Interesting article in USA Today (of all places) delving into the There Will Be Blood milkshake line:

[Director P. T.] Anderson concedes that he’s puzzled by the phenomenon — particularly because the lines came straight from a transcript he found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Sen. Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for oil-drilling rights to public lands in Wyoming and California.

In explaining oil drainage, Fall’s “way of describing it was to say ‘Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I’ll end up drinking your milkshake,’ ” Anderson says. “I just took this insane concept and used it.”

By the way, it’s now kind of painfully obvious this milkshake thing has gone from inside joke to appallingly mainstream, and really is no longer cool. We need to find a more obscure line from an even indier movie. [Honest to blog. —Ed.]

The crew at Overthinking It are committed to reflecting thoughtfully on even the most crass of cultural phenomena. We’re like doctors: you can tell us all your embarrassing secrets. We will nod sagely, and prescribe a cream you can put on your junk.

The life and career of Anna Nicole Smith (née Vickie Lynn Marshal) could be called the most telling artifact of American culture at the opening of the twenty-first century (not by us, but by some bloviating twit or other). The woman became a canvas onto which a culture could project its darkest fantasies and consuming obsessions—celebrity worship, plastic surgery, fad dieting, greed, drugs, boobies—a demented clown enacting in distorted parody the most decadent aspects of late capitalism.

Today, Friday, February 8, 2008, we pause to remember the one year anniversary of the woman’s death. The posts may be irreverent. They will almost certainly be in bad taste. But they will not—you have my word here—be underthinking it.

I didn’t know about Eugene Mirman before he came through New Haven a couple years ago. His show alternated live bits with videos he had made. One of these, Eugene Mirman: Secret Agent, contained the memorable threat: “I’m gonna kick you so hard in the dick, you’ll cum fear.”

He now has made a parody of the blogfamous Tom Cruise Video.

Eugene Mirman: Scientologist [23/6 via Defamer]

No sooner did I finish my weeklong series on Rambo than I came across this little corner of the blogosphere, and I think it, as much as anything else, helps me clarify why I bothered to do a weeklong series on Rambo. more »

I’ve always appreciated the honesty of this song. Rather than the posturing and posing that characterized much of 1990s hip-hop, I always believed Daddy Mac and Mac Daddy wrote about what they knew on this track- no gangsta posturing, no “smacking bitches”, just the pure anxiety of two kids who overslept for school.

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So let’s talk about the music. As you probably know, the score is by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood (the musical equivalent of stunt casting) and it’s gotten a lot of press for that reason alone. But Greenwood has serious chops – this is one of the best scores I’ve heard in years. I’m sure it would have gotten an Oscar nomination, if the Academy hadn’t judged the score ineligible (apparently because Greenwood reused sections of a preexisting composition that he’d written for the BBC in 2004). A lot of my fellow film music nerds are pissed off about this, but I don’t particularly care… Greenwood doesn’t need the money, fame, or validation, and the score itself has received plenty of media attention already… more »

Our old buddy Rambo’s got the best poster for a new movie I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a pretty good work of graphic design (I love how Rambo’s mullet forms the drips of a hasty paint job), but more importantly, its manufactured message blunders its way close to honesty, which is something we rarely get from movie posters. more »