Tacos and Beer

I’m posting this a few days late. But Friday was March 15, AKA the Ides of March, AKA the anniversary of the first DVD release of INTERPLANETARY in 2011. I always forget that movie came out in 2011 because it should have come out much earlier. But that movie was literally years in the making — it was a tough movie to finish! I am always happy to see that my old blog about the making of INTERPLANETARY... I’m posting this a few days late. But Friday was March 15, AKA the Ides of March, AKA the anniversary of the first DVD release of Interplanetary in 2011. I always forget that movie came out in 2011 because it should have come out much earlier. But that movie was literally years in the making — it was a tough movie to finish! I am always happy to see that my old blog about the making of Interplanetary is still available on Blogger. And I am happy that people can still watch the movie — it’s currently streaming on Tubi .

I’ve been playing music with Eric McGinty for two decades now. Our band the Exhibit(s) has recorded a couple of albums, and Eric worked on the music for several of my film projects. (You can listen to our albums on Bandcamp here and here , and you can check out Hide and Creep if you’d like to hear some of Eric’s film scoring work.) Eric and I have been talking about recording another (very overdue) Exhibit(s) album, plus maybe a side project album, so I’ve been thinking about recording drums. The obvious way to record drums is to go to a professional studio and pay a professional engineer to record the drums. But that kind of stresses me out. Drums are generally the foundation of rock music recordings, which means the drums need to be recorded first. And given that I am not the most consistent drummer, I worry about wasting everybody’s time and money while they wait for me to get my parts recorded correctly. I can’t record drums at home because I live in an apartment, and I ...

Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt makes the case for heroic guitar solos . He also nerds out about Van Halen and Queen and Supertramp. Defining what exactly is a “hair metal” band is tricky on its own. Rolling Stone gave it a shot and then put together a list of the 50 greatest hair metal albums of all time . Not the list I would have made (Faster Pussycat’s second album should be on this list!), but some good picks in here all the same. A Superwoman that almost was . Sometimes comic books influence movies, and then those movies influence comic books .

The Venture Bros. is probably my favorite TV show ever. It’s like the one show I wish I could have worked on. It got canceled a while back, but the Venture Bros. movie is high on my list of best films of 2023. If you’re a Venture fan, here’s a good Swimpedia interview with the creators of show . I mean, it’s a good interview regardless, but it won’t make a lot of sense to folks who aren’t well-steeped in Venture lore. And speaking of great cartoons, here’s the lost-until-recently six-minute Boondocks pilot .

Michael Shelton (who’s been in almost every movie I’ve ever made) texted me earlier to let me know we started working on our third feature film ten years ago today. Hoo boy, time sure flies. I wasn’t blogging while we were making that movie. Its working title was Red Season , but the real title (I love the real title, and all credit to co-director/co-writer Chuck for coming up with it) is For a Few Zombies More . It’s a sequel to our first feature, Hide and Creep , but it’s an old-fashioned sequel that should make sense for anybody, whether or not they’ve seen Hide and Creep . If you haven’t seen For a Few Zombies More , you can literally watch it right now — it’s available free-with-ads on Tubi.

I don’t usually watch a lot YouTube. But sometimes I go to look for something on YouTube and end up falling down random YouTube rabbit holes... Here’s a Veruca Salt demo tape from 1993 . And here’s a video from the ’90s titled “Veruca Salt — Out of the Loop.” Not sure where it came from, but it features some interview clips with the band and ends with a really nice hanging-out-on-the-couch acoustic performance. And here’s the great Sam Rockwell talking about some of his great acting roles . And here’s a playlist of the broadcast versions (including commercials!) of a bunch of episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 . (If you want to watch non-boogleg episodes of MST3K , you should definitely check out the Gizmoplex . There’s also a Gizmoplex app for Apple TV !) Not from YouTube, but the Too Scary; Didn’t Watch podcast recently tackled Prince of Darkness , which is possibly John Carpenter’s most underrated movie.

Congrats to my pal Andrew Bellware on getting his PhD! His doctoral thesis is about how music works in movies. Apparently in his thesis he mentioned that a friend rescored 2001: A Space Odyssey using 1980s pop songs. I am that friend! That friend is me! I wish I could show you my “remixed” 2001 . But it obviously breaks several copyright laws, so I assume if I put it on YouTube it’d get immediately pulled. That said, I did make a trailer for it, and the trailer is somehow still on YouTube. So who knows.

I am an iPhone guy. And I’ve been an iPhone guy basically since they started making iPhones. It’s been fascinating to see the camera evolve from rudimentary (low-res stills and no video) on the first iPhone to generally amazing (comparable to many “real” cameras) on modern iPhones. My current phone is a couple of years old — I am an iPhone guy, but I am not a gotta-get-a-new-iPhone-every-year guy. But I am going to have to get a new one pretty soon, because apparently the camera on the current “pro” iPhone is legitimately pro. I mean, you can shoot “log” video on an iPhone 15 Pro and record it to an external USB-C drive! Stu Maschwitz has an excellent blog post about how he uses professional post-production tools to color correct shot-on-iPhone video. Be sure to check out the post’s embedded video to see some examples of how good iPhone video can look these days. Speaking of professional post-production... Here’s a video about the visual effects of (the most excellent) ...