categories. I didn’t nominate any film or actor in a category where they received an actual Academy Award nomination. This necessitated leaving off films that I genuinely loved (e.g. Hugo and The Tree of Life are easily among my five favorite films of the year, but they both received Best Picture nominations by the Academy, so I crossed them off my list.) My hope was that by looking at 2011 from a different angle, I can chip away at some of my malaise.

2011 was the most complex and aspirational movie year of the new millennium. With the medium threatened from all sides, filmmakers worked to create durable, almost militantly pro-cinema entertainments. (How else do you explain multiple silent film homages?) Long story short, when the going got tough, the tough got going. And it’s about damned time. In the past couple years, it’s become fashionable to exalt even the clumsiest television artistry and dismiss the most advanced film artistry. Television has its passionate defenders, letter-writers, online petitioners. After every new episode of Breaking Bad, the internet floods with messages declaring it better than any movie. However, major cinematic achievements go unheralded. Did you send a lot of tweets about Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation? No, because it was barely released in America.

Today, movie audiences are terrible because they want to be terrible. They are rebelling against high ticket prices, reboots to reboots, The Smurfs, et al. But it’s the movies- communal experiences with current movies- that I treasure now more than ever. And, as the good book says- for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

BEST PICTURE
Beginners
Bridesmaids
Drive
Melancholia
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

A more culturally relevant Best Picture category would surely include Bridesmaids and Drive, right? After all, those were the movies we actually enjoyed this year. As the struggle for marriage equality continues across the country, Beginners took an intimate and deeply emotional view of oft-politicized matters of the heart. Melancholia was the more bitter (and maybe smarter) cousin to The Tree of Life, not to mention an unparalleled technical masterwork in the first ten minutes alone. And Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was maybe the best spy movie ever. So there we have it- a best picture race that could have been very fun to watch.

BEST DIRECTOR
Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
Brad Bird (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol)
Lars von Trier (Melancholia)
Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive)
Steven Spielberg (War Horse)

My personal choice here would probably be Nicolas Winding Refn, but this entire group is stellar. Alfredson made the most complicated movie of the year, von Trier made the most euphoria-inducing. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol might have had a little too much Paula Patton for a Best Picture nomination, but is there any doubt that Brad Bird revitalized that franchise (and the action genre) in a way none of us expected? And Steven Spielberg made a movie so perfectly Spielbergian in it’s historical scope and liberal scattering of magic dust, it just might be my desert island pick from the master’s canon.

BEST ACTOR
Steve Coogan (The Trip)
Rob Brydon (The Trip)
Ryan Gosling (Drive)
Michael Fassbender (A Dangerous Method and Shame)
Woody Harrelson (Rampart)

A best actor face-off between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon would be my dream for a much, much younger Academy. Gosling gave a better wordless performance than Jean Dujardin, and Fassbender’s omission seems truly perverse in a year where he elevated so many flawed movies. But my actual favorite performance of the year was Woody Harrelson in Oren Moverman’s Rampart. The film itself is a little uneven, but Harrelson gave a brave portrayal of a unlikable man that plays in the same ballpark as Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in There Will Be Blood (this is about the highest praise I can give). Harrelson’s performance might have gone unheralded this year, but he’s probably a film or two away from his rightful acclaim as one of our best living actors. He’s like Brando without all that Brando.

BEST ACTRESS
Juliette Binoche (Certified Copy)
Kristen Dunst (Melancholia)
Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
Charlize Theron (Young Adult)
Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids)

It was such a phenomenally good year for female performances, you could have swapped out all five actual best actress nominees, replaced them with these five and no one would have been the wiser. Kristen Dunst and Charlize Theron made quantum leaps in their ability to portray detached obsessives, Tilda Swinton seemed more like a real person than ever before, and Juliette Binoche gave a performance that, had it been in a major commercial release, would be dominating the discussion of movies in 2011. But my absolute favorite lead performance of the year belonged to Kristen Wiig. She had everything you want in a comic performance- charm, emotion, subtlety and the capability for uproarious mania. When we’ve forgotten so many of this year’s acclaimed performances, we’ll still remember Wiig’s.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Albert Brooks (Drive)
Benedict Cumberbatch (War Horse and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
Ben Kingsley (Hugo)
Viggo Mortensen (A Dangerous Method)
Andy Serkis (Rise of the Planet of the Apes)

Kingsley and Serkis are commodities we take for granted, but they were indispensable to heavy CGI-assisted movies. As Sigmund Freud, Mortensen could have played a cartoon but was instead authoritative and controlled in a way I’ve never seen him. Albert Brooks, (the world’s funniest man), channeled his comic neediness into a repugnant immature killer. But there was no actor I enjoyed seeing in small parts this year than Benedict Cumberbatch. In both War Horse and Tinker Tailor, Cumberbatch was the portrait of low key grace. I predict he’s the next Peter O’Toole, (meaning he’ll always be great and never win an Oscar).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jeannie Berlin (Margaret)
Angelica Houston (50/50)
Mélanie Laurent (Beginners)
Helen McCrory (Hugo)
J. Smith-Cameron (Margaret)

If the Academy had seen Margaret, they surely would have nominated Jeannie Berlin, perhaps J. Smith-Cameron, maybe both. Angelica Houston was the best thing in 50/50, equal parts funny, aggressive, and vulnerable (the kind of role Annette Bening tends to overplay). Helen McCrory was so perfectly understated in Hugo (playing much older than she is, by the way). And Mélanie Laurent has now given two-for-two performances that should have been nominated, (Inglorious Basterds being her first).

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Drive (Hossein Amini)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Steven Zaillian)
A Dangerous Method (Christopher Hampton)
War Horse (Lee Hall and Richard Curtis)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsey and Rory Kinnear)

I do think it odd that the Academy neglected the smartest historical screenplay of the year, A Dangerous Method. Most of the Academy should have been alive to personally know Freud.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Beginners (Mike Mills)
Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
Rango (John Logan)
Win Win (Thomas McCarthy)

I’ll just single out two here: Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret and Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win, two screenplays that function as highly engaging moral puzzles. These aren’t stories of high stakes murder or romance. In these films, the conflict is ethical, interior. Will guilt be resolved? Will the justice be served? How do you do the right thing? Margaret is ungainly, overstuffed, and (for now) unfinished, but any ten minutes of it contains bigger, better ideas than you’re used to in movies. And Win Win has a kind of careful decency that seems archaic. They both deserved bigger audiences.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Rip Torn - For being Rip Torn.

listgenerator: RIP

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:09:35 -0500

listgenerator:

RIP

tightlyclosedbook: Beavis Albert Nobbs

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:49:53 -0500

tightlyclosedbook:

Beavis Albert Nobbs

listgenerator: Justice May Be Blind, But the Courts Machine...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:13:45 -0500

listgenerator:

Justice May Be Blind, But the Courts Machine Sees All

Danny Jelinek wrote and directed this parody of “The George Michael Sports Machine” where I play George Michael. Might be my happiest day as an actor.

Douglas Sirk

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:52:51 -0500

Douglas Sirk

So I’ve decided I’ll occasionally post shorts of my...

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:41:00 -0500

So I’ve decided I’ll occasionally post shorts of my own on tumblr because hey, why not?

Here’s one starring Tim Meadows as Herman Cain. Many terrific people were involved in this, but listgenerator lost a night’s sleep working on it, so he receives special mention.

listgenerator:

funnyordie:

Herman Cain’s 1986 Sexual Harassment Training with Tim Meadows

In this 1986 sexual harassment training video for Godfather’s Pizza, Herman Cain explains the dos and don’ts of sex in the workplace.

New Ryan Perez video! Really happy I got to work on this one! Tim Meadows is hilarious!

"One, we owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to..."

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:27:00 -0400

“

One, we owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.

Two, every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else’s. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.

Three, when we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.

Four, no artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.

Five, at any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on. They will fight or intrigue to work on a subject they feel is urgent or contemporary, and fight equally hard to avoid working on a trivial or pointless subject. And we agree with them and want the best workmen with us; and get them. These are the main things we believe in. They have brought us an unbroken record of success and a unique position. Without the one, of course, we should not enjoy the other very long. We are under no illusions. We know we are surrounded by hungry sharks. But you have no idea what fun it is surf-bathing, if you have only paddled, with a nurse holding on to the back of your rompers.

We hope you will come on in, the water’s fine.

”

- The Archers Manifesto as outlined by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger