I Don’t Have Time For Your Blog

I guess the residuals from “The Brown Bunny” haven’t been rolling in: self-obsessed filmmaker Vincent Gallo is now available for evenings, weekends escort:

I, Vincent Gallo, star of such classics as Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny have decided to make myself available to all women. All women who can afford me, that is.

Just beautiful. Read the whole thing, it just keeps getting better and better. The two things you need to know are: He actually wrote all that, and he’s probably serious.

The thing is, I really liked Gallo’s Buffalo 66 as a movie obsessed with itself and with family dysfunction. The Brown Bunny I enjoyed more as a cultural artifact and publicity stunt than a movie. I honestly can’t wait to see what else the guy does, because his life appears from the outside to be some sort of performance art piece.

I definitely have an addiction to reality TV.

For the moment I’m not talking about the glorified game show stuff. The real life stuff, no no immunity challenges, and none of that “and let’s see what happens when they all have to share a house together” crap.

Nope, for me it’s The Osbournes. Nick & Jessica. The Barkers. The kinds of folks blessed with that special kind of stupid dysfunction that makes executives in the TV industry jump and clap their hands like 13-year-olds girls at a Britney Spears concert.

So it’s with that sort of image in mind that I must genuflect before the altar of Breaking Bonaduce from VH1. I’m absolutely hooked by this, because Danny is smart, likeable, loving, funny — and riddled with gaping flaws in his personality you can see from a mile off. And he’s self-aware and really trying to think his way through and yet you can see how hard it is for him to reach these aspects of himself in order to truly grapple with them.

He’s right… it’s a car crash I can’t look away from.

And it’s true. I want him to succeed, even though it’s hard to believe how self-centered he is at times. Because there’s some part of him that’s trying like hell to be a good husband and a good dad. Because he’s deeply in love with his wife. Because in spite of himself he seems to be trying.

Now, deep in the bowels of any reality TV series is the fiction they decide to tell with every choice they make in what to include and what to leave out. So I don’t pretend to think I actually know these people from watching the show. But I do know this story about them and some of the truths in that story are like truths in any story — they speak to the human experience.

Oh, yeah, and bonus points — it’s clear to me that they live pretty much in my neighborhood. I recognize the spots they go for dinner and where he rides his skateboard and where he buys his alcohol when he falls off the wagon and so on. It’s one thing to be in Los Angeles and recognize people from television. It’s another to watch television and recognize places in Los Angeles. Both are experiences I can’t quite get used to.

Ya gotta feel for the insects. I mean, collectively speaking, there they’ve been, happily buzzing along for millions and millions of years, minding their own business, nibbling at this and that, setting off the occasional malaria pandemic, when all of a sudden in the last fraction of their almost limitless existence there appears a flurry of flyswatters, bug zappers and insecticides that suddenly show up and change the game completely.

I mean, if you think of them as having some sort of eternal collective unconscious, it must have gone down something like this:

Dee dee dee. Flowers are nice. Dee dee dee. Oh, look, some smelly things. Yup, those are nice too. Isn’t life wonderful? I think I’ll check out this—what the holy >BZZZZT!<

Maybe that’s what it will be like for us one day too. The world ending, not with a bang, but with a sharp zapping noise.

I am having way too much fun with this guy with the scarf and the toboggan.

The fun begins when you manage to knock him off. See if you can get the sled to go flying back into him!