Patrick Cassels: Internet Enthusiast

“I thought we asked you to bring the cranberry...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:02:53 -0500

“I thought we asked you to bring the cranberry sauce.”

“The Second Thanksgiving” on CollegeHumor.

Spying Is Easy, Babysitting Is Hard

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:09:00 -0500

The poster for Jackie Chan’s “Spy Next Door” was released this month. I have a soft spot for red-lit PG action posters.

If you’re watching this Father Larry, just tell me how...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:25:32 -0500

If you’re watching this Father Larry, just tell me how many Hail Marys I owe you now.

Total Recall is one of my favorite action movies, so imagine my...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:54:25 -0500

Total Recall is one of my favorite action movies, so imagine my excitement when someone managed to capture the subtlety of its dystopian themes in a mere 3 1/2-minutes.

“Kuatto lives!” —The Resistance

“If he was so ‘great,’ what the hell was he...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:39:00 -0500

“If he was so ‘great,’ what the hell was he doing in Long Island?”

Classic Titles Made Sarcastic With Quotation Marks, a new post from me on CollegeHumor.

CollegeHumor’s crack video team found this “oddly...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:19:47 -0500

CollegeHumor’s crack video team found this “oddly satisfying,” 6-minute video of people silently doing completely random things with household items. If the measuring cups being thrown at sheet metal don’t grab you, the shaving cream on welding mask will.

“I really believe the Terminator franchise has only begun to plumb the depths of questioning...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:57:00 -0500

“I really believe the Terminator franchise has only begun to plumb the depths of questioning the human condition during awesome stunts.”

Buffy the Vampire slayer creator Joss Whedon has written an open letter to the owners of the Terminator franchise, offering $10,000 for the rights and offering advice on how to improve the series — clearly taking a cue from me and Jeff Rubin’s open letter on how to improve Whedon-based board games.

"There’s some historically important ones missing. “My Bologna,” isn’t even..."

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:41:58 -0500

“There’s some historically important ones missing. “My Bologna,” isn’t even on there…”

- “Weird” Al Yankovic on The Essential Weird Al, interviewed by Jeff Rubin.

Scott Gairnder, whose very funny sketches normally come months...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:59:00 -0500

Scott Gairnder, whose very funny sketches normally come months apart, is releasing a new video every monday in November. It’s like March Madness, except not in March. And with people being thrown over ledges instead of college basketball games.

This was the last time the Beatles let Ringo produce a...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:14:00 -0400

This was the last time the Beatles let Ringo produce a concert.

One of my favorite random web videos CollegeHumor’s featured in a while. Where did the VentriloChoir come from? Apparently they were a recurring feature of Late Night in Conan O’Brien’s earlier days. The choir was seen by a Hungarian TV producer, who had them flown to Budapest to sing his favorite song. This was in the pre-YouTube era, meaning Conan 15 years ago was doing stuff on TV so bizzare it makes for perfect Internet video today.

On this week’s “Bleep Bloop,” Jeff and I sit...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:59:49 -0400

On this week’s “Bleep Bloop,” Jeff and I sit down with actor/comedian Jonathan Gabrus and amateur drummer Streeter Seidell to talk about music-themed videogames, including Crue Ball (Motley Crue pinball) and Markey Mark’s “Make My Video” (on the extinct Sega CD, appropriately enough).

As wonderful as these finds were, we were unable to secure the one game we really wanted: Queen’s “The eYe.” Jeff and I began searching for this PC adventure in 2008, and were soon involved in a quest that spanned one year and an ocean. We ultimately had the game shipped from the UK, only to have the 10-year-old discs fail to work on our modern PCs. The most we found was a video of the game’s prologue, which seems to claim that in a distopian future all of Freddie Mercury’s songs are made illegal. I disagree with this law: the only Mercury song that should be illiegal is “Body Language.”

Earlier this month, Jeff Rubin and I sat down with some friends...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:49:00 -0400

Earlier this month, Jeff Rubin and I sat down with some friends and played Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game, which attempts to recreate the excitement of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer through a series of dice, cards and moon phase charts. Now, as someone who’s played his fair-share of TV-show-based board games in the past, I wasn’t expecting any rules more complicated than “Fonzie made the jukebox play! Take three steps forward!” It turns out Buffy translates to one fucking complicated game (particularly one based on a teen WB series) that required Jeff to spend an afternoon memorizing its Bible-thick instruction manual in the back seat of a Siesta (keep in mind we were technically on vacation at the time), and still left us with a dozen questions. Here we are, weeks later, calling the Hasbro comment line with a few key complaints about werewolves’ ability to hold weapons and how best to represent Drusilla’s psychic powers in board-game form. My favorite part is when the wonderfully patient Hasbro quality control rep sympathetically breaks it to us that the Buffy game was discontinued almost a decade ago.

Warning: The following video contains 7 minutes of two grown men talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer lore. Watch at your own risk.

Legendary novelist, notorious recluse, and my favorite writer...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:31:43 -0400

Legendary novelist, notorious recluse, and my favorite writer Philip Roth gave a (very) rare video interview with the Daily Beast about, among other things, my favorite Roth book Portnoy’s Compaint. It’s nice to see 40 years and one Pulitzer Prize later, he can still laughably refer to himself as a “crazed penis.”

(Check out the full interview here.)

Why wasn’t I informed earlier there was a comedian who...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:52:00 -0400

Why wasn’t I informed earlier there was a comedian who ended every joke by shouting the word “hamburger” for some reason?

(thanks to Adam Newman)

Bronson Pinchot Interview Greatest Hits

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:49:00 -0400

Wednesday morning, my editor Jeff looked over at me and cried, “There is a mind-blowing Bronson Pinchot interview online this week.” Normally, hearing the words “mind-blowing” and “Bronson Pinchot” in the same sentence would sound pretty fishy to me, but luckily, Jeff and I have watched Total Recall together enough times (twice to be exact, unless you count the times we just fast forward to the violent parts) for me to trust his judgment. What I got was way more than I ever thought I wanted to know about Perfect Strangers, Tom Cruise, and guns on the set of Step By Step. Here are the highlights:

—[Tom Cruise] was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, “You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?” I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, “It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.”

-There’s this scene [In True Romance] where I’m driving with this prostitute, where I get coke in my face, and I’m doing this insane cackle of joy in the car as I drive, because I’m getting a blowjob, which was my idea, and Quentin said, “Thank you for putting that in the movie. That’s the sound that I wanted.”

—Denzel Washington cured me forever of thinking that there is any amount of money or anything that could ever, ever make it okay to be abused.

—[Step by Step] was all the Perfect Strangers people saying, “Come and bail us out,” because the guy who played the surfer dude on the show had shown up with a gun, and they had to send him on his way for a year, and they needed somebody to be the goofy character, so they brought me for a year to be the goofy character.

Wikipedia is arguably my favorite website, but sometimes they...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:49:00 -0400

Wikipedia is arguably my favorite website, but sometimes they drop the ball, like when you want to read up on intergalactic smuggler and all-around scruffy-looking nerf herder Han Solo, and it sends you to the page for the prehistoric trilobite known as Han solo. For this week’s “Brain Filler,” Jeff and I examine this and four other equally misguided Wikipedia searches.

“Hardly Working: The Golden Years!” Are you a silent...

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:13:03 -0400

“Hardly Working: The Golden Years!” Are you a silent film enthusiast? A racist? Equal parts both? If so, enjoy…

Joking.

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:05:00 -0400

The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man is one of my favorite movies of 2009, but it’s also been the most perplexing. I’m still not entirely sure what, exactly, the movie is about. But after reading the last sentences of a dozen or so reviews, it seems critics agree one one thing:

“The punch line is a little different, but you know the joke. And it’s on you, of course.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times

“At the conclusion of their new movie, ‘A Serious Man,’ the Coen brothers pull off a neat little joke.” —David Denby, The New Yorker

“I’m sure you’ve heard the old joke where Job asks the Lord why everything in his life is going wrong.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

“Needless to say, Larry’s miserable. But his unhappiness makes for a pretty good joke.” —The New York Times

“The doubter in me never got over the suspicion that the Coens may only be fucking with Larry, and with us.” —Dana Stevens, Slate

“God help the rube who can’t take the joke.” —Ella Taylor, Village Voice

BriTaNick presents “The Morning After,” an homage to...

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:00:00 -0400

BriTaNick presents “The Morning After,” an homage to hairbrained shcemes and introduction to my favorite Internet character of the year: Mr. Fancy the R-Rated Film Enthusiast. Enjoy!

(Shameless plug/fun fact: The season finale of The CollegeHumor Show was called “Morning After.”)

Jeff Rubin and I have written an overview of Alternative...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:19:00 -0400

Jeff Rubin and I have written an overview of Alternative Dinosaur Extinction Theories, mostly proposed by science fiction writers. What could have killed off our giant reptilian predecessors? Evil, flying brains (Futurama)? Dragons (Reign of Fire)? A Biblical flood (Creationism)? Read and find out for yourself.