On Cinema at the Cinema on ilxor.com

RENEVANT

i'm standin' on a bridge of spies
i'm sick of hearin' all your goddamn lies

^ goes through my head at least once week

The Relevant

I was bored this afternoon so I searched and found an old tweet of mine from 2011 astro-turfing the OG podcast lol.

Should I post it here? Then y'all will know my notsoweird twitter.

mad max
he gives the ladies heart attacks

oh my fucking lord the cgi tom cruise jr.

mark proksch is a gift

feel like i gotta talk to my therapist about the whole james dean subplot

I've been watching the trial in bits and pieces over the weekend (which is a must for any On Cinema head, as the highlights don't fully capture the awe-inspiring magic) and just got to Tim calling Nicholas Meyer (co-writer of Star Trek IV) to the stand. OMG, I must've laughed for a solid minute at Gregg's muttering 'no...no...' from the gallery as Meyer describes the plot of the movie he wrote. This is really the culmination of every ridiculous thread of the On Cinema universe, just astounding.

Yeah that was an amazing capper to that running joke

the best part is that Gregg gets escorted out of the courtroom believing he's been proven right

Believer interview with Tim:

JP, our tour manager, who I’ve worked with for many years, and who I’m very close with — we are picking up some VHS tapes for Gregg, which we sell at the show, and Gregg is finding them at various thrift stores as we drive all over. And Gregg really gets into it, and he’s going on about some horrible movie we found, and I look at JP and say, “The funny thing is, there’s a lot of Gregg in Gregg.” And he looks at me and goes, “There’s a lot of you in Tim!” And I go, “Really?” And he’s like, “Yes.”

also, a real review:

I’m not kidding when I say that Paddington 2 is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s so clever and funny. I’m not kidding. Watch it. First of all, everyone in the movie is a great, accomplished actor. It looks like Wes Anderson, but without being so heavy-handed. I liked this way more than I liked Isle of Dogs, which I feel is so in on its own joke. Paddington 2 has great British humor; it’s unpretentious, genuinely funny. Emotional. Very emotional. And [the first] Paddington is also good, but this one is better. And I wept.

I read a few years back that Gregg's character is based largely on his 12-year-old self.

With that in mind, how much do you identify with your character on On Cinema?

I think when I was 12 or 13, that was probably about where I was at. It was really before I got into punk rock, which was something I was only into for about a year before the corruption started to become apparent and I moved on. I was super, super into watching movies when I was a kid, and this was before home video was really readily available—or at least not readily available to me, because we didn’t really have any money for that—but I didn’t know anyone who owned a VCR or anything, so I was really into going to art house theatres and going to the multiplex and paying for one movie and then trying to stay there all day, slipping from one to the next trying to see as many movies as I could. I had a little book where I kept track of everything that I saw and rated them all. I was super into it.

I think that I kind of lost that interest at some point. I still like movies, but I might watch a couple a month—as opposed to that point, when I was 12 or 13, when I would watch, like, 40 a month and document them all. But I think that that character on On Cinema is less like me than Neil Hamburger is like me.

from: https://hazlitt.net/feature/im-playing-one-percent-who-do-it-interview-gregg-turkington

can irl Gregg move his neck or is that particular physical tic specific to the character himself? The way he has to move his whole upper body to turn his head towards somebody seems like such a wierd affectation.

that's a great interview that chimes with the experience of meeting the great man

love it

Here's a clip where he's pretty mobile lol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfu4XJ4qqKY

oh man, didn't know there was a Caroliner connection

Tim name dropped this guy in that interview; apparently the work of two guys. New to me at least!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzWw910b2zM

yeah those guys seem promising

can irl Gregg move his neck or is that particular physical tic specific to the character himself? The way he has to move his whole upper body to turn his head towards somebody seems like such a wierd affectation.

― Οὖτις, Monday, July 22, 2019 8:11 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

been wondering this myself

Until yesterday I did not know that Gregg was Neil Hamburger. Despite doing an (awful) internship at (interning here is) Drag City in 2006, I’ve never heard or seen any of his Hamburger material

wow

i mean he's not very neil hamburgery out of costume so i only knew who he was due to knowing the name. "gregg" is a very different character and performance

yeah I don't think I would've ever put that together either. there's like one brief scene in one of the Oscar Specials (maybe the first one, after Tim pukes on the tapes) where he lapses into the voice.

hah, I just posted that on the things I learned thread

I mean, I had read about Neil Hamburger, including his real name, a bunch of times. But it wasn't until now that I saw it mentioned and thought "wait... that Gregg... is this Gregg"

I’m glad you all didn’t know, either. Felt like some big obvious thing that was I was already supposed to know

I've readily associated him with Neil Hamburger at least since McSweeney's put out Tim & Gregg's 'Bicycle Built for Two' screenplay in 2011, but I think I knew his real name before I even knew what a Neil Hamburger was (pretty sure they mentioned it in the Zip Code Rapists entry in the '90s Trouser Press Guide).

(Mentioned that Turkington was Hamburger, I mean.)

I'd like to hear more about your awful internship at Drag City Karl

there's not much to say. i was hoping to learn something about how record labels work but instead they stuck me in another room away from everyone else working there, cutting cardboard squares to be packaged along with record shipments all day. i think after ever 8 or 16 hours i was given a free record of my choosing as my payment. no one talked to me, and i wasn't enough of a networker to saunter into the main office and try to convince them that i was worth talking to. on my last day, literally as i was walking out the door toward the train, one of the label people realized that i was old school good friends with a key musician that they were looking to work with and suddenly they became very interested in talking to me for the first time. but i so cool that i just let them know that i'd tell him drag city said hi next time i talked to him

the reverse side of this is that i looked like i was 13 even though i was 23, i looked like a drug addict because i'm really skinny, i was socially awkward, and actually i'm not sure if i ever talked to that cool musician i thought i was good friends with ever again, because he was busy playing one trillion shows and being cool and i was busy piling up life experiences that will good for my memoir which i plan on writing and publishing in a nursing home someday

Sad lol? Sounds like a fairly universal intern experience. If it makes you feel any better there's a possibility one of your cardboard squares protected a record I love.

but i so cool that i just let them know that i'd tell him drag city said hi next time i talked to him

Roasted

five bags of popcorn and a *vapes furiously*

colin filth

I was not prepared for Al Jardine's appearance in Decker 4. Although I probably should have been since my only time spotting Gregg in the wild in LA was outside a Brian Wilson show (w/ Al in the band) at the Greek a few years back. He was wearing a bowling shirt and holding court with a bunch of Gregg-heads. As always a true class act.

fuck, the edm remix of "empty bottle"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxDsA82_-e4

xxpost Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuude, I just watched that ep of Decker tonight! I was all like 'man, that sure looks like Al Jardine but it can't possibly be Al Jardine'. Thanks for saving me a trip to IMDB!

Holy shit, it'd probably be cinch to get Love on if you showed him a few episodes out of context.

Jardine/Beach Boys talk has me digging out this trivia:

Did you know.... that Gregg has unironically sung a shockingly-faithful cover of "Good Vibrations" (the "sMiLe" sessions version, not the more famous single version):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I56Hmf7wKUY

That's Gregg doing Carl's lead and Trey Spruance doing the Mike Love parts.

This podcast talks about Jardine's involvement if you're interested in interviewing Tim & Gregg out-of-character (though slightly drunk?):

https://talkradio.co.uk/funny/late-night-alternative-iain-lee-bonus-podcast-tim-heidecker-and-gregg-turkington-17090518193

I love the little motor boat sound he makes when decker shoots him in the forehead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJpI377Akg8

if we've gotten to posting Caroliner clips we should definitely be posting Faxed Head

THERE'S A BIG DROUGHT WHERE WE COME FROM. YOU DEPEND ON OUR CROPS, YOU GUYS. DON'T LAUGH.

On the Japanese wikipedia page for Taco Bell, there is a mention that heavy metal band Faxed Head recorded at least one of their albums in the Coalinga Taco Bell mens room.

tim coughs all over the VR camera and then returns it to best buy

Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were never real brothers, they were "blues brothers." So you can have other "blues brothers" in life. John Goodman, I think, is a legitimate "blues brother," from Dan Aykroyd. And some of these other guys — you've got James Brown, B.B. King, the Blues Brothers Band, Paul Shaffer — these are all blues people, and this is a blues movie, and I love it and it will cure the blues.