Marion Cotillard

It's pretty hard to not have a crush on Marion Cotillard. She's pretty. Sure. Sure. But she's also a good actress. Like real good. And if that wasn't enough- did you know she is in, what Vanity Fair describes as, an Expressionist-Surrealist band?

On playing in the Expressionist-Surrealist band Yodelice fronted by composer Mazim Nucci:
"I play the bass guitar, keyboard, and tambourine--I'm their one-woman band and all-purpose maid," Cotillard explains. She's taken to appearing with Yodelice on tour, dressed as a man, under "Simone," the name of her maternal grandmother. "It's pretty refreshing to be in a situation where the spotlight is on someone else."

Now, you can check out the band on their MySpace page (is this 2004? Did France not get the memo re:Facebook?)- and you might think "this is just some interesting singer-songwriter stuff- I don't get the surrealist angle" to which I would respond "YOU SHUT YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH! DON'T YOU EVER- E!V!E!R!- SAY ANYTHING THAT IN ANY WAY CONTRADICTS SOMETHING THE LOVELY SURREALIST MS. COTILLARD SAYS OR EVEN IMPLIES! EVER!" "My issue was really more with Vanity Fair's descript-" "I WILL PUNCH YOU- IN THE FACE- WITH MY HAND!"

Also, she did something with some other band... um, but with singing... What band was it? The Arctic Monkeys- or The Killers- one of those bands I don't really care about... Coldplay? Are Coldplay still together? I don't know. What do I look like? Pitchfork?

Dan

Surreal Medical Instructions

I have bronchitis, which sucks, but it will all be worth it if our readers share the same appreciation for these completely insane instructions I just got for this new inhaler. There has been a lot of digital ink spilled about Engrish instructions, so I won't go into that. But illustrated, language-independent instructions are catching on, and there are some basic insanities sewn into the fabric of those, too.

I got a medicated inhaler, which I guess is what asthmatic people have, but I'm supposed to spray it into this bottle and then breathe from the bottle. These are the instructions I received for the contraption, and my interpretation for each of the illustrated steps.


Step 1: Remove caps from bottle and inhaler.
Step 2: Insert bottle into eyeball.
Step 3: Attempt to detonate bottle. (I have no idea, though. This one's a mystery).
Step 4: Breathe from bottle. Do not listen to music.

Ok, I feel like ass, so it won't REALLY all be worth it if you guys appreciate this health care industry Surrealism, but we've got this blog, and I can't keep putting angry beavers on it.

Vince out.

Drugs and Surrealism

Dan and I don't really have an avowed position on controlled substances except to say this -- when people say that taking a consciousness-altering drug was "surreal," they're wrong. Surrealism, as we've probably talked about before (I mean, right? This seems like the kind of thing we'd talk about), is about two things that don't necessarily belong together colliding unexpectedly. And consciousness-altering drugs sort of render the idea of "unexpected" obsolete.

I mean, this isn't surreal: "Dude, I took a hit of acid and started seeing monkeys climbing all over my walls, and guess what? They all had kazoos and were playing Tool songs...on their kazoos!" This, however, would be: "Dude, I took a hit of acid and didn't see anything weird at all, so I went to the grocery store, bought some soup and stuff, then came home and mowed the yard, then my neighbor came over and we watched SportsCenter." Clearly, without the drugs context, the first scenarios seems defintely stranger than the second, but when you factor in drug use, the potential for Surrealism really starts to drop off.

All of that said, drugs can produce Surrealism, but the context has to be somehow Surreal -- someone unexpected on a hallucinogen, for instance. Like this seven-year-old boy who lives on YouTube.



Vince out.

At the Beach, Keepin' it (Sur)Real

We don't usually go to the beach. We've got a lot of reasons for this- the main one rhymes with "bird bipple"... Anyway, we've just sort of assumed that the people at the beach aren't anything like us- But then we saw this dude.

He's a possible PSUA member, adding a little bit of surrealism to the lives of everyone on the beach that day.

Thanks dude, well done. And as a tribute I'm going to set my desktop to a beach scene and drag my mouse around- it looks exactly the same!

Dan

Welcome, Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman has just been named a lifetime honorary member of the Practicing Surrealists Union of America, thanks to his film Synecdoche, New York. A lot of you might be thinking "Crap, shouldn't he have already been in there for, like, that movie about the puppet and the actor who played that jewel thief? Or that one where Francis Coppola's nephew tried to steal some orchids? Or, hey, what about that one where Ace Ventura and that naked girl from Titanic gave their brains to Mary Jane Watson?"

No. Because Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may have all been odd, but on some very fundamental level, they all made sense. People did and said and felt things that exhibited some continuity within the narrative space of the films.

Not so with Synecdoche, New York. Among other things, Samantha Morton's character moves into a house that's constantly on fire because she's thirty-six and thought she'd be married and have a family by now. To say anything else about this film would be spoiling it for you.

So we say congratulations, Charlie, and offer you dues-free lifetime membership in the PSUA. For those of you who haven't seen the movie (which is all of you, probably), here's what Charlie Kaufman did in the space of two hours and four minutes:

1) make the highst-profile, most expensive, and unabashedly Surreal feature film since That Obscure Object of Desire, and
2) win all the bets he made that "After this, nobody will ever let me direct a film again."

We don't even need to ask if it was worth it. It was. We know it was. Charlie, thank you.

Vince out.

Artful Global Warming Protest...

Sometimes art doesn't mean anything. (See everything we've ever done).

But sometimes it does- and that's cool, I guess... sort of takes the fun out of it, but I'd rather these people (i.e. people with beliefs, who like, care about stuff...) express themselves this way instead of picketing, writing letters, voting, etc...

This at least looks cool.

And it certainly does make the world a little more surreal for the people who pass by- which, now that I think about it, is the one cause that we support.

So we agree with this protest, however, ideologically we believe it's much more surreal to think that global warming is some sort of conspiracy made up by a team of radical environmentalists who want to... um... like... pass laws to make the world better... or something... Oh! And deregulate trees, and then the trees can take over. If they have their way, this time next year we'll all be married to trees... Or something, right? Could someone clear this up for me?

Dan

Update: Surrealist Magnum Opus

A while back, I invited everybody to contribute lines to the First Ever Dan and Vince and the Whole World's Surrealist Magnum Opus...Print Edition. Well, it's not proceeding quite at the pace I envisioned, but it is progressing, so I wanted to give everybody an update.

Here's what we've got so far:

A fish popsicle, trying to breathe, trying to prove to a Zambian expat that, if you put your mind to it, anything is possible. Je suis une main. Ma poubelle est pourpre.
“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” I said, “is actually a communist propaganda song. Have you heard the other verses?” The ingredients of water are as follows: water. Certain trees -- some deciduous, some coniferous, some man-eating – have been known to hazard the arduous trek between Grand Rapids and St. Louis. Which is in Michigan. Stay clear of them. They wish not to be seen.
“My pants! What have they done to my pants!” MTV has stolen my children.
Coolidge, Jennifer M. 310.953.8513
Coolidge, Jennifer Y. 323.232.9001
Coolidge, Xerxes S. 310.496.3481
Coolkamp, P.P. 213.898.3344
The PA crackled again. “Please report to the principal’s office.” I wept. The sun hit Raymond Chandler’s grave at 7:14 am, PDT, this morning. Is this for real? Are you guys really doing this? Ok, then here’s my contribution: “You guys are dumb. Art is gay.” If I don’t receive your rent check by 8:00 a.m. on the 12th of this month, I’d better see a moving van out front or I’m calling the cops. I’m tired of telling you two.
De förväntades un utföra icke-verbala förtrollningar, inte bara i försvar mot svartkonster utan också i trollformellära och förvandlingskonst. Regularly adding funds to your account can help you achieve your financial goals. Unluckily for Dr. Matthews, there is not the slightest sign that the novelists and newspaper men on the two sides of the ocean will ever bring themselves to such eschewing. On the contrary, they apparently delight in the use of the “localisms” he denounces, and the result is a growing difficulty of intercommunication.
Her bodice torn, the duchess stumbled into the hall, fell to her knees, and pronounced for all to hear, “At long last, behold! I am a woman, truly.”
“You want to go get some tacos?”
“I don’t know. They still on sale?”
“Oh yeah. That goes through the end of the month.”
“Then hells yeah. Tacos is tasty.”
I saw a girl wearing a shirt that said “Make awkward sexual advances, not war,” so I went up and asked her if she’d like to play hide the salami sometime, but I stuttered a little while I asked. I thought it was what she wanted. But then she slapped me, so I booked a plane to Cambodia, and the villagers there never knew what hit them.

Good work, Whole World. Keep the submissions coming.

Vince out.

Great Moments in Wikipedia Vandalism, Part 4

We haven't done one of these in a while... but someone (specifically someone at the IP address 158.64.118.154) added the following information to the Surrealism page on Wikipedia- and I'll be honest, I checked with Vince, and neither of us knew this. But it's on wikipedia (or it was...) so it must be true...

Surrealism was made in victorian britain by Jack Bauer.

Fascinating... However our friend, who we'll call 158 for short, has also been doing some exhaustive research on Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. Of Page's time with the Yardbirds he writes

I like pIE

And saves his biggest bombshell for the section on Page's formative years, where he pronounces

Jimmy Page is gAy

Wow!

Dan

New Show Idea: Rejected by Fox!!

As many of you know, Dan and I occasionally get to pitch movie ideas to Hollywood studios. Sometimes they write us big checks because there is a small faction of entertainment insiders who recognize that with the complex juxtaposition of images, music, and content afforded to today's viewers thanks to the Interwebs, the average content consumer has a greater, more fundamental appreciation for Surrealism than at any time in human history. Our country, for instance, managed to not self-destruct when that kid with the hair on American Idol made it to the finals or whatever. The only possible explanation is that Surrealism has taken root in the mainstream. Therefore, while you haven't seen this movie yet, or this one, rest assured we'll be on somebody's screen somewhere sooner or later. And we're not talking just on YouTube, either.

We thought, this morning, that our first big mainstream conquest would come by way of a TV show, which we pitched over lunch to executives at Fox, called WHEN SURREALISM GOES WRONG!

Here's the idea: We wanted Fox to go back to their roots -- before they were the Reality TV Network, they were the Lamentable Clip Show Network, which aired such bastions of good-ole'-fashioned entertainment as "When Animals Attack," "World's Most Shocking Moments: Caught on Tape," "World's Funniest Party Disasters," and of course "Real Stories of the Highway Patrol." So we're bringing that back, but with a Surreal twist. The twist is, it's Surrealism going wrong, so NOTHING SURREAL ACTUALLY HAPPENS, and then, at the end of each episode, Dan and I run out and go "Dammit! We screwed up again! Crap!"

One episode we pitched, for instance, was thirty minutes of a locked down shot of pedestrians in New York City, and occasionally, a voice would come on and say things like "Ok, now watch the woman in the green blouse...Wait...wait...oh, and...gah. No!" And the woman would walk offscreen without doing anything of note. Another was documentary footage of clowns getting dressed for the circus, and, again, the voice would come on saying something like "Now, this is the part where the gorilla comes in wearing a suit of armor and tells everybody to get the hell out...(nothing happens)...or, wait. Maybe that was on a different tape."

When we told them that the season finale would be an extended episode offering ninety minutes of dead air, they politely told us they weren't interested. And, by "politely told us they weren't interested," I mean they surmised we weren't really janitors, asked us where we got those uniforms, and had us chased from the premises by some of those zombie dogs from I AM LEGEND, which are apparently on loan from Warner Bros. and remembered our scent.

It's too bad. It would've been compelling TV.

Vince out.

Unintentional Surrealism Awards

Time once again for Dan and Vince's Unintentional Surrealism Awards. This year's recipients are:

Best Digital Cable Listing:
Turner Classic Movies, "Here Comes Trouble" - "A cub reporter helps solve the murder of a stripper. (1948), (Comedy)."

Best Overheard Conversation Fragment:
That guy who walked past at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf - "And then you stand up from the chair and suddenly you've got an assful of chlamydia."

Best Random Action of a Public Official:
The Parking Enforcement officer who drove past a line of parked cars with a wet sponge tied to the end of a metal stick, rubbing the sponge on the wheels of the cars.

Best Election-Year Election Results:
From CNN.com - Muskogee, Oklahoma Elects 19-Year-Old Mayor — A 19-year-old freshman at the University of Oklahoma was elected mayor Tuesday of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in the northeastern part of the state.

Best Surreptitious Way to Ensure Your Shareholders Fire You:
Speed Racer.

To all the nominees who didn't take home the coveted Dan and Vince Tube O' Ground Beef Trophy this year, try harder. Or, alternately, try less hard and hope the universe favors irony.

Vince Out.