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Crashing THE HAPPENING

My Grandfather’s Final-Final Column
[Like 2Pac, he be dropping new joints even after he dead. Pretty sure this really is the last one, though. -- LYT] Don’t I know you? “Of course I know you.  We met at a conference 20 odd years ago and I remember you well.”  What sort of knowledge is that?  The claim to know someone is a big one, and unlikely to be true in anything but the most superficial sense.  The trouble, I think, is that it sounds so clumsy to ask, “Are you acquainted with so and so?”  Yet it’s surely better that the claim to know someone should at least imply a degree of understanding of the person under discussion.

Eulogy for Peter Graham
[written and delivered by Luke Y. Thompson, Nov. 20, 2009, at Sherborne Abbey in Dorset, England] Not long before he died, Peter Graham started a Facebook page. Probably not everyone here knows what that is, so let me explain: Facebook is an Internet social networking site originally designed for college and high-school students to network with each other. It’s grown a bit beyond that now…but I’m not sure “86 year-old retired vicar” was ever in the imagined demographic. Now, let me tell you why that’s significant. I live in Hollywood, and work in the media, and the way older people are so often portrayed is exemplified by Grandpa Abe on The Simpsons: Scar

A near-decade of dickishness
This past August, I passed the ten-year mark as a film critic. My, how times have changed. When I started, it actually seemed like a more pragmatic career move than acting. And I made a good living at it. The paper ran as many as six full-length reviews a week. I didn’t especially have much desire to do a Best of the Decade list, but every LAFCA member is being asked to do one. And it isn’t quite my full tenure — my very first ten-best list was for 1999, an indisputably great year. I don’t really know how it’s gonna go, but I know this much – it makes sense to cull my 10 Best of the Decade from the top-ten lists I’ve done every year

New DING DONG DEAD screenshots…

AFI FEST 2009: “Ricci Rich”
Following the Thursday closing night of AFI Fest in Hollywood – and let me give them major props for keeping the free booze lounge going on that day, when normally one expects it to shut off completely on the final stretch – I stayed home all day Friday, recouping and forgetting what day it was. Besides, most of the movies playing Friday at the 2-day Santa Monica leg of the fest were ones I’d already seen. But when I told a friend, “Hey, Liam Neeson horror movie Saturday!” he was into it. Then, based on the experience of the Hollywood fest, I also added that I had not seen any regular screening totally sell out. Which was true. But I had reckoned without the fact that th