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Moody Wins Coveted "PreVie" Award
Is runner-up in second category
(AP, January 13, 2004) Artist and weblogger Tom Moody has won a coveted PreVie award, given out annually for the best "prereviews" of Hollywood films.
"It was a three-way tie for 'Best Rant,'" says an ecstatic Moody. "The award committee really liked my review of the movie, The Order. No, not the one with Jean-Claude Van Damme, the one about the rogue priests."
"Prereviews" are an Internet phenomenon, where reviewers describe and opine about films they don't see.
"In an information-blitz society, there is so much data out there about films that one can formulate a reasonably good opinion about them," observes Charles Sheckley, a media studies professor at Virginia Polytechnic University. "Also, frankly, Hollywood films are so cookie-cutter and filled with platitudinous 'conventional wisdom,' who actually needs to go?"
Inspiring many other prereview websites, Joe McKay's "PreReview" was the first, and "still absolutely the best," according to TinselTalk, a Hollywood-watching site. McKay raised a few eyebrows by judging this year's competition, especially since he gave himself one of the awards.
"That was a bit tacky, but hey, it's his site," said TinselTalk's Sherry Flanagan.
Moody was also runner-up for his "Classic PreReview" of the movie Top Gun. Classic PreReviews apply to older films and must also not have been seen by the reviewer.
"Yeah, I'm probably the only person in America that hasn't seen Top Gun. But I wasn't confused when everyone was comparing it to Bush's flight deck stunt. I certainly knew it well enough to review it," Moody said.
New Strong Bad email features different generations of cheesy video games. A Pong-level charmer called "Secret Collect," ye texte-bafed gamme called "Dungeonmaster," the ultra-sophisticated "Rhinofeeder," and best of all, a 3-D vector game called "Strongbadzone." In the last, you use your cybershield to block Strongbad's "perplexing 3-D geometric attacks" and whenever you lose a point, a message appears on the screen saying "YOUR HEAD A SPLODE." Wait a few beats after the end of the email and playable versions of the games will appear. Back off, baby!
Great interview here with Christopher Guest, who plays Nigel Tufnel in This Is Spinal Tap and who directed Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. I was surprised to learn that he's a British Lord, his half-brother is Anthony Haden-Guest, and if I can get even more gossipy, he's been married to Jamie Lee Curtis for 20 years. Here's one of my favorite monologues of his:
In Best In Show, Guest played Harlan Pepper, a solemn, lugubrious outdoorsman from South Carolina who bore an uncanny resemblance to his bloodhound Hubert and possessed a talent so absurd that it's hard to imagine anyone but Guest dreaming it up. In Pepper's words, "I used to be able to name every nut there was. And it used to drive my mother crazy. She would hear me in the other room, and she'd just start yelling. I'd say, 'Peanut. Hazelnut. Cashew nut. Macadamia nut.' That was the one that would send her into going crazy. She'd say, 'Would you stop namin' nuts!' And Hubert used to be able to make the sound - he couldn't talk, but he'd go 'Rrrawr rrawr' and that sounded like macadamia nut. Pine nut, which is a nut, but it's also the name of a town. Pistachio nut. Red pistachio nut. Natural, all natural white pistachio nut."[via]
UPDATE: The Guardian's transcript of the monologue is abbreviated. Here's the full text (still missing some "awhhm"s as Harlan thinks of perfectly ordinary nuts, according to Bill):
I used to be able to name every nut that there was. And it used to drive my mother crazy, because she used to say, "Harlan Pepper, if you don't stop naming nuts," and the joke was that we lived in Pine Nut, and I think that's what put it in my mind at that point. So she would hear me in the other room, and she'd just start yelling. I'd say, "Peanut. Hazelnut. Cashew nut. Macadamia nut." That was the one that would send her into going crazy. She'd say, "Would you stop naming nuts!" And Hubert used to be able to make the sound, he couldn't talk, but he'd go "rrrawr rrawr" and that sounded like Macadamia nut. Pine nut, which is a nut, but it's also the name of a town. Pistachio nut. Red pistachio nut. Natural, all natural white pistachio nut.