Oh my. The whole wide internet is now talking about David Cross’ blog post in defense of his decision to cash in on Alvin and the Chipmunks. Cross was apparently moved to write the post, at least in part, by “a snide comment” made by fellow comedian Patton Oswalt on his own blog. Oswalt, who acknowledges the irony that he’s somehow managed to maintain some modicum of credibility even after playing “the fat sidekick from King Of Queens” for something like three decades, had originally claimed that “[B]oth Brian Posehn and I were offered the part [in Alvin]. We both threw the script across the room in disgust. David Cross caught it.”
Now, in a letter ostensibly addressed to Cross, published by The A.V. Club, Oswalt says said snide comment was actually an inside joke which Cross just didn’t get. Oswalt says he ran into Cross after attending the premiere of Failure to Launch, in which Oswalt had “a tiny, three-line part in the movie, and I used it as a way to scam Paramount into flying me to Manhattan for a few days.” And then…
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David Cross has written a long blog post justifying his appearance in Alvin and the Chipmunks. He lists four “mitigating factors” (and #4 has a sub-clause, so it’s really five), but it all pretty much comes down to what you’d expect: “indie hipster cred” doesn’ pay for upstate cottages, and he needed the job. An excerpt:
I like to work. I really do…Up to working on Alvin I had not worked in six (SIX!) months. That is an eternity if you’re an actor. Think about not working for two months with no hope of anything on the horizon. Now triple that. It was the longest period without work since after Ben Stiller got cancelled (the show, not the man) and I was going nuts. I was depressed and difficult to live with. I was VERY happy to have the work. Again, no regrets.
Cross basically has to do this (the blog post, not the work) because his fan base consists in large part of post-punk consumerists––ie: people who themselves enjoy the spoils of consumer culture, but persist on holding their cultural icons to an impossible high standard of “integrity” and commercial purity. This is why we don’t see similar posts from, say Helen Mirren, justifying her choice to follow up her Oscar-winning work in The Queen by playing sexy academic in National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Which is a shame, because I’d love to see her follow in David Cross’ footsteps, and use a New York Times review as evidence for why her fans could/should “suck it.”
Earlier this week, Grady Hendrix (co-founder of Subway Cinema, the collective that puts on the annual New York Asian Film Festival) re-launched his Kaiju Shakedown Asian cinema blog at Variety. Yesterday, Hendrix posted a mighty listicle, in an effort to catch his readers up on the Asian film world gossip that they missed while the blog was on its “six month bathroom break.” And thank God he did, because otherwise, we would have never known about this post on Jackie Chan’s official blog, dated July 16 and titled “Absolutely No Fun”. An excerpt:
Today is Monday. I have to begin my fourth day of prosthetic make-up. Thinking about doing the same thing tomorrow just makes me feel like there is no joy in life. Supposedly, I was scheduled to finish filming my prosthetic make-up shots today. But they told me they needed an extra day because they haven’t finished filming all the shots. When I heard this news, my whole body felt like it was about to break down. I totally lost my appetite. I didn’t want to drink. I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want to make any phone calls. Even if someone called me, I didn’t want to answer the phone. I didn’t want to write my diary. If they needed me to film, then I would film. Otherwise, I didn’t want to do anything else…
The prosthetics are for a film Chan is making for The Weinstein Company with Jet Li, called Forbidden Kingdom, and since the pairing of the two stairs makes this a huge project for martial arts fans he’s apparently contractually forbidden from releasing pictures of the “no fun” make-up job (Twitch linked to some cast photos in June, but there are no close-ups of Chan). We wouldn’t want to wish this kind of suffering on anyone, but you’ve got to wonder: is Chan undergoing some kind of karmic retribution for continually enabling the ascendancy of Brett Ratner?
