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All the wrong lessons learned

2007-04-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

As a follow up to my last post, here are three links on the subject:

Student Arrested for Essay's Imaginary Violence

"Students were told to "write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing," according to a copy of the assignment." However, when the student wrote "don't be surprised on inspiring the first [Cary-Grove High School] shooting" his teacher called the police.

This is exactly what I am afraid of, the obvious lesson of the VT shooting is that it is far too easy to get a gun, but the only lesson that will be learned is that it is better to be safe than sorry, so round up all the weird kids who doodle guns on the margins of their notebooks.

Student Arrested for remarks about Virginia Tech Shooting

"During a class discussion of Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech, the student "made comments about understanding how someone could kill 32 people," university police Cmdr. Brad Wiesley said.

Several witnesses told investigators the student said he was "angry about all kinds of things from the fluorescent light bulbs to the unpainted walls, and it made him angry enough to kill people," according to a police report. Witnesses "said they were afraid of him and afraid to come to class with him," Wiesley said."[2]

No one wants to hear something like this, especially right after a tragedy. However, in an academic setting it is important to be able to discuss controversial subjects. The student in question was speaking of a need not to dehumanize the shooter at VT. Maybe he could use a lesson in tact, but "I am going to shoot up the school" is a threat, "I can understand how someone gets that angry" is not. Further, the fact that the student in question runs a campus paper that is extremely critical of the school, points out that this was just a contrarian making controversial speech, which is exactly the sort of thing that colleges used to encourage.

"If a major university means anything, it means the free exchange of ideas," said Karson's father, Michael Karson. "Max was arrested for making intellectual comments to an academic discussion. I don't think you should be able to arrest a kid for expressing his views."

Exactly. This is another black eye to free thought and liberal education from the knee jerks and fear mongers in this small minded hegemony.

As a bonus there is this charming anacdote: "At Oregon's Lewis & Clark College, another student was detained by campus police Wednesday shortly before a vigil for the Virginia Tech victims when he was spotted wearing an ammunition belt. Portland police later determined that it was "a fashion accessory" made of spent ammunition, and said the man did not have a weapon. The belt was confiscated."

Great work. If it was Virginia then the student could legally be carrying a concealed weapon and the police wouldn't (couldn't) blink, but make sure to get all the trendy ammo belts off the streets before someone gets hurt!

And finally to lighten the mood: A Lost In Negative Space cartoon (hat tip to one of my favorite blogs: The House Next Door)

So much more succinct and biting that I could ever muster.

300: The New Litmus Test

2007-03-24T14:25:00.000-07:00

I previously wrote about how excited I was for 300, and well, when I am wrong and I really, really wrong. I waited a few weeks before seeing it, and so I got to see the most peculiar phenomenons: everyone I knew loved it, raved about it and even went so far as to say they thought that the Watchmen movie was now possible in Zach Snyder's hands (OK, not everyone said that, but someone did); meanwhile, every review I read said that it was a terrible movie and stopped just short of saying it was a crime against art and humanity. So, I thought: it is probably a crowd pleaser full of empty violence and rock music, but a little light on artistry or subtlety. Sure there is an uncomfortable parallel with the war in Iraq, but that's probably unintentional. Again, when I am wrong, I am really, really wrong.

300 is Triumph of the Will by way of a Marine recruitment video and a M-rated video game. Explicitly so if fact, the damn thing opens on a field of infant skulls as two flawless looking Aryan men decide whether or not to kill a baby if it fails to meet certainly eugenic standards. Even if they keep the baby, it will be beaten and starved to toughen it up. Don't worry though, the Spartans don't get off on this sort of thing, there are plenty of crying mothers around to show that they are just doing their duty creating the master race.

From that initial scene till the last overwrought second- where the whole movie is revealed to be the long version of Mel Gibson's "but they'll never take... our FREEEEdom" speech in Braveheart- 300 pits our heroes, perfect looking, straight, white guys, against the forces of evil: black people, Asian people, ugly people, gay people, diplomatic people, people who have sex outside of marriage and basically all things other. Much has been made about how gay the Spartans look oiled up in big red capes, but they make it clear that they aren't like those "boy lovers." The Spartans aren't gay, they are just phalluses that rip and tear through their effeminate others (I was tempted to reinterpret the movie as a "tops" versus "bottoms"). The slow motion shots of bloody penis spears thrusting through men only cement that image in my mind. Xeres, meanwhile, looks like a drag queen without a wig (husky voice, big cheekbones, lipstick, jewelry and glitter) and travels with a harem that includes all manner of sexuality (I saw men and women of all races plus at least a dab of transgender). These evil Persians seem to like to fuck, unlike King Leonidas who looks like he is doing it for his country even when he puts it to the missus. The lesson as always in American movies is that the glorification of violence is fine, but sex is very, very wrong and should be punished.

All of this would be fine, I mean, I liked Natural Born Killers and and A Clockwork Orange, I can appreciate a compelling psycho. However, Snyder goes out of his way to paint the Spartans as fighting for the survival of Western civilization against the hordes of barbarism. Maybe it is just my personal politics, but the Persians seem a lot more like Western Civilization to me. They don't discriminate on the basis of race, they use diplomacy to attempt to prevent war, they even hang out with monsters from Doom while Spartans are busy killing the ugly babies. Thankfully, Western Society was based on the ideals of those "boy lovers" in Athens, though this sort of single-minded militarism seems to be making a comeback.

That said, the movie isn't an allegory for the war in Iraq, at least not as a jingoistic appeal to hold the line against the onslaught of "mysticism" from Persia (aka Iran). Despite its incessant buzz about freedom and glory, the story of a small but determined group of men fighting on their home terrain against a much larger invading army sounds more like al-Queda than the United States. The Spartan "beautiful death" so closely mirrors the mindset of a suicide bomber, that the metaphor is terrifyingly apt. Although, the stilted subplot involving corrupt politicians back in Sparta makes me think that maybe Sparta is supposed to represent America after all.

But in the end, any movie that would rape its only female character as a plot device is too empty-headed to have thought through the particulars and so what is point of analysis? It is art so post-modern in that it reduces to pure ugliness if you consider it for even a moment. It is all things to all people, as long as you don't think about it at all. 300's eye candy and CGI blood feed the unwashed masses, but I feel like I just donated to the "Society for the Preservation of the Third Reich"- and all the copycats haven't even come out yet. At least I know what Michael Koresky is talking about now.

It wasn't the best or worst of times, Film in 2006

2007-03-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

I think I saw more new releases in 2006 than in any other year in my life, and yet I still think I missed more interesting stuff than I got to (even with two plus months to catch up). I guess that is the nature of culture consumption at this point, even people who are in the enviable position of doing this for a living can't keep up with the volume of the content put out every year. Specialization allows one the see most of any one medium, but if you have disparate interests then all you can hope to do is rely on referrals to ensure you get to the very, very best stuff. My interests being (in descending order of time invested, if not actual esteem) film, television, music and literature, I feel I have done a mediocre job with movies, a fair job with television (it is the easiest, since all I have to do is go to the living room and turn off my brain), a bad job with music and no job with literature. I don't think I have read any book released in 2006. Books have the longest shelf life, and require the most investment, since they take so long to get through, so I tend to be the most risk adverse in my literature picks. I watch plenty of bad tv and movies, but only pick up books that I am fairly certain to enjoy.

Still, this is supposed to be a movie post, and I did get to see 32 movies released in 2006 (numbers unofficial and subject to change). Those movies are: Lucky Number Slevin, United 93, Mission: Impossible III, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Break-Up, Cars, Superman Returns, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Clerks II, Miami Vice, Little Miss Sunshine, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, The Queen, The Departed, Flags of Our Fathers, The Prestige, Babel, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Volver, Casino Royale, Letters from Iwo Jima, Dreamgirls, Children of Men, Notes on a Scandal, Pan's Labyrinth, Idiocracy, A Prairie Home Companion, The Last King of Scotland, The Proposition, A Scanner Darkly, Confederate States of America and I Am A Sex Addict.

Yet, at the end of the year I find that there are another 30 or 40 movies (officially, there are probably another 50 I don't even know about) that I really wanted to see. including The Black Dahlia, Jackass Number 2, Stranger Than Fiction, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (which Netflix just sent me), Three Times and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, to name a few. Some of them I will catch up on netflix (though the bottom of my queue is death row since I usually add two movies for every movie I watch), some I will see eventually in the theaters and some I will never see. That's just the way the cookie crumbles. It wasn't a great year for movies, nothing immediately jumped into my all-time top 10, but I haven't seen some of my favorites twice (which is where all-time favorites are developed).

So, without further ado, here are my favorite movies of 2006.

Children of Men: Hands down, number one with a bullet for me. I was absolutely thrilled from start to finish. It would be the most thrilling action movie of the year if it didn't have so many interesting and terrifying ideas. Clive Owen is the best actor working right now, and he is definitely the only actor working who demands that I see everything he is in (Leo and Christian Bale are close). The direction and cinematography are so amazing that despite no overall Oscar buzz everywhere I looked predicted an award for Cinematography (which went to Pan's Labyrinth). I am tired of reading reviews that pass off the incredible long takes as gimmicks and dismiss the movie as a setpiece. If any experimentation is seen as the tail wagging the dog, then film is already a staid and sad set of rules. I predict that this movie will have a second life on DVD and be a college classic for years to come.

The Departed - The most fun I had in a movie theater this year. I have seen the movie twice, but I was surprised that it was two and a half hours long, as the time flew by both times I saw it. My only complaint is about Jack Nicholson's awful, drooling, crazy eyed performance that doesn't convey the sort of horror-show terror that it should. Instead he makes the central character a cartoon character, like the Joker without the makeup. The fantastic dialogue delivered by the otherwise spectacular cast make up for Jack's scenery flavored gum, and I was estactatic when The Departed won Best Picture.

Borat: Some critics have retroactively saying Borat was a failure because its political message doesn't really hold water. First, who the fuck cares? It's a comedy. Would anyone criticize Old School for not making a coherent political point? Second, Borat's gift is that it gives us a wonderful cross-section of American insanity, but doesn't attempt to pass some grand judgement. That's us, racist, homophobic, xenophobic and patronizing, but then we are also endlessly patient and tolerant to those we think are handicapped for whatever reason. The attitude of everyone in the movie is summarized by the person on the elevator who steadfastly ignores the Borat and his manager even though they are both completely naked and Borat is carrying a rubber fist. All Americans are taught not to mention the embarrassing characteristic everyone is trying not to stare at, at least until they leave the room. By exploiting the American belief that everyone wants to be just like us, only they just haven't learned how yet, Borat manages to be the funniest movie of the new century.

Confederate States of America - I have reviewed it before, but suffice to say I think everyone in America would be well served to see and discuss this movie with a complete stranger.

Letters from Iowa Jima - While watching The Thin Red Line the other day, I though to myself: "War movies rank up there with musicals and biopics as my least favorite genres." The genre is so stifling that very few interesting things can be said anymore. Either the picture is jingoistic (The Green Berets) or it is a remake or All is Quiet on the Western Front, either way I am hardly thrilled by the explosions and gore. The ubiquitous color draining technique that Speilburg used in Saving Private Ryan only makes it worse, as the pictures all look the same now too. After I watched Flags of Our Fathers, which I didn't like at all (the ending was akin to the end of Pyscho in its explicitness), I was so bored that nearly didn't bother with Letters. Boy would that have been a mistake. It shows us a group of men dying and justifying it through a variety of reasons (honor, tradition or just to keep their families safe for a few more days). It doesn't spell out its themes and it demands that you think about the images and metaphors of the movie.

Superman Returns - Comic book movies are about as anti-arthouse as you can get. They are all summer blockbusters, loaded with special effects and they usually need to have mass appeal so there is pressure not to make anything too hard to figure out. Thus, I was blown away to see Superman, a comic book movie that is full of subtle details and subtext, without sacrificing the thrills. It is wrestles with uncomfortable personal responsibility as Superman's powers become a burden. Jesus's path to the cross is the obvious metaphor, but several others (Atlas, the Morningstar) are visually alluded to. It strongly bring Its a Wonderful Life to mind (one of my all time favorites), but it has more of an edge than that. It is heartbreaking movie, where the hero doesn't necessarily get the girl and even his mother can't comfort him, but it is beautiful and brilliant throughout.

Idiocracy - This is a deeply flawed movie, though I wonder how much Fox's meddling had to do with that. However, Idiocracy and CSA both demonstrate how devastating comedy is as weapon of subversion. I already posted on Mike Judge's hopefully not forgotten newest work, but I would like to strengthen my earlier comments to say that Maya Rudolph is fantastic both here and in A Prairie Home Companion, and I am officially converted to the church of Maya.

The Proposition - Nick Cave is bad, bad man. Between his screenplay for this movie, which is as raw and bloody as anything in Sam Peckinpah's oeuvre, and his album Abattoir Blues (an album entirely about death and murder), he has demonstrated that he is willing to tap into the ugliest and darkest parts of humanity with impunity. Violence in this movie is so wet and hard, and yet strangely compelling. The people are either hard boiled killers or doomed to have their innocence brutally despoiled. The town people are cowed into submission and two equally evil factions are compelled towards Guignol ending where no one is unscathed. This movie demonstrates again just how versatile and wonderful the mostly defunct Western genre is.

The Queen - It plumbed the depths of something I didn't care about at all, and yet I found myself enraptured by a performance that defines the method. I hate biopics, don't care at all about Princess Diana (I remember being upset that everyone focused on her and ignored Mother Theresa who died the same week), but this was an extraordinary look at post-WWII Europe. All of the cultures in Europe have unique characteristics and Englishmen are not like Dutchmen who aren't like Greeks who aren't like the Spanish, on and on, except now Europe is so unified that those cultural identities are melting into something more uniform. In The Queen, the most traditionally British person is suddenly made to confront how much the world has changed. Her ultimate decision to capitulate to the somewhat unreasonable demands of the populus is a remarkable portrait of the power of public opinion in the information age. Even the Queen has to bow her knee to an incensed public (and her warning to Blaire that he will suffer a similar fate is a nice dig in the present day).

A Prairie Home Companion - Leave it to Robert Altman to make a sweet comedy about dying right before he dies. It's a movie of moments, it doesn't have much conflict or plot, instead shows us a bunch of friends and associates spending one last night together. It would have been easy to make it a melancholy night, but Garrison Keillor doesn't believe in big goodbyes (that's what makes radio so great) and so everyone reminisces and tells funny stories. Any attempts at ceremony or decorum to commemorate the end of an era is subverted (the show stopper is Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly telling "bad jokes" while the producer is reduced to drinking). Death is treated with similar irreverence as a discussion of the demise of Chuck Akers devolves into fart jokes and Keillor discusses an unfunny joke with the Angel of Death while eating an apple. The cast is great (Would you expect anything else in an Altman movie?), though Kevin Kline and Maya Rudolph stand out. I bet I'll watch this movie more than anything else on this list (I've already seen it twice). I am going to miss Altman, but as Virginia Madsen says: "There is no tragedy in the death of an old man. Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care." Thanks again, Mr. Altman.

The worst movies of 2006:

The Last King of Scotland: Can someone make a movie about Africa that doesn't star a white guy? This movie mentions in passing that hundreds of thousands of Africans were murdered, but bleeds with our idiotic Scotsman who not only aided and abetted the murderous Amin, but actually deserved some comeuppance for fucking Mrs. Amin. You don't fuck with crazy people! Why anyone would use mass murder to tell the story of how Nicholas Garrigan became a doctor in Scotland is beyond me. Whitaker is good, there are some pretty pictures, but nothing can save a movie this flawed.

Mission Impossible: III: I hated this movie more than anything I saw this year. So much so, that now I cringe when I hear anything positive about J.J. Abrams (writer and director) - and I like "Lost." Here is the fancy new "thriller" formula: Start the story in the middle, show something crazy happen (say: the hero gets shot in the face) and then flash forward to some other action sequence which would have opened the movie though now it has no drama since you know nothing interesting can happen, since you have already seen the middle of the movie. After 45 minutes of by the numbers plot and some action sequences that don't really make sense featuring a diverse cast of a hot girl (double points if she is Asian or Latino), a wise cracking black guy (I think LL Cool J or Ice Cube is available) and a "nerdy guy" (picture a prestardom Orlando Bloom with glasses) you get back to the opening of the movie. Of course there is a twist so you don't actually have to deal with what you showed happen at the beginning (for some reason the badguy shot one of his henchmen dressed up like the hero, just to prove to the hero that he would shoot him) and after a predictable mind-fuck twist towards the end (hint: the good guy with the most screen time besides the hero is always the traitor), everyone unimportant dies, happily ever after. The only, only, thing worth seeing in Mission Impossible is Truman Capote beat the crap out of Tom Cruise.

Oscar fever

2007-02-23T11:53:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in quite awhile, but hopefully starting tomorrow I will be able to post everyday, more or less. I have been on a movie watching binge lately, and I have seen 19 of the movies nominated for Oscar's this year: (Babel, Letters From Iowa Jima, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen, Borat, Children of Men, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, Pan's Labyrinth, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Superman Returns, United 93, Cars, Dreamgirls, The Prestige, Volver, Flags of Our Fathers and The Last King of Scotland). This is about four times as many as I usually have seen at this point (I only watched 4-5 nominees in time for last year's show, though I have seen at least that many since then). My favorite movie of the year is definitely Children of Men, and though I didn't hate any of the nominated movies, Pirates is definitely the worst movie and Babel (which I saw last night) and Flags of Our Fathers, were the least likable.

My personal top ten includes Superman Returns, The Departed, Borat, The Queen, Pan's Labryrinth, Children of Men, Letters From Iowa Jima and The Prestige, so on the whole I think the Academy did an decent job. It remains to be seen if they will follow through though. Babel didn't do it for me, but it had its moments. I would be far more disappointed if it won "Best Original Screenplay" than "Best Picture" as the direction and acting were solid, while the screenplay was ugly, tired and exploitive. I can not fathom how it is a "Best Picture" favorite, since it isn't favored to win any other award (I bet it will pick up a consolation "Best Editing" prize over the suburb Children of Men). With all the acting awards sewn up, "Best Picture" is poised for an upset, even if two of the three best movies in the category (The Queen and Letters From Iowa Jima) are deemed to have no chance to win.

I am just going to sit back and root for Marty, The Departed and Children of Men and try not to get upset if the unthinkable happens... well, that channell surf the channel rather than sit through the "Best Orginal Songs".

A few Masterpieces

2007-02-12T13:52:00.000-08:00

The New World was far and away the best thing I saw this weekend. An earth shattering masterpiece full of beautiful, quiet moments and wonderful visual clues. I haven't seen anything else by Malick, but obviously I should go back and take a second look. It immediately invokes Hiroshima Mon Amour, with its use of poetic naration, though The Proposition uses a similar device, but not to this extent. The New World is the sort of movie that might exist if sound hadn't been introduced to the movies until decades later. There is a complete lack of exposition, and a general sparsity of dialogue, instead the movie is a series of images and sounds, juxtaposed with poetry. It is an sensuous experience, rather than a cause and effect story. I absolutely loved the movie from top to bottom, but I would suggest reading Matt Zoller Seitz or Walter Chaw for a more in depth analysis. Interesting side note, the actress playing Pocahontas, Q'Orianka Kilcher, was 14 when the movie was filmed. I thought that the love scenes between her and Colin Ferrall was beautifully suggestive, rather than explicit, little did I know that was probably due to a legal concern.

I beg you to watch this movie. It is the best thing I have seen in a very long time.

I also read six of the ten story lines in The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman (I read: Season of Mists, Fables and Reflections ,Brief Lives ,Worlds' End, The Kindly Ones- twice, and The Wake . It was beyond fantastic. It was so good that I had to go back and reread the last story arc again, which is no mean feat because it checked in at 13 chapters and approximately 400 pages. It is already my favorite graphic novel series and I just wish that someone could do a movie version justice (let's see how The Watchmen turns out before we greenlight some fresh blasphemy). The Sandman is dense with mythic, religious (is that redundant?) and literary allusions and the coolest details you can ever imagine (like the dream library of all the books never written, a sample: Bestselling Romantic Spy Novel So I Wouldn't Have to Go to Work Anymore, by you while you were commuting on the train). In Walter Chaw's review of Pan's Labrynth he says: "I can't dream like he can dream." That is the long and the short of it. The Sandman is the story of the King of Dreams and his 6 siblings, and it whirs through Hell, the Dreaming, Earth, Greek legend, Hades (distinct from Hell), Norse legend, legends that never were created, witchcraft, the future, the past, and ultimately becomes about people and choice. It is a cosmic series that boils down to its central character's growth, without ever sacrificing the magic on the page. The end of the series is so perfect that it demonstrates again that it is possible to set impossible expectations and beat them (another example, my favorite book: One Hundred Years of Solitude). Endings don't have to be cheats, and I am holding my breath that "The Sopranos" manages to do as well in that regard.

Go rent The New World and hit your local library for The Sandman, you won't be disappointed.

Write West Young Man

2007-02-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite genres of movies is the Western. John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Howard Hawks... need I go on? Unfortunately for all of us, the Western is essentially dead. For whatever reason- probably the obvious, not many people like them- they are made all that much anymore. However, I have been thinking about writing one anyway, and recently a friend of mine talked about basing a Western on Bob Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts." "Lily" appears on my favorite Dylan album, indeed my favorite album of all time, Blood on the Tracks, and it is a gripping tale of betrayal, murder and robbery all told to rhyme. I'll post the lyrics below and please leave a comment about the story.

The festival was over, the boys were all plannin' for a fall,
The cabaret was quiet except for the drillin' in the wall.
The curfew had been lifted and the gamblin' wheel shut down,
Anyone with any sense had already left town.
He was standin' in the doorway lookin' like the Jack of Hearts.

He moved across the mirrored room,
"Set it up for everyone," he said,
Then everyone commenced to do what they were doin' before he turned their heads.
Then he walked up to a stranger and he asked him with a grin,
"Could you kindly tell me, friend, what time the show begins?
"Then he moved into the corner, face down like the Jack of Hearts.

Backstage the girls were playin' five-card stud by the stairs,
Lily had two queens, she was hopin' for a third to match her pair.
Outside the streets were fillin' up, the window was open wide,
A gentle breeze was blowin', you could feel it from inside.
Lily called another bet and drew up the Jack of Hearts.

Big Jim was no one's fool, he owned the town's only diamond mine,
He made his usual entrance lookin' so dandy and so fine.
With his bodyguards and silver cane and every hair in place,
He took whatever he wanted to and he laid it all to waste.
But his bodyguards and silver cane were no match for the Jack of Hearts.

Rosemary combed her hair and took a carriage into town,
She slipped in through the side door lookin' like a queen without a crown.
She fluttered her false eyelashes and whispered in his ear,
"Sorry, darlin', that I'm late," but he didn't seem to hear.
He was starin' into space over at the Jack of Hearts.

"I know I've seen that face before," Big Jim was thinkin' to himself,
"Maybe down in Mexico or a picture up on somebody's shelf."
But then the crowd began to stamp their feet and the house lights did dim
And in the darkness of the room there was only Jim and him,
Starin' at the butterfly who just drew the Jack of Hearts.

Lily was a princess, she was fair-skinned and precious as a child,
She did whatever she had to do, she had that certain flash every time she smiled.
She'd come away from a broken home, had lots of strange affairs
With men in every walk of life which took her everywhere.
But she'd never met anyone quite like the Jack of Hearts.

The hangin' judge came in unnoticed and was being wined and dined,
The drillin' in the wall kept up but no one seemed to pay it any mind.
It was known all around that Lily had Jim's ring
And nothing would ever come between Lily and the king.
No, nothin' ever would except maybe the Jack of Hearts.

Rosemary started drinkin' hard and seein' her reflection in the knife,
She was tired of the attention, tired of playin' the role of Big Jim's wife.
She had done a lot of bad things, even once tried suicide,
Was lookin' to do just one good deed before she died.
She was gazin' to the future, riding on the Jack of Hearts.

Lily washed her face, took her dress off and buried it away.
"Has your luck run out?" she laughed at him,
"Well, I guess you musthave known it would someday.
Be careful not to touch the wall, there's a brand-new coat of paint,
I'm glad to see you're still alive, you're lookin' like a saint."
Down the hallway footsteps were comin' for the Jack of Hearts.

The backstage manager was pacing all around by his chair.
"There's something funny going on," he said, "I can just feel it in the air."
He went to get the hangin' judge, but the hangin' judge was drunk,
As the leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk.
There was no actor anywhere better than the Jack of Hearts.

(Note: The next verse is not on the album, but is listed in the lyrics, I think it was removed because it is obviously inferior, but here it is for the sake of completeness)
Lily's arms were locked around the man that she dearly loved to touch,
She forgot all about the man she couldn't stand who hounded her so much.
"I've missed you so," she said to him, and he felt she was sincere,
But just beyond the door he felt jealousy and fear.
Just another night in the life of the Jack of Hearts.

No one knew the circumstance but they say that it happened pretty quick,
The door to the dressing room burst open and a cold revolver clicked.
And Big Jim was standin' there, ya couldn't say surprised,
Rosemary right beside him, steady in her eyes.
She was with Big Jim but she was leanin' to the Jack of Hearts.

Two doors down the boys finally made it through the wall
And cleaned out the bank safe, it's said that they got off with quite a haul.
In the darkness by the riverbed they waited on the ground
For one more member who had business back in town.
But they couldn't go no further without the Jack of Hearts.

The next day was hangin' day, the sky was overcast and black,
Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back.
And Rosemary on the gallows, she didn't even blink,
The hangin' judge was sober, he hadn't had a drink.
The only person on the scene missin' was the Jack of Hearts.

The cabaret was empty now, a sign said, "Closed for repair,"
Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair.
She was thinkin' 'bout her father, who she very rarely saw,
Thinkin' 'bout Rosemary and thinkin' about the law.
But, most of all she was thinkin' 'bout the Jack of Hearts.

Links in the chain

2007-02-02T09:01:00.001-08:00

I have been really busy at work so I haven't had much time to post. Yeah right. I just haven't had anything to say. However, other people have been doing great work, so instead of contributing I thought I would just point out their fine work (the mix-tape artist theory)

1. Walter Chaw absolutely destroys Diane Keaton and Because I Said So . The money quote:
"The best that can be said about this early contender for the worst film of 2007 is that it's properly keystone'd by Diane Keaton, who, between this and The Family Stone, cements her position as the most smug, insufferable, unwatchable persona in a long and tumescent line of such personae. She embodies the absolute worst of every single stereotype of the domineering mother: dotty, ditzy, Luddite, sexless/oversexed, cruel, racist, otherwise intolerant, and above all hysterical. Throw her psychotic mommy dearest from The Other Sister into the stew and it's hard to find a more stalwart movie monster in the last ten years than Keaton, who's gone from a charming neurotic to a cobwebbed, cell-phone-wielding vagina dentata."

No one writes a flamethrowing review like Chaw (observe his reviews of Failure to Launch, "Grey's Anatomy" and Lady in the Water), but this was a new high, or low, or whatever. 2. Fresh off the staggering break-even success of the over hyped Snakes on a Plane, Samuel L. Jackson's decided to be in one of the wildest movies I have ever heard of, Black Snake Moan. I beg you to watch that trailer. I have seen it five times and I still can't believe it.

The plot (as seen from the trailer) in one sentence: Samuel L. in a dirty wife beater and balding afro with a mutton chops beard, chains a half-naked, beaten up and emaciated Christina Ricci to his house in order to "cure her of her wickedness." Wow, I will be there the first weekend it opens, before it gets pulled because of mass protests from the NAACP, NOW, 700 Club and the KKK. (hat tip: The House Next Door)

3. ESPN vs. Deadspin. ESPN is a shell of its former self. Once it was hip and irreverent, now it Disney approved faux-cool with big budgets. Once it was the go to site for sports commentary and information, but now, most of the of the columns on espn.com have moved behind the pay curtain and what remains is Bill Simmons (who I like as a pop-culture writer, but he has a severe limitation as a sports talking head, namely, he doesn't know anything about sports) and worthless stuff like Scoop Jackson (who is a terrible writer and somewhat racist to boot). To make matters worse, the Internet at large and the blogsphere in particular has exploded with great sports content. Specialty sites, like baseballprospectus.com, offer a lot more bang for the buck and team centric sites, like my beloved dodgerthoughts.com, are free and offer 100 times more content about the teams you actually care about. Deadspin.com meanwhile is like defamer.com, except it focuses on sports, not celebrities. It posts all relevant, and not so relevant, news, with funny commentary and user comments. The people who comment there are both hilarious and very, very inappropriate (see the comments on the day Barbaro died or when T.O. supposedly attempted suicide) .

So the worldwide leader decided to start allow comments under its articles and immediately has to start deleting the comments from all the people at Deadspin- which included things about the Sports gal (Mrs. Simmons), Barbaro, parodies of the Sports Guy, criticisms of Bill's squeaky voice, and lots of discussion about ESPN firing black journalists like Jason Whitlock and Harold Reynolds, but not Sean Salisbury. It was obviously a bad idea to let the unwashed masses have a voice, and since deleting the comments looks bad, I am guessing this innovation will go the way of the ESPN cellphone (which lost hundreds of millions of dollars). The Sports Guy is probably getting picked on for being unbelievably successful, as much as for actually sucking. Deadspin follows the story here and here.
UPDATE: Bill's new column is getting the same treatment. I love that they are using references from last night's "Office." See, that is good topical humor ESPN! Why don't you use quotes like that on home run calls?
4. Postsecret. When I saw this cnn.com, but I was blown away. People send postcards with their secrets written on them to this guy in Georgia and he posts them on his webpage. People then write emails to him and he posts the interesting responses under the postcards. The stuff is so personal and moving that you get a charge out of reading it. It is just a few words, but you really feel like you are inside their skin for a moment. My only complaint is that he doesn't have an archive, so you can only see the most recent secrets. However, he posts new secrets every Sunday, so this is good Monday reading.

5. The House Next Door's tribute to Molly Ivins. One of the best liberal voices in print passed away this week and Matt Zoller Seitz posts several of his favorite articles and quotes. My favorite: "The poor man who is currently our president has reached such a point of befuddlement that he thinks stem cell research is the same as taking human lives, but that 40,000 dead Iraqi civilians are progress toward democracy."
A very nice tribute, that thread also discusses Black Snake Moan, so it is a regular daily double.

Have a great weekend, Go Colts, even though I am kind of rooting for the Bears so I can participate in my first riot!

Hidden Advertisements

2007-02-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

I recently bought a new cellphone and I was surprised to find out that all of the games on it were demos that included links to buy the full versions of the game. Further, if you play the games for a short period of time, they stop working and just direct you to the purchase screen. However, the games can not be deleted either. This has very little effect on my life, but I find it annoying that I can't play the games and I can't delete them. I purchased the phone, but I have to endure inconvenient advertisements. As a frequent text messager, my phone's memory often fills up and getting rid of five java-based games would make room for a lot of texts.

The phone companies no doubt replaced the old standard games with these because the money is in the services and not the phone itself (which sells for a loss). But as a consumer, I feel this is the equivalent of buying a car and having a mannequin wearing clothes I would like to wear in the backseat. I can't wear the clothes and I can't use that part of the seat. Ironically, if I bought the full versions of these games, I would be able to delete them.

Oscar Cheat Sheet

2007-01-29T08:26:00.000-08:00

The grand-daddy of all award shows is almost upon us and putting aside for the moment the question of validity, I want to look at who will win. This is a first order look at the Oscars, what is, not what should be. Hopefully this will help you win your office pool (unless you are in my office, in which case, shoo).

Actors are the largest group in the academy and since they have their own awards (which are mind-numbly-ing boring and self-serving to watch), I wanted to see how well the SAG awards predict the four acting categories and best picture.

Here is a list going back three years.

2005

Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote. - also won Oscar
Actress: Reese Witherspoon, Walk the Line. - also won Oscar
Supporting actor: Paul Giamatti, Cinderella Man. - didn't win Oscar
Supporting actress: Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener. - also won Oscar
Ensemble cast: Crash. - also won Oscar

2004

Actor: Jamie Foxx, Ray - also won Oscar

Actress: Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby - also won Oscar
Supporting Actor: Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby - also won Oscar
Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, The Aviator - also won Oscar
Ensemble cast: Sideways - didn't win Oscar

2003

Actor: Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl - didn't win Oscar
Actress: Charlize Theron, Monster - also won Oscar
Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins, Mystic River - also won Oscar
Supporting Actress: Renee Zellweger, Cold Mountain - also won Oscar
Ensemble cast: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - also won Oscar

Over the past 3 years the SAG awards have been 80% right (over the three years before that they were 33% right though). The three mistakes, George Clooney won Best Supporting Actor in 2005 (for Syriana), Million Dollar Baby won Best Picture in 2004, and Sean Penn won Best Actor in 2003 (for Mystic River), all have explanations. Clooney was nominated for Best Director in 2005 and this was his consolation prize. Sideways didn't win any other acting awards at the SAG, while Million Dollar Baby won two and like Johnny Depp- and Sasha Baron Cohen- found out, never bet on comedies to win Oscar Gold (Johnny lost again the next year for the dull Finding Neverland, which showed that it is okay to get serious, but not boring).

In short, the SAG awards are pretty excellent predictors and so I pick:

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker - The Last King of Scotland

Best Actress: Helen Mirren - The Queen
Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy - Dreamgirls (this is my weakest pick)

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson - Dreamgirls

and

Best Picture: The Departed

The Departed wins instead of Little Miss Sunshine, because the again, Oscar doesn't go comedic, the SAG Awards are 80% right, so I needed to change one, and this feels like Marty's year.

Now for the directing and writing Awards. The Oscars are a psychological web of intrigue. You try and guess how people vote, but the winners affect each other. Some awards trigger other wins for the same movie, while other awards are indications that there aren't going to be anymore wins for that movie. So, assuming I am right about the first five here are my guesses for the rest.

Best Directing is going to The Departed. The Best Picture needs to pick up a few other major categories and The Departed was largely snubbed in the acting categories (the good performances are being punished for Jack's scenery chewing). Plus, its Marty's turn.

Little Miss Sunshine is going to get the Sideways/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Best Original Screenplay red ribbon, for being the movie that the voters wished they could have voted for.

Best Adapted Screenplay is one the most wide open category of the night. It is probably safe to discount Little Children and Notes on a Scandal, but the other three all make compelling cases. Borat was a box office hit and was generally snubbed elsewhere. The Departed is a Best Picture favorite and its screenplay was a knockout (best dialogue in recent memory). Children of Men (my favorite movie of the year) and was snubbed in above, but still managed three nominations, with this as the biggest one. Hollywood loves success and the movie of the year has to win something so: Borat.

Some other picks, briefly:

Best Cinematography: Children of Man, though it might win in editing instead.

Best Editing: I would give it to Children of Man, but I think it will go to Babel, which has to win something, but not Best Picture.

Best Art Direction: Dream Girls.

Best Costume Design: Marie Antoinette, the period piece always wins best costume.

Best Animated Feature: Happy Feet, but any of these could win.

Best Foreign Language Film: Pan's Labyrinth. Much deserved, hopefully Guillermo del Toro curses during his speech.

Best Documentary: Either Iraq in Fragments or An Inconvenient Truth. I am hoping for an Al Gore speech, so An Inconvenient Truth.

To Recap:

Best Picture: The Departed

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker

Best Actress: Helen Mirren

Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson
Best Direction: The Departed

Best Orginal Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine

Best Adapted Screenplay: Borat

Best Cinematography: Children of Men

Best Editing: Children of Man
Best Art Direction: Dreamgirls

Best Costume Design: Marie Antoinette
Best Animated Feature: Happy Feet
Best Foreign Language Film: Pan's Labyrinth

Best Documentary: An Inconvenient Truth

*I didn't pick any thing in the Musical categories because I don't have a clue. I didn't see Dream Girls and that seems like a lock to win something or another.

United States of Confederacy

2007-01-26T07:17:00.000-08:00

CSA: The Confederate States of America is a great movie, the spiritual progeny of Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee signed on to produce the movie after it had already been released), proof that creativity can overcome budgetary constrictions and the final nail in the coffin of Paul Haggis's tame and obvious Crash. In his Oscar acceptance speech Haggis quoted Bertolt Brecht: “Art is not a mirror held up to society, it is a hammer by which to shape it.” In CSA the mirror is the hammer and I dare someone to peer into it honestly without flinching.

The premise is that the Confederacy wins the Civil War and slavery doesn't go away, ever. The movie is a faux-documentary (mockumentary is inappropriate and inaccurate) from the perspective of a BBC film crew in the late 1990's, but it is now being broadcast on "Confederate Television," which includes commercials that are the most shocking and guiltly exciting, parts of the documentary. The bracingly racist commercials are the comic relief that fulfils the promise of the movie's opening quote: “If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.” Most of those laughs are just to fill the uncomfortable silence in the room as you watch the movie.

The movie closes with the revelation that the most racist scenes in the movie where taken from real life. While that ending is informative, it felt redundant after the commercial for "Runaway", "Cops" with a different theme song, a hillbilly blue-grass reworking of the iconic "Bad Boys" song. As I squirmed and listened to "Run boy, run boy, gonna catch you, run boy, run boy, ain't gonna get away," I stared at the U.S.A, not the C.S.A.

Some critics have questioned the historical interpretation of the movie, pointing out that it is light on historical accuracy and most of its presumptions wouldn't have happened. When a movie starts with the assumption that the U.S. still has legal slavery, it is safe to say that they have taken some liberties with history, but that is besides the point. The C.S.A. would be a straw man, a flat metaphor, if it was just an faux-cautionary tale of a history we barely avoided. The scary thing is that as evil as the C.S.A is- and it is evil enough to advise Hitler that it considered the Holocaust an immoral waste of manpower- it is just a rose by another name (how does "the American Holocaust" sound?). The C.S.A. took all of the Indian land and then sent the natives to boarding schools that eradicated their culture, it conscripted Chinese labors to builds the railroads, it practiced segregation (they called it "Separate and Unequal" and noted that it had the had the benefit of "letting the Mexicans know their place, and keeping them there"), and it formally ruled South America. That is a U.S. history course written with bracing honesty, from the victim's perspective, and it begs the question: "Who wrote our history?"

The film history of the C.S.A is a recreation of our own as well. Gone with the Wind becomes A Northern Wind, D.W. Griffith's The Hunt for Dishonest Abe replaces The Birth of a Nation, and WWII propaganda films and anti-Communist films become about literal race wars and abbies (the abolitionist communist equivalents in the C.S.A). Many people point out Abraham Lincoln's speech in Dishonest Abe (Lincoln in black-face says: "I ain't no prez'dent! I'z a darky!") as the most shocking scene in the movie, but for me the fictional speech that stood out was from the 1940 war movie, The Dark Jungle: "This world is made for the God fearing, to use as we see fit. For awhile these savages thought it was theirs, but their just renting it. It's ours, it was always ours, we just ain't claimed it all... yet. Kill em all, and let God sort em out." I would laugh, but then a coworker called me a coward last year because I "wouldn't defend our country in Iraq."

The C.S.A does suffer occasionally from its low budget; some sets are non-existent, some of the acting is uneven (I would like to praise Rupert Pate as the pro-C.S.A. talking head, he is excellent) and some of the green screen work is glaring. Fortunately, the strength of the writing carries the movie and overcomes any small technical glitches. Beyond being incendiary, it is consistently entertaining and features some riotously funny moments (the C.S.A.'s position on reparations springs to mind). This is the best movie of the 2006 (even if imdb.com says it was made in 2004) and I wish it received some Academy buzz, and the attention that went along with that. The academy likes statement movies that make us feel self-righteously warm and fuzzy, CSA is too busy setting American history on fire to remind that those watching it are exempt from its recriminations.

Amsher is bending to my will

2007-01-25T14:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got a call from Amsher, the company that bought my debt from T-Mobile. I informed the caller that I sent a certified letter of dispute to the company. Surprise, surprise, they hadn't received it. I am so glad that sent that letter certified, because otherwise I bet they would just throw it away. Letter or no, they would like to settle with me.

I said I still didn't owe any money, but what is their offer?
"180 dollars."
"That's still a lot more than zero, but thanks for the information. I'll call you when I find out that my letter has reached you."

So in less than a month of wrangling, I now owe less than half what I owe originally. While an infinite series of getting half off would never reach zero, it would reach a number that I find acceptable (say... twenty dollars) in a little more than three months. By that point my credit would probably be in bad shape though.

What to watch if you can't afford Tivo

2007-01-22T14:15:00.000-08:00

I love television. It is the most easily accessible way to get from point A (now) to point B (the sweet release of death). I think I have fairly exacting, if idiosyncratic, standards of how I waste my time in front of the Teevee. Here is my night by night guide of what is good on network TV.

Monday (all times are Eastern Standard, which is to say, standard everywhere but Central, where I live) :
7:00: "Jeopardy," ABC, still the best game show on television. Assume that is what you watch at every night, because I like to feel good about myself before wasting my entire night (which is four or five hours long, since I get home at six and go to bed by eleven). Maybe you don't consider watching "Jeopardy" productive, but I always feel like I learned something.
7:30: There are about 20 good sitcoms in syndication to get you from 7:30 to the beginning of network shows, which usually aren't as good as what is in syndication. "Seinfeld" is on Fox, and that is usually what I watch.

8:00: Go eat dinner and turn off the TV. This is the valley of dry bones as far as entertainment goes. Not even any enjoyable empty calories with junk like "Deal or No Deal", "Wife Swap" and "Prison Break" ("24" with more contrivances, but a prettier, unfortunately male, cast. Plus, Wentworth Miller's brother on the show should button one more button on his shirt, he is running around like he is in a club in South Beach).
9:00: "Heroes," NBC. I am extremely faithful to this show, but I am not as sold on the premise as some people. The voice overs at the beginning and end are painfully overwrought, and every episode seems like a stunt. Plus, the tag lines don't make any sense (how did saving the cheerleader save the world? It saved the hottest girl on the show, but the world?). That is nitpicking though, the characters are cool, the big revelations make sense (unlike "Lost") and even the evil characters seem nuanced. The fact that this is a huge hit shows you that there is a big market out there for quality Sci-Fi.
10:00: "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," NBC. The only show I regularly watch, but don't like. In fact, I hate "Studio 60." Sure, everyone, especially bloggers, hates "Studio 60". But, with good reason. All of the characters are interchangeable, there is never internal conflict, only external pressure, it isn't funny and it is plotted soooooo slowly. I should watch an episode and write down every wasted, empty scene. The show is all filler, with a "cliffhanger" that no ones cares about and everyone expects. So why do I watch it? Well, it is a nice boost of confidence to see the creator and head writer of one of the best series ever, "The West Wing," reduced to this. We are all human, folks, and Sorkin is just proving that episode after episode.
11:00: "Daily Show"
11:30: "The Colbert Report" - Where I get my news, even if it isn't strictly on the networks.
12:00: ZZZZ. Actually I fall asleep during "Studio 60" most of the time, but I blame Aaron Sorkin.

Tuesday:
7:00-9:00: Same, the only difference is that you will be ignoring the most popular show in recent memory on Tuesdays, while most people will be ignoring Mondays.
9:00: "Veronica Mars" The CW. Like "Arrested Development," this show will probably go out well before vastly inferior shows of a similar type (all 15 varieties of "CSI", including the ones named "Cold Case" and "Without a Trace", for "Veronica" and "Two and a Half Men" for "A.D."). It hasn't been as good as the first season, but neither was "A.D." ("The Office", meanwhile, is best in season 2, though still going very strong in season 3). Kristen Bell is so cute that I find myself talking nonsense to the screen when she is on. "Oooh, Veronica, you're funny... and hot. So hot, right now." I was taken with her from the first time I saw her on "Deadwood" and she just rocks on "Veronica Mars", even if she is getting a little too flip at times (I mean seriously, Veronica, I just asked you if you loved me, don't give me some cutting joke or pop culture reference). The supporting cast is terrific too, though the CW is so poor that most of the cast only appears intermittently. It is distracting when Wallace will disappear for a month only to pop up like nothing happened. It is still a good-to-great show, even with all of that, and if it was on CBS it would probably be one of the most viewed show on TV, but then it would probably also be dumbed down for old people, morons and necrophiliacs, like everything else on CBS.
10:00: Nothing is on at this time. This is a good time to watch a movie or go to bed.

Wednesday:
7:00-8:00: Same old, same old.
8:00: "Beauty and the Geek". The Airheads of network TV. No nutritional value, but oh my is it delicious. The girls are so dumb, the guys are so clueless and the message is so heavy handed. This is the only reality show (non-MTV) that I watch, but it's a doozy. Honestly, I might falsify my resume, grew a patchy beard, profess to be a huge "Babylon 5" fan, and constantly reference the quantum mechanics and physics in an effort to fake my way onto the show. Here is a real quote from one of the guys on the show: "That would be like finding out that Brownian motion was inversely proportional to viscosity- unbelievable." One or two zingers like that and I would be in, baby! I think I would have a 90% shot of getting one of the girls, just by comparison to the gamma males I would be competing against.

9:00: Nothing really to watch, though you could try and sit through "The Knights of Prosperity" and "In Case of Emergency" on ABC, but I wouldn't recommend it. Both are proof that single camera shows can be just as formulaic and boring as the four camera shows. They might make you smile, but won't make you laugh.
10:00: Eventually "Lost," ABC will be back here, but for now, you might as well have gone to bed at 9:00. "Lost" is a case study in the law of diminishing returns as all of its "revelations" have become increasingly less interesting. The formula of focusing on one character's past per episode, while loosely mirroring that back story with the events on the island is my least favorite device on the show. It was one of the best parts of the show- such as Locke's back story involving his dad, which is one of the coldest things I have ever seen- but now it feels like avoiding dealing with the messy plot on the island. Still, it is great looking cast and they always plug in new hotties after they kill off minor characters. Plus, most of us are too invested to quit at this point, so we all eat it up the bullshit with a spoon.
11:00-12:00: "Daily Colbert Report Show", as usual.

Thursday: The best night of TV!
7:00-8:00: Same as usual, but get your dinner/blanket and pillow/remote ready because you don't want to miss much from 8:00-10:00 on NBC (of course there will be an 40 minutes of commercials in those two hours, so you will have time to run to the bathroom).
8:00: "My Name is Earl" is generally enjoyable, but not quite as funny as some people think. It makes me smile and I like the cast, but most of the jokes center around how stupid everyone is- which can be tiring after awhile. I think that Ethan Suplee as Randy is likable, but never funny. It will be surprisingly funny some weeks though, (the Cops episode last week was a scream) and it is a nice aperitif for the best show on TV.
8:30: "The Office"! This show is Barry Bonds on the juice- unbelievably good in its own time. It never has a bad episode, somehow manages to be emotionally demanding and yet extremely funny, and when it's really on, it absolutely blows away everything else on TV. I think "Arrested Development" was the cleverest (most clever?) show I have ever seen, but "The Office" trumps it for sheer laugh out loud funny moments and "A.D." never had the emotional core of the gang at Dunder Miflin. It is amazing to me that its ratings are still relatively mediocre, while "Grey's Anatomy" cleans up. I know that "Grey's" rakes in the females, but if all the girls watched the season finale last spring, I bet that Jim would convert some away from the contrived romances in the hospital. In short, if you don't watch "The Office", then go grab the DVDs and give it a shot. Season One is spotty, but if you finish watching that season and you aren't convinced... then go watch season two!
9:00: "Scrubs" isn't my absolute favorite show anymore, and one could make a pretty good case that it is past its prime. However, it stills brings the funny, and at this point they are in "I'm Keith Hernandez"phase, where they know they probably won't get picked up again and so they can do whatever they want. Case in point: last week's "Scrubs: The Musical," which, in conjunction with "The Wizard of Oz episode" and the homoerotic friendship between Turk and J.D., makes a pretty good case for "Scrubs" as the gayest comedy in prime time. I watched Zach Braff on Carson Daly the other night and while he was diplomatic, it seemed like he was leaning towards leaving the show even if it is picked up. He was also surprisingly awkward, much more like J.D. than his character in "Garden State".
9:30: "30 Rock" is a very solid comedy and as everyone points out, Alec Baldwin is amazing. Maybe I am in the minority, but I have always liked Tina Fey and she does good work here. Tracy Morgan plays just the sort of character he excels at (silly), and because the tone of the show is so wacky, it works. There is a minor reoccurring character on the show, played by Katie Bowden, who is Jessica Alba hot, which also helps.
10:00: All good things come to an end, and Thursday night on NBC bleeds into snooze fest "ER". I can't believe that show is still on the air, with much better ratings than "The Office" to boot.
11:00: "Colbert Daily Report Show", if you managed to make it through the boredom of the preceding hour.

Friday: Don't watch TV on a Friday night! Go out, get a little crazy, or at the very least, go watch a movie in the theaters.
Saturday: The worst night of TV of the week. The networks and cable have given up on this night, so should you. Go get drunk and ask random women if they lost weight (like I apparently did at the office Christmas party. I only found out about my misdeed today, a month later. In my defense, I was dared, and when I'm drunk, I'm like Marty McFly- don't call me chicken).
Sunday:* Supposedly a good night for TV, but I don't like any of these shows. Which is unfortunate, since I am usually nursing a hangover and regretting all the money I spent the past two nights, so I end up watching crap I don't like.

So there is it, what to watch on network TV, but if you have HBO, then you have access to drama that is better than anything on network TV. However, HBO has yet to do a great comedy ("Lucky Louie", "Arli$$"), which is why "The Office" is far and away the best show on network TV. It is the only show that is better than its equivalents on the pay channels, I mean let's face it, "Lost" isn't in the same league as "The Sopranos".''

* I don't watch "24", and though I generally don't say anything bad about in front of the million people a day who tell me how great it is, I think it sucks. Maybe I just can't believe that the growling midget is really the toughest guy on the planet, or maybe I don't like its politics (It is a case study in why torture is appropriate and when Jack Bauer is cutting people eyes out and shooting women to an audience of tens of millions, it is hard to get upset about Guantanamo Bay and water boarding), but my experience with "24" has been uniformly negative. I get bored by the constant "danger" with no real expectation that Jack will die and no investment in any of the other characters. Beyond the fact that "real time" makes the show in less authentic than most crap on TV, the show feels very contrived, even when Jack isn't getting from gun fight to knife fight faster than the speed of light. Even the supremely hot Elisha Cuthbert (The Girl Next Door was a four star sex appeal performance) can't make me watch this show.

More fun ways to ruin your credit

2007-01-19T07:02:00.000-08:00

I am a recent college graduate and last summer I decided to go on a two month road trip before getting down to business. My first stop was to visit my aunt in upstate New York and for reasons beyond my control (car trouble) I ended up spending about 10 days sitting around watching TV there. I decided to break up the monotony by getting a new cell phone, since the one I had was purchased through my school and was about to expire. I wanted to get T-Mobile, because my entire family used T-Mobile, and I wanted to keep my number, so I wouldn't have to tell all of my friends a new number. Fortunately, Congress passed a national law that said you could "port" in your number to a new cell provider.

So, I went to the T-Mobile website to look for a T-Mobile Store near my aunt's house and one of the closest stores was at Wal-Mart. I decided to go to Wal-Mart because my aunt knew where it was, and I certainly didn't know my way around. So off to Wal-Mart I went and I picked out a phone I liked and bought it. While it was getting set up, I asked if I could port in my old number. The lady didn't know how to do it, so she called T-Mobile and was informed that it was relatively simple to do and I could do it at home. Satisfied, I bought the phone, went home and called T-Mobile.

This turned out to be something of a nightmare. My old service provider, Alltel, didn't acknowledge that the phone was in my name, because I had purchased it through the University. So I had to call the University and get them to call Alltel who then had to call T-Mobile. I would say conservatively that I spent ten hours on the phone trying to get my number ported in, as even after Alltel released the number, T-Mobile was struggling to assign the number to me. Finally, two days after I got the phone, a lady from T-Mobile informed me that I couldn't port my number because T-Mobile didn't have any towers in that area code. I immediately told the lady I was going to return the phone and cancel service, since I asked when I bought it if I could port in my number and was told then that I could. T-Mobile has a two-week money-back policy and so easy-breezy I returned the phone to Wal-Mart and got my money back.

That same day I got a Cingular phone and recently re-upped with Cingular for two more years.

Flash forward to last weekend, where I was home celebrating a late Christmas with my family. I wake up Friday morning and my mom informs me that I received a call from a creditor that morning and she had gotten a call back number. I call the agency back and lo and behold, I owe $360 to T-Mobile and they have now turned the account over to Amsher Collection Agency, and now they were calling my parents. When I signed up for T-Mobile, I used my parent's home number as my home number, since I couldn't very well use the only other number I had-- the cell number I wanted to port in. I more or less go ballistic on the phone ("I'm not paying anything, don't call my parents, don't fuck with my credit), but to be fair, collection agency's aren't known for their customer service, I had gotten the phone in late May of 2006, more than seven months earlier and this was a spectacularly bad piece of news to get at 8:30 in the morning.

After taking a few days to collect myself, I called T-Mobile and get some information. It turns out that the phone was never disconnected and I owe $200 for breach of contract, plus four months of service at $40 a month (the phone was turned off for lack of payment in October 2006). I told them what happened, but I was told to call the collection agency as T-Mobile no longer controls the account, however, they would extensively note the account so that the agency could refer to my call to T-Mobile.

So I called the agency and I was transferred to a supervisor, and again I relayed my story of misunderstanding. He said he would have to check with T-Mobile and he would get back to me, so I gave him my Cingular number and waited for him to call back.

An hour later he left me a voice mail (I was on the subway, so I didn't get the call) saying that I am libel for the phone, because I "returned it to Wal-Mart, which is the same as returning it to someone on the street. [I] should have returned the phone to the T-Mobile warehouse."

What the hell is the T-Mobile warehouse? Obviously, I was never told this by T-Mobile, in my extensive phone conversations with them, or Wal-mart, when I purchased or returned the phone. I was supposed to simply figure this out, and if I didn't figure this out, it would be a very costly mistake indeed.

I called Amshare back today and was informed that they would settle the account for $280 (the equivalent to seven months phone service) or they would refer my account to an attorney. I asked to speak to the supervisor I spoke with yesterday. I informed him that I couldn't possibly have known to return the phone to the T-Mobile Warehouse and that I only learned of its existence yesterday when he told me about it. He responded: "That's business."

I told him that I can not and will not pay $260 for a phone I only used for a week before returning it to where I bought it from. "Then you will be liable for the charges and we will get an attorney to get the money from you, including legal fees, which will come to more than $360."

I called T-Mobile and asked to speak with a supervisor and I was told that I would get a call from someone. I am currently waiting for that call, but obviously I am not optimistic. T-Mobile says that they have no control over the account once it goes to collections, and the collection agency has no incentive to let me off. In fact, their entire business is based around not letting people off. Collection agencies and car towing service both operate on the principle that no one can afford to do anything other than pay them. When push comes to shove, common sense and fairness never enters the picture because the consumer has no leverage. When a supervisor from T-Mobile calls me back and tells me that he can't do anything for me I will be faced with the choice between ruining my credit and probably being tried in absentia in some court that almost certainly won't be near where I live, or paying more than half what I owed in the original contract despite never receiving any of the services of the contract. I'll let you know what I choose.

UPDATE: I talked to Legal Aid and they advised me to negotiate with Amsher because T-Mobile has already sold the account to them and thus will not help me. Since Amsher tells me that they need a letter from T-Mobile in order to close the account and T-Mobile says they turned over the file to Amsher, I am pretty much screwed. I am filing a formal dispute with Amsher, which should keep me out of court and hopefully will get T-Mobile to do something.

If not, then I will just have to start writing a lot of letters. $280 isn't a huge amount of money, but it is more than I will pay for nothing.

The Greatest American

2007-01-18T11:03:00.000-08:00

I am a little late to the party, but I thought I would point out a poll by AOL and the Discovery Channel from 2005 that asked: "Who is the greatest American?" I found this poll by looking at the Greatest Briton list, which I found because it was mentioned on his wikipedia page that Thomas Malthus wasn't on the list. Obviously, I have too much time on my hands, which I guess is why I have a blog. Now this list is an unscientific poll, but still (via Wikipedia):

Ronald Reagan - 24% of the First place votes
Abraham Lincoln - 23.5%
Martin Luther King, Jr. - 19.7%
George Washington - 17.7%
Benjamin Franklin - 14.9%
George W. Bush
Bill Clinton
Elvis Presley
Oprah Winfrey
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Billy Graham
Thomas Jefferson
Walt Disney
Albert Einstein
Thomas Alva Edison
John F. Kennedy
Bob Hope
Bill Gates
Eleanor Roosevelt
Lance Armstrong
Muhammad Ali
Rosa Parks
The Wright Brothers
Henry Ford
Neil Armstrong

1. Ronald Reagan as the greatest American of all time? Does anyone, literally, ANYONE, believe that to be true? Greater than George Washington, the first President, the General who more than anyone contributed to America even existing, the man who presided over the Congressional Congress, the man who refused to be king and stepped down after only two terms? Really? Not only that, but Washington comes in behind two others! Reagan meanwhile, is a mediocre actor and a President whose only significant accomplishment, the fall of the Soviet Union, came at the cost of years of nuclear paranoia and a huge national deficit. Plus, there was Iran-Contra, which, according to some, was only the tip of the iceberg of Reagan's crime in South America. I don't think it is even possible to make the case that Reagan was the greatest American ever, even if he did die the year before this poll.

2. Abraham Lincoln. I don't want to get into all of the specifics, but Abraham Lincoln is generally overrated. He failed to prevent the bloodiest war in U.S. history, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963- three years into his administration and not primarily because he cared about the interest of the enslaved, rather he was trying to block Europe from entering the war- and he excercised near fascist state power during the war, including suspending the writ of habeas corpus and severely limiting both freedom of speech and press. I am not saying he wasn't one of the most important figures in U.S. history, merely that his role is badly misunderstood. History has turned him into "Honest Abe the slavery hating man", but the reality was far more complex. He belongs on the list, and I can understand why so many people like him, but I would put him down a few rungs.

3. MLK was by any standard a great American and I would put him over Lincoln or Reagan (I mean seriously, Reagan over MLK?), though I would still put Washington first.

4. George Washington, the greatest American ever. The only knock on him is he had slaves, which is significant. But slavery was legal then and I don't think you can dock him too many points by rejudging history in the light of present morality. Plus, he wouldn't sell slaves if it broke up slave families and he released slaves upon the death of his wife. Not enough absolve his involvement with the institution, but fairly admirable. He should be number one with a bullet.

5. Ben Franklin belongs on the list somewhere, but probably not this high. He did numerous important things, but never was president and didn't have that much of a prominent role in the revolution. Still a minor error, entirely overshadowed by:

6. George W. Bush in a ranking that is already strikingly anachronistic two years after the poll was taken. Bush would probably top a list of the 25 worst Americans today, but I suspect that some Conservative ballot stuffing got him and Reagan so high on this list.

7. Bill Clinton, God love the big guy, is not one the of the top ten Americans of all time. He is more like the modern Calvin Cooledge than a President of note. Sure, Bush makes him look really, really good, but his Administration was non-descript and the booming economy was not his doing. I imagine all the people who didn't vote for Bush put Slick Willy this high on the list.

8. Elvis Presley, um no. Beyond the questionable nature of putting entertainers on a list of the "greatest" people, I wonder how "great" an entertainer Elvis was. He was a bad actor and spent the last third of his career as the world highest paid night club singer. He didn't write most of his songs and stole his sound from African Americans. How can he be on the list, but Bob Dylan, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemmingway aren't? Answer: the average idiot has heard of Elvis, but the other three earn blank looks and indifferent shrugs from the masses.

9. Oprah... Wow. She is 13 places over Rosa Parks! She is infinity places over Jonas Salk, who only managed to develop the polio vaccine. Sure she does some charity work, but how can someone primarily known for having a day time talk show be among the ten greatest Americans of all time?

10. FDR. Overrated, but definitely one of the most important Americans. His untimely death saved us from the first psuedo monarchy in U.S. history and 22nd Amendment ensured that no one else will serve for longer than George Washington.

11. Billy Graham... Well at least it isn't L Ron Hubbard or the Morman Jesus (he came over here and became an American). More ballot stuffing by Conservatives.

12. Thomas Jefferson, had some characters issues but I think he should be in the top five for sure. It is cultural revisionism to paint him as a racial monster according to our current values. The Declaration of Independence is best piece of writing in U.S. history, and then we have the Louisianna Purchase, the "Revolution of 1800" that demonstrated peaceful political transition, the Lewis and Clark expedition that he authorized and on and on.

13. Walt Disney? Geez, are people just voting for the names they recognize? Henry Ford was a better industrialist and there are many movie people who are more influential. The Disney corporation's continual strengthening of intellectual property law (to protect 1928's "Steamboat Willy" and thus Mickey Mouse) is a major problem for artistic freedom. Nothing would pass into the public domain, ever, if Disney had its way.

14. Albert Einstein - First he should be way higher on this list and second he shouldnt be on it at all. He was only a citizen of this country for 15 of his 76 years and he retained his Swiss citizenship until his death. At least he was a legitamately great man.

15. Thomas Edison - This is about where Ben Franklin belongs. Both were great men, though not inner circle Greatest Americans.

16. John F. Kennedy was one of the worst Presidents of all time. He was hopelessly out of his league in Cuba and almost caused the end of the world with his leadership during the missile crisis (how come no one mentions that we had missiles in Turkey that convinced the USSR to put missiles in Cuba? It should be the Cuban-Turkey Missile Crisis, since the missles were only removed from Cuba when we agreed to remove our missiles from Turkey). If a little Texas redneck (or a vast conspiracy) hadn't ended his Precidency prematurally, then who knows how bad things he would have mucked up foreign policy. He was good looking however, and a lot of baby boomers identify him with the idealism of youth. Never mind that his dad was a bootlegger and he was elected President under false pretenses (read: mob related). Not a great American.

17. Bob Hope, I don't know if he was particularly significant in an artistic, political or social way. He did perform a lot of USO shows, and I guess that makes him the 17th greatest American ever (despite being born in England).

18. Bill Gates went from being a hated, cut throat capitalist to one of the greatest philanthropists in history in only a short few years. I have high hopes for what he is going to do with all of Warren Buffet's money and I can admire an American success story. Bill was smart and went from not much, to more than anyone else.

19. Eleanor Roosevelt did some good things, but how could she possibly be on this list when Clara Barton, the founder of the Red Cross, isn't? Another example of people voting for the names they have heard of.

20. Lance Armstrong is pretty amazing and this list was from before he started partying with Matthew McConaughey all the time. Still, I don't see what makes him better than Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, not to mention Jackie Robinson (!) or...

21. Muhammad Ali is, to my thinking, far and away the most significant American Athlete this side of Jackie Robinson (whose exclusion from this list is criminal). He sat out the draft, joined the nation of Islam, aggressively self-promoted (now the norm), fought in Africa and generally refused to be quiet. The model that every loud mouth super-star tries to live up to, and no one has come close.

22. Rosa Parks wasn't the first person to sit in the white section of the bus and the popular story of the woman who refused to get up after a long day at work is fiction, still, hers was the most significant act of civil disobedence in this country since the Boston Tea Party. Hard to argue with those credentials.

23. Wright Brothers are certainly worthy.

24. Henry Ford personifies the American Industrial ideal (now exported to the country with the worst paid workers). I would put him a lot higher on the list.

25. Neil Armstrong was just the monkey in a space suit prancing around a moon set in Los Angeles. At least that is what I read in Cracked magazine.

To summarize: 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 19 and 20 don't belong on the list at all and 1, 2 and 5 were overrated. I propose we substitute James Madison (who wasn't even nominated, though Tom Cruise was...), Bob Dylan (not nominated, though Arnold Swartzenegger was), Mark Twain, Jonas Salk, Michael Jordan, Ernest Hemmingway, Andrew Jackson (controversial, but undoubtably one of the most important presidents), Susan B Anthony (where are the women on this list?), John Marshall (not nominated, though Donald Trump was), Jackie Robinson and Theodore Roosevelt.

If we can take solace in anything, it is that we are not the only country with no clue who was important. On the list of the 100 Greatest Britons, Princess Di is 3rd, ahead of William Shakespeare. Evidently being the prettiest Royal trumps being the greatest writer of the English language, EVER. Sigh.

You like reading blogs? Fag!

2007-01-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

The Netflix DVD has been kicking around my house for almost a week, but last night I finally got a chance to see Mike Judge's Idiocracy. It has many problems (technical, scene execution, repetition, third act), but its premise is gold and it isn't so much irreverent as genuinely disrespectful. From what I understand, copyrights do not proclude spoofing and so Judge wouldn't necessarily need permission from Carl's Jr., Fuddruckers or Starbucks to imagine a world where Carl's Jr. drugs patrons and confiscates children, Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers and Starbucks doles out "full release" lattes (read: blowjobs). The movie is harrowing look at a world where corporate concerns trump real problems (a Gatorade like product is being used to water the crops, but the nation riots when switching to water damages the stock price in brilliant satire of the economy versus the environment debates of today) and the average person considers thinking or reading "Faggy".

The movie feels like you could watch it five or six times and still find cultural references and delirious stupidity. The opening alone is the funniest thing this side of the naked fight in Borat. It is ironic that the creator of "Beavis and Butthead" now bemoans a society where the top rated show is "Ow, my Balls" and the Best Picture (and Best Screenplay) winner is "Ass" (and that is what it is). At least "Beavis and Butthead" wasn't impervious to analysis like the idiotic, calculated "reality" that populates TV today.

I have always like Luke Wilson and I think he does a fine job here. I agree with Dennis, at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, that Dax Shepard as Frito steals the show. I had always just thought of him as "that guy from 'Punk'D'" (his work in Lets Go to Prison and Employee of the Month didn't help), but coaxed genuine empathy, not to mention belly laughs, from what was essentially a one note song (clue: Frito isn't smart). The scene where Frito acts as Luke Wilson's lawyer in a courtroom that was part day time TV and part Melee at the Palace was one of my favorites in the movie. Another surprise was how good and even, dare I say it, hot Maya Rudolph was. I find Saturday Night Live completely unwatchable and have never considered her even remotely attractive, but she definitely did it for me here as the completely average hooker who is mostly concerned with avoiding trouble from Upgraydd, her pimp. I recently watched Terry Crews in an embarassing turn in White Chicks (he seemed to be playing "scary miscegenating black man"), but he rallied nicely here. All in all, a nice job from the cast on a script that is definitely pretty flat and flabby (how about that slightly oxymoronic combo) at times.

Fox sabotaged this movie from the get go, only releasing it in six cities (not including New York), before pulling it and releasing it on DVD. Moreover, they reshot the movie after Judge finished, refused to let it be prescreened, slashed the budget (which shows up in the special effects), denied requests by festivals to show the movie after release, and reportedly never finished a trailer for the movie! This year Fox released gems like Date Movie and John Tucker Must Die to seemingly endless ad campaigns, but they didn't even bother to make a trailer in case they wanted to advertise this movie to the public. Perhaps Fox had a problem with a movie that showed the future Fox News as a shirtless guy and a cleavage baring bimbo as co-anchors. Supposedly, there was some sort of fight with Mike Judge and Fox only released the movie at all because it was contractually obligated to. Will the evil of Newscorp never end? First the Dodgers, then the news, now Idiocracy!

So, rent this movie you won't be disappointed. Sure, it has the same third act problems that plagued Office Space, where the ending is a little too neat, not to mention the implications* raised in the third act of either movie, but it is damn funny throughout and even with everything I mentioned there are a million laugh out loud funny quotes I missed.

*Ok, fine, I will mention that it is absurd to think that construction work is substantively better than working in an office. I mean seriously, have you ever worked construction Mike Judge? It sucks. It is hard, you wake up early, your body hurts, the pay isn't good, there is little to no recognition of your accomplishments and bosses are often far more openly abusive than the passive aggressive pussies talking down to you in your cubicle. But, Office Space points out that at least you get to be outside... Idiocracy, meanwhile, concludes that dumb people are doomed unless the smart people save them from themselves, and even then the dumb people will just sit on the sidelines having tons of kids and killing themselves.

Remix to Ignition

2007-01-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

So, it ended up taking me two days to come back (and I bet this is my last post until Monday at least, because I am going home for the weekend). What can I say? My computer at home is broke, so not only do I occasionally post at work, I exclusively post at work. Thus, if work gets in the way of wasting time on blogger, I don't end up wasting any time (on blogger anyway).

Without further whining and excuses, here is more songs I really like (unfortunately some of these aren't links to the full song, maybe you are better at finding them than me):

Talking Heads - This Must Be the Place - One of my favorite closing credits songs of all time- it is one of my favorite songs of all time anyway, and it happens to be in the credits for Wall Street- even if it doesn't really carry the mood at the end of the movie.

I love this song pretty irrationally, I can't really describe why it is one of my favorites. I just love it. I love that it goes on for more than a minute before the lyrics start. I love that while I can't entirely decipher the lyrics, I can sing along with the whole song. I love the high points: "And you're standing here beside me, I note the passing of time". I love the little keyboard "duh duh dunt" in between lines. It is a song that both describes nostalgia and makes me nostalgic. I feel safe saying that this song wouldn't be made today and certainly wouldn't be a hit if it was. The 80s were often horrible (see: the CIA and South America), but they were doing crazy, off the wall things musically. A lot of which was terrible, but some was incredible, especially the Talking Heads and this song. (Another thing that couldn't happen today: this dirt cheap artsy video for the song)

Johnny Cash - Cocaine Blues - Another song prominently featured in a movie, Joaquin Phoenix does a solid job with it in Walk the Line, but you have to hear the man himself do it. Johnny was a bad, bad man who loved to sing about killing people (at least I think he did, otherwise why do it so often?). This strumming pattern is like a fist banging the words home and this one features him at his most extreme: "Early one morning, while making the rounds, I took a shot of cocaine and shot my woman down. I went right home and I went to bed, I stuck that loving 44 beneath my head." God damn, hide the guns Johnny makes it sound so cool I want to go on a coke and murder bender right now.

Lady Sovereign - Hoodie - Silly, stupid lyrics. But I love the drums and I am a sucker for clapping in songs. I know, I know, idiotic... but catchy.

The Mystery Jets - Diamonds in the Dark - Both this and "You Can't Fool Me Dennis" feature idiotic lyrics: "You can do anything you want, as long as it makes sense." What? Yet, I sing along because it is the kind of idiotic that goes down easy.

The Pink Spiders - Modern Swinger - "My baby's pretty as car crash, sex as the stinger of a hornet in your arm, just another modern swinger". Those lyrics over a pulsating bass line that turns into delicious pop punk ear candy...

Ryan Adams - Oh My Sweet Carolina - Heartbreaker is the best country rock album of all time for my (limited) money. It is tough to follow up and unfortunately Mr. Adams hasn't. Still we have amazing vocal performances like his warbling ode to Carolina, either the state (he's from Charleston I think) or some chick by the same name. "Come Pick Me Up" is an amazing song too.

Wilco - Jesus, ect. - I already mentioned that I like the way "Jesus" sounds. Geez-Us. Wilco has the best body of work every to be grouped under the genre "country rock". My freshman year of college Wilco came to campus to play a free show, and I didn't go. I can't even blame the booze- though I was fucked up- I just didn't know who they were. I was pissed because they didn't get someone I knew about. "Wilco... screw that indie bullshit, can we get some rap or what?" Weep not for the youth, my friends.

Josh Ritter - Kathleen - He rounds out my country rock trifecta. I am seeing some online props for Josh Ritter's latest album, and deservedly so. However, for my money I like Hello Starling. It is a little rawer, more truthful but still retains his lyrical talents. This song features the line I most want to say to a girl, but never will: "All the other girls here are stars, you're the northern lights."

Sufjan Stevens - Romulus - Sufjan is the man! Sure his albums are full of stuff that I don't give a crap about, but the high points are worth the fluff. Illinois features two of my favorite songs, but this is a high point off of "Michigan".

The Unicorns - The Clap - Maybe my fifth favorite song from the album but it was the one I could find online. The Unicorns just wanted to have fun and their album was often silly, but always a blast to listen to.

Teddybears - Punkrocker - Iggy Pop absolutely owns these lyrics. This song is featured in a Cadillac commercial, and Iggy's growl probably sold a lot of cars.

Cursive - The Recluse - How come people don't make rock operas anymore? Cursive's The Ugly Organ is a pretty solid example of a rock opera/concept album. Pretty lonely lyrics, but the song keeps it upbeat.
" I wake alone
in a woman's room I hardly know.
I wake alone
and pretend that I am finally home."

Antony and the Johnsons - Hope There's Someone - Sure Antony kind of sounds like a drag singer, but that is the point. I like all the songs about "breast amputation" too, but this one is a nice introduction to the wonderful world of big transsexual music.

My Morning Jacket - It Beats For You - The guys at hearya.com think that MMJ is pretty much the best thing going. I don't know if I am quite there, but I definitely agree it is a special band. Their sound sticks with you, especially the eery echo on the vocals because Z was recorded in a silo with mics on the top and the bottom. The drums are pared down to a top hat and a snare and the rhythm drives the song from start to finish. Great opening line: " Who could see and not believe? The heart that beats the wavelength."

And of course, I love Steely Dan - My Old School.

Sorry things got a little rushed, but I gotta run to the airport. Have a happy MLK day!

Remix

2007-01-09T07:29:00.000-08:00

Everyone is making end of the year lists, and I feel left out. At the same time, between partying, graduating, moving and generally being broke I didn't consume nearly enough to make a good list of stuff from this year. So I am going to give you a playlist instead. Sure, some of these songs are from this year, but most are just kick ass oldies (meaning last year). I can't figure out how to post the songs, so I will just link to where you can listen to them.

Interpol - Stella Was A Diver and She Was Always Down - In Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman talks about the dichotomy between weed people and coke people. Sure, many people (including Chuck) do both on occasion, but everyone (save those poor non-partakers) has a preference. Chuck says that weed-heads enjoy sitting around and having intellectual conversations, while coke heads "chase the members of Interpol around New York City". Well, sign me up for two rails of nose candy then, because who needs to talk when you can listen to songs like this?

Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #2 (Laika) - This is my favorite song from one of the best albums of the past few years. The simple drum beat drive the song and the lyrics chant along with them, though unlike Destroyer the lyrics are intelligible and evocative. "When Daddy comes home you always start a fight, so the neighbors can dance in the police disco lights."

The Decemberists - Yankee Bayonet - I've already mentioned that I love this album, and I today this is my favorite song. What can I say? I love male-female duets, Bob and Joan and Carly and James and now this.

Sigur Ros - Svefn-G-Englar - If you heard about a ten minute song, entirely in Icelandic, consisting of electronic music and shrieking vocals, tell me you wouldn't get excited? Sigur Ros's second album Ágætis Byrjun (literally "Good Start") is absolutely gorgeous and I couldn't decide whether to include this song or Starálfur, but went with this one because it has no relations to Tom Cruise (Starálfur was featured prominently in Vanilla Sky).

The Killers - When You Were Young - The Killers first album was the musical equivalent of a bag of potato chips. Delicious (especially when you are a little out of it), but unfulfilling. Sure it was easy to listen to, but did it have to be so stupid? "I got soul, but I'm not a soul-ja" Well, their follow up broke new ground, for them anyway. They went arena rock and the big change was now they weren't easy to listen to and stupid. However, in the midst of hugely successful mediocrity (is their any other kind of huge success?) they did produce one great single, which begs the question: Why don't people use Jesus as a reference point in pop songs more often? Sure, pop songs might talk about praying or getting comfort from our sweet lord, but as a comparison to whoever we are dating? That is rare. Plus, Jesus is just one of those words that sounds good (like Fuck or multi-syllable rhymes). It has a nice two syllable punch, Geez (which you spit)-Us (which is a rising tone that can be exaggerated for added effect).

Alright, work got in the way of freetime at work today, so I will finish my list tomorrow. I know that is only five songs, but two of them are longer than seven minutes, so in total this has a longer run time than your average Weezer album.

Stevie baby

2007-01-03T07:31:00.000-08:00

It has been a little while since I posted. Mostly that is because I went to Louisville for New Years, but also I have been playing Motherload, which is probably the best flash game since Insaniqarium.

Continuing my long history of only catching things well after they are hip, I finally got around to watching Stevie. I don't watch a lot of documentaries, but filmfreakcentral.com wrote that they loved it and so I pushed some buttons on netflix and like magic it came. How rarely is so little effort so richly rewarded.

One of the most popular modes of criticism today is to find a contextual theme to generalize the movie. V for Vendetta is about the war on terror and X-Men: The Last Stand is about the gay gene. Stevie defies such easy packaging, sure it is about things, but to say that it is about the failures of society that ultimately produce criminals is to ignore most of the movie. As meta-fiction that could function simply as a discussion of the responsibilities of documentarians to their subjects. Or it could be a demonstration of personal responsibility and empathy, even for those who have done very bad things. It is far more than that, and even at more than 2 hour long it delivered the goods so often that I was left reeling.

Stevie manages to get you to empathize someone who has done something loathsome and then continually demonstrates that behavior was not an aberration. The basic premise is that documentarian Steve James (director of one the best sports movie ever, Hoop Dreams) goes back to rural Southern Illinois after 11 years to visit Stevie, who he mentored in the Big Brother Advocate program. However, after his initial visit he returns two years later to discover that in his absence Stevie has graduated from petty crimes to sexual molesting his 8 year old niece. When he returns, Stevie is in jail after writing out a confession, but shortly after he is released on a Miranda ruling that suppresses his confession.

At this point, James returns and follows Stevie and interviews the principle characters in his life, his abusive mother, who ultimately abandoned him; his girlfriend, who suffers from a nerve condition; his step-grandmother, who took care of him, but feuds with his mother, his unabused sister and even the sister whose daughter he molested. Stevie's life is features countless instances of neglect, both physical and sexual abuse and abandonment. His mother gave him up to the state, the good foster parents left him to the sexually predatory ones and even Steve James left and moved to Chicago to pursue a film career. Even though Stevie commits the crime, we become more and more aware that the movie is about Steve Jame, not Stevie. There were precious few people who could have made a difference in Stevie's life, and James's decision to move to Chicago clearly did not have a positive effect on Stevie. The movie is rife with conversations that discuss something general while revealing something specific, and when Stevie's one time foster mother wonders: "Sometimes I wish we didn't have to be human" it is a telling look at James's own guilt.

James is careful not to judge Stevie, but many of the other subjects do. When a member of the Aryan nation talks about how "if it was my daughter you wouldn't live to see trial" and James can not muster a coherent reason why Stevie should be protected in prison, I was forced to wonder what did Stevie deserve? James's wife, a therapist who treats sex abusers, confronts Stevie very directly. After James's own silence on the subject, it is shocking contrast to see her say: "I know you did it and you know you did it. That doesn't mean I don't care about you, that I don't want to help you."
There is no moral equivocation; she deals with people like Stevie on a daily basis and while he may be a product of his environment, he still did something unspeakable.

Stevie's girlfriend, Tonya, initially appears to be mentally handicapped and I felt that she was just a very disadvantaged person settling for what she could get. But as the movie wears on, her love and patience shines through and I understood the depths of her love for the very broken Stevie. However, even she can not hide that she suspects Stevie is guilty even in absence of DNA evidence when discussing the case with her best friend, who is even more severely disabled. Her friend was a victim herself and her discussion of the subject, with Stevie in the room, is by far the best part of the movie. "That's why I'm not married, that's why I don't have children. I love them, I want them. But I can't trust a man." Stevie looks at her, the abuser and the abused, personifying both her pain and inflicting it.

Every time Stevie makes progress, he immediately does something wrong. In a visit to Chicago (to a club I have visited no less) he gets drunk and becomes unhinged. James narrates how betrayed and angry he felt, and it reflected my own disappointment. I wanted redemption, and there are scenes of reconciliation and hope, but Stevie can not be simply cured and all we are left with is a glimmer of hope in his renewed relationship with his mother, James and the one or two other positive people in his life. I highly recommend this movie to everyone and anyone.

300, and then some.

2006-12-28T09:23:00.001-08:00

300 Movie Trailer (I removed the imbedded video because it was fucking with the formatting)

I am cautiously optimistic about this movie. Well, more than that, I am both geeked up and very worried. The last comic book movie I had high hopes for was V for Vendetta, and while pretty much everyone else loved it, I had trouble getting past my affection for its source material. Fortunately, this is movie is sourced from something by Frank Miller, not Alan Moore, and Frank Miller's most famous work was already faithfully adapted for the big screen. Slightly off topic, but Alan Moore has disowned the film versions of all of his books (which he doesn't own the rights to), even refusing to take, what I imagine are, extremely lucrative amounts of money on principle so he won't have his name on them. Considering how bad Constantine, From Hell and LXG were, I can see why he doesn't want to be associated with them, even though I probably wouldn't have had the willpower to resist the cash.

So anyway, 300 isn't much of a graphic novel, I mean that quantitatively not qualitatively. It is only 88 pages and it features mostly splash pages and narration, instead of panels and word balloons. That said, it is an excellent telling of perhaps the most heroic battle of all time. A friend of mine said that Thermopylae was the battle he most wanted to see adapted into a film and I can see why. This is a book of surpassing brutality and a celebration of the sort of masculinity that makes William Munny or Marv look tame by comparison. The Spartans in 300 are fucking and fighting machines,that live and die for honor and glory. Not to spoil too much of the story, but the King of Sparta starts an unwinable war because he won't bow a knee to the God-King of Persia and then he has the audacity to win anyway. So sex, violence and speeches about honor and glory? Sounds like a Hollywood winner to me.

So why the worry? Well, for one this movie could easily become cheesy and gratuitous, in fact it will be very difficult for it not to be. The Illiad seemed impossible to mess up, and yet we had Troy. The preview for the movie features a heavy rock song and editing that is very reminiscent of the Matrix, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but only a few movies have pulled that look and sound off, even most of the Matrix Trilogy didn't manage it. Also, there is a speech in the book, about dying for an age of freedom, that worked on the page, but I wonder if it will turn jingoistic and flat on screen. I am always skeptical of speeches that try to make the exotic palatable for our modern, Western sensibilities. Most of us can't understand dying for pride, but we all have to hear about dying for freedom. But I am getting ahead of myself because I haven't seen the movie yet. I also haven't seen anything by the director, Zack Snyder, though filmfreakcentral.com loved his remake of Dawn of the Dead. Coincidentally, his next movie is Watchmen, only the most celebrated comic of all time and the magnum opusa of forementioned malcontent, Alan Moore. I do like that the cast of 300 does not feature any big stars and the movie is coming out in March, not June, so it doesn't have Blockbuster bona fides AKA licence to dumb it down for kids and people who see two movies a year.

In short, I will be there opening day and this one has home run written all over it, but don't be surprised if there is just a violent swing before the ball ends up in the catcher's mitt.

Kramer's everywhere rejoyce

2006-12-28T06:56:00.000-08:00

Well modern medicine manufacture miracles all the time, but to cure the jimmy leg? I was watching tv last night and noticed this hilarious commercial for REQUIP, which treats "moderate to severe restless leg syndrome." I was watching a show that I never watch ("Two and a Half Men", what? I was bored) and so I thought that it might be a joke commercial, but it just wasn't funny enough. Though I did laugh when I heard that REQUIP may cause you to fall asleep while driving, which seems to be much worse than the symptoms associated with "restless leg syndrome". Since REQUIP is also- primarily, I would imagine -used to treat Parkinson's I guess this is just a cross promotional opportunity and I can just see the pharmaceutical executives sitting around making up a disease to try and get some more bang out of REQUIP.

Far be it from me to mock those who are suffering, but I wonder how people in the Great Depression would have felt about restless leg syndrome.

"Oh, you have an uncontrollable urge to move your legs? Good, go move your legs over to the woods and gather some fire wood so we can heat up our dirt soup."

Sweet things from Montana, so young and willing

2006-12-21T08:58:00.001-08:00

So Donald Trump, the male equivalent of Paris Hilton in that his worth is both imaginary and derived by his questionable epitomizion of the stereotypical male role (supposedly his finances are not as rock solid as he asserts they are every time he pulls out Trump Checkbook, Trump Wallet or Trump Bankruptcy), has decided not to fire Miss USA. Donald is one of the most unlikable people on the planet, so I will go so far as to agree with Rosie O'Donnell, how is he "the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America[?]"

That is all besides the point though, the real story is that Tara Conner, Miss USA, was almost fired for drinking, sneaking guys into her shared Trump apartment, testing positive for cocaine (hey, we have all been there) and making out with Miss Teen USA in public!!! So, she went from being someone I have no interest in, to my dream girl. Unfortunately, the party is over because she is (wait for it...) checking into rehab.

By the way, there has to be something that checking into rehab won't get you out of.

"Officher, I-I-I-m shorry, I-I-I wahsh driv-v-vin-g tuh rehab."

"Yeah, I killed her, but I checked into rehab right afterwards."

"Honey, It was just a hooker, and I'm checking into rehab."

Well anyway, enjoy your break Tara, you deserve it. I would give my first born to have been at the party where Tara made out with Katie Blair, who is exponentially hotter than her senior counterpart. Honestly, this story is so hot that I don't even need the pictures (and there must be some out there somewhere), just hearing it makes me go lightheaded.

Before: Aw... Poor thing doesn't even look hot.
After: All better now. Yah Donald!

They're bring Sexy Back

2006-12-20T07:13:00.000-08:00

I was in despair last week because I had forgotten to watch the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, which generally is the best showcase of gorgeous women this side of- well, the Victoria's Secret Catalogue. Fortunately, they reran it last night and I blocked out some time to be a creepy voyeur.

To my surprise, the show was disquieting and decidedly un-sexy. I struggled to figure out the common theme among all the things I hated about the show, but the theme of the show was "What it is like to be a Victoria's Secret model" and that theme is resistant to deep thought. However, I do have some observations.

It is remarkable how gay the event is. It is like an incredibly expensive drag show. Everything is either campy or glam, but either way it is over the top and fabulous. The girls are wear big hair, glitter, diamonds and campy costumes. The music consisted of Justin Timberlake, electronic remixes of pop songs and a huge choir. The last drag show I saw was less of a parody than this.

The show strives to fulfil fetishes, especially kid fetishes. The themes of various "acts" were angels, stewardesses, Scotland (think leather and buckles) and most bizarrely, growing up (over a carnival remix of Kelis's "I'm Bossy", though the song before that was the more appropriate, "When You Were Young"). They had models dressed only in bras and panties walking down the runway in in garish colors dragging a pink comforter, carrying pom-poms or graduating. The idea was to sell the Pink Line, which markets to undergrads, but the conjunction of child imagery and sexuality is um... disturbing.

In even worse taste is the state of the models. Besides the few models I recognized (Adriana, Gisele, Alessandra, Ana and Karolina... ok so I recognized a lot of them, but there were 27 models total so I am only 18.5% a loser) the models began to look like anorexic adolescents or freakishly elongated aliens. The look for runway models is 90% leg and abs, with a big smile and bigger hair as the cheery on top (like I said, drag show). The problem is that most of the girls are stick figures wobbling on chicken legs and emaciated frames and the big hair can't hide pre-teen faces. Is it too much to ask for models that don't look like high school freshman who just spent some serious time on the rack?

The show pretends that it is about anything but dudes looking at girls they will never attain. So to fit their loose "We are regular people, see how we live" theme, they jam the show full of gimmicks like interviews with the models and a hidden camera (if they would have taken the camera into the bathroom then they would have hit three of the four "unacceptable" perversions: bondage, kids and water sports, leaving out bestiality). So instead of just watching hot models, we were forced to sit through grainy bouncy footage of nothing. Literally, nothing. The camera never focused on anything of interest and the shot of "What it is like to walk down the runway" became grainy blown out lights bouncing with the model's strut. The interviews were full of annoying "Idiot says something uninteresting and then laughs in pretend embarrassment" moments. Adriana Lima, one of the hottest women in the world for my money, destroyed the illusion by opening her mouth and being vapid and self important. What was I expecting, right? Since she recently reported that she was a virgin, I guess she is from the Paris Hilton school of public relations. Which is to say, lie because no one can prove different.

On the music front we have an interlude from J.T. Justin Timberlake has emerged as the clear winner from his break up with Britney Spears. He has reached a point where a guy could conceivably like him and not get made fun of. That said, why have him in the show? To rope in the women (who would presumably be the target audience for a company that exclusively sells women's clothing) that otherwise have nothing to see in the field of starving T & A? Justin clearly can dance, but why dance like that? It is all pointless jerky motions that look like a million variations on the robot; it is highly skilled cheerleading instead of real dancing. Also, did he write (or whoever wrote it, Timbaland probably) "Sexy Back" specifically for the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show? It is a little too neat of a fit.

The "climax" of the show was the final string of models in diamond bras came out to a winter theme over a huge choir singing in the background. Someone put together the obvious metaphor of diamonds and ice, since they needed some way to showcase the absurdity of a multi-million dollar bra. The best thing was the choir singing "Just a little more love, just a little more peace, is all we need." Say what? A song about peace while diamonds of all things are paraded up and down the runway. Diamonds are worth far less than they cost, since their value is neither intrinsic or rare. De Beers suppresses small diamonds (1.3 billion dollars in present day worth withheld from the market in 1981) to keep the price of a relatively common rock high. That diamonds (with can be produced with superior quality in a lab, though diamonds that are made are considered "fake". What a metaphor for a Nip/Tuck industry) were juxtaposed against millionaire women whose value is derived from talents that are inflated by a similarly bankrupt system was too much for me to bear. So I ended up watching sports instead. Eat a sandwich and I will see you next year girls.

Dude, Si.com writers are pricks. (with obvious exceptions)

2006-12-18T12:50:00.000-08:00

SI.com recently reported that an Asian Games silver medal winner had her medals stripped from her because she failed a gender test. However, unlike Helen Stephens, Shanti Sounderajan was not a "cheater". Stephens won the gold medal in the women's 100 Meter dash in 1936, setting a new world record in the process. She was accused of being a man, but the charge was denied. However, in 1980 she was killed in a robbery and it was discovered that she had male genitalia, despite living as a woman all of her life (my favorite professor in college recently wrote a screenplay about Stephens's life). Instead, Sounderajan is physically and mentally female, but genetically a little too "male" because she had a hidden "Y" chromosome.

Understand, this is a 25 year old woman who trained very hard and due to something completely beyond her control she is now losing her medal and further probably will never be able to have children. Beyond the fact that "gender" is very contentiously defined, everyone in professional sports are "genetic freaks" in one way or another. If indeed this genetic accident did give her some marginal advantage, how different is that from the fact that most of the NBA is in the top .001% of the population for height? Every woman competing in the 800 meters at that level is in the top 1% of the population in fast-twitch-slow-twitch muscle ratio and lung capacity.

Imagine if you had trained for years to be among the best at a very competitive field and in order to clear your name of completely ridiculous allegations, as she must have assumed they were, you submitted to a voluntary test. Only to fail the test due to no fault of your own, in the process losing your coveted job forever and to top it off, you become the punch line to thousands of jokes around the world. Including at SI.com, where the title of the article is "Dude looks like a lady." If you lost your career and your prospects of having a family, at least you wouldn't have to do it while enduring international attention and derision from idiots. If this had happened in America then gay rights groups would indubitably be up in arms both about Si.com's insensitivity and the unfairness of taking away her medal. In my academic writing experience, when referring to a transsexual person the chosen gender pronoun is supposed to be used. This is one of the most depressing stories I have heard this year and I wish Shanti all the best in the future and in her appeal.

Update: I notice that article is an AP article, so it is possible that the title is also AP. In which case SI.com is just the monkey throwing the shit around as opposed to the one creating it.

As an artist, a person has no home save in Paris.

2006-12-13T08:06:00.000-08:00

Paris Hilton is the most important pop figure of our age. I don't like her at all, but there it is, she's the modern version of Bob Dylan (following up on the post from yesterday, I found a place where you can listen to all of Dylan's XM shows online). Dylan always tried to dodge the "voice of a generation" label he got stuck with, fortunately for Miss Hilton no one has tried to brand her anything like that, until now anyway.

Pop culture is important- not intrinsically, but it is important because so many people think it's important. I don't subscribe to US Weekly or watch Ryan Seacrest on E! (though I do watch "the Soup" sometimes), but I could tell you with a fair amount of accuracy who is dating who and who is hating who. Why? Because I pass the couple of minutes in the grocery aisle finding out. The lives and lifestyles of the rich and famous are worthless in every way, except in that they help waste the time until death for masses of people who have already put their lives on cruise control. It is hypocritical to pretend I am better, since I am huge sports fan, and that is just the other mostly gender specific way throw away time.

Among all the dimwitted good looking people that the magazines stalk, Paris Hilton is the most important, not because of what he is, but what she isn't. She manages to be among the most famous people in the world without being particularly talented or even very good looking. If you listed her talents they would amount to: being blonde, tan and skinny. Her other charms include being rich, wearing skimpy clothing (sans underwear on occasions that serve as cautionary STD tales for adolescent boys), always posing (she always assumes some striking or smoldering look for the camera) and being extremely famous. Famous for what exactly? Well, she is rich and was well known in the Hollywood set for years, but only became truly famous when she starred in a sex tape. Since then she has been in a reality show, which was a product of her fame, not the source of it, two supporting parts in movies and produced a book and a CD (both of which were eviscerated by critics before they even came out). But, Paris is most famous for frequent minor "scandals" involving herself or other celebrities, the most famous of which are the sex tape and her rift with rail thin druggie, Nicole Ritchie. That Brittney Spears (oh how the mighty have fallen) was hanging with Paris when she showed us where her kids came from 3 (count em, 3) times (Paris only pulled that trick once... no twice...) is no surprise. That is Paris Hilton's stock in trade, the manufacture of shameless fame by shameful behavior.

Understand, I am not moralizing. I don't care, further I don't even think anything is wrong with Miss Hilton sleeping with hundreds of thousands of people, animals, plants or inanimate object, nightly doing exotic and dangerous drugs so extreme I don't even get to know about them, ceasing to wear clothes altogether and starting to speak in some combination of the language from A Clockwork Orange and valley girl. In fact, if all of those things happened, my opinion of Paris Hilton would probably become much more positive, at least that would be interesting. People shouldn't be famous for having night vision sex tapes, showing their 500 bad miles of vagina, losing their cell phone with "famous phone numbers" in it, feuding with their drug-addict, anorexic BFF or any of the other shit that Paris does on a regular basis. She has turned being a ditsy coke-whore princess into a multi-million dollar business, and as a human being I feel slighted that someone would be given so much for so little.

But her general negative contribution to the world that lavishes her with success is why Paris is the key figure of our age. We live in a post-modern world where most people (myself especially) lead lives that are insular and small. There is so much "noise" that it is difficult for any book, movie or song to rise above it all and gain acclaim and no one has time to consider all of the "important" or "good" things coming out in a year. So what we are left with is the lowest and least important people become the most looked to and sought after. The most important aspects of culture to the average man and woman are sports and pop culture respectively. So ours is a culture that has rejected culture. In world where sports figures, actors and rappers are our demi-gods, pure fluff like Paris Hilton is elevated to the status once reserved for people who had, you know, done something. So enjoy all the good things that lady luck throws up on you Paris, by being the least deserving, you've earned it.

I'm wondering where in the world my lunch might be

2006-12-11T08:54:00.000-08:00

Now maybe I am biased, well definitely I am biased, but I think Bob Dylan's new (or rather newest, it isn't exactly hot off the presses) album is fantastic. Then, I am a frequent drinker of the Dylan Kool-Aid. At sergioleoneifr.blogspot.com, Dennis Cozzalio recently posted one of his movie quizes and one of the questions was: "Is there a movie that would make you question the judgment and/or taste of a film critic, blogger or friend if you found out they were an advocate of it?" I struggled to answer that question, but I know its musical inverse by heart, because if anyone tells me that they think Bob Dylan makes bad music, or they can't stand his voice... (I have certainly heard this before in the great Linkin Park vs. Bob Dylan debates that left many with hurt feelings, though not me, I have no feelings... sob) Well, that's it. We aren't friends anymore. I can appreciate different opinions, but Bob is my litmus test. If you can't at least appreciate that it is high quality work, I just can't trust your opinions on anything else. Sure, some people only like electronica (I am looking at you, 3), but you're gonna have to serve my man Bob his due props.

Back to the album at hand, I think this is his finest work since the 70s (I like some of his stuff from the 80s, but never got that into Love and Theft or Time Out of Mind, but in the 70s he put out the best album of all time, and this one doesn't top that one). There aren't any songs I really dislike and I really like tracks 1, 2, 5, 6, 8 and 10.

Dylan's music is at its best when it communicates a feeling or experience, but doesn't get too specific and this album is full of those types of tracks. Like Steely Dan, attempts to really unpack what Dylan meant are fruitless from the start, because I don't think that Dylan sat around making up metaphors for Watergate or Vietnam that became his "115th Dream" or "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" (two excellent songs). His focus was far broader (and far more specific), though when he was specific ("Hurricane") he avoided the temptation that artists have to become jingoistic. Let me stress, that I am all for thinking a lot about Dylan and his music, I just don't believe there is a final answer out there. Most of the time Dylan was talking out of his ass anyway, just to fuck with people, consider these two quotes: "I've never written a political song. Songs can't save the world. I've gone through all that." and "I'm speaking for all of us. I'm the spokesman for a generation. " If there is a disconnect there, don't worry about it, maybe Bob could save us but he was too busy doing it better than anyone ever had or will.

Here is the video that prompted this post.
Slate Took it Down, but here is a link to the video.

Three're very well known

2006-12-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

Finally I finish. I love reading lists, but this list was a huge mistake from start to finish. It took forever, and I ended up making sweeping generalizations and overviews of movies I hadn't seen in years. I stand behind my opinions, but this site was supposed to be about thinking hard about culture, not trying to extrapolate from distant memories of things I didn't like when I watched them. Now that I have said it is unimportant, here are thousands of words to read:

Terrible Oscar Winner I somehow dropped off my list

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – This is a very sweet movie, with a benignly positive message that everyone gets and everyone leaves the theater with that “I just drank a warm cup of America-coco with little marshmallows of vague humanism in it” after glow. The obvious charge against this movie is that Morgan Freeman’s character is reminiscent of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s most famous character. I don’t want to go there, because I think it is revisionist to say that Sidney Poitier played regressive characters, when he was always the most educated, well spoken and heroic character in every movie he was in. It is simply absurd to say that every black character who is civil in the face of white abuse is an “Uncle Tom.” There is nothing wrong with maintaining your composure and not sinking to the level of the small minded; of course, there is also nothing wrong with standing up for yourself with force and conviction. In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee addresses the MLK-Malcolm X dichotomy far more poetically than anything I can add, but I will note that most of the characteristics typifying an “Uncle Tom” are found in peaceful nonviolent protest.

That said, at best this movie doesn’t have much of a racial point to make and so it becomes the limited story of twilight friendship. Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy are both fantastic and it is generally well done, but it probably shouldn’t have won for Best Picture (though it was in a mediocre field of Field of Dreams, My Left Foot-which I haven’t seen, The Dead Poets Society, and Born on the Fourth of July- which I also missed/avoided). I would have given the award to Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)- AKA Matchpoint, the Prequel- but I’m a sucker for Woody Allen.

Terrible Oscar nominees

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) – Terrible is a strong word, E.T. is just a nothing of a movie that became a classic like sentimental weepers often do. Don McKellen, of the Village Voice, destroys the movie in one of the best-written film criticisms I’ve read. An excerpt:

"E.T. is a dog movie. Genre-wise, I mean. It's about a boy meeting a dog, naming it, taming it, learning from it, and growing up. Of course, the genre is superficially disguised as science fiction, as was the fashion at the time. Star Wars, Alien, Outland, and Blade Runner are among the many other films of the period that were deliberate sci-fi updates of established genres. But, in the case of E.T., there's no way to overlook the dog-yarn genealogy. The script makes things quite clear with lines like "I found him, I'm keeping him!" "He's trying to tell us something," and "E.T. phone home," a repeated refrain that evokes that most famous of canine titles, Lassie Come Home. "

I can’t top that, so you should just read the article.

The Prince of Tides (1991) - Oscar Nominee. I never really got into the Godess New York Singer/Actresses, Babs, Bette Milder, Liza Minelli et al, so the female lead doesn’t get any sentimentality points from me. The ultimate story is one of sacrifice, where the leading man leaves the love of his life to return home to his wife and child. To top it off, Nolte is Bab’s therapy patient, so their intimacy compounded because they really got to know each other on the couch before they got to know each other Biblically, on the couch. I guess this was edgy in the 80s, of course The Sopranos does a better job with this subject every episode and tops that by not telling the viewer everything expressly. Whatever, I wasn’t this one’s target demographic anyway.

The Sixth Sense (1999) - Oscar Nominee. For the purposes of full disclosure, I knew the ending before I saw the movie, so I didn’t get the big shock that I guess everyone else did. That said, a great movie should be reliant on more than just a twist, something that M. Night Shymalan should learn before making “Big Twist 6: She’s really your Sister” or whatever. I know that this one was a big hit back in the day, but it is just a tightly written genre movie, it doesn’t improve, redefine, subvert or do any of the other things that great genre movies do. This is Rooster Cogburn, not The Searchers.

Erin Brockovich (2000) - Oscar Nominee. This out is more Movie-of-Week's than The Prince of Tides. I can hear it now: “Erin Brockovich is a struggling single mom just trying to support her family, yet she takes on the biggest water company in the country because she can’t stand to see them getting away with with murder. Will she let the good looking motorcycle rider next door distract her from her quest? With Julia Roberts, Albert Finney and Aaron Eckhart as Generic bad boy, join Lifetime on Saturday for this unbelievable tale.” Pass.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) - Oscar Nominee. On first viewing, I enjoyed this movie for all the exciting derringdo and seamanship. That said, the plot is weak, including a scene where Captain Jack (not the cool one, the literary one) learns a tactic from a bug. I think Russell Crowe was just a guarantee for a Best Picture nod in this period, because this was the third year in a row featuring one of his movies up for the highest honor this side of a Moonman. It is an excellent portrayal of life at sea, but the Discovery Channel makes those three times a month and it only gets a .025 rating for its troubles. Period pieces always get overrated come Oscar time.

Finding Neverland (2004) - Oscar Nominee. In an infamous, and amazing, response to Crash winning Best Picture, Annie Proulx, the writer of the short story “Brokeback Mountain”- the basis for the movie of the same name, stated:

The prize, as expected, went to Philip Seymour Hoff-man for his brilliant portrayal of Capote, but in the months preceding the awards thing, there has been little discussion of acting styles and various approaches to character development by this year's nominees. Hollywood loves mimicry, the conversion of a film actor into the spittin' image of a once-living celeb. But which takes more skill, acting a person who strolled the boulevard a few decades ago and who left behind tapes, film, photographs, voice recordings and friends with strong memories, or the construction of characters from imagination and a few cold words on the page?”

I often wonder the same thing as four of the past six Best Actor/Actress wins have been for people playing real people. Biopics are my least favorite genre of movies (well, second least favorite. Musicals are the worst. THE WORST!). They have such a clear-cut structures that they are entirely predictable, and the focus is generally on mimicry rather than innovation. I don’t read biographies (well, actually I was reading a kid’s bio- well, maybe it was for adults, but you couldn’t tell by the idiotic writing- of Andy Warhol, all I wanted to know about was Edie Sedgewick and Bob Dylan and they covered that in no detail 10 pages. I knew it was a mistake to read anything but fiction) for the same reason. I don’t really care how some famous person overcame various obstacles to become famous, which is of course the plot of every biopic, biography and auto-bio. Finding Neverland doesn’t elevate the discussion of Peter Pan, if anything it turns it into something small and cliche, instead of a subversive classic. On top of that, the real J.M. Barrie was slightly pedophilic and the villain of the piece is a woman who is worried because a man starts spending his time with her grandchildren. Boring, pointless, inaccurate, cliched and nominated for Best Picture. Par for the course.

So to conclude, here is a numbered list of the most overrated movies of our (my) time. Note, this is a list of disparity between actually quality and esteem. Both values are subjective and I am just going with my guy. By the way, I somehow ended up with 26 movies, which is better since there are 26 years covered in my poll (27 really, but whatever, 2006-1980=26 so there it is).

1. Forrest Gump (1994) - Oscar Winner.
2. Dances with Wolves (1990) - Oscar Winner.
3. Braveheart (1995) Oscar Winner.
4. Crash (2005) - Oscar Winner.
5. A Beautiful Mind (2001) - Oscar Winner.
6. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) -
7. Titanic (1997) - Oscar Winner.
8. Driving Miss Daisy (1989) - Oscar Winner.
9. A Few Good Men (1992)
10. Gladiator (2000) - Oscar Winner.
11. American History X (1998)
12. Erin Brockovich (2000) - Oscar Nominee.
13. The Prince of Tides (1991) - Oscar Nominee.
14. The Sixth Sense (1999) - Oscar Nominee.
15. Scent of a Woman (1992) - Oscar Nominee.
16. As Good As It Gets (1997) - Oscar Nominee.
17. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) – Oscar Nominee
18. Finding Neverland (2004) - Oscar Nominee.
19. Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989)
20. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) – Oscar Nominee
21. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) – Oscar Winner
22. American Beauty (1999) - Oscar Winner.
23. Kagemusha (1980) - Palme d'Or Winner.
24. Magnolia (1999)
25. Scarface (1983)
26. Goodfellas (1990) - Oscar Nominee

A date that will live in infamy (times two)

2006-12-07T14:58:00.000-08:00

No new posting today, besides this one, because today is my birthday! I have a long standing tradition of getting depressed and/or/consequently drunk on my birthday and today will be no exception. Happy Pearl Harbor Day to me and you too!

This is our receptionist, Pam. If you think she's cute now, you should have seen her a couple years ago.

2006-12-06T20:34:00.001-08:00

I watch a lot of TV and among all the shows I watch, which I will go over once I finish the list of overrated movies, "The Office" is my favorite. Not only that, but I think the British version of "The Office", might be the best and smartest television comedy of all time. Not necessarily the funniest, but the existential drama of the show is something I have never seen in a comedy. The American Office might be consistently more funny, though the "Training" episode of the British Office is the funniest and most rewatchable thing I have ever seen on TV, but the price is that it does not quite mirror real life as truly. I am going to get into this subject in far greater detail in the future, but I just wanted post something and then point out some excellent links on the subject:

Tad Friend of The New Yorker discusses both shows. (from Officetally.com)

Travis Hoover of Film Freak Central (my go to place for movie reviews) reviews seasons one, two and the Christmas Special of the British Office. I don't necessarily agree with his opinion of the Christmas Special, but it is all a great read.

Best of all, here is David Brent showing the chops that allowed him to open for a little Scottish outfit called Texas.

They're Well Known, two.

2006-12-05T22:33:00.001-08:00

The other movies were all Oscar winners and won movie that won Cannes. Today I will have themes to group together similarly overrated movies. I still have 6 7 left to go, this is taking forever unfortunately (and I miscounted)

Important, but not very good.

Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) - This is an incredibly important movie, but not for what is on the screen. When this movie became a breakout hit and made more than twenty times its 1.2 million dollar budget, Hollywood took an interest and the age of "independent" movies made by major corporations began. I find the movie itself creepy and weirdly plotted. I have heard people describe James Spader as "magnetic" in the movie, but if I had kids I would want to be warned if he moved into the neighborhood. Andie MacDowell is one of my least favorite actresses and she is wooden and awkward in the movie, though maybe her character is supposed to act that way. The romance that builds between the two of them is inexplicable. Do girls really like the quiet guy who smiles awkwardly and has a huge collection of homemade porn in his living room? Perhaps I have been going about this all wrong. Meanwhile, the two characters we are supposed to hate, Sandy from "the OC" and that girl from "Just Shoot Me", are exciting and interesting. Laura San Giacomo actually is brilliant in the movie, easily my favorite thing about it, but that isn't saying much.

Good, but overrated.

Scarface (1983) - I am not quite as sold on Brian de Palma as the guys at 24 Lies a Second, sure he has his moments, but he can go pretty far afield. However, Scarface is in general an excellent movie, great acting, interesting story, ect, so why put it on an overrated list? Well, call it the "MTV Cribs" backlash. Every rapper on "Cribs" has the same favorite movie and for the same reason. The rise of Tony Montana from penniless immigrant to drug kingpin is seen as an inspirational tale, or at least the correct movie to maintain street-cred. It might seem bizarre to denigrate a movie because other people like it, but this is a list of overrated movies and in some circles Scarface is way overrated.

Magnolia (1999) - Paul Thomas Anderson is kind of a genius and definitely an asshole. One of his movies, Boogie Nights, is a modern classic, his last one, Punch-Drunk Love, was even better in my opinion and, from what I hear, the one I didn't see, Hard Eight, was the best of all (someone on Film Freak Central said they loved it, but I couldn't find the link). On the other hand he ripped into Fight Club using the Columbine argument:

I think John [Reilly] and I have both had a good laugh many times about this argument that movies don’t cause violence. But movies do cause violence. … Movies absolutely promote violence. I don’t particularly want to see a whole lot of guns in the rest of my movies. I’m not really interested in it anymore. I’m sick of it. I think a movie like Fight Club is an incredibly iresponsible film.

Beyond the fact that Fight Club is a work of art and making art beholden to imposed moral standards is a dangerous path to start out on, the violent character in Fight Club ultimately becomes the "villain" for lack of a better word and the violence is shown as a negative. In Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love some of Anderson's characters engage in drug use, prostitution and extortion, but all of it is portrayed negatively, surely P.T.A. wouldn't argue that Magnolia encourages people to kill frogs.

On that note, let me finally get to the movie in question. Magnolia is brilliant at times (the opening especially), but its grand climax which allows Anderson to get himself out of all the corners the messy scripts writes itself into isn't anything like the grand design stories at the beginning of the movie. This is a movie for people, who love movies, but it isn't a classic and it doesn't stick with you like Anderson at his best.

Scenery Chewing 101

A Few Good Men (1992) - Oscar Nominee. Jack Nicholson has become a cartoon, a caricature actor playing the high energy version of the actor he used to be every role and A Few Good Men shows that it isn't a recent development- I personally think he is still playing the Joker after all these years. Nicholson was the worst part about The Departed, and I was left wondering what Ray Winstone, Mr. French, might have done a better job (someone else online suggested this before me, but I can't member who). I have a general tendency to discredit all of Tom Cruise's movies, but he is fairly solid here, this was back when he was more than a big smile hiding miles and miles of crazy. The movie is just ho-hum, like a special episode of "J.A.G" or "Law and Order: Military Police". I honestly can't understand how this movie became a "classic" or an Oscar Nominee- fortunately one of my favorite movies of all time, Unforgiven, beat it out for the statue.

Scent of a Woman (1992) - Oscar Nominee. I have a good friend who loves this movie and credits Al Pacino's performance as his favorite of all time. To that all I can say is: Hoo-ah! It is quite a scene when the blind Colonel yells at Prep School, but of course that scene is mirrored by Chris O'Donnell rescuing him from himself. The cliches of that scene, committing suicide on a dark rainy night in full uniform, only to be interrupted by the one person who could talk you out of it, pale in comparison to the execution. "You can dance the tango and drive a Ferrari better than anyone I've ever seen" says the simpering youth and apparently that was enough to live for. The aforementioned Ferrari scene being as Hollywood a moment as anything I have ever seen. But that is what this is, a Hollywood father-son movie, where the son redeems the father so the father can protect the son. The topper, of course, is Pacino turning the ham up to an 11. This movie is a nice Friday night date movie, but it should have been lost to the sands of early Saturday morning cable programming by now.

As Good As It Gets (1997) - Oscar Nominee. Jack Nicholson plays perhaps the least likable protagonist in the history and yet because the genre demands it, he ends up with the girl at the end. Understand, Jack plays a racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-semite, with O.C.D; plus, he is several decades older than Hunt and somehow more offensive than any of the bigot words connote. Sure, the dialogue is snappy, but where exactly does anyone start to like Melvin the misanthrope in this movie? Every year a movie or four gets nominated needlessly for Best Picture and an actor like Jack wins for what he once did, instead of the movie he or she is nominated for.

Psuedo Important Subjects done with Sledgehammer subtlety.

American History X (1998) - Did you know that being a Nazi is bad? In case you were wavering on the subject, American History X goes to great lengths to prove that racism is wrong. Ed Norton puts in a solid performance, but he can't carry a movie this sloppy and pointless. All flashbacks are shot in black in white, either as a silly metaphor or just to make sure that we understand it's a flashback. Spike Lee has commented that this movie features the worst shot basketball sequence he has ever seen, but I will go further and say nearly everything in the movie is the worst shot I have ever seen. The climax is the real topper when we find out that racism is wrong, but black people will kill you. The movie fortunately never won anything, but it is held in high regard at imdb.com and in the minds of the people (at least people I know). I think the "curbing" scene is responsible for 90% of this film's popularity.

Overrated by its Inclusion in a Beloved Series

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) - I am not a Star Wars fan by any stretch of the imagination, so perhaps I just don't get "it". The last three movies (aka the first three) are horrible and lots of people run around acting like George Lucas betrayed the proud legacy of his original trilogy with these sub-par follow ups. However, the original Star Wars was pretty clunky in the plot department (George Lucas ripped off Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces structure point by point and even word for word) and only became a classic because of its then state of the art special effects. Empire Strikes Back is the trendy pick as the "good" or "best" movie, mostly because it avoids the Huck Finn quandary (how to end a story) by leaving everything open. E.S.B. (the movie, not the ale) ends on a down note, so people think it feels less cheesy than the others, and I agree. However, Lucas quickly undid that by making Return of the Jedi, which is bad enough that no one should be surprised that the prequels sucked. The Ewoks became Jar-jar Binks, the dialogue was always bad, so nothing has changed there, and the sickly sweet, cringe inducing romance in the prequels mirrors the idiotic Luke-Darth dynamic in this movie. Beyond that, the climax of this movie is exactly the same as in the first movie, they do a bunch of random shit and the Death Star blows up. Like I said, maybe I don't get "it", but from where I'm sitting, this movie sucks. George Lucas makes merchandising advertisements, not cinema.
Tomorrow or next week, one day, the final six and a ranking.

Goodfellas (1990) - This is a bona fide great movie. It is a classic in every sense of the word and it would be a career defining movie for almost any director, besides the director who directed it. What Goodfellas isn't, is the greatest movie of all time. It isn't the best movie of its genre, it isn't the best movie by its director, it isn't the defining movie of the decade... it just isn't in the pantheon. The clumsy use of narration and the weak third act hold the movie back from such a status, which is no insult.

My Crane Wife

2006-12-04T13:23:00.000-08:00

I am almost finished with the other 15 movies on my overrated list. Having a blog is a lot of work!

I just wanted to post that by far my favorite album of the year is the new one by the Decemberists, The Crane Wife. It is a gorgeous album that sounds as pretty up from a distance as it does up close. By that I mean, if you pay attention to the lyrics and the music it is mind boggling, but even if you just put it on in the background it puts you in a good mood. Plus, it is 100% kid friendly and they might even learn something as this is probably the most literate band around right now. The Decemberists have been a great band for awhile, but this one is a real topper. They have three songs posted on Hear Ya, check em out.

They're Well Known

2006-12-02T14:04:00.001-08:00

Since I shot fish in a barrel last post, I thought I would aim for a sacred cow with my next post. Actually, 25 sacred cows, as this is my list of the 25 most overrated movies of the past 26 years (everything since 1980, which I guess is technically 27 years, but whatever). In order to determine what exactly is a highly rated movie, I looked at the Academy Award nominations, the AFI top 100 list of nominations, Cannes prize winners and IMDB's top 250. Obviously some highly regarded movies might not make these lists, but then how overrated could they be? Just about every Oscar winner could be listed as overrated, so for the record I haven't seen Terms of Endearment (1983), Out of Africa (1985), The Last Emperor(1987), The English Patient (1996) or Chicago (2002) ; so, probably a few of them would be on the list if I bothered to watch them.

Dances with Wolves (1990) - Oscar Winner. - So boring, so heavy handed, so long. This movie won for being very obviously about the exploitation of Indians and thus it made people feel good about themselves to vote for it. See Crash for further examples.

Forrest Gump (1994) - Oscar Winner. It beat out Pulp Fiction for Best Picture and enabled assholes to yell "Run, Forrest, Run!" anytime they saw someone running (hey, I was 10 when this movie came out, it was a major pet peave at the time). The plot is endearing, even if it is a dumbed down, historical version of Being There. However, the political message of the movie is not only overbearingly conservative, but, it goes the extra mile by making liberals the product of child abuse and, consequently, making liberalism a inflicted psychological disorder. The twin fates of Forrest, the good hearted man who went to war and became a millionaire, and Jenny, the whore who protested, eventually got AIDS and finally found redemption by getting pregnant, reinforce the most repressive concepts of gender, race (Forrest was scorned from the Black Panther Party, but Bubba's Mammy gets a big pile of money from whitey to rescue her from the plantations in Alabama), class and justice. There is even a funny commentary on John Kerry's political career, since the anti-war speeches that launched it were successfully replicated by a mentally handicapped man. If you are the sort of person who roots for America like it is your favorite football team, then this is the movie for you, otherwise it's an embarrassment.

Braveheart (1995) - Oscar Winner. Famous for its "ultra realistic" battle scenes that look like they were filmed by someone having a seizure. Grossly historically inaccurate, with a scene chewing villain without a speck of humanity and a script of thunderous lines, it is a solid action flick that got a Golden Statue because people were unwilling to vote for a movie about a pig. It did feature Sophie Marceau looking incredibly sexy in period clothes, so that is something.

Titanic (1997) - Oscar Winner. I make the case that this is the worst movie ever to win Best Picture, with its only saving grace being its relative lack of ambition. Sure, it cost 200 million dollars, but at least we didn't have to wade through an obvious message- unless the message is ships don't do well when they hit icebergs (thank you Paul Haggis!). It is a straightforward, weepy love story, with a huge action section jammed in the middle (or maybe the love is jammed around the action, I mean you could make Titanic without Jack and Rose, but not without the ship sinking). It's your basic summer blockbuster that made huge sums of money by having enough romance to get the girls and some nudity and violence for the guys. There are two problems: Hollywood rewarded the movie with a Best Picture Oscar for making a lot of money and the screenplay is simply terrible. The meandering plot includes a boring frame story that serves to distance the viewer from the real story- culminating in the heroine throwing away a priceless jewel in an act of selfishness that presumably is an attempt to pay tribute to her lost love by making the people looking for the jewel suffer- and, best of all, a sequence involving the Billy Zane chasing and shooting at our starcrossed lovers as the Titanic is sinking! In short, this movie features terrible dialogue, mediocre acting, and a miserable plot, but at least they went for realism by building a big, big boat. To be fair, this movie doesn't make a lot of "best of" lists anymore.

American Beauty (1999) - Oscar Winner. This actually was my favorite movie for years. Most of the characters feel alienated and unfulfilled, and the broadly anti-suburban motif really resonated with my wannabe-edgy teenage mindset. I didn't watch the movie for a couple of years and then came back after actually learning a little about film and to my surprise A.B. had tarnished in the meantime. The central plot of the middle-aged Lester waking up from his malaise and realizing his life is unhappy and inauthentic is completely betrayed by his adolescent response to this epiphany. Lester doesn't like his job, wife, car or body, so he starts smoking weed and working at a fast food restaurant, he buys a muscle car and idolizes one of his daughter's friends. Just like the creepy drug dealer next door finds incredible beauty in a plastic bag, the movie finds the antidote to modern alienation in living like a 16 year old. No wonder it was my favorite movie back then.

Gladiator (2000) - Oscar Winner. Won in an incredibly weak field that featured another movie on this list, two foreign movies (those sure aren't going to win) and Traffic, which should have won by default, though movies like Momento and Snatch were better that year. This is a more exciting version of Braveheart, with even more violence and Joaquin Phoenix playing the role of scenery eater. It has a great score and the speeches definitely give you that warm and fuzzy feeling, but ultimately it is an action flick about "honor and glory". Specifically, the honor and glory of killing everyone in the way of your quest for revenge, making this a period version of Death Wish (a badass movie in its own right, though certainly not an Oscar winner). At least Braveheart was about how the English are evil and soulless, while Gladiator just demonstrates how effective the death penalty would be as a deterrent if it was executed (punny) with swords in front of a big crowd.

A Beautiful Mind (2001) - Oscar Winner. Russell Crow pulled off his second dupe in a row with this by the by the numbers drama that managed to beat Gosford Park and the first Lord of the Rings. Someone at the academy likes a good twist (see the nomination of The Sixth Sense), since all this move had not much going for it was the revelation that *SPOILERS AHEAD* he was crazy *END SPOILERS* (did I mention that Rosebud is the sled?). This is fine fare for boring night, but a best picture? Not even close.

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - Oscar Winner. I really enjoyed the first two movies and this one was awesome for the first three hours and fifteen endings. I realize that the movie won because of the strength of the entire series, the special effects and the huge piles of money, but come on! This was a kid's movie that was yawn inducing for the last hour. The series is incredibly popular and should have taken all that money as its own reward, but it got greedy and it got overrated.

Crash (2005) - Oscar Winner. - In his acceptance speech for "Best Original Screenplay"PaulHaggis said the following: "Bertolt Brecht said that art is not a mirror, but it is a hammer. Not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer in which to shape it. So I guess this is ours." In other words, Haggis used his bully pulpit to bludgeon us to death with the never before seen message that some people are racists! Haggis takes no chances that we might not catch this subtle theme, so he has the characters say expressly that, in between demonstrating it over and over again. Beyond that, I hate that this movie won over Brokeback Mountain which ultimately fell victim to its own success, despite having a much more interesting message (the high cost of keeping homosexuality private), a far more moving conclusion and superior cinematography and acting. Crash's win is proof positive that the Academy Awards are just the best attended television event of the year and have no credibility at choosing the best movie of any given year.

Kagemusha (1980) - Palme d'Or Winner. I had no intention of attacking this movie, until I saw that it won the grand prize (no, not the Grand Prix, that is second place...) at Canne's. I think this movie is insufferably boring and plays even longer than its 3 hours since almost nothing happens in the movie. Kurosawa's body of work is untouchable, but this smells like a lifetime achievement award, like the Oscar Marty is going to get this year for The Departed (which I loved). This is a beautiful movie to look at, with a full palette of gorgeous colors in scenes of wading through rainbows of paint and legions of different colored flags aligned and blowing in the breeze. Unfortunately, sometimes scenes take several minutes to set up while we see soldier after soldier march into position. This movie could be trimmed down an hour without losing a scene or line of dialogue. Only a renowned master like Kurosawa would be allowed to make a movie this fat.

The other 15 tomorrow.

Makes me wanna smoke crack

2006-12-02T07:43:00.000-08:00

I watch a lot of television, though not as much as I did when I had On Demand, HBO, Showtime and DVR in college. I do manage to avoid two of the most popular types of programming: procedural dramas and reality television, with a few exceptions, all of which are on MTV.

MTV is a tough channel to defend, as it is perhaps the single most evil influence on our society, only al-Qaida and Islamic fundamentalism even running a close second. A short list of MTV's crimes: perpetrating the careers of people like J-Lo and Jessica Simpson, who sap the collective IQ by broadcasting stupidity like anti-intellectual Tokyo Roses; celebrating being rich and wasting money ("My Super Sweet 16") and purveying the culture of being famous for being famous ("Laguna Beach", which is also is about the rich wasting money and tops that by being ephebophilic to anyone over 18 who watches it). But worst of all, MTV created reality television with "The Real World" in 1992 and in the process became the forefather of everything from "Temptation Island" to "The Swan".

Most MTV reality shows, or any reality show on any network, follow this simple formula: put ridiculous people together in ridiculous situations and encourage them to overact to any perceived slight or affront (bonus points for getting them drunk too). Shows like "The Real World" boil people down to specific stereotypes (conservative, thus bigoted, southern white girl; flamboyantly gay black man; girl with emotional problems stemming from bad childhood; angry black man; angry black woman; angry white man; angry white transsexual who wants to be an angry black lesbian...) that the people on the show seem to constantly try to live up to, rather than escape from. MTV screens these people with a professional psychologist before hand, to ensure they really are crazy and find out which cast will be the least compatible, and thus the most entertaining.

In Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman says that he thinks everyone in the world became like people in "The Real World" after the third season. Before "The Real World" he viewed people as individuals, but after the third season he realized that everyone is just like someone from the show. In other words, despite being incredibly inauthentic, "The Real World" is more real than real life. His tongue may be firmly in his cheek, but that idea isn't that far fetched in a society when the media tells us who we are supposed to be both expressly- in Miller commercials that tell us what men are allowed to do (evidently men are supposedly to live in constant fear of accidentally acting like a homosexual)- and subtly by demonstrating how idealized men and women act on television. A generation of people raised by the television would naturally have role models on the silver screen and even as we laugh along with the laugh track, we learn how to behave. The guys get laughs for being dumb animals who only know about sports and hate all things feminine, including art, literature, or education (examples: Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor and Dan Conner). The women, meanwhile, are either domestic foils or portrayed as crazy or baby obsessed for laughs (Lucille Ball is the archetype, while shows like "I Dream of Genie" or "Bewitched" just reduce the women to cartoons). Obviously there are many exceptions, but those shows are the successful exceptions that prove the rule. A deeply flawed show like "Sex and the City" became a huge hit just by showing women as rational, self-sufficient adults unafraid of their own sexuality. A show like "the Real World" is the next logical step in the other direction: true life role models demonstrating how to be a young, hot, sexually active alpha male or female. Unfortunately, those role models are picked for being emotional unstable and filling out a tank top or wife beater and have about as much credibility as role models as the average professional athlete.

All that said, MTV is incredibly watchable, at least in small doses. One of my friends theorizes that the producers' of MTV programs make them with the express intention of appealing to two audiences, the very dumb, who can only appreciate it at face value, and the people who ironically appreciate how ridiculous everything is. I don't believe that MTV producers make shows like "My Super Sweet 16" with the express intent of exploiting the brainless greed of teenagers, and if they do, that is worse than just making a show about quarter of a million dollar birthday parties. I choose to believe that most MTV shows are well crafted junk TV, the equivalent of a microwave dinner from Jean-Georges, delicious but ultimately unsatisfying.

So, why do I watch MTV? First, because I have watched it for a long time and I will keep doing something I don't like for a long time, but I won't start doing something unless it is immediately compelling. It is a lot easier to quit smoking if you never start. Second, the shows are always on and I sell my free time cheap. Even if MTV is evil, its shows are more entertaining than anything that has ever graced the screen of 80% of my basic cable channels. Shows like “True Life: The Jersey Shore”, are so unbelievably funny that they have to be seen to be believed. Serious or not, exploitive or very, very exploitive, when MTV nails it the results are stunning and some people just deserve to be made fun of. Third, and most importantly, MTV is a reflection of what is going on in mainstream youth culture and sometimes I need to look in the mirror and realize how far I haven't come. I, and my like-minded compatriots, create a distance between the caricatures on MTV and ourselves based on an assumption of mental superiority. Sure, I am smarter than the Tommy, the meathead looking for love in the clubs of the Jersey Shore, but am I doing anything better with my life? Just watching a show like that begs the question, if I’m really so smart then why do I spend all my time watching him on MTV?

Do you all like my looks?

2006-12-01T18:31:00.000-08:00

Here we, and by that I mean me, are. I vociferously read blogs, but thus far, resisted starting one of my own because I couldn't stand the thought of promoting it or eventually abandoning it after my friends mocked it behind my back for being mediocre. However, since college ended I have lost most of my outlets for intellectual discourse about the things I spend my time doing- namely, watching television and movies, attempting to read a book a week, following sports and generally complaining, we called it critiquing, everything in sight. In a completely unrelated coincidence, I haven't really been around marijuana and people who consume it, though according to a commercial I recently saw that means I should have seen a spike in time spent ice skating with girls and mountain biking. Unfortunately you don't have to smoke weed to waste all of your time.

That is what this blog is ultimately about, I spend all of my time doing things that can only by the most generous of definitions be termed "constructive," but I think that fiction is important, perhaps more important than non-fiction, at least in the arts. In fact, when I see people who never read novels and only watch documentaries, I generally assume that their world view is as big as pin. Documentaries in any form can tell us about the world, but great fiction can tell us about ourselves. That is what the lid of my Snapple can said anyway. I want to think very hard, or at least as hard as I can while still listening to music and playing Snood, about the things that entertain me and hopefully one day people will read this and tell me I am wrong and we can have a conversation.

As a counterpoint to all the heart on my sleeve stuff, I will point out that the last time I wrote a column it advocated banning booze to encourage drinking and not trusting people who didn't do drugs. The point being, I don't take myself too seriously and I always value humor over content. So let's see how long I can keep this up!