candied angelic lowriding ghoulies

I'm not 100 percent sure I have anything interesting to say, given that lots of working has eaten into my doing-anything-else time - I'm not going anywhere until the trip to Berlin (for Wizards Of OS) and London (to see my folks) next month, and it's full steam ahead until that happens. So let's talk spare-spare-time media consumption, filled out to encompass more than a paragraph this time, shall we?

Pulp-wise? I'm currently reading The Devil's Candy, by Julie Salamon, an apparently infamous movie-industry book about the filming of the colossal flop Bonfire Of The Vanities, of which I confess I have neither read Tom Wolfe's book or seen film. But you don't really need either of these to appreciate the raw trainwreck honesty of the whole thing, and the amazing pluck of Brian De Palma to allow complete, uncensored access to the movie's long and perilous production phase.

Also notable with regard to The Devil's Candy: the phrase after which the book is named was coined by the one-time producer of the film, Peter Guber, who I enjoyed seeing bickering with Variety editor Peter Bart on AMC's Sunday Morning Shootout, up to the point they started repeating themselves with the grosses vs. halcyon Hollywood spiel. Their interviews with genuine Hollywood bigshots, of both the acting and directing species, are still well worth TiVo-ing, though.

Over on the DVD menu du jour, we have the first season of Angel, which feels easier to get into fresh than Buffy The Vampire Slayer itself (I've seen so many Buffy bits and pieces over multiple series that I'm thoroughly confused about how to fill in the gaps.) Anyhow.. Angel, at least the first season, is a fun, witty, fleet of foot show, and while it sometimes seems a little rote, and the Buffy crossovers make less sense when you can't see the corresponding episodes at the same time, it feels like a darn fun part of the whole mythos, snobbery be damned.

Finally, on the interactive entertainment front, I've been playing a few random GameFly rentals, including Lowrider (much as I like rhythm games, ehh... not so much. Feels like it was made out of flimsy plastic), Jet Li: Rise To Honor (reasonably serviceable, although comes across as a bit.. vanilla?), Metal Arms: Glitch In The System (top-notch, sacrificed sales for cute character designs, grab it if you see it in the bargain bin), and Grabbed By The Ghoulies (replace Jet Li with cel-shaded wimp and Hong Kong mob boss with inexplicably Dick Dastardly-styled evil genius, add a little stylin' presentation, but left with lingering taste of same... vanilla?)