Look, if you’re a fairly intelligent person, it’s not that impressive to be an A student. I mean, big deal, all you’ve got to do is study all the time and work really, really hard. Easy. I’ve never been all that impressed by A students. In fact, there’s a name for those poor saps who studied all the time in college while I was out having the time of my life. It starts with SUC and I bet you can guess what the rest is. That’s right – SUCcessful doctors and lawyers. CRAP! I ruined my life. Alright, so, aside from the substantially improved likelihood of wealth, success, prestige, respectability and the sort of job where, when you wear a suit everyone doesn’t just automatically assume you’re interviewing for another job or fighting a DUI conviction, working hard all the time to be an A student is just not that impressive. It’s way more impressive be a B+ student and do absolutely no work at all – like me! I mean, sure, I could have stayed up all night for three days in a row writing an exhaustively researched 30 page term paper on Media Strategies in the 1988 Presidential Election filled with well thought out opinions substantiated by hard facts and data. If I was LAME. No, I chose to take the “road more awesome” (to quote Robert Frost) and throw down ten pages of triple spaced 13 point Arial yumminess chock full of wild speculation about Kitty Dukakis’ hairspray addiction based on an article in Newsweek, a couple of book jackets and half a Larry King Live with Olympia Dukakis (I fell asleep). BOOM. Plug in the Nintendo, fire up the bong and drop the mic. Peace Out.  I mean, there’s an important life lesson here. It’s not What You Know or Who You Know that counts in life, it’s How Well You Can Bullshit and How Little Effort You Can Get Away With Putting In that matters and the sooner you learn that, the more frustration you’ll save yourself in the working world when you work your ass off in anonymity and still get laid off while some lazy idiot rich kid with cooler hair and a higher Klout score than you could ever dream of gets promoted to VP of Marketing cause he can use the word “viral” in a sentence correctly when not referring to the spread of disease. The key to successful bullshit is confidence. Remember, what you lack in “information” you can make up for with “volume”. Just use the Fox News Ignorance to Assertiveness Ratio to figure out how loud you need to be (there’s an app on their website). Plus, by not living up to my potential, I cultivated this great aura of mystery. Everybody always wondered just what I could accomplish if I ever truly applied myself but, HA! The joke’s on them, cause I never truly applied myself and I accomplished nothing! So…ha ha? CRAP! I wasted my life. And, not for nothing, but it was a lot harder for me to squander my academic potential than it is for kids today. We live in a golden age for lazy students. Just think about how much incorrect information they have at their fingertips. Why come up with your own poorly researched wild speculation when you can just steal someone else’s? It’s my 19-year-old self’s dream come true! Hell, I could write a whole term paper just from Facebook memes. As Martin Luther King said: “Have you noticed that you can put any random series of words next to my face in a jpg and post it on Facebook and everyone will think it’s like a real quote and they should take it seriously? Just try it! Put “purple grapefruit frog tomato” next to that black and white picture of me looking all visionary and shit and everyone’ll start...

Director, Writer, Artist and Musician Marc Hampson braved the heat of our North Hollywood studios to delve into the complicated and fascinating world of independent filmmaking. We end up disappointed with Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing and defending Zach Braff’s recent Kickstarter brouhaha. Who expected that? Album reviews and discussions include Tricky’s newest False Idols and everyone’s favorite band to listen to in the background, The National’s Trouble Will Find Me. Listen to it here: Your browser does not support the audio element. Podcast Powered By Podbean   Or download it here. Pub Trivia 10 Score: Related Links: Much Ado About Nothing Review Gordon Family Tree Press Brotherhood Pictures And just because I love the movie and you should watch...

Parties at Joss Whedon’s place must be an absolute pleasure. Intelligent, pretty people bantering about, dressed in finely tailored suits and gowns, drinking fine wine and basking in the serenity (no pun intended) of a glorious evening. The film Much Ado About Nothing however, based on the classic Shakespeare comedy and shot over a 12 day period at Whedon’s house, is a little more like your friend mangling a report about what a great time he had. You should’ve been there. There’s been much ado about Whedon modernizing the play and right off the bat we’re shown Benedick leaving Beatrice alone in bed. The implication diverges in an encouraging way but soon we realize that outside of location and costumes, not much else has will be updated. The characters speak the Bard’s words verbatim (with few exceptions), creating a strange juxtaposition between the modern visual context and the Renaissance sensibility of the source material. The blocking and dialogue exchanges feel more like actors practicing their lines at home before performing them theatrically at a later date. I wish the film had followed the lead of its opening scene. Outside of for the sake of doing it, I can’t figure out why the decision was made keep the original dialogue, references and themes intact. The characters presented don’t embody them in an way. Alexis Denisoff’s Benedick is about as much a war hero as Amy Acker’s Beatrice. Both are amiable enough in their roles, Acker especially. They’re not Branagh and Thompson, but if they were Branagh and Thompson, the same objections would apply. It’s not their fault. If you’re going to modernize Much Ado About Nothing, why not update it with more than revolvers, swimming pools and automobiles? It’s not like satirizing patriarchal double standards is more difficult in 2013 than it was 400 years ago. It may not be acceptable to strangle your daughter to death for an affair (in the Western world anyway), but the same hysteria exists. In the interest of fairness, I should point out that it’s a relatively harmless experience. The black and white is gorgeous, the actors are having a great time, the direction is slick and Nathan Fillion’s hilarious Dogberry is almost worth a recommendation on its own. I realize that, to many people, this review will come off as little more than me not getting it. That’s fair, but I wanted to like this, I really did. I’m a sucker for directors gathering friends to make passion projects over a weekend or two. I just wanted Much Ado About Nothing to establish itself as more than a whim. Rated PG-13 – Limited release in NY, LA and San...

THE INTERNSHIP For reasons that still evade me, Wedding Crashers was a phenomenal hit back in 2005, grossing $209M at the domestic box office. 20th Century Fox is hoping the Vaughn/Wilson man-child machine can duplicate that return some eight years later. I still don’t understand the appeal of Wedding Crashers, but as I once told my boss at New Line Cinema, “nobody ever made money on what I like.” [Note to Self: Don’t f*cking say that. What’re you, stupid?] Is there an actor who FedExs his performance in from a shorter distance than Vince Vaughn these days (besides Bruce Willis and Adam Sandler)? Vaughn looks like he boxed his part up in 2006 with the note, “Do Not Open Until Desperate.” The Professor Xavier bit is worth a chuckle I guess. I don’t know man, I’m out. Feel free to tell me how amazing The Internship is in the comments (with a scan of your ticket or it doesn’t count).   THE PURGE Like Sinister, The Purge is another entry on the ever-growing list of “What Ethan Hawke Does To Keep The Lights On While Making Good Movies.” [See: Before Midnight] Sinister doesn’t entirely suck and maybe this won’t either, especially if you like routine home invasion flicks with THE F*CKING STUPIDEST PREMISE OF ALL TIME attached to it. All right movie, let me get this straight, if we suspend criminal punishment for one day a year, unemployment will be 1% and all other crime will vanish for the remaining 364 days? Economic inequality and the ramifications thereof disappear because every June 7th we get to steal a bike, shiv an old guy and rape a cat? Eat it with a side of poop movie! I hear on Wall Street, The Purge is being released as Tuesday. True Story: When you write screenplays, people pitch you “ideas” for a movie all the time. Not ideas they think are worth fleshing out to 105 pages on their own, but if you do it, guaranteed hit! Most of the “ideas” are minimally different variations on The Running Man, Die Hard, The Matrix or something they just watched. “Three guys wake up in Reno after a crazy work retreat and they’re all like, ‘what the hell happened?” Anyway, years ago my co-writer was pitched an idea by her dad called Kill Day about a utopian society where people get to murder one person every year…for some reason. It was one of the dumbest concepts we’d heard up to that point (though he had many more of equal silliness). We laughed it off accordingly and went back to writing something no one would eventually care about. When I saw the trailer for The Purge I said to myself, “Mother f*cker, they made Kill Day.” Let that be a lesson to you screenwriters out there, write every idea your dad comes up with. In Hollywood, stupid is an asset.   MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Due to a strict deadline for an unrelated Fierce & Nerdy obligation, I won’t be doing a video review of this one until next week. I will be discussing it on the podcast however, so look forward to that. I said look forward! Loooooooook! While working on a little movie that flew under the radar last year, Joss Whedon invited some friends over to his Santa Monica home and shot this much higher profile retelling of Shakespeare’s classic comedy. It’s shot in black and white with a jazzy soundtrack but sadly doesn’t star Keanu Reeves. Oops. Ted Theadore Logan’s recitation of Early Modern English was the glue that held the Branagh version together. Despite this egregious oversight, Much Ado About Nothing opens in limited release in NY, LA and San Francisco on Friday. That means you can either see it at a movie theater or watch it performed live a few blocks away by a fledgling theatre group in black...