Jack the Giant Slayer

Rated PG-13

There has been a spate of fairytale-themed movies lately. The Oscar-nominated Snow White and the Huntsman and the more recent Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters immediately come to mind, but there have been plenty others the past few years. Maybe it’s the popularity of ABC’s primetime show Once Upon a Time, or more likely, it’s because you don’t have to pay any royalties for public domain characters. Whatever the case is, I’m all for it. These stories have been around for a long time for a reason. They’ve been passed down for generations. Still, with each new telling, the stories get a new makeover. Jack the Giant Slayer come to us via over by X-Men director Bryan Singer, and though the film had a rough opening week at the box office and has received lukewarm reviews, I thought it was a hell of a good time, and a worthy retelling of Jack’s journey up the beanstalk.

It more or less starts as the familiar tale of Jack (Nicholas Hoult), a wide-eyed farm boy with big dreams who’s slow on making the transition from boy to man. A monk trades beans soaked in dark magic for Jack’s horse, and the young man’s life is never the same again. The beans get wet, a giant beanstalk grows and our young hero is transported into a land of giants who like to think of humans as things you can roll into pastries and snack on.

There are some wrinkles added to the well-worn tale, though. Stanley Tucci plays Roderick, an evil usurper with his eyes on the throne; Ewan McGregor chips in as Elmont, the dutiful captain of the king’s guard; and what fairytale would be complete without a princess? Eleanor Tomlinson stars as Isabelle, a headstrong and idealistic young woman who would be queen—and a darn good one too—if she ever gets her shit together.

When Isabelle leaves home so she won’t have to marry the much older Roderick, she meets up with Jack, who’d previously stood up for her honor outside the castle. Their flirtations are cut short when one of Jack’s magic beans gets wet and, a la Gremlins, completely freaks out and sprouts a leafy green staircase to the heavens. Isabelle gets captured by the giants’ two-headed leader (voiced by Bill Nighy and John Kassir), and Jack ends up a part of the expedition to go rescue her.

The one problem with Jack the Giant Slayer that makes the film a difficult study is that it doesn’t seem to know which audience it wants. There’s plenty of childish humor (some of which is pretty funny), but there are also a few scenes of intense fantasy violence. Though you won’t see blood and guts all over the place, there are instances of people and horses getting buffeted, stepped on or skewered. More timid parents may want to steer younger children clear.

However, for the teens—and the teens at heart—there’s a whole lot of fun to be had in Jack the Giant Slayer. A cast of capable actors bring this classic story to vibrant life, and the CGI monster designs are wickedly fun.

There is also a giant (no pun intended) battle scene that is actually quite thrilling. As the giants storm the humans’ castle, the danger is palpable. Moats are set on fire, enormous hammers and boulders crash into castle walls and soldiers struggle under impossible odds. While you may roll your eyes at the epilogue (as I did), the action-packed ride to the finish is definitely worth the price of admission.

Look, there are swashbuckling heroes, a beautiful princess and a horde of unruly monsters threatening to flatten all of humanity. You may very well be too grown up for a movie like this. And if you are, I feel kind of sorry for you.

Deadlands re-releases debut album Evilution to an international audience of headbangers

Local thrash metal band Deadlands is barely more than two years old, but this isn’t a group of rookies. Members Brian O’Connor (vocals), Michael Garner (lead guitar), Kevin Rohr (guitar), Steve “Dedbass” Northam (bass) and Danny Sabian (drums) have earned their metal stripes in a variety of notable bands including Vicious Rumors, Spectre, The Council and HateFX. In 2010, they joined forces to form Deadlands and soon after released their first album Evilution, which has now been released worldwide by German metal label Massacre.

Re-released Feb. 22, 2013, Evilution received something of a sonic facelift for its Massacre debut. The band turned to Juan Urteaga, who has produced Machine Head, Testament and Death Angel in the past, to give the album the punch it needed for an international audience.

“We had him add more of a lower end,” Northam said in a recent phone interview with Submerge. “It’s got a much bigger sound to it.”

Deadlands also added a cover of Dio’s “The Last in Line” to round out the re-release’s track listing.

Evilution has a very modern metal sound, but it’s also something of a throwback. Contemporary influences such as Killswitch Engage and Lamb of God mingle with old school nods to King Diamond, Mercyful Fate and classic thrash bands such as Testament and Exodus.

The link between the new and the old can be heard most clearly in O’Connor’s vocals. Though he’s not afraid to release a good growl when the situation calls for it, he’s equally adept and letting out a classic metal vibrato. What you won’t hear, however, is the tried and true Cookie Monster-style vocals that have become pervasive in modern metal bands. Northam said that this was an intentional move on the band’s part.

“I think that’s something we all wanted, because a lot of us, other than Brian, have been in the Cookie Monster bands, and I think we all wanted to try something different,” he said. “We did think it would separate us from everyone else, because the scene has become filled with growling.”

More nods to the days when metal was metal come in the form of Deadlands’ penchant for solos. While Garner and Rohr both prove prodigious in their fret board mastery, the band also reached out to a few metal greats to flex their shredding muscles. “Final Solution,” a track from Evilution features a bevy of guest spots from Mercyful Fate guitarists Hank Shermann, Michael Denner and Mike Wead. King Diamond’s Andy LaRocque and Serpent and Seraph/Dragonlord’s Claudius Creamer also provide solos for the track. Elsewhere, Glen Alvelais (Testament and others) and Steve Smyth (Nevermore) heat up as guests on “Path We’ve Chosen.”

“We laid down all the rhythms for the album, and Michael [Garner] laid in his leads later. He got to that song [“Final Solution”], and he realized that he had seven solo slots,” Northam said. “He’s a huge King Diamond and Merciful Fate fan. He just started hitting guys up. He started with Hank Shermann, that was the first guy he got in touch with through email. He liked the song and said he was down… They all liked the song. It was cool. We were honored that they wanted to be on the album.”

Deadlands is currently working on new material for a forthcoming album and gearing up for the Evilution CD release party at The Boardwalk on March 16, 2013. Northam gave us some insight into the band’s writing processes and also explained why Deadlands is not simply shredding for shredding’s sake in the following interview.

How did you get hooked up with Massacre?
Our singer Brian O’Connor, he toured the world with Vicious Rumors. He’s well known overseas. He was familiar with Massacre records, and he flew the album by them. They really liked it and they wanted to pick up that album, so we just decided we’d add one more song and give it a better mix since it was going worldwide.

I was listening to Evilution, and I really dug the sound. A lot of the lyrics have a political or socially conscious bent to it. Was there a theme behind the album?
Yeah, the theme was generally about the apocalypse and the decline of the world. It’s from the starting place where politicians get too greedy and kind of suck from the world, and then the apocalypse and life after that. The album has the ongoing theme of that. The lyrics are something we all sort of collaborate on.

How does the collaboration work out lyrically?
Lyrically, most of it’s Brian. I’m the other main lyricist. Occasionally a guy will throw in an idea for a hook or something…

I predominately wrote the lyrics to “Asphyxiate the Masses” and “Shed My Skin,” but Brian was there for the whole process. He took out parts of mine that he wasn’t sure of and added his stuff. He was definitely involved with the process.

What kind of place were you coming from with “Shed My Skin?”
“Shed My Skin” is about drug addiction. It’s something I’ve dealt with. My father was a heroin addict. There were several heroin addicts in my family. My best friend grew up around a lot of meth heads. It’s just something that I saw a lot growing up. “I was gonna kick tomorrow…” was about quitting, but the people never get around to it, and they end up dying, which I saw a lot growing up. It’s about the decline, being an innocent person and you slowly partake in drugs and watching it eat you up until you die. You see the people want a way out, but a lot of times they don’t find their way out.

Does it make it easier to write lyrics having a thematic focal point, or does the theme just come out after you’ve started writing?
With this album, ever since it started coming into play, there was that apocalypse thing. Fortunately, that’s something that ties into so much. Any time you’re on hard times—like, say, there was an apocalypse, or right before an apocalypse—people start using drugs. Any bad situation, drugs come into play. It’s fitting for so many topics, it really made it easy to write for, thematically.

You have a lot of guest soloists on “Final Solution.” Was it tough to find a spot for all of them on the song?
No, there was a little bit of tweaking, because we didn’t figure everyone would agree to be on it! We ended up extending it a little bit, because we wanted to get all those great guitarists in there.

When you play that song live, does it put a little extra pressure on your guitarist?
Oh yeah, he’s good though. He learned all the other guys’ solos. I feel sorry for him, but he got it.

You’ve played in other bands before this, how does your experience with Deadlands compare?
Personally, it’s been the best experience I’ve had as a band. I’ve been in bands that I’ve enjoyed, but I’ve never been in a band where everyone is such a pro player. All of these guys are so talented.

You mentioned that you were working on new music, could you talk about that a little bit?
We’re mainly putting together riffs at the moment, working that out. Once we have what we feel is solid, we’ll have Brian come in and dictate what parts he’d like to sing on and rework the songs at that point.

The thrash metal sound is so technical. Getting together on riffs and stuff, is that something you have to drill constantly to get it to a point where you like it?
Yeah, it takes a little bit of time. I’ve been in the technical death metal bands before, you can just throw those riffs back to back. It’s a lot harder what we do, because we write songs. You have to think about the singer too. Even though we get crazy technically on some parts, we realize songwriting is the most important part, and we realize we have to bring it back to that. That’s actually harder than the technical riffs.

So for you guys, it’s not just shredding for shredding’s sake.
Exactly. That was the most important thing about getting the members. We wanted guys who could play their instruments and shred, but we all realized and seen before that a lot of times guys like that aren’t such good writers. We wanted to make sure we had a band of writers.

You have the CD release show at The Boardwalk coming up. What do you guys have coming up after that?
After that, we don’t have any shows lined up. That’s when we’re really going to start hitting the writing harder. Depending on the record sales, we are trying to work out some tour overseas and in the United States, but that’s all up in the air right now.

Does it make things a little more difficult working with a label in Germany?
Not really with the way computers work. That’s just how everyone communicates. Metal is just bigger across Europe than it is in the States. It’s actually better because we’re getting more pushed over there. We’re in the magazines on the shelves over there and stuff like that. The big time metal magazines are reviewing our album. We get the interviews over there, where we don’t quite get as much love in the United States, but things could change with the album release.

It must be a surreal feeling to know that thousands of miles away that people are reading about you.
It is. it’s really cool.

But then at home you’re kind of low key.
We’ve been getting the best of both worlds.
Our shows have been going really well around here, and the support we get over there is incredible.

See Deadlands headline their CD release show at The Boardwalk in Orangevale on March 16, 2013. War NRV, Force of Habit, Steel Savior and Dire Peril will play the support slots. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. You can purchase tickets in advance and learn more about Deadlands on their website Deadlandsmusic.com.

A Good Day to Die Hard

Rated R

When John McLane first burst into the American film lexicon in 1988’s Die Hard, we had a different breed of action hero. Played by Bruce Willis (whose major claim to fame was the prime time dramedy Moonlighting), we were given a counterpoint to the Schwarzeneggers and Stallones of the world. McLane wasn’t a juiced-up Neanderthal. He was just an honest cop from New York, trying to make amends with his wife around Christmas time. This was someone we could relate to, but instead of just being a cool all-around guy, he could also dispatch bad guys with a quickness. Die Hard spawned a series of sequels, all with Willis reprising his role, but with the latest and fifth film in the series, this franchise is starting to show its age.

Let’s set aside for the moment that A Good Day to Die Hard is a bad movie. That would be forgivable. There are plenty of movies that are, for lack of a better word, bad, but are at least good for what they are. A Good Day to Die Hard isn’t even a good Die Hard movie, and that’s the most troubling thing about it.

First of all, it’s mostly humorless. At its start, it feels like a bargain basement Bond flick as we start out in a foreign city (Moscow), and we’re inundated with tedious intrigue. John’s son Jack (Jai Courtney) is working for the CIA and has found himself wrapped up in some pretty serious shit. There’s some sort of political demagogue with his sights set on world domination and a cover-up involving weapons-grade uranium that dates back to the Chernobyl disaster.

Enter the senior McLane to the rescue. He flies to Moscow, promising his daughter he won’t get into trouble, to find out what’s going on with his son, who now finds himself in a Russian prison. John gets there in time to save Jack from incarceration (and most likely worse) but ends up complicating the situation even more (as if that were possible), much to Jack’s chagrin.

A Good Day to Die Hard does have a few things going for it. First of all, it’s short. At 97 minutes long, it is by far the shortest in the series. This is a blessing as there’s never a dull moment. Nary a minute goes by without gunfire, an explosion or explosive gunfire. There are elaborate car and helicopter stunts and it seems the only way the McLane boys can get off of a rooftop is by plummeting through glass and/or scaffolding until they reach a soft spot on the ground below.

In that regard, it’s a good action movie. Unfortunately, Die Hard set the bar high back in the late ‘80s. That film not only had a wisecracking hero we could all root for, but it also had a great villain we loved to hate. Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber should go down as one of the best and most memorable heel performances of all time. He was dastardly to be sure, but also human, witty and interesting. A Good Day to Die Hard doesn’t have such a luxury. In fact, it’s hard to really know who we’re supposed to be rooting against until the very end. The film has some twists and turns, but really, it just feels like the filmmakers are over thinking it.

Look, don’t try to dazzle me with your plot devices, because your dialogue is weak (if I had to listen to one more “sins of the father” style heart to heart, I would’ve thrown myself off a building). Just give me ol’ Johnny Mac shredding through a well-funded and calculating horde of baddies, and I’m a happy guy. It’s what made Die Hard my favorite Christmas movie of all time. It also made me proud to be an American.

Twenty One Pilots are new to Fueled by Ramen and may be the label’s next big success

Drummer Josh Dun sounds a bit winded during our interview, but that’s understandable. One half of one of 2013’s bands to watch (according to MTV) just got off stage. He and Tyler Joseph, collectively known as Twenty One Pilots, played to a sold-out crowd in Bowling Green, Ohio, just minutes before our interview.

Twenty One Pilots are known for its high-energy live show, which may feature Dun playing his kit in the crowd or Joseph back flipping from his piano into the audience. It’s a perfect compliment to their explosively catchy blend of hip-hop, hardcore and electronica. It’s also the formula that has garnered the Columbus, Ohio-based twosome some much deserved attention and a slot on star-building label Fueled by Ramen. Though Dun admits that he and Joseph really didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when they embarked upon this wild ride, he’s excited that they’re on the cusp of realizing their wildest dreams.

Just a year ago, Twenty One Pilots played Bowling Green to a much different crowd. Dun says the group was in the small Ohio college town, thrown in perhaps as an oddity in a hip-hop festival. It’s funny how fast things can change.

“No one knew who we were, and there were maybe 30 people there,” Dun says. “So it’s kind of cool to come back a year later and sell out this little club.”

It was selling out a show in Ohio that got Twenty One Pilots to where they’re at now. A packed venue in the band’s hometown got the ball rolling, and labels began to take notice.

“We didn’t think that was that big of a deal, but that caught the attention of the industry,” Dun says. “So then a couple weeks after that, we had a little over a dozen record labels that sent us emails and said that they were interested in signing us.”

Dun and Joseph spent the ensuing months flying back and forth to Los Angeles and New York, meeting with various labels.

“Even then, Tyler and I didn’t know what that all meant,” Dun admits.

Eventually they settled on Fueled by Ramen, the label that sent bands such as Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco and Fun into major stardom.

“Ever since the beginning, we worked really hard to brand ourselves as a band,” Dun says of the decision to go with Fueled by Ramen. “I haven’t seen that done a whole lot. There are a few bands that really stick out as far as branding themselves, like where the logo is more recognizable than the band name… That’s what we were into from the beginning. Fueled by Ramen I think has done a really good job of branding itself as a label. We really connected with that.”

Twenty One Pilots began their “branding” with an easily recognizable logo, which looks something like this: |-/. It was created by Joseph’s roommate, Mark, who’s been supporting the band since the beginning.

“He’s all things creative to us,” Dun says of Mark, who’s also created videos for the band. “He’s been there since day one. I don’t think we’d be where we are without him.”

More than just a recognizable mark, the logo also holds significance for the band members.

“It has a couple of meanings. There’s a lot of tension and struggle and battle within ourselves and each other every day,” Dun says.

“At the same time, this logo, this obscure design, there’s something we’ve come up with where if you create something, and you’re all alone, whether it’s a painting or a song or whatever. If you create something where only you can understand the full meaning of it, is the beginning of finding purpose for yourself and your life. The logo represents that in the sense that only we totally understand what it means. It means Twenty One Pilots, and it represents purpose and creativity.”

In 2012, Twenty One Pilots released their Fueled by Ramen debut, Vessel, an album as rife with struggle as it is infectious. Hip-hop beats clash with sugary pop, as rapping gives way to clean and even screamed vocals. Heavy electronic beats collide against symphonic passages. The most amazing thing about it is how it all works. This isn’t a sort of Franken-music situation, where a multitude of styles are stitched together into an awkward monstrosity. Instead, it seems to acknowledge the commonality between all forms of popular music and exploits that to wonderful effect.

Vessel was recorded in Los Angeles with producer Greg Wells and engineer Ian MacGregor. Prior to this debut, Twenty One Pilots recorded their music in Joseph’s basement studio. Stepping up into an actual recording facility was a new experience for the band, and one that Dun says the band entered into with some measure of fear.

“It was scary at first,” Dun says. “In the basement, as much as we didn’t know what we were doing, we had complete control over what sounds we had to work with and the direction of the song.”

It didn’t take long for Wells and MacGregor to quell that fear, however. Wells, who has worked with Weezer and Adele in the past, proved to be the perfect person to guide Twenty One Pilots through the intimidating process of making its first proper studio album. Dun says Wells and MacGregor added ideas while incorporating what Dun and Joseph had worked on in their basement, fortifying the structure of what made Twenty One Pilots popular in their hometown in the first place.

“The best thing about Greg was that he loved it from the beginning, and he wanted to keep the integrity of what it is that we did in Tyler’s basement,” Dun says. “We’ve got a lot of the same programming on the album and even some of the same vocal takes that were done in Tyler’s basement. What we weren’t skilled in was making it sound bigger and fuller and getting the live drums captured.

“He put such tasteful ideas into the songs,” Dun continues in praise of Wells. “[He and McGregor] are both just so good at what they do. Greg would come in and work his magic on these songs and make them sound the way that we wanted them to. They both interjected their ideas, and we all worked together really well. Those things are really the main fears that we had going into the studio and handing over the reigns to somebody else.”

As for how the band’s mindset has changed now that they’re out of the basement and poised for the big time, Dun says, for the most part, the status quo remains. Twenty One Pilots’ live show is still their bread and butter. It even affects how their music is written, as Dun explains the band’s outlandish stage stunts sometimes influence the directions of their songs. Though they may have more eyes and ears pointed in their direction, Dun says he and Joseph haven’t deviated from the course they set out upon when they started Twenty One Pilots.

“We’re working harder now and playing a lot more,” Dun says. “But…we’re just going to go up there, just the two of us, and go completely nuts and lose our minds with a bunch of people. But we’re still shooting for things as big as we can dream of.”

Watch dreams come true when Twenty One Pilots play Sacramento State’s University Union Ballroom on Feb. 19, 2013. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. and tickets can be purchased through the band’s official website Twentyonepilots.com.

Emilie Autumn has created albums, crossed over to film and wrote a novel, but her whole career has lead up to this

It’s 7 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Emilie Autumn is excited.

She just got off the phone with director Darren Lynn Bousman, the macabre visionary behind Repo! The Genetic Opera and more recently The Devil’s Carnival, a film in which Autumn stars as The Painted Doll. Bousman just called to let Autumn know that he was finishing up the final cut of the video for “Fight Like a Girl,” the title track to her most recent album, a sort of pop-goth invigoration of Broadway musicals numbering 17 tracks.

“He’s flipping out,” Autumn says of her conversation with Bousman. “He’s like, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done.’”

The video, not yet released as of this writing, is more of a mini movie according to Autumn. From her description, “mini movie” sounds like a bit of an understatement. She says the video was shot in a “massive” eight-story Victorian theater in Los Angeles. In the video, she portrays a rebellious inmate who battles brutish orderlies for control of an asylum.

“We built this entire world with three levels,” she explains. “I did all my own stunts, as did we all…and I have the bruises to show for it still. I’m super proud of it, but it was kind of out of control.

“In the beginning, I get beaten up a lot and thrown to the floor, and of course, you have to do a million takes of that because you have to get Emilie being thrown to the floor from all angles; and Emilie getting smashed against the floor from all angles,” she continues. One entire day was me getting beaten up, and the second day was me transforming myself and the other inmates into the gorgeous mohawked warrior princesses who take over the theater, interrupt this ridiculous show that’s going on and kill a bunch of people.”

She chooses to stay mum on the video’s surprise ending, but it’s one of the few things Autumn isn’t open to talk about during our conversation. In fact, early on, she even turns the tables, asking me questions about how my day was and just my life in general. It’s a dizzying experience to speak with Autumn. She’s strange mix of brash and cocky yet utterly charming; a bit self-involved but genuinely curious about others.

This fascinating dichotomy shouldn’t come as any surprise to any one who’s followed Autumn’s career. She’s a sort of a living harlequin doll whose soaring voice and preternatural chops on the violin are equally as jaw dropping as her onstage appearance and elaborate stage shows. She’s style and substance–a rare but potent combination.

Autumn has currently embarked upon another stint on the road in support of Fight Like a Girl. In true Autumn fashion, she and her all-female backing band The Bloody Crumpets will be creating a full-on musical as opposed to your traditional rock show. In fact, Fight Like a Girl is a sort of pre-cursor to a full-blown musical that Autumn plans to unveil in 2014.

The full-length musical she’s working on is based on her 2010 novel, The Asylum for Wayward Girls, a fictional account of Autumn’s real-life institutionalization and bipolar disorder.

“The album is about one-third of the musical,” which will eventually reach the three-hour mark, she says.

Following suit, you can consider her current tour a teaser for what is to come, which is still evolving. Autumn reports that the show they’re taking on the road this time around is wildly different than what she and her band unleashed upon audiences last year.

“It’s new costumes, new sets, new songs,” she says. “It’s all on the next level. The girls and I are out of our minds with excitement to get on stage and perform it for everybody. It’s like it’s the most exciting thing that has ever happened.”

Hyperbole aside, it’s easy to understand why she’s so amped up. Autumn says the idea to turn The Asylum… into something more than the book came during the writing process. She decided that she should use all of her talents–writing, songwriting, performing, costuming and set design–to bring her vision to full fruition.

“It was just like, how did I ever think of anything else? Of course, this is a musical. That’s been my ultimate destiny,” she says.

Autumn believes that the next logical step from musical will be an Asylum… movie. And so, the artist has been getting more experience in front of the camera to prepare for that eventuality. She says she has a few film projects forthcoming this year, most notably Bousman’s The Devil’s Carnival 2, in which Autumn will have a very prominent role.

“When I was first asked to do Carnival a couple of years ago, when they were first putting together the idea for it, I thought, OK, I have no idea if this is going to be embarrassing or not or who else was going to be in it, because I was the first person to sign on and say yes,” she says. “Of course, I’m thrilled that it’s this beautiful, incredible art piece, but I didn’t know that at the time. Why I signed on was because I thought, OK, I need practice for The Asylum… movie, because when I do that, I don’t want to fuck it up. You don’t get a second chance to make a movie, and I want to make sure I know what the hell I’m doing.”

Autumn also sees the current tour as good practice toward her ultimate goal, but that doesn’t mean if you catch her and The Bloody Crumpets on the road that you’ll see the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of a rough-shod tech rehearsal. Though she has her sights set on bigger things, Autumn says she and her band are determined to bring it each and every night.

“What we work with every day on tour with the idea being the audience must never know that this is a compromised version of what I want,” she says. “They must always think this is the best show they have ever seen on the face of the planet. That’s our job, to make every thing seem on-purpose, totally intentional.”

Autumn believes that the first step of making her dream come true is visualizing it in her mind. The Asylum for Wayward Girls will open at London’s West End Theatre in 2014. From there, she wants to bring the full-scale show to New York, Los Angeles and beyond before bringing it to the screen.

“I’m trying to be very detailed with what I want, because that is how you manifest things–to create them in your mind and make them real, and then build the reality around that,” she says. “That’s how The Asylum… happened. It was real to me, and now it’s real to so many different people, because I just really committed to that reality. I think this is the next version of that reality.”

Autumn’s “ultimate destiny” may still be quite a way off, but it’s rapidly approaching on her horizon.

“I don’t want to play arenas,” she says. “That’s not my goal at all. I don’t want to have radio hits; that’s not my goal. It’s really just about that I want to create a story. I want to create magic. I want to create theater.”

If that’s her goal, then it’s already mission accomplished. If that’s not something to be excited about, I’m not sure what is.

See the spectacle that is Emilie Autumn live at The Colonial Theatre on Feb. 1, 2013, presented by the Sacramento Horror Film Festival. Doors open at 8 p.m., and tickets ($20) can be purchased through either http://emilieautumn.com/ or Sachorrorfilmfest.com.

Texas Chainsaw 3D

Rated R

In the first weeks of any new year, people are clamoring to set the tone for the 12 months to follow. Texas Chainsaw 3D is the first widely released studio film of 2013, so maybe Hollywood wants us to expect plenty of gore this year. The creepy supernatural horror flick Mama is up later in January, and April will see the release of the Evil Dead remake, which is produced by the makers of the original film Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and the incomparable Bruce Campbell. If the red band trailer shown before Texas Chainsaw 3D is any indication, Evil Dead might be one of the most terrifying and bloody films in recent memory. But for now we’re stuck with this quasi-sequel of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 art-house classic.

Texas Chainsaw 3D isn’t a remake. They already made a decent but forgettable Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake in 2003 starring Jessica Biel. This time around, director John Luessenhop takes us back to the film’s grimy roots… At least, he does in the first couple of minutes before giving the franchise something of a pretty, Twilight-esque makeover.

We start out with a montage recap of the 1974 classic, beautifully remastered for 3D. Footage from the original film pops back to life, yet still retaining that grainy hand-held 8mm feel and giving you a reminder of how shocking this movie must have been to audiences who weren’t accustomed to seeing so much splatter on screen.

As a blood-soaked Sally Hardesty is carted away from the chainsaw-wielding madman, Leatherface, in the back of a pickup truck, Texas Chainsaw 3D begins to suppose what happened after. An honest cop (Sheriff Hooper nicely played by Thom Barry) is called out to the scene. Leatherface’s family, the Sawyers, holed up in their dilapidated farm house, shotguns in hand. The sheriff has things under control until an angry mob from the nearby town burst onto the scene. There’s a firefight, and the Sawyer house is burnt to the ground, presumably killing everyone inside.

But you know that’s not the case. Heather Miller (Alexandra Daddario) was just a baby at the time, and two members of the mob unable to conceive a child of their own pluck her from the arms of her dying mother. Heather grows up unaware of her bizarre back story until the death of her grandmother leaves her an unexpected inheritance–a huge house in Texas and everything that goes along with it, including someone residing in the basement… Any guesses as to whom that might be?

Texas Chainsaw 3D follows in the franchise tradition of being brutal and bloody. Most of the gore is accomplished through traditional special effects techniques, which is nice since computerized splatter effects often suck (as do the rare instances in this film). The kills are excruciatingly painful–mallets to the head, tenterhooks to the spine and of course chewed up with a chainsaw–and there’s plenty of them too. Luessenhop isn’t afraid to pile on the gore and shove it in your face. He’s also not shy about paying frequent homage to the original movie–the dead armadillo on the side of the road, the Volkswagen van and even the original Leatherface, Gunnar Hansen, makes an appearance.

The elements are there, but there’s nothing new or interesting done with them. Also, though Luessenhop clearly has reverence for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he didn’t seem to be playing close attention. His film bears the same slick, antiseptic look of any bad, modern horror film, replete with an absurdly sexy cast, unnecessary relationship nonsense and by-the-numbers “gotcha!” scares.

Perhaps it’s wrong to compare Texas Chainsaw 3D to the original film instead of judging it on its own merits. Unfortunately, there aren’t many merits here to judge it on. I suppose that’s the danger of simply rehashing great ideas from the past without coming up with new ones of your own. Look at it this way, as far as movies go, 2013 has nowhere to go but up.

John Oliver gears up for some well-deserved relaxation…live on stage

Dateline New York City. It’s 9 a.m. (local time), and English comedian turned mock news correspondent John Oliver is gearing up for another writers’ meeting for Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.

Oliver tells Submerge that The Daily Show workday starts promptly at 9:15 with a writers’ meeting. Basic ideas for stories are hashed out, and then the writers are broken up into groups.

“We try to get a first draft in in an hour and a half, and if the show’s not ready by 6 o’clock in the evening, we’re in real trouble,” Oliver says.

“The time between now and then is basically just controlled panic.”

Though he’s best known for his sternly delivered reports on The Daily Show, Oliver is also a seasoned stand-up comic, though it’s amazing given the show’s schedule that he has time to work on anything else. But stand-up has become a necessary outlet for Oliver, alleviating some of the pressures that mount up during The Daily Show’s rigorous schedule.

“It’s such a controlled environment here [at The Daily Show],” he says. “They’re working toward a very narrow goal. Stand-up is something that you can develop over much longer periods. Also, geographically, it gets me out of the city and clears my head a little bit. I find it a good way to relax, even though to work to relax yourself from another kind of work is not the healthiest situation. I’ve always loved doing it. I find myself tending to get more angst-y when I haven’t done stand-up in a while.”

Despite working as a writer and on-air correspondent for The Daily Show for about six years, Oliver says that the writing he does for the television program hasn’t really influenced the way he works on his stand-up material.

“There’s not a lot of crossover between this and stand-up,” he says of writing for the show versus writing for himself. “This becomes something where you sort of train your body to churn out stuff like a sausage factory. You just mentally sharpen yourself up so you can just push a button and something will come out mocking whatever it is you’re supposed to be working on. Stand-up sits with you for a bit longer. [Writing for The Daily Show] becomes instinctive, really.”

Oliver was kind enough to grant Submerge some time before beginning another day on The Daily Show. During our brief but jovial conversation, Oliver reminisced about the 2012 U.S. presidential election and waxed eloquent about what it was like to don the prestigious mantle of Smurfdom.

Photo by Scott Gries

You’ve got some stand-up dates during winter. It sounds like something you’re really looking forward to.
Definitely. In the run up to the election, I couldn’t really do anything at all. I couldn’t really do anything other than sit here and witness the election in gruesome, point-blank range. So this is my first chance to get out and talk about whatever I want, so I’m really looking forward to this. Each weekend for the next couple of months I’ll be going somewhere.

You were busy covering the 2008 presidential election as well. How did 2012 compare?
Well, it was impressively nuts, really. Four years ago, you had no incumbent. You had McCain and Palin and the first potential black president, and there was understandably a huge amount of excitement behind that. This time, the excitement seemed less, but they certainly spent a lot more money on it. The sheer spectacle alone of watching that scale of money get wasted was pretty impressive. I mean, short of actually setting fire to a billion dollars, they couldn’t really have done a more impressive installation art piece of how not to run a democracy. It was absolutely awful.

You lampoon news networks a lot on the show. I was watching the coverage on NBC, and it seemed like they were trying to make the drama of the election more interesting than it actually was once the results started coming in.
Yeah, and then you’ve got Karl Rove digging his heels into the floor of the Fox News studio saying, “This thing is not over. Only on my signal is this thing over.”

But all the way through the Republican primaries, it was the same thing. They were circling around and around and around the inevitable fact that they were going to get a candidate that they didn’t want. It was evident from the first debate that they were going to get Romney, and they tried everything–through Bachmann and Herman Cain–they tried everything to not have him and they got him anyway.

A friend of mine who was on the fence about who he wanted to vote for said he felt as if Romney had been running for president his entire adult life.
Not just his adult life, but his child life as well. His temples started graying when he was 6 years old. This is a guy who was practicing his acceptance speeches while he was in the bath.

Do you think he’ll come back again in 2016?
He’s rich enough to do it, though it might just be cheaper for him to pay people to pretend he’s president now.

You do The Bugle podcast with your buddy Andy. On one of the more recent ones, you were talking about Kate Middleton being pregnant, which I think was even big news for me…
The Golden Child. The Golden Child is being born now to save the planet.

Is this kid the messiah?
Well, yeah, it’s going to be a cross between a messiah and Superman. This child is going to restore the British Empire to its rightful place. Every British person should put all of their hopes and dreams into this one, poor, unborn infant. If this kid lets us down, I don’t think we’re coming back from that.

Can Americans really fathom how big news this is?
It’s huge news. I can’t really put it into context for you. Imagine if Michael Jordan had a baby with Martha Stewart. It’s the perfect child.

Do you think this child has any chance of having a regular life?
Nope! I don’t think this child has any chance of anything other than being institutionally wealthy. If that’s not enough for it, which it probably won’t be… I’ve never felt so sorry for a rich, unborn child before.

Last year, you got married, and I’d heard on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon that you’d met your wife at the previous Republican National Convention.
I did. It was very strange. She was at both conventions. She was in the army. She and a bunch of veterans were at both conventions campaigning for veterans’ rights. So yeah, I met her there. It wasn’t the most romantic place to meet. I wasn’t expecting to meet my wife at the Republican National Convention, and if you told me that was going to happen, it would have chilled my blood on the spot, but it’s funny how life works out.

How’s married life been treating you?
It’s awesome! It’s great. I really don’t have a bad thing to say about it. Ask me again in 10 years. Statistically, I’ll have a different answer I think.

Looking forward to 2013, you’ll be reprising your role as Vanity Smurf in The Smurfs sequel. When you first started your career, did you have any idea that you’d be the voice of one of the Smurfs?
I mean, that’s always what I was aiming for, because I thought it would come later in life. The problem is there’s nowhere to go from here. Once you’ve embodied a Smurf, I guess, I don’t know, Eastern religion is the next point. Life is finished, My work here is done on Earth.

I grew up on The Smurfs, were they as popular for you growing up in England?
Of course! We’re geographically closer to Belgium. Those tiny blue Belgians were almost in touching distance. I had Smurf toys. I watched The Smurfs. I think even as a child you’re like, “This doesn’t really make sense, but I’m enjoying it.” When someone asks, “Do you want to be a Smurf,” the answer is, “Yes.”

There were some weird things on the show, like they’d dance around pentagrams and stuff.
Yes, I think they’ve removed some of that from the American movie version. When you see Smurfs dabbling in the occult, that can affect your opening box office. I haven’t seen the final cut of The Smurfs 2 yet, but there may be a pagan sacrifice in there. I’m not sure.

Do you have any inkling of what will be some of the big news stories of in 2013?
The Supreme Court’s going to rule on gay marriage. They’ve announced that, so that will be a big one. I think other than that will be everyone gearing up for the election in 2016. I think that will already be underway, so Iowa and Ohio better get ready, because Hillary and Jeb are coming.

Don’t miss John Oliver when he brings his stand-up to Sacramento. Oliver will perform at The Crest Theatre on Jan. 18, 2013. Tickets are $35 and can be purchased through http://www.thecrest.com/.

Dream pop purveyor Jean-Philip Grobler travels the world before finding St. Lucia

St. Lucia’s Jean-Philip Grobler has led a wanderer’s life. The South African born singer/songwriter spent his late childhood/early adolescence traveling the world as a member of the Drakensberg Boys Choir. Though he now calls Brooklyn, N.Y., home, he continues to lead a mobile existence. Submerge caught up with Grobler in our nation’s capital, just a couple days after playing to a packed crowd in Toronto.

“We sold out the venue, our first night there,” Grobler said of his show north of the border. “The thing that kind of sucks about being on tour–it’s kind of a good and bad thing–is that you get to go to so many places you’ve never been before, but you don’t really get a chance to see them. It was great, the crowd was great and the venue was awesome, but I just wish I could have seen more of the city.”

It’s busy for the band now, but St. Lucia’s touring schedule will become even more hectic in the New Year. The band will play dates in support of Ellie Goulding’s North American tour.

“The longest we’ve been on tour has been a month, and we had a lot of free days during that tour,” Grobler said. “But this one is going to be full on, every day, traveling at least six hours. I’m anticipating it with excitement and utter dread.”

Though singing in the choir may seem like a wildly different experience than fronting an up-and-coming electro-pop act, Grobler admitted that his life on the road with Drakensberg prepared him for what he’s doing now. Perhaps it’s not so surprising considering that this occurred during the most formative years of his life. Grobler was just 10 when he started with the choir and finished his stint with them when he was 15.

“It was this crossover period between my childhood and my adolescence,” he said.

Like most teenage boys, he was eager to rebel against the things he knew. Grobler said he was one of the first people he was in the choir with to start a band.

“I feel like I have this natural personality where I see what’s going on around me, and I just have this urge to fuck with it,” he said.

“As I started becoming older, I started getting into stuff like Radiohead, and all the choir stuff just seemed so regimented to me,” Grobler added. “I had this urge to break out of it, so I started a band. In a way, I guess that fed into what happened with this.”

As we learned through our interview, it was the same sort of against-the-grain attitude that fueled the musical direction of St. Lucia, though in a slightly different way. So far the band has released two EPs, a self-titled collection of intoxicating dream pop, which came out on Neon Gold in March 2012, and September, an EP-length single (featuring the title track and a handful of remixes of it) came out in September of the same year. A full-length is in the works, but before that, check out what Grobler had to say about life on the road and the considerable journey that brought him to the electronic music paradise that is St. Lucia.

Things are really picking up for you now. You’re on a good label with Neon Gold, and people are starting to recognize your music more. Is it like how you feel about the Ellie Goulding tour–equal parts joy and dread?
In a way it is. It’s amazing for someone like me who sat in a studio for years and years trying to figure out what the fuck I’m doing musically, and then for people to suddenly be taking notice, it’s a great feeling. But it’s a complex thing, because on the one hand, it’s amazing and exciting, but on the other, the fact that people like it puts pressure on me to make the next thing really good. You can never know if people are going to like it until they listen to it and it’s released, you know? Now my time is just so full of doing stuff other than doing music, like–um–interviews [laughs]. It’s both good and bad, but I think everything in life is like that. I think the fact that I’m doing what is my passion–music–and I’m spending all my time doing that is amazing. I couldn’t hope for anything more than that.

I saw a picture of your live setup on your Twitter feed, and it looks like a pretty traditional rock/pop setup. From what I’ve heard, your music sounds really dreamy and electronic. Is the sound live a lot different than what people are accustomed to on the recordings?
I don’t think so. I’ve heard people saying it’s very similar to the recording. We play as much of the stuff that we can live, and I’m blessed to have a lot of great musicians who play with me. I would say it’s different, but I try to take it as far away from “guy on laptop” as possible.

You’re originally from South Africa, but you traveled all over as a kid. How has that prepared you for what you’re doing now?
It’s funny, because earlier I was saying to the guys in the band that I’ve realized that the way that it feels doing this with the band is almost identical to how it felt with the boys’ choir, except now there’s alcohol involved and people can go home with other people at night. It’s very similar, and in a way, I think it gave me stamina for this, because I can easily sit through a 10-hour bus drive, squashed next to other people, and have no problem with that. I can just listen to music and not get bored. I think that’s probably the influence, and I’m also open to new experiences and trying new things.

Before you mentioned that you were sitting in your studio for years trying to figure out what to do. Did you have an “ah-hah!” moment that pointed you in this direction?
I think it was a gradual dawning, I guess you could say. It took a while. The stuff I used to do was more rock-based, more overtly influenced by Radiohead, that kind of stuff. Just being in New York, and that being the epicenter of the whole indie explosion that happened over the last decade, it started to feel to me that things were getting too precious in a way. There are a lot of bands in that scene that I loved, but I think I just started to get tired of trying to be that way. I just started listening back to a lot of stuff that I was influenced by when I was a kid–stuff that my parents would listen to or would be on MTV or whatever, like Lionel Richie, Phil Collins, Michael Jackson or Earth Wind and Fire. Something about the super positive and really over-the-top, flamboyant quality of that music seemed really refreshing to me at that point when it seemed like everyone else was trying to be small and weird…which is cool! I really love a lot of those bands, but this was something else that I hadn’t explored yet that I should maybe just take a look at it because it’s so ingrained in my consciousness. Just from listening back to that stuff, it just started emerging in my music. It was just a gradual thing where more and more of the stuff I was writing came out in that style. It wasn’t like one moment where I was like, “Yes!” or whatever.

There’s a full-length album in the works, right? I’d heard it was supposed to come out this year, but has it been pushed back?
What happened was there’d been a few mix-ups, like certain delivery dates were promised to the label, which I wasn’t privy to, but at the moment, it’s looking like the full-length will be out April/May next year. I’m working with Chris Zane, who produced the most recent Passion Pit album and the Holy Ghost album. We’re finishing up a couple details here and there and tying the whole thing together, because I think just by the nature of doing the whole thing by myself, I think it’s natural that you kind of miss things here and there. It’s good to have an outside opinion, and we’re also getting some alternate mixes on a couple of things, but it’s pretty much done. All the songs are there, all the parts are there, we’re just ironing out the creases.

Now that you’re touring and will be for a good part of next year with your band, is there any inclination to get them more involved in the creative process?
For me, I’ve been doing it for so long the way I’m doing it now, it just seems very natural for me to go to the studio and do it by myself. I have a very ironed-out process of what to do to bring something to life, but like you said, just because we are going to be on the road so much together, and everyone I play with is such a talented musician, someone is bound to play something that will spark something and something will happen. I don’t want to force it.

Your wife Patricia Berenek is also in the band. Do you often bounce ideas off of her?
She’s definitely a very big part of the whole thing… Her opinion affects the way I see things. But she’s not always in the studio every day. I think it’s good to have that separation.

You’ll be playing New Year’s Eve in Sacramento. Do you typically enjoy New Year’s Eve?
To me, I just hate it when I feel like I should be partying more than other nights on New Year’s Eve. I just want it to be a normal night, and if I get tired, then I can go home. Sometimes I hate it, but when it’s natural, and everything flows, and you’re just surrounded by good people, then I love it. It’s great.

Would that be your tip to enjoy yourself on New Year’s Eve? Just to not put any undue pressure on yourself?
For me, yeah, but some people need that pressure. Or they just need to go [roars] and go crazy!

Catch St. Lucia at LowBrau in Sacramento (1050 20th Street) for a New Year’s Eve party you won’t want to miss. For just $20, you’ll get a midnight toast, party favors and plenty of entertainment. St. Lucia will help you countdown to 2013, and top DJs (Whores, Shaun Slaughter and others) will keep the party going till 2 a.m. Doors open at 9. St. Lucia will also be part of the Snow Globe Festival in South Lake Tahoe. The band will play day two of the festival (Dec. 30).

In a short time, Sacramento’s Cave Women have been churning out exciting new material

For Sacramento band Cave Women, things fell into place very quickly. Whereas some bands take years to find their voice and record, the five highly skilled musicians who make up the group hit it off almost instantly.

Is this the musical equivalent of love at first sight? Well, not entirely. But I thought I was pretty clever when I thought of that while interviewing Cave Women vocalist/bassist Casey Lipka.

“It’s really special to be able to play original music with everyone,” Lipka says of becoming fast musical friends with the other Cave Women, who have only been together as a band since 2011. In that time, they’ve already released a five song EP and a full-length, self-titled album, which was released Nov. 15, 2012.

“I think in a certain sense, that’s what we’ve all really been enjoying,” Lipka elaborates. “We’ve all participated in different music projects, but for it to be our own compositions and have them develop in this way and just be able to work on our music together, it’s been such a great opportunity.”

Lipka has been on quite a journey in order to make it to where she is today. A Venice, Calif., native, Lipka began studying music at Sonoma State before furthering her education in Montreal, Quebec. It was there that she began learning to play bass.

“I was hanging out with a lot of bass players by chance,” says Lipka, who lists voice as her first instrument. “They had this really big room for bass in that school. If you could imagine just walking into a room with 10 human size instruments, it was pretty intense.”

About three years ago, she moved to Sacramento, where she still lives and teaches voice and piano. While enrolled in a world music class at Sacramento State, she got turned on to the mbira, a small instrument with origins in Zimbabwe that consists of 21 to 28 metal keys that are plucked by hand. She has brought her love for the mbira to Cave Women.

“We’d go through all these different types of music from all over the world, and my teacher put on that kind of music,” she says. I don’t think I was concentrating in the class, but the moment she put on that music, I was like ‘What is that?’”

Though she has bounced around quite a bit in her life, Lipka seems to have found a home in Sacramento, which she calls a “small big city.”

“What I mean by that is that there’s enough going on that there’s quite a bit to do, but at the same time you can have a community of people here,” she explains.

Not long after moving to Sacramento, Lipka met up with Alicyn Yaffee, Cave Women’s vocalist/guitarist, and the two began performing as a duo, Lipka says. The duo was soon joined by Vanessa Cruz (drums/percussion), then Emily Messick (vocals/accordion) and finally Kim Davis (vocals/flute).

“I happened to get a free recording session at the Art Institute in San Francisco,” Lipka says. “And all of a sudden, we had this recording and we were somewhat of a band. It was like, ‘Wow, this works.’ It was definitely an evolution of instrumentation and sounds and addition and experimentation.”

Explosive growth would probably be more of an apt term. Of the five songs on the band’s first EP, only two of them appear on the self-titled full-length. On top of that, Lipka reports that she and the band are already working on new songs. Not bad for someone who says she’d hardly written her own compositions before starting Cave Women.

“Songwriting is very new to me,” she says. “Cave Women kind of kick started it for me.”

Cave Women’s songwriting maturity betrays the group’s youth as a band. These musicians have an almost magical connection with one another that’s easily apparent on their debut full-length (recorded by notable engineer Pat Olguin, who has worked with Papa Roach, E-40 and Black Eyed Peas), which incorporates world music and jazz influences into catchy pop song structures. This could be a byproduct of the band’s nurturing songwriting process that allows each member’s talents and instruments to shine.

“Someone will come to the group with a composition, at whatever stage it’s in, and everyone adds their own voice to it through their instrument,” Lipka says. “There isn’t necessarily a conversation like, ‘Oh, there’s a lot going on. You should add less here.’ It’s more of a natural process of adding in the different voices.”

One of the more striking songs on the album, “Hunger” practically swoons through your speakers. Beautiful, dreamy harmonies mingle perfectly with the tune’s somber lyrics as the melody builds to a soft crescendo. Lipka says that “Hunger” is one of the songs that Yaffee first brought to the band, but the rest of Cave Women were quick to add their own personal touches to round out the track.

“[Alicyn] had her melody and guitar part, and the voice parts that we added on the end, everyone made up their own voice part,” Lipka says of “Hunger.” “That was really neat in the sense that…gradually every person added how they heard their own part mixing into the song.”

The video for “Hunger,” shot by photographer Nicholas Wray, shows a behind-the-scenes look at the band in the studio working on the full-length album. In it, you can see Lipka at work on bass and with her mbira, which she has fixed to the back of an acoustic guitar. She says that it amplified the mbira’s sound in a “richer way, because it had the guitar body for it to resonate in.” She goes on to say, though, that you won’t see her trying this trick on stage.

“It’s way too complicated. I don’t think I could hold a guitar and an mbira at the same time,” Lipka says through laughter.

Though the band just seems to click as if it was fate, Lipka does say there are some complications in playing in a band like Cave Women. The band employs so many instruments and sounds that it’s a challenge for the group to recreate their sound live.

“There are certain places that we just can’t play because we have so many instruments,” she says. “If we bring everything, we just can’t physically fit in certain places. There will be times when everyone will just bring one instrument.

“There have been shows where I’m like, ‘My mbira is over there. How am I going to get there?’”

Though the stage might be cluttered, Cave Women’s songwriting is anything but, and a bright, productive future seems pre-ordained.

Celebrate the release of Cave Women’s first full-length at Bows and Arrows in Sacramento on Dec. 19, 2012. Alto and David Alfred will also perform. The all-ages show is $6 and starts at 8 p.m. To listen to and order the album, go to http://cavewomen.bandcamp.com/.

Comedian Iliza Shlesinger moves from reality show fame to rise the stand-up ranks

Talent, hard work and confidence–and a dash of luck–are needed to nurture any career in entertainment, and Iliza Shlesinger has been fortunate enough to have all these ingredients in abundance.

The winner of Last Comic Standing 6 back in 2008, Shlesinger is the only female comic to take the title, though even that wasn’t an easy road. She staved off elimination multiple times in order to take the prize. It’s an accomplishment to be sure, but it’s not something she has ever hung her hat on.

“It’s a cool thing for sure, but I think other people are more impressed with it than I am,” she says. “I would be a real tool if I rested on those laurels and still talked about it.”

While it’s not her sole accomplishment, it certainly gave her a quicker start than others in the field. Still, it’s what she’s done since that’s entrenched her as a force in stand-up.

“I know comics who have been doing it longer than I have,” Shlesinger says. “I know comics who have been doing it for 10 years, and they’re still featuring, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s the way it is. I’ve had the luxury of skipping a lot of the BS that stands between opening and being a headliner. I’m very fortunate to have been able to do that, but there’s also lot of hard work that I’ve put into it.

“I don’t brag about it, because I know what I did. As we get farther and farther away from it, I don’t want to be the guy who’s like, ‘Remember how good I was at football in high school?’”

Her journey in comedy began before Last Comic Standing. She says her first loves were sketch comedy and improv. She wrote for a troupe while she was in college, but then one day, she wrote a one-woman show, which, probably more so than her victory in the popular TV show, laid the roadmap for her current career.

“I was the only girl in my troupe who wrote stuff, and then it hit me, why am I writing stuff for other girls who aren’t writing for themselves?” she explains. “Why don’t I throw my thoughts in linear form on to paper and write them for myself? I just started writing paragraphs. It’s a weird answer, but I moved to Los Angeles, and it didn’t seem like a stretch to start doing stand-up comedy. Someone gave me some stage time, and they asked me to come back the next week. I just kept coming back and getting asked to do other shows, and it just became something I was obsessed with, I guess.”

Shlesinger says that she always knew she would be “funny for a living.” She was so single-minded about that inevitability that she “just didn’t think about anything else.” For years, she hosted The Weakly News, a news satire show for Thestream.tv in addition to touring as a stand-up comic. Armed with striking good looks and an even sharper tongue, she has recently made the jump to more traditional airwaves, hosting the syndicated dating show Excused, which has recently been picked up for a second season. Shlesinger discussed her latest endeavor, how success as a stand-up comic hasn’t necessarily translated to success in auditioning for acting roles and fetishist Google searches in the following interview.

When I Googled your name, the second thing that popped up was “Iliza Shlesinger feet.” I wasn’t sure if you were aware of that.
I don’t know why. It’s very odd. Everyone mentions it to me. I don’t have a foot fetish, I don’t know people who have feet fetishes. People are just creepy.

It’s because of that one video you did, right? For The Weakly News where you showed your feet because you injured one of them.
I guess, but it’s not like billions of people watch it, but I’ve done plenty of videos where my arms are showing, and people forget about that.

That’s just the one that happened to catch on.
Yeah, people are sick.

How did you get hooked up with Excused and how has the experience been so far for you?
I wish I got hooked up with it. I auditioned for it. Do little girls dream of hosting a dating show when they grow up? No. [Loud car horn] Sorry. [To another driver] For real?! Oh my God! I’m sorry, this one person is ruining my life single-handedly. Give me one second. Is it bad that I believe she should be put in jail for being that bad of a driver? My whole thing is like, if you’re driving and this is a simple turn that you can’t complete, what poor decisions are you making in everyday life that are affecting the rest of us. You’re an animal. You shouldn’t be allowed out if you can’t make a left hand turn.

Anyway… It’s a late night dating show, and I got the gig, and I was like, I either do it my way or I don’t do it at all. I make up all my own jokes on the spot. There are no writers, there’s nothing like that. I’m fortunate, because most stand-up comedians get a gig, and they have to read lines…but for me, they really let me say what I wanted to say.

I’ve seen a few clips from the show, and you really don’t pull any punches with the contestants.
There are things that I want to say that they won’t let me say. Then you watch it, and because of standards and practices, they edit out a lot of things. Even though it’s a late night show, in some places it’s syndicated at 4 in the afternoon, and it’s like, really? It’s weird what will fly and what won’t. Last night, I made a gay joke on the show, and they kept that in, but I’m not allowed to say, “douche bag.” It’s like, OK, let’s offend the gay community, but not douche bags.

Were you into dating shows when you were younger?
No. I loved Blind Date when I was in middle school or high school. I don’t remember, but this is the same producer who did Blind Date. Everyone liked Blind Date. I remember, of course, watching Singled Out. I really liked Jenny McCarthy, and I always thought she was great on that show. It’s kind of ironic that I looked up to this blonde woman with big boobs who was funny and crazy, and now I do that for a living. I don’t think I look like Jenny McCarthy at all, but it’s funny how things come full circle.

Has the show affected your views of the dating pool or the dating scene?
No. It’s such a microcosm. You’re going to get creepy guys and gold diggers and douche bags no matter where you go or what you do, so the fact that we condense that world down to 19 minutes and put it on display, I’m not disheartened or anything like that. It’s a TV show, so everything’s exacerbated. I look for very specific things in mates, and I don’t think I’ve found it on my show, so I don’t like to judge them because different people like different things. I’m trying to be as political about this statement as possible [laughs].

Is writing something you’d like to get more into?
For TV shows? No. The people who love writing, all they want to do is be writers, just like teachers or nurses or whatever. I find a lot of times for stand-up comics, you write because it’s a gig that you can get that you’re good at, but if you had your druthers, you’d write for yourself or do your own thing. I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve never had to take any sort of job in comedy that I didn’t want because of these small successes that I’ve had. Writing for my own show would be one thing, but I don’t really have an interest, other than for a friend or a really cool project, in sitting in a writers’ room and writing for someone else. It’s hard to do once you’ve done stand-up. It spoils you for a lot of things.

Is it the singular control you have over it?
Kind of. I could imagine any writer would be like that. When you write a joke, you want to have it said a certain way, and depending upon your director or your producer with his two cents, the actor may say it differently. For me, I don’t think I would want to have the challenge of writing for someone else’s voice. I’m always impressed when writers can do that. Being a stand-up comic is a weird thing, because when you’re on stage, everyone loves you and you’re a star. And then the next day, when you go out on an audition for like girlfriend No. 3, you walk in the room and no one knows who you are. Someone will be like, “Oh, have you tried stand-up?” and you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve tried, and I’ve bought a house with that money.” One art form doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be good in another art form or recognized in one, so it’s a real mindfuck for lack of a better term.

Sometimes I’ll see stand-up comics who I really like, and they’re in a commercial for like two seconds, but I know them by name.
Right, right. It’s weird. Even just from an appreciation standpoint, you go to a club, you’re there for the weekend, they pick you up in a car, your fans come. You want to go to these casting directors and say, “I have fans.” People ask me for my autograph, and you want me to show me your profile so I can read this horribly written thing about being a sexually frustrated neighbor. Give me a break. It’s the weirdest thing ever.

Is it tough to find good roles for women in comedy?
I think it’s getting easier and easier. I think people are starting to realize that women are just as funny. It’s not about the fact that you have a vagina. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of unfunny women, but there’s also plenty of unfunny guys. In fact, there are probably more unfunny guys. Pretty much everything I read is, “You’re the quirky neighbor who just wants to have sex and doesn’t understand relationships.” I’m like, I don’t really know a ton of women like that, but OK. A lot of them are written in a very similar voice. One network will get a show that’s a hit so every network will copy it. I think women are gaining more and more. You look around at movies and TV shows, and women are getting more of a chance to give their opinions, and I think that’s great.

Iliza Shlesinger will play Punch Line in Sacramento Nov. 15—17, 2012. You can buy tickets for the show through Punchlinesac.com. To keep up to date on Iliza, you can follow her on Twitter at Twitter.com/Iliza, where, amongst other things, you can view daily pictures of her freakishly adorable dog Blanche.