I guess it’s a little weird to be upset when celebrities pass away, but then few celebrities are as cool as Peter Boyle.

He’s got a permanent place on my cool list just for his performance in Young Frankenstein, of course. But he was great in everything I saw him in — the “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” episode of “The X-Files,” and every episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” It’s a shame that series was so popular and long-running that it created a backlash, since it was consistently funny and frequently genuinely moving, and Boyle was always one of the stand-outs.

What always impressed me the most about Peter Boyle was that he just seemed to “get” it. He wasn’t just somebody delivering funny lines; he was a real comedic actor. The difference is knowing how to play a character as a real person — even an obnoxious or belligerent person — and work it so that it’s true to the character and still comes across as funny and relatable. Reading his obituary makes it sound like he had a pretty interesting life off-screen as well.

Update: Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog has the best obituary of Boyle I’ve seen.

I was surprised that For Your Consideration had such a low rating on Rotten Tomatoes until I started following the links. Some of the reviews, like the one from The Onion’s AV Club are critical of the movie but still give it a recommendation. I guess that’s a sign that a pass/fail rating isn’t suitable for a Serious Art Medium like The Cinema.

The AV Club gives it a B-, which is about accurate. The people who are going to see it anyway (fans of Best in Show and A Mighty Wind) are probably going to like it, even if it doesn’t attract any new fans. The performances are great as usual, but a lot of the cast is under-used. And the movie has enough laughs to warrant a recommendation, but as a whole the movie feels dated and off-center.

It feels like the usual Christopher Guest/Eugene Levy cast getting together to do an old SCTV sketch, without updating it from the original. One of the reasons A Mighty Wind seemed “off” was that it was stuck between character story and comedy/satire; they liked the characters too much to really make fun of them. The same is true here, but the result is that the movie feels as outdated and out-of-touch as its characters are intended to be. In 2006, who really doesn’t know what the “interweb” is?

And a lot of it is so subtle that you know it seemed brilliant when they were coming up with it, but it doesn’t have enough weight in the final movie. The biggest example is the movie-within-a-movie, a story about a Jewish family in the south in the 40’s which one review calls “Tennessee Williams meets Neil Simon,” a great description. So the characters switch between Yiddish and southern accents, “Oy gevalt! What have I done?” and comedy ensues. They take it a step further in an interview with the screenwriters, played by Michael McKean and Bob Balaban, where McKean admits he’d never heard of the Purim holiday before working on the screenplay. And then that goes a step further later, when a producer suggests they tone down the Jewishness of the movie, and McKean goes off on an indignant tirade about how they’re compromising the integrity of his work. It’s a clever concept, material for great satire, but it just doesn’t come across as funny.

So you end up watching the movie for the cast. As you’d expect, Catherine O’Hara is great, John Michael Higgins is great, and everybody else is good but underused. Fred Willard always stands out in these movies, and in this one he’s doing basically the same so-clueless-he’s-cruel schtick from Best in Show, this time with a faux-hawk and fake earring.

But I couldn’t be a bigger fan of Jane Lynch. She steals every movie she’s in, and she always does it with the littlest gesture or best-delievered line. In A Mighty Wind, it was her winking description of her past in adult movies. In The 40-Year Old Virgin, it was her unbelievably creepy seduction of Steve Carrell. In For Your Consideration, she plays a Mary Hart-style co-host to Fred Willard’s character, and she steals the scene just in the way she stands and walks. It’s just brilliant, and one of the few laugh-out-loud moments in the movie is just her standing there. I’ll go see any future Christopher Guest movies as long as she keeps appearing in them.

I was watching “Saturday Night Live” this week (eyes over here, Mrs. Beatty) and the first musical guest was Gwen Stefani doing “Wind it Up” with an over-enthusiastic drum line and a throng of badly-dressed dancers.

It’s difficult for me to describe my reaction to seeing this, but in short: I became firmly convinced that the World is coming to An End. It started as an unfocused sense of unease from deep within my soul. Each yodel and every sample made it more concrete, more defined, until it became a concentrated pit of despair lodged in the center of my heart.

Imagine you’re a simple country villager in the outskirts of ancient Rome, and you’re asked to cater at one of Caligula’s parties. As you stand dumb-struck behind the buffet table, watching the proceedings, the servants wheel in another horse and some more lubricant, and you think, “Well, they’ve finally done it. They’ve destroyed civilization.” That’s the sense I got.

Now, I still like to think of myself as being on the fringes of hipness — not really genuinely cool, but at least at the VH-1 level of social awareness. But seeing this thing rocked my whole perception of what’s going on in American pop culture. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like it; I didn’t understand it. At all. I hated “Hollaback Girl” and “My Humps” like any right-thinking person should, but at least I had a sense of what they were trying to accomplish with them.

“Wind it Up,” with its video and album and fashion line and interviews and promotions and YouTube and MySpace appearances, is such an engineered consumer product package that it’s as far removed from actual music as Lunchables are from actual wheat. Video didn’t just kill the radio star, it’s on Fox News promoting its new fictionalized account of the murder titled If I Did It.

I’ve heard and read a lot of people — usually well into their 40s by the time they say it — say they remember the exact moment they realized they were “old.” Usually it’s when a clerk calls them “sir” or “ma’am,” or when they meet a co-worker who was born the year they graduated high school/graduated college/were released from rehab.

For me, it was watching a woman (who’s two years older than me!) doing a performance on “Saturday Night Live” and me feeling like I just saw a series of mushroom clouds over the horizon.

Gizmodo has a link to this video of a woman playing the boxing game of Wii Play. The blogger warns that the audio is not safe for work, because it sounds like the woman is in the throes of passion.

Two questions:

1. What the hell kind of bizarre psychosexual shadow realm are these gadget bloggers living in that would cause them to hear the anguished shrieks and yelps from this video and mistake it for getting off?
2. People are always asking why more women don’t play videogames. I think we have our answer. And a new question: are we really missing out that they don’t?

For the past week I’ve had Molly Shannon’s voice running through my head. A few years ago, she did a bit on Saturday Night Live making fun of Julianna Margulies for leaving “ER.” As far as I can remember, the whole bit was Shannon saying “You crazy! You crazy, pretty lady!” over and over again. Margulies got a ton of flack for it at the time, but I remember thinking she had a pretty cool attitude about the whole thing. She didn’t need any more money, she felt like she’d done all she wanted with the series, so she left.

Now I’m not, as far as I’m aware, a hot actress, and I sure as hell am not getting offers of millions of dollars to keep my job. But still, I’ve had a pretty sweet deal over the last year and a half. Working with great people for a company I’ve always wanted to work for on a project that was as cool as hell, with flexible hours working from home and occasional business trips to theme parks.

So I did the only sensible thing and quit. When I was trying to make up my mind, I had two different people tell me, “Maybe you’re just afraid of success,” which is exactly the kind of thing you want to hear when you’re a self-obsessed person contemplating a job change.

Fact is, though, that another year like this one would’ve driven me crazy nuts. Getting in crunch mode on a project you’re working on from home means that you can spend an entire week without ever speaking to another human being — I did it several times this year. I’m sure that there are people out there who can tolerate that, who even think it’s ideal. But for me, it’s just no way to live.

All but one of the friends I have in California, I met either directly or indirectly through work. And with the amount I’ve been housebound over the past year, even those are mostly virtual friends at this point. If I didn’t have e-mail and this blog, I’d probably be hanging out at Union Square begging strangers to talk to me. One of the managers at Disney had a great line, which I hope he’s not planning to put in his memoirs because I’m about to steal it on the internets: “There’s no such thing as a five-minute conversation with a contractor. You can schedule a quick conference call, but you have to be ready to listen to how their entire day went in great detail.”

There’s no telling what I’m going to do for a living, now. The idea of getting a job in an office where actual human beings work is pretty appealing, but at the same time it seems like a shame to give up a sweet contracting gig after giving it only one chance. And I’m kind of nervous at the thought of finally escaping the cubicle only to run right back to one. I’m not really looking forward to dong job interviews again, either. You have to validate yourself and explain why you’re a good candidate, which is something I’ve never been good at. I don’t really know why I’m a good candidate, people just keep offering me really cool jobs.

I don’t know, maybe a month or two of confusion and unease that I don’t have a definite way to support myself lined up will be interesting. I got my first job the week before I graduated college, and have either been working or had a job lined up every day for the past 13 years. Maybe this’d be a good time to get caught up on the billion different projects I always say I’ll finish if I ever get the time.

Last Saturday I left the apartment for the first time in a week. Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge on a perfectly clear, sunny day reminded me that there was a time I used to get out and do stuff for no reason. I’d drive down Lucas Valley Road or along Highway 1, or take pictures of random buildings, or walk around Berkeley just for the hell of it. I can’t remember doing that since I moved to Walnut Creek for EA. Maybe I’m not so much afraid of success as I am fond of not working.

When I heard they were doing a reboot of the James Bond franchise, I thought it was a terrible idea. The series has degraded so far down to parody at this point, the only way to do it correctly would be to start releasing them as period pieces.

Not Austin Powers parody, but just turn back the clock to make it all work again. Jump back to the early 60s, where you’ve still got the Cold War and cool cars and you can film everything in technicolor and your hero will seem like less of an anachronism.

I’m really glad to admit that I was wrong. I finally got the chance to get out and see a movie last night, and it was Casino Royale, and it rocks in all kinds of ways.

I was hooked from the opening title sequence. Granted, they didn’t have the cool silhouettes of dancing naked women with guns, but they made up for it with the new theme song, which kicks boatloads of ass and is probably the best in the series. (It’s a drag, though, that the real version of the theme is only available on Chris Cornell’s myspace page, so you have to wade through loads of myspace effluvia to hear it). Best is that they didn’t bother trying to shoehorn the title into the lyrics — none of that “like Heaven above me, the spy who loved me” nonsense that Carly Simon didn’t have the stones to reject.

I’ve seen almost all the Bond movies, but have never really been a fan. I let myself get excited about the one with Michelle Yeoh, but of course they wasted her and ended up with just another all-hype, no-substance action movie. And seeing as how in retrospect, that was one of the better Bond movies of the past 20 years, I’m surprised they didn’t just give up the entire franchise the moment Denise Richards came on screen.

Casino Royale is impressive because they made all the right choices every step of the way. For starters, they cast the right guy. I don’t have any problem saying Daniel Craig’s the best James Bond; Sean Connery’s a movie star, but this guy is an actor. An actor who does a kick-ass job with the action sequences, too. He’s as cool playing poker as he is stopping jets from exploding.

There was a ton of negative hype around the casting before the movie was released, and you can see why — in still pictures, he doesn’t really look the part. But as soon as the movie takes off, he owns it. He plays Bond not as a superhero, but as a real person who is really good at just about everything. It was the first Bond movie I’ve seen in years that lived up to the ideal of the character — you can’t be a guy watching the movie and not think, “I wish I were that much of a bad-ass.”

And everything else shows that they just get the true appeal of the character, and not what it had turned into. They remembered that he’s a spy, and should therefore be doing the kinds of thing that spies do — more of the investigating leads and gathering information, less of the riding space shuttles and jumping on alligators and putting on the worst “Japanese” disguise in the history of cinema. By scaling back the action sequences, they made them a lot more impressive. The opening chase through a construction site is just amazing, even without the invisible car or snowmobile chase or secret backpack parasailing chute.

There’s a long sequence where Bond is trying to stop a bomb at the Miami airport. It’s inserted into the plot seamlessly, the pacing is dead-on perfect, and the editing is not only genuinely surprising, but manages to make one of the most tired cliches of action movies (”We’ve got to stop that truck!”) exciting again. It ends up being the best car action sequence since the one in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the best part of all — it culminates in an explosion, but the explosion happens off-screen. And still you’re left saying, “oh hell yeah!”

The dialogue is excellent, conveying an assload of character with only a couple of words. (”You noticed.”) The references to the franchise are clever and subtle, when they could easily have been over-done. M comments, “God I miss the Cold War,” and that’s the last you hear of it. All the technology has been updated without stealing focus from the plot; it’s almost as if the filmmakers decided that story and characters were important again.

Even the product placement, inevitable in one of these things, was in the end inoffensive. The only way they could’ve worked the Sony brand in there one more time would be to have Bond fire up a PS3 and challenge the villain to a game of Ratchet & Clank. But the story’s got so much momentum behind it, and everything is so well-done, that you barely notice.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Thunderball and From Russia With Love, but I don’t remember enjoying them as much as the new Casino Royale. This is the first Bond movie I’ve seen where I didn’t feel like I was watching some historical artifact, or seeing something that’s cool only because it’s supposed to be cool. It’s the first Bond movie where I feel I can finally understand what the appeal of the franchise is, and I can’t wait for the next one.

I mentioned RiffTrax a while back. Tonight I finally got to try it out.

Fans of MST3k have wondered a lot what it would be like if the guys had been able to do a good movie for a change. Well, I still can’ tanswer that, because I saw The Phantom Menace. (Yes, I own a copy of The Phantom Menace. Am I supposed to be embarrassed by that? Please, I have no shame left.)

The RiffTrax deal is just about exactly what I’d expected. Sci Fi Channel-era MST3k with bigger-budget movies and no host segments. It’s pretty damn funny, and I’m looking forward to the other ones. With the commentary and the “DisembAudio” they use to keep in sync, I’d say it’s the best possible job they could do without actually having the rights to the movie.

Now, for the movie itself. Holy cow!

What kind of reality distortion field was I living in when I saw The Phantom Menace the first time? I remembered it was bad, but I’d somehow managed to convince myself that it wasn’t completely irredeemable. It’s pretty, at least. And the pod race is kind of cool, right?

No! It’s such an enormous flaming turd that has nothing, nothing going for it. When it was released, it was bad enough to inspire years of disappointed mockery on the internets. It’s still got all that awful stuff — Jar Jar, midochlorians, racially offensive aliens, a plot so boring and incomprehensible it makes Russian movies seem action-packed.

Now on top of all that, it hasn’t aged well.The CG was the only thing it had going for it, but it already looks dated and it draws attention to itself. There’s just not a single good thing about that movie. It’s been like seven years since it came out, and now I’m mad at it all over again. I want to burn the DVD, but there’s still just enough residual Star Wars fanboy at my core that won’t let me.

Best moment in the whole thing is when Mike tells Jar Jar, “Okay, just go to hell, all right?”