the Sins of Memphisto

MOVIES- TRON LEGACY part two

2010-12-24T13:59:00.000Z

So, enough about a 28 year old move. What does the new TRON have to offer?

Well, it does succeed where the old TRON failed. It is a visual spectacle to anyone sitting in the audience. But unfortunately it fails where the original succeeded.

Where the original tried to be a good, old fashioned good guys vs. bad guys romp, the new movie strives for profundity and fails miserably. As a headline on fark.com said: "Tron Legacy Director Says He Aimed for Bold Concept- Made Tron Legacy Instead." The religious allegories take center stage instead of the passing wave the first film gave them. Flynn has become a holy man, a zen Lebowsky, trapped in a world of his own creation. This creator has two sons- his artificial progeny Clu, who has fallen from grace and decided to make the world perfect through fascism, and his human son, Sam, who holds the capacity for salvation of this microcosmic world and is transfigured into a simple program who is yet so much more. Like Satan, Clu is the ruler of this fallen world. He walks to and fro, back and forth in the earth, but his mouth doesn't work quite right and his face looks kind of freaky.

And there's the second problem for TRON redux. While AVATAR may have jumped the uncanny valley in a single bound, TRON LEGACY falls to it's death in the chasm. You might believe Clu as a soulless program, but you're never for a minute fooled into thinking he's the embodiment of a young Jeff Bridges. In TRON Bridges was funny, exciting, and droll. His face was expressive and (dare I say it) animated. Clu looks just a little bit more like a young Jeff Bridges than Jason in the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies looked like William Shatner (look it up). I never quite got away from the idea that it was somebody wearing a young Jeff Bridges latex mask. Or that rather than CGI that they had just given Bridges whole face Botox injections. It's a great idea, but everything is in the execution. And whoever thought audiences would be taken up in all this pseudo-religious claptrap or taken in by the digital youthening of the leads should be executed.

And then there's THE MATRIX.

You see, just over a decade ago they made a sequel to TRON. It was called THE MATRIX. It was about a computer uprising, where a programmer was trapped in a computer generated world, and had god-like powers. It came at a time when computers were becoming commonplace, when a worldwide network of them had entered the zeitgeist, and when pseudo-religious claptrap was becoming mainstream. THE MATRIX was the right movie at the right time to catch the imagination of the general public. And it had visually spectacular special effects. Neo fought using Kung-Fu, not day-glo frisbees. Neo lived in a completely realized computer world indistinguishable from reality, not a black light Salvadore Dali painting. Neo fought for the salvation of mankind from a monolithic, inhuman, oppressive, totalitarian state; not to prevent a bunch of 8-bit programs in an antiquated CRAY mainframe from getting into our cell phones and iPads.

And where THE MATRIX and its sequels tried to actually present some of the philosophical questions inherent in the story- mind-body dualism, determinism, messianic complexes, systems of control, whether consciousness is an emergent or intrinsic property, the nature of reality, subjectivism vs. objectivism- TRON LEGACY doesn't even give lip service to any of the ideas contained in its scenario. The closest we get to a philosophical idea is when Flynn says, "The only way to win is not to play." A bon mot so deep and insightful that they lifted it directly from another movie released around the same time as the original TRON- WARGAMES. The world Flynn built in his antiquated mainframe is a molecule deep at best. Shiny, but without substance.

And in addition to not giving the story even the depth of the original TRON, let alone THE MATRIX, they also seem to have borrowed a lot of the look of the film as well. TL's virtual world is a place where the sun never shines, where the sky is filled with roiling clouds all the time, and even interior rooms are dimly lit. It's like the "real world" from the MATRIX only with better urban renewal. The only place in the Mainframe that's brightly lit is Flynn's villa, and it resembles, more than anything else, the hotel room from the end of 2001. That's what passes for a visual metaphor in this movie.

I think that it's pretty clear that the people who made this movie knew they had been beaten to the punch.

And even the one part of the movie that was almost sure to add some depth, that it's in 3-D, didn't come off well for me. A lot of folks online have praised the 3-D effects as adding to the story. I didn't see it that way. Having the parts of the movie set in the real world in 2-D (mostly) and the parts in the computer in 3-D was a neat idea- WHEN THEY DID IT WITH COLOR IN THE WIZARD OF OZ 70 YEARS AGO! Taking a darkly lit movie and darkening it further with 3D, missing the fact that depth of field is compromised in a dark environment anyway, and still missing the fact that out of focus foregrounds and backgrounds are a way to have 2D cameras simulate depth and don't work in 3D films because in a real place your eye is able to focus on whatever it looks at automatically, whether near or far, just adds further to the feeling that nobody associated with the movie really gave a damn about anything except OOHHH LIGHTCYCLES.

The filmmakers must have known this was a problem. Before the movie started they had a disclaimer (here I quote from memory, so it may not be entirely accurate): "There are parts of this movie that were shot in 2-D and parts that were shot in 3-D. We realize this is going to be weird and disorienting to the audience so we're asking you to keep your glasses on and just go with it. Let's face it, we don't really know what we're doing. And that Cameron dude came along last year and changed all the rules and how were we supposed to know that was going to happen after we were two years into production? Anyway, we fucked up. Just go with it, like we said. You've already paid for the ticket so what have you got to lose? And by doing this little disclaimer where we claim that we meant to do it all along, we can say that it isn't us, it's you if you spend most of the movie wondering why things look shitty."

Now, don't get me wrong. I got a thrill out of seeing the old Lightcycles updated. I enjoyed seeing programs on the game grid shattered into cubes. I liked the new Solar Sailor, the dogfight with the virtual AT-10, the new lightcycles defying gravity and acting like, well, REAL motorcycles (except for the gravity defying part). I'm as much a victim of geekstalgia as anybody. And there were a couple of nice things about the movie. Olivia Wilde is pretty. And I'm a sucker for bowl haircuts. Michael Sheen was entertaining as Ziggy Stardust (the Merovingian? Oh yeah, Zuse), the bar owner. It's nice to see him getting work impersonating Brits besides Tony Blair. Garrett Hedlund is fine in a pretty flat role, although he keeps morphing from looking like Trip from Star Trek: Enterprise when shot straight on to Jon Stewart when shot in profile. Unfortunately Jeff Bridges, who was the standout performance in the original and who I like in just about everything, sleepwalks through the whole thing. Maybe he's overdosed on the Botox they gave him for the Clu scenes.

So what's left to say? TRON LEGACY isn't a bad movie if all you want is eye candy, lots of shiny vehicles going fast, and attractive people dressed up in funny costumes saying things between trips in other shiny vehicles going fast. And there isn't anything wrong with that. But if you are looking for anything more, it just ain't there.

MOVIES- TRON LEGACY part one

2010-12-22T20:33:00.011Z

Well, the Gfriend and I went to see TRON LEGACY on its opening weekend. But first we watched an HDNet showing of the original I'd been saving for about six months on my TIVO to set the mood. Here are my reflections on both movies in two parts.

The original TRON was groundbreaking for its time. The first movie to make use of what has now become ubiquitous computer generated special effects. Other than that, it was groundbreaking for Disney. It may be hard to remember, but in the early 1980s Disney was a company flirting with bankruptcy. It was considered passe and outdated. It's animation department was in shambles. (Don Bluth had left the company in 1979 out of disgust for their death spiral, and taken most of the good animators with him. The same year TRON came out, Bluth would release THE SECRET OF HIMH, a movie closer to the animated Disney classics like SNOW WHITE and DUMBO than anything the company had been able to manage in decades.) The company's stock was in the cellar. And the smart money was that Disney wasn't long for solvency. Their big post-STAR WARS SF attempt, THE BLACK HOLE, was just that- a black hole- at the box office and TRON was an act of desperation to cash in on the burgeoning video game market.

Disney's desperation led them to Steve Lisberger, someone outside their corporate plantation, who had the skills and "nerd cred" to undertake such a radical departure. Unfortunately, TRON wasn't the blockbuster Disney was hoping for and a couple of years later a hostile takeover attempt by financier Saul Steinberg would cause Roy Disney to enlist Jeffery Katsenberg to run the company. The rest is, shall we say, history. Katsenberg led the company back from the edge of corporate ruin to its current megacorp status.

But as a movie, TRON wasn't that bad. It didn't catch the popular imagination, probably because it was a little too esoteric for early 80s audiences to grasp. The whole idea of being sucked into a computer was a little too cutting edge for a population thats closest interaction with a computer had been a trip to the local arcade and whos most sophisticated computing device was an Atari 2600 or a PONG game. Added to this were all the "in" jokes in the script. TRON is, in fact, a command in Basic, the predominant programming language for home computers at the time. (Please realize, this is two full years before the first Macintosh- the first computer with a mouse!- was released by Apple. The same year that the original IBM PC was widely distributed, and when over 80% of the tiny market for home computers was pretty evenly divided between Radio Shack's TRS-80 and the Apple IIC. Owning a computer in 1982 was like owning a HAM radio rig, except there were more HAM radio rigs.) It meant TRace ON and was a command to debug a program you had written. Invaluable in a time when most of the programs you ran you had to write yourself.

The movie is full of such "in" jokes that audiences didn't get. "Bring in the logic probe" (it looked like the very logic probe I sold in my Radio Shack store at the time), "grid bugs" (bugs in a program were unknown to most people), I-O towers (input-output busses), laser digitization (scanners were unheard of, let alone 3-D scanners), users (Lisberger says that one of the Disney execs thought this was vaguely dirty), and even bits (Flynn's, and Clu's, sidekick was a visualization of the basic nomenclature of binary systems- it's either positive (YES) or negative (NO), 1's and 0's, get it?). And my all-time favorite, "Cummon you skuzzy data, be in there." (SCSI, pronounced 'skuzzy', was an early hard disk interface.) Too much of the movie was simply way too geeky for the audience.

But the movie itself is a great deal of fun. Jeff Bridges shows the kind of natural likeability in front of the camera that would serve him well for the next 30 years. His lines really aren't much: "That's a big door." "It's all in the wrist." "Hey, it's the big Master Control Program everybody's been talking about!" "You don't look anything like your pictures." "Does she still leave her clothes all over the floor?" "How you gonna run the universe if you can't solve a few insolvable problems?" But Bridges delivery makes them shine and is the reason some of them became standards in GeekSpeek.

The rest of the cast isn't really given much to do. David Warner somehow stands out as Dillenger/Sark, and has a few ironically funny moments (such as when he suddenly turns his smile on for Alan during their confrontation in the office). Bruce Boxleitner displays his typical cardboard hero character (which he pulled out of mothballs as John Sheridan on four seasons of Babylon 5) but here it's OK because he's playing an uninspired programmer and a soulless program. He does get one unintentional laugh however with his 'ol west delivery of the line, "The name... of my user." And Barnard Hughes is here because it was some sort of rule at the Disney Studios back then that Barnard Hughes had to be in EVERY FRIGGING MOVIE DISNEY MADE.

Walt Disney's Common Law Same Sex Marriage Partner

But the real reason to see TRON was the visual spectacle. It was the era of the Special Effects Movie and people went to the theater to be dazzled. Unfortunately, it was five years after George Lucas started this trend and two years after THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. So bedazzlement was beginning to get a little old. And while TRON had a new way of putting impossible pictures on the screen, CGI wasn't really ready for prime time and the result looked like animation in a time when animation was almost a dirty word. Lucas and Spielberg had been delivering never-before-seen movie magic for years, using decades old techniques. And although 1982 was the debut year for the technology, with TRON, THE LAST STARFIGHTER, and the Genesis effect in STAR TREK II, CGI wouldn't begin to challenge conventional special effects technology until TERMINATOR II, and wouldn't draw crowds into theaters for the sheer spectacle until JURRASIC PARK. In fact, the technology was still so primitive that it couldn't even be used to paint in the glowing lines on the costumes- they had to be rotoscoped by hand! (The computers they used were about as powerful as the one in your watch and nowhere near as sophisticated as the one in your phone.) In contrast to the visual alacrity of TRON, Ridley Scott's BLADERUNNER came out the same year. And Douglas Trumbull's special effects on that film set new standards for veracity.

But one thing that TRON and BLADERUNNER shared was visual designer Syd Mead. At that time Mead was perhaps one of the busiest artists in Hollywood. It seems that almost no big budget SF movie made back then didn't employ Mead to design vehicles. And while Lucas didn't hire Mead to design for EMPIRE, he wasn't above stealing the design for the Imperial Snow Walkers from a painting Mead had done years before.

The other designer TRON used was the incredible artist Jean Giraud, who went by the pseudonym Mobius. Giraud was known predominantly to American audiences through his work in Heavy Metal magazine. But at the same time he was one of the most respected international comic artists, famous in Europe and Asia for his Blueberry westerns as much as his groundbreaking SF work. Mobius' more organic and complex style would be reflected in, of all things, the costuming of the programs inhabiting the computer world. Sark's helmet is a particularly iconic Mobius design.

Alas, TRON didn't do too well at the box office. Steve Lisberger would say afterward that it was because they didn't make the MCP evil enough, but I disagree. There was never any ambiguity in the good vs. evil story of TRON. After all, didn't they show Flynn's doppelganger Clu being derezzed in the first few minutes, and Bernard Hughes crucified and tortured near the end? No, I think the failure of TRON was due to the reasons stated above: special effects that were only special if you understood how unique they were, a story that didn't connect with an audience that didn't understand the implications of the new technology they were just beginning to sample, and Disney's faltering reputation for making childish entertainments with nothing to offer adults. Add that to a religious allegory in a time when religious allegories were out of fashion, and you have a movie simply too far ahead of it's time.

But what of TRON LEGACY?

MUSIC- Old Man's War (Toy Matinee)

2010-12-14T19:37:00.003Z

Got together with an old friend from high school, that I hadn't seen for 30 years in-between, for the second time a couple of weeks ago. The uncanny thing the first time we re-met was that we were able to pick right up where we left off. The weird thing this time was that in the interviening years we had developed so many similar tastes. Perhaps it's no so strange. After all, we'd been together through our formative years. Why wouldn't we follow paraelle paths in the years later? But the thing is- we've had different carreers, different love lives, different interests. I traveled all over the world, he stayed close to home. I was prone to small groups of close friends, he was more outgoing and social. I developed odd ideas about the world that sometimes it seems only I subscribe to, he is funny, charming, and relatable. Even my girlfriend thought he was more immediately accessable than I am (she was privy to most of our last get-together) and she's every bit as odd as I am. (In fact, I often think of her as the female version of me since we are so much alike. And realize that when she annoys me it's just Karma paying me back for how much I must have annoyed everyone around me for all these years.)
But the thing we seem to have paraelled more than anything else was our taste in music. Perhaps that isn't surprising. We were both musicians in high school. We loved going to concerts (rock, classical, big band, marching band, whatever...). But I was surprised to hear that he didn't like Steely Dan so much in high school but came to appreciate their music in later years (just as I had). So I turned him onto a song from another band that I love who makes music just as pop and yet as complex as Steely Dan did.

Toy Matinee

Toy Matinee made only one album. Like Steely Dan it was the brainchild of a pair of musical geniuses: Kevin Gilbert and Patrick Leonard. Unfortunately, Gilbert died before a second album could be made. Their music was a combination of pop, progressive, jazz, and fusion, that dealt with political and intellectual subjects (the first album contains songs such as Remember My Name about Vaclav Havel and Turn It On Salvadore about Salvadore Dali) while being filled with great gituar and keyboard riffs, lush productions, lyrical complexity, and catchy pop melodies. I found them when a radio station started playing this tune while I was in college.

Enamored with the Steely Dan combination of great musicianship, provocative lyrics, layered production, and catchy pop hooks, I sought out the album and in the interviening 20 years it has become the most played album in my life. It simply never seems to get old as I find new newance in the melody/countermelody, rythmic changes, key changes, and catchy tunes. Other standouts from the album include:
Turn It On Salvadore

wow, just...wow. The first lyric references everything from UN CHIEN ANDALOU (drag the bound priest across the floor) to "death and a Gala Premere". Gala was, by the way, the love of Salvador Dali's life and the muse for most of his great works of art. It has nothing to do with a gala premere with the "a" having a long a sound.
This is just scratching the surface of why these guys made ART while most pop bands make SHIT.
Let's go back to the definition of ART: (well, at least my definition of ART, but I have yet to find a better one. If you know one, please clue me in.) Art is that which is complexly satisfying. Art is something that touches the brain and the heart. Art is something that makes you want to learn something while it makes you FEEL something. If you feel something visceral (if you get a chill, it sturs your loins, it frightens you, it moves you) while it makes you want to know something (it stirs your curiosity) then you have found a work of art.
Toy Matinee does that for me.

But, like so many artists, they didn't stick around on this world too long. Next time I'll talk about their successor: Third Matinee

In the meantime, go buy their album...

PERSONAL- The Social Network Part 2

2010-11-09T13:58:00.004Z

This is another personal post and I apologize. Looking back, I've posted more personal stuff this year than in the entire history of the blog until now. I've also posted less than any other year. It's just been that kind of year.

So anyway (ahem) after seeing THE SOCIAL NETWORK I decided to open a Facebook page. Sunday morning, 3AM. Put out feelers for two old friends from high school who I hadn't seen since.

And boom.

After 30 years of carefully hiding my tracks on the Net, now it's like the walls of my house have turned transparent. And, no, that's not a typo- 30 years. I tell some of the younger people that I was on the net before the web existed, and they laugh. But it's true. I first went online in... well... a long time ago. Back in the antediluvian days of text only. I was old when Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet by pushing the button on the first webserver (a neXT if you remember that computer brand) in 1990. I was old when Apple introduced the first Macintosh. I was old when the first IBM PC was introduced.

Hell, I'm just old.

And now, for two weeks, I've been on Facebook. A newbie again for the first time in a long time, coming late to a technology that everybody else is already using. It's unnerving for me.

So I did what I imagine everybody does. I started looking up people from high school.
And what the heck- I found some!

Hell, I even met up with one the other day and got caught up.

But I'm still not sure what it's all about.

So I asked a friend who is much younger but far more experienced than I in these matters (a self professed Facebook Whore- a term I immediately fell in love with) because I figured that since she's hella smart she could give me the key. And she gave me the key.

Or what I think is the key.

It's for gossip.

Which means that I'm probably the last person Facebook is aimed at. I never know the gossip going around. I'm completely out of the loop. In fact, my neighbors could be sacrificing small animals to Chthlu next door and, unless they made too much noise,
I wouldn't have a clue. And this is a social space where I don't know the rules. Do you friend a 19 year old girl who you work with, or is it as creepy as it feels? Do you just friend everybody you know, like a fisherman with a net (bad joke, bad) and see what you catch? If you die with the most friends on Facebook, do you win?

I just don't know. And I HATE not knowing things.

But, what the hell. I'm going to give it a try. And perhaps that means that the blog can return to it's usual content of lame jokes, indecipherable movie reviews, weird links, obscure science articles, and general crap that nobody reads anyway.

Or maybe I'll just become a Facebook Whore.

MOVIES- The Social Network, Facebook Part I

2010-11-02T08:29:00.007Z

So I finally got a chance to catch the late showing of THE SOCIAL NETWORK a couple of weeks ago and it was everything I hoped it would be but not anything more. Of course, it's the story of the founding and the founder of Facebook, and the legal battles that resulted from that. Of course, it's a time capsule for later generations to understand the early years of digital communication and ubiquitous connectivity and connectedness. Of course, it's a history movie about history so recent that the memory is still green, like WWII movies made in the 1940's. Of course, it's David Fincher's first directorial endevour since Benjamin Button and allows him to use what he learned by aging Brad Pitt from old-man infanthood to baby dotage in order to cast two people and one face as a set of twins. Of course, it's Aaron Sorkin's return to docudrama in his first screenplay since CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR as he continues to mine recent history for a chance to improve recent history in the retelling.

Of course, it's a damn good movie, as its 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes attests.
But is it a great movie? Does it make the transition to being art? Does it enlighten the human condition and make you think about the world and your place in it? Does it provoke discussion and provide insight into the vagaries of life?

Maybe a little. But honestly? Nah, not really.

It's just a damn good movie in a time when damn good movies are becoming more rare than untainted waters in the Gulf of Mexico. A damn fine movie In a time when most television has devolved into endless variations on watching the antics of indigenous troglodytes near the coast of New Jersey; watching people competing on endless game shows that involve either eating bugs or overcoming pointless challenges for the chance to stab each other in the back; watching endless crime procedurals where every room is lit like a disco and characters use fantasy science to arrive at unlikely solutions to unlikely crimes- all the while acting with the subtlety of a 19th century melodrama; or watching mindless sit-coms where various stereotypes are the basis for both the situation and the comedy (nerds are nerdy, bachelors are depraved, fat people are desperate, fathers are stupid, entertainers are neurotic, businessmen are dolts, and low level employees in telephone centers work in India). A damn original movie in a time when most movies have devolved into endless sequels, endless explosions, endless appeals to childhood nostalgia, endless stoner comedies about luckless losers, endless comic book adaptations (possibly an offshoot of the two former categories), and endless sit-coms made for the big screen with big names. Let’s face it. We live in a time when the original is so unusual that a one-off movie with no hope of a sequel or prequel, about something with even a passing resemblance to a reality bigger than what you could find by simply camping out in the parking lot of your local trailer park, winds up being both the most successful and most critically acclaimed movie of the year.

But credit where credit is due... Eighteen months ago, when the idea first was reviled on the internet that a movie about Facebook was going into production, the response was almost uniformly negative. "A movie about a web site?" "How can you make a movie about a web site?" "It's just Hollywood cashing-in on something it doesn't understand." And then Fincher and Sorkin remind us that it's execution and not subject that makes art. And that two talented men can tell a more interesting story about a web site than a horde of untalented ones can about the end of the world.

Of course, I have to start with Aaron Sorkin, the writer. With the disclaimer that I've been an unabashed fan for a long time. Sorkin writes of a fantasy world I wish I lived in. A Narnia where hella-smart people talk in rapid-fire repartee completely unafraid of being terribly clever or devilishly witty. It's a world where the smart-asses have taken over. Sorkin is fully aware of this as in the very first scene one of the characters says to the protagonist that talking to him is like being on a stair-master. Actually, it's more like the verbal equivalent of watching a ping pong match played with bazookas. IMDB reports that it took Jessie Eisenberg 99 takes to finish the scene. Such is the challenge for even excellent actors to reproduce Sorkin's dialogue, and they aren't even making it up as they go along.

And while on the subject of the actors, and the challenge of delivering Sorkin's machine gun words and ideas in a way that makes it seem they are your own, Jessie Eisenberg was an amazing piece of casting for the lead. With this role he cements his place as the thinking man's Micheal Cera- sensitive, dweeby, unlucky-at-love but a little (or a lot) smarter than the average bear. It's been fun to watch Eisenberg's ascension from the Could-have-easily-been-played-by-Cera character in ADVENTURELAND, to the Strangely-contemplative-and-empirical zombie-hunter in ZOMBIELAND, now to the Smartest-guy-in-any-room founder of facebook. However, unlike Cera, Eisenberg doesn’t play the same character in each role.

The other stand-out is, of course, David Fincher. Fincher has a real gift for telling complex stories in a way that is accessible to everyone, while at the same time adding those little visual surprises that remind you he used to make music videos. Scenes like the sculling race in London, that looks like a tilt-shift photograph, hearken back to Edward Norton’s Ikea catalog apartment in Fight Club. But as in Zodiac or Benjamin Button, Norton keeps enough of a lid on his penchant for visual fireworks that it doesn’t become a distraction. Which is a good thing since the multiple time frames and slight tinge of Roshomon-like storytelling might become confusing to audiences who didn’t already know the story.

And I have to take a moment to mention the supporting cast, who are each as perfect as the leads. Andrew Garfield as Edwardo Savarin, Mark Zuckerberg's co-founder, gives a pitch-perfect performance that somehow reminds one of a young Richard Benjamin. And Armie Hammer gets two roles which he pulls off so well that I didn't realize it was only one guy. (Trivia break: Armie Hammer is the great-grandson of Armond Hammer, famous for his baking soda fortune and having parents with a particularly silly sense of humor in naming their son. A sense of humor that seems to be genetic since Armie is also Armond.)

But, for all this talent and wizardry, somehow the end result is still just a very good and not a great movie. If there’s a moral it’s that if you are smart and lucky enough to create something original that might make you rich there will be plenty of people to try to take it away from you. (Just ask Preston Tucker and Leo Farnsworth). If there’s a philosophical question it’s how having an idea is different than actually creating something. (Just ask Jeremy, a character on Sorkin’s television series SPORTSNIGHT who once said “My grandfather invented the clipboard.” “Really,” someone asks. “Well,” Jeremy replies, “he did often complain that he didn’t have a portable writing surface.” If there’s a social more exposed it’s the idea that the rich have a casually nonchalant expectation that they should be the ones that profit from anything they are associated with without having to do any of the work and at the expense of their social inferiors. (Just ask, hell, anybody).

So, while THE SOCIAL NETWORK doesn’t really have anything profound to say, it says what it does have to say in such an entertaining way that it’s well worth a look.

And yah, my own fannish love for everyone associated with it aside, it's a great movie.

Fan Films- Batman

2010-08-19T13:39:00.003Z

I'll never see Batman again the same way since I met my best friend fifteen years ago. He is BATMAN. He's the God damned Batman! It's funny. I was always Superman. Bigger, stronger, smarter, and more alienated than my contemporaries growing up. He was smarter, more disciplined, more touched by tragedy.

This is for him. The best Batman fan film since Batman: Dead End (do a Google search, it's worth it).

And contribute to the charity the film is pimping. It's a pretty good cause. If you want to be a hero.

CITY OF SCARS
Uploaded by Batinthesun. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

Music- Lessons

2010-08-18T10:26:00.004Z

Ever since I was a small child I've wondered if everything in a world is just a projection to see how I would react to it. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. The only subjective reality is what you perceive and everything else is just your interpretation of it. It's Plato's metaphor of the cave.

On of the things that has kept me from dismissing this viewpoint is the wild coincidence that music I like sometimes comes back to slap me in the face with what it's saying years after I've forgotten about it. I couldn't have known it was going to teach me something when I fell in love with it but there it is, years later, reminding me that it said something I would need to hear years before I needed to hear it.

Let me tell you a little story. When I was in college I fell in love with a woman. Our relationship progressed and eventually I was ready to move in with her. At that point she suddenly became distant and I learned it was because she (without being honest enough to just tell me outright) had gotten back together with an old boyfriend.

I was heart-broken. I had never been jilted by a lover, let alone cuckolded! Yet, after much crying and soul-searching, I picked myself up and continued with my life. She disappeared and I finished school. One of my last clinical projects was to spend two weeks at a state mental hospital in McClenny, Fl. When I returned home and returned to work my charge nurse (who was also my roomate) took me outside during a break and told me that she had called while I was gone. Over the next few weeks she called several times.

But I began to piece together some things that didn't make sense. She said that she wasn't with the man she had left me for, yet she was living in his mother's house. She only called me from work and wouldn't give me her home phone number. She was vague about what she was doing and what was going on in her life. Eventually I came right out and asked her. "Are you still living with -----?" Yes, she was. I told her that I wasn't interested in playing the same role in her relationship with him that he had in ours and she was welcome never to call me again.

I thought that was the end of it.

Until three months later when she showed up on my doorstep.

Sure, I should have known better. God knows all my friends told me she was nothing but trouble (more unanimity than I had ever known them to show before). But, what can I say. I was young. I was a romantic. I thought that what we had was true love.

In short, I was stupid.

I was in love.

So, a year later, we got married.

Over the next twenty years I supported her and her three children. Paid for her to go to college (she flunked out). Set her up in her own Real Estate Business (she never sold a house). Begged her not to ruin her children through a combination of enablement and bad parenting (her daughter was arrested for the first time at 10 years old for shoplifting and spent the majority of her teen aged years in reform school). Bought her the first new car she had ever owned. Bought her the first house she ever owned. Tried to be the best husband and father to her children I could be.

And the whole while begged her to stop being emotionally unavailable and stop belittling me at all times.

Then one day while I was at work I got a phone call. "I just wanted to know that you were alright." "Yeah, sure. See you tonight."

Except when I got home that night what I found was that she had taken everything she wanted from the house, emptied out our bank accounts (including the profits from a house we had just sold in Colorado), and told me that she was leaving with a message on my voice mail.

Still, I let her go. Two months later I called my step-son and told him that I was filing for divorce, he ought to tell his mother. I hadn't heard from her. I didn't know where she was. I just didn't think it was right to divorce her without at least letting her know.

A week later she was naked on my living room rug.

Yeah. I know. I'm usually a very logical person. My only excuse is that I was deeply, passionately, head-over-heels in love with this woman the whole twenty years I was with her. In spite of being used and abused, cheated on, lied to, and stolen from, none of it changed the way I felt about her.

Over the next three years I tried to reconsile with her. Even when I found out that she was cheating on me again. Even when she lied to me about it. The bottom line was that I wasn't ready to quit making excuses for the way she acted.

Eventually she did one thing too many and I had to admit that I was just being stubborn. She wasn't ever worth what I invested in her and I had to finally admit that she was just what she was- not what I wanted her to be.

Since then things had gotten a lot better. I've fallen in love with a woman who is everything any man would want. She's beautiful, tall, willowy, caring, financially secure, and 16 years my junior. She's put up with a lot of shit that she doesn't deserve from the damage done by my last relationship and yet she seems to love me for who I am and not be afraid to show it.

But about music teaching you things you don't know you need to learn yet. Here's a song I liked long before I met my ex-wife that perfectly taught me a lesson I didn't know I needed to learn for a long time.

(BTW, the last nasty thing she did to me was just last week when I realized that my mortgage company had stopped sending me statements for the last few months. When I called them about it they informed me that she had changed the address on the account to her P.O. Box! I called her and asked why she would do such a thing and, in typical form, she told me the bald-faced lie that she had never done any such thing. Yeah. That's it. Now my bank is lying on her to make her look bad! It's completely conincidence that she used to work for that bank and knows their services inside out.

They say that one possible definition of a sociopath is that they don't see anything wrong with lying to you and can't figure out why you would see anything wrong with them lying to you either.)

MORE MUSIC- Jim Croce

2010-08-18T09:01:00.003Z

Following my post about Michael Hedges, I want to introduce you to another dead poet and songwriter. I fell in love with Jim Croce when I was just a child, not nearly old enough to know how profound his lyrics were.

Here's one song that proves my point...

And any man who has given everything for a woman and hung on the cross to pay for every sin of her old lovers knows what this song is about.

But my fave has to be this story-song about a man on the road who still pines for a lost love who threw him over for his best friend.

But Croche wasn't all about unrequited love or broken romances. He wrote some of the most sublime love songs ever penned. Such as this...

And there were things that were just for fun...

Enjoy!

SABBATH MEDITATIONS- Michael Hedges

2010-08-15T16:04:00.005Z

I did a search of the blog this AM while in church (church for me is a sedate Sunday morning where I can contemplate the universe and lie in bed with a beautiful woman- I dare you to say your services are more spiritual or enlightening) and found that, in spite of his music being a real part of my spirituality, Michael Hedges had not been featured.

If an extraterrestrial came to earth and found a guitar, he might play it like Micheal Hedges did. I use the past tense because this genius (and he was exactly that, in spite of the term being sullied by calling every pop-culture flavor-of-the-month a genius when they obviously don't have enough brain to wet a napkin) died almost thirteen years ago at a tragically young age. Anyway, you've probably never heard a guitar played as well, or in this way. You've probably never heard lyrics more poetic or pointed. And you've positively never seen a more original performer or musician. In a world where the latest 13 year old girl gets to be another pop sensation because she's going through puberty a little early and can almost carry a tune, listen to this and weep for all the REAL artists crushed by the people who tell you what to like.

(You may recognize Micheal's style from the scene in AUGUST RUSH where August finds a guitar and starts playing it without ever having seen one played.)

The first track is one of his most mainstream. Yet sublime...

WOMAN OF THE WORLD

The second is the title track off his album AERIAL BOUNDRIES, which is considered one of the greatest acoustical albums of all time.

The third is just... well, you haven't heard anything like it. It's an instrument that's unfamiliar and a way of playing that you've never heard. It's a true Martian guitar piece.

This is a song he wrote for a movie soundtrack about a mountain climber named Naiomi on something called the Symphony Harp Guitar. Close your eyes and be thrilled that it's only one man and one guitar that makes this music.

Enjoy (something beautiful and unique)...

TELEVISION- Daily Show of Facial Hair

2010-08-10T05:06:00.004Z

The only daily television show that I watch is The Daily Show. I don't TIVO (yes, DirecTV, it's as generic as Kleenex) any stripped sit-coms. I don't watch any daily news (on television- I have this internet thing on my computer). I don't follow any soap-operas (a lower form of entertainment than the Grand Guignol, IMHO). But I do watch the Daily Show.

And since the last hiatus (not counting the 08092010 repeat that I watched a little while ago) Jon Stewart has sported a goatee for the last two weeks. Now, a lot of men his age have decided that particular type of facial hair is a fashion statement. It hides a lack of chin (not his problem) without being as silly as drawing a jawline on your face with a full, but carefully cropped, beard might. It has kind of a Robin Hood swashbuckling connotation to it. And it allows men a chance to change their looks in a major way.

(I remember the Star Trek- The Next Generation episode in which Beverly Crusher, sitting at a poker table with Worf and Riker states that she things beards are an "affectation" on men. There were a few sublime moments in ST-TNG, and this one rates right up there with the one where, after losing the love of Ashley Judd, Wesley Crusher says to Guinan, "I'll never feel this way about anyone else." And Guinan replies "No, you won't. But you will love other people as much, just differently." For Beverly Crusher to say men affect beards (which they grow naturally) while she was wearing enough eye-shadow and rouge to choke all her pores to death is the essence of why men can't take women seriously.)

So, I'm instituting the "Jon Stewart's Beard Death Watch." Personally, I think he looks like an anorexic, Jewish, Colonal Sanders. But I hope he continues this particular "affectation" long enough to bring it back into style.

*Obligatory note- I've worn a goatee since I was able to grow one because I was influenced by DC Comics Green Arrow character as a little boy. The fact that the only man I work with, a new graduate from college in his forties- and who just came to work with us, also sports one is some kind of synchronicity.

I'm finding out that he's also Hella smart and has a bodacious wife.

What are the chances?

TECHNOLOGY- Smart Phones that are really smart

2010-08-03T10:43:00.001+01:00

So I’ve finally pulled the trigger on a new phone. Usually I hate getting a new phone. After my parents divorced we didn’t have a phone and I never developed the habit of chatting. At best I see a phone as a necessary appliance and frequently I don’t even take my cell phone with me when I go out- a horrifying idea to many of the people I work with. I don’t text (duh, I have a phone in my hand) and if I want to take a picture I’ll use a real camera, not the shitty one in my phone.
But I do like computers. And the internet. For an information junkie like me the internet is the greatest creation in history. An endless supply of reading material on any subject that might kindle my curiosity. Carrying a small computer with internet access with me everywhere- now that excites me. But I’ve been waiting to see what was going to happen with smart phones and debating whether to get an iPad (lack of FLASH and your overbearing attempts to control how I use the devices I would buy from you ruined that, Mr. Jobs). But hearing that ATT was going to a tiered system for charging for data and rumors that Verizon might do the same forced my hand.
So I’m waiting for my phone to be delivered and I’m rumbling around looking at the kind of apps that are available for the Droid and I find one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Google Goggles!

(The video is too big for my space so just double-click to open it in a new window (tab).)

POLITICS- Obama's War on Privacy

2010-07-30T23:01:00.001+01:00

Just another reminder to any of you still naive enough to think that there is really any difference in the political parties, or that either of them are interested in freedom, civil liberties, or privacy. The Obama administration is asking that the FBI have access to your browser history, email history, and even when you send and receive email without having to get a court order! So much for the Democrats protecting civil liberties. Orwell's book is a tired analogy, but that doesn't mean that it isn't frighteningly prophetic or perfectly apt. Bit by bit the government is nibbling away at any privacy you might have left. Doesn't matter if it's the Republicans or Democrats in office, the government is in the business of growing like a malignancy and metastasizing into every part of your life.

POLITICS- Palin's neologism

2010-07-20T20:58:00.002+01:00

So, Sarah Palin has “created” a new word. Jeebus! How stupid is this country going to get? Palin didn’t create a new word- SHE’S JUST TOO FUCKING STUPID TO LEARN THE OLD ONES! Refudiate isn’t a word. It’s a retarded contraction of refute and repudiate. I used to have a friend who said “flustrated”. I finally had to tell her that it wasn’t a word. “How do you know?” she asked me. Well, I said, Because it isn’t in the dictionary! Q.E.D. Even Sarah Palin’s stupid ass must have heard of a dictionary. It’s a big book where we keep a list of all the words, how to spell them, and what they mean.

But then it gets better. After being called out on using a non-existent word she tweets this:
"'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' "wee wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it. Refudiate it."

Yes. Like every other arrogant imbecile in the world, rather than owning up to a mistake she just argues that she meant to do it all along. And she compares herself to Shakespeare! FUCKING SHAKESPEARE! A new high in arrogant stupidity!
Got a flash for you Sarah, people may use words like “refudiate”, “misunderestimate”, and “wee wee’d up” (WTF?) but people with “brains” and “education” or who aren’t “fucking morons” will still make fun of them for it.

And you.

2010-05-31T00:26:00.004+01:00

CHRISTMAS IN MAY- the third time around

2010-05-01T13:56:00.002Z

Hello. Back from the longest hiatus yet, I return like Santa Clause, bearing gifts for SINSOFMEMPHISTO’s THIRD ANNUAL CHRISTMAS IN MAY!!!

And just like every other May 1st, we kick things off with a rendition of Jonathan Coulton’s FIRST OF MAY. Although to follow his advice in my Confederate home today looks like it’s going to mean braving the fast approaching tornadoes we frequently have around this time of the year.

Nevertheless, here it is, Jonathan Coulton’s FIRST OF MAY with an added W(orld)O(f)W(arcraft) bonus. And a tag of one of my all time favorite Coulton songs NOT ABOUT YOU.

(And yah, NSFW.)

Tomorrow we remember a few past Christmas in May presents to mark their passing. What’s Christmas without a little depression?

POLITICS- Those Seven Deadly Words

2010-01-16T13:52:00.000Z

As I’ve said before, in my opinion most of what comprises the political debate in this country is simply a smoke screen to hide the fact that the government and the rich have gone into the business of stealing the citizens blind while we argue over trivialities. Well, here’s a story that encapsulates much of the silliness in our culture (wars). Seems the FCC got schooled the other day when a trio of appellate court judges heard arguments in a case challenging the current rules for what can be broadcast on television. Of course we aren’t talking about showing images of violent brutality, grotesque dismemberment, or graphic sexual congress, we’re talking about somebody saying a dirty word during a live TV broadcast. This has been going on for the last few years, with the FCC all over the highway trying to decide if it can make a little scratch by fining broadcasters if some musician says “fuck” during a show giving out awards for music in which it is perhaps the most common lyric. Or even if some poor interviewee says “shit” about having just watched his house and family blown away in a hurricane during a news telecast.

The judges rightfully pointed out that there are worse things of television than impolite language already. That we seem to be letting little old ladies of both sexes and the most bluenosed self-righteous hypocrites in the country muzzle everyone else. And that the whole thing boils down to the FIRST FUCKING AMMENDMENT! (Ahem… excuse me.)

I’ve always been amused by our obsession with collections of sounds- most especially those nasty old Saxon words that most of us don’t even remember the origin of. And I’ve always been puzzled by the basic dishonesty inherent in getting all bent out of shape over the things that are the most common in human existence. Somehow we can talk about alcoholism, wife-beating, racism, war, famine, and Pat Robertson on television, but the two things every single adult in the world does as often as possible are off limits. As Red Foxx once joked, “I say shit and fuck because- people do. You don’t shit? Fuck! You don’t fuck? SHIT!”

I’m not offended by much. I don’t understand it and, frankly, I think it’s usually passive aggressive bullshit. I’m certainly not offended by any particular collection of phonemes, even if I might be offended by what they signify. That’s the crazy thing in all this juvenile “dirty words” hogwash. Some mental midget is offended by the SOUNDS. (No offence intended to little people- a term I personally find more degrading than midget.) If you don’t have problems with the act of defecating or making love, why do you care what sounds you use to identify them? And if you do have a problem with either act, then you have far bigger problems with what’s between your ears than you do with what’s entering them from the outside.

Top Twenty Movies of the Decade

2010-01-13T13:18:00.005Z

The Top 20 (Fantastic) Movies of the Decade

IMDB published their list of the top grossing SF and Fantasy movies of the decade a few weeks ago and I thought they might be worth a look. For some reason I can’t imagine they have omitted THE DARK KNIGHT and SPIDER-MAN. And AVATAR came out just after the list did so it isn’t included even though it would sit at the top already. In case you don’t have IMDB Pro- here’s the list (with short commentary or links to longer previous reviews).

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen-
Haven’t seen it. Probably will.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith-
The best of the prequels even if everybody in the world already knew the ending. Jon Stewart interviewed George Lucas on The Daily Show the other day and Lucas is sticking by his guns that the difference between the original trilogy and the prequels is mainly that the fans of the originals aren’t 12 years old anymore. I hate to say it, but I think he’s right. I took my teenaged daughter to the re-release of the originals in the 90’s and she was totally underwhelmed. Part of that, I think, was that she had grown up seeing so many movies that used the same tricks, often better. And part of it was that she’s a GIRL (never really SW’s main audience). As they say, the golden age of science fiction is twelve. I think the last Indiana Jones movie got a lot of grief for the same reason. I didn’t think it was any sillier than the others, it just could have never lived up to the memories the audience had of the originals. All in all, EPISODE III isn’t as bad as the first one, but truthfully, none of these movies are great works of art. Arguably they aren’t even great works of pulp adventure. But this one isn’t too bad if you don’t expect anything more from it than that.

Transformers-
What saved this movie is that it struck the right note of being funny and lighthearted without making fun of itself. Why it and the sequel are so far up this list is a mystery for all time, however.

Iron Man-
Three words: Robert Downey Jr. Full review here

Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones-
If not for Jar-Jar and Mannequin Skywalker in the first one, this would be the worst Star Wars movie of all time. As it is, it’s only half as bad because it only has one of them. True, Mannequin is being played by a different actor, but the “acting” he does is so wooden it’s easy to think that it’s the same person years later. Isn’t helped by the dialog in the romance scenes, which has been given so much hate over the years that there’s no need for me to pile on. This movie’s place on this list is proof that you can slap the name Star Wars on just about anything and it will sell.

The Matrix Reloaded-
The reason this movie is here and not the third one (REVOLUTIONS) is because everybody loved THE MATRIX and couldn’t wait for the sequel. After seeing this, they just didn’t care anymore. Personally I think it was a missed opportunity that could have easily been fixed by combining both the sequels into one 2-hour movie. I was impressed that the Wachowski brothers tried to take their concepts a little deeper, most filmmakers would have been happy to just have Neo and friends have new adventures in Matrixland, but the movie winds up being boring because it’s too long. The audience leaves every fight and chase more exhausted than the characters doing the fighting and chasing. Fortunately the ANIMATRIX collection exists as the true sequel.

Star Trek-
There are three attempted reboots (not counting the Star Wars prequels as a reboot attempt) on this list and of the three this is the only one that works. And the funny thing is that it’s because it’s not really Star Trek. Oh, the set pieces are all there, the Enterprise, the characters we love, the rousing space opera, but ST was never about running around and blowing shit up and this is. Still, it was a welcome change from the snoozefest that Trek became at the end. Where Lucas sucked all the fun and humor out of Star Wars, Abrams put it all back into Star Trek. I just hope that JJ Abrams and Co. can overcome the urge to redo Khan for the sequel. Isn’t ripping off that plotline once already enough? Full (kinda) review here.

I Am Legend-
Where Will Smith’s other foray into literary SF this decade decided to throw the source material away to ill effect, here staying closer to Richard Matheson’s book pays off. In fact, the weakest part of the whole thing is that they changed the ending and thus eviscerated the whole subtext. Luckily the original ending is on the supplemental materials included with the Blu-Ray, so you can see more of what the writer intended.

X-Men: The Last Stand-
Another movie that would have been better served by staying closer to the original material. Too ambitious, too scattered, and too many mutants. Wolverine pared down the cast and at least tried to have a story, so maybe they learned their lesson.

The War of the Worlds-
Of the two literary SF adaptations Spielberg and Cruse did this decade I prefer Minority Report over this one. But this is a pretty good movie hurt first by the fact that Tom Cruse is only able to play Tom Cruse in movies. He isn’t so much an actor (he once was, remember TAPS?) as a special effect. I can’t see him as anything but Tom Cruse. Even in Valkyrie, with the limp and the eye, it’s was just Tom Cruse trying to kill Hitler. So that’s a problem. The second problem is that the source material is so dated. Wells novel was kick-ass over a hundred years ago but the alien invasion thing has been done a thousand times since then and the shock has worn off. In spite of this Spielberg stays pretty close to the original (except for the obligatory kids in danger fetish he has) and more or less pulls it off.

Signs-
This is the one with the aliens and the crop circles by M. Night Shyamalan and Mel Gibson. Is there anything else that needs to be said?

Wall-E-
I didn’t think Pixar could make a better movie than The Incredibles, but somehow they did. One of the best movies of the decade and it should have won an Oscar. Full review here.

X2: X-Men United-
X-Men movies carry their quality rating as their sequel number.

Superman Returns-
One of the movies in the reboot trifecta that stayed too close to the series it was trying to kick-start and failed as a result. Brian Singer didn’t so much make a Superman movie as he made the third movie in the original 1978 Superman movie series. Most people take issue with Lois Lane’s kid, but I could have forgiven that. The real problem for me was Lex Luthor. From his continuing obsession with real estate (That’s the best you can do? Really?! A supervillain that wants to be a land baron? And of an ugly piece of rock in the middle of the ocean? Shit!) to Kevin Spacey’s pseudo-Gene Hackman portrayal (in which none of Hackman’s charm and wit was evident) Luthor came off as a buffoon. Comic books are only as good as their villains and this one wasn’t much of a match for the most powerful superhero of all time.

Monsters vs. Aliens-
Didn’t see it. Probably won’t.

Men in Black II-
Another sequel that was a missed opportunity and got such big box office numbers because people loved it’s predecessor. The first MIB was original, inventive and funny. This one wasn’t, wasn’t, and wasn’t. You’ve got to bring the FUNNY, Barry!

The Day After Tomorrow-
Like comic book movies, disaster porn is another up and coming sub-genre. I expect that just like it did in the ‘70s, disaster movies will blow themselves out in a couple of years.

Jurassic Park III-
Honestly I can’t remember much about the Jurassic Park sequels. But hey, everybody loves dinosaurs, even creationists.

Planet of the Apes-
And the third fumbled reboot. Frankly I never cared much about the original series of movies. The central conceit was kind of silly and there is good reason Pierre Boulle isn’t considered a great SF writer. Still, the original had the benefit of Rod Serling’s scripting and that classic final scene. This one has been hated on a lot but I never really understood why. The plot isn’t any more of a mess than the original, and the ape costumes and acting are (at least) up to the level set in the previous series. (Can you say Tim Roth vanishes into the role when he’s hidden under 40 pounds of make-up?) And anyway, who goes to a Tim Burton movie for the story? You go to see his visual styling. And in that respect, I thought this movie was fine.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine-
This is another movie that wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. I don’t know what people expected. Sure, it wasn’t SPIDER-MAN II, THE DARK KNIGHT, or THE INCREDIBLES. Hell, it wasn’t even WATCHMEN. But it wasn’t DAREDEVIL or CATWOMAN EITHER.

Now you can take what you want from this collection of movies. John Scalzi takes the idea that almost everything on it is that Hollywood has no originality left.

If you remove remakes, sequels, and comic book adaptations out then all you are left with is SIGNS, WALL-E, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, AND THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. But saying that Hollywood has no originality isn’t really very, uh, original, is it? OTOH, his generalization isn’t without merit. The first thing that leaps out at you is that movies made from comic books have become a serious sub-genre. Eight of the movies are made from comics. (Yeah, Transformers is actually a comic and cartoon made from a line of toys, but if you want to swap out those two for DARK KNIGHT and SPIDER-MAN you are welcome to.) And if you look at the release dates you see that this trend is accelerating. Countering this trend is the fact that only two works of literary SF that were made into movies hit the top twenty. Hell, the X-Men alone beat that! And while these two adaptations are pretty good (not great in either case) the other notable big budget literary adaptation was I, ROBOT, and it was an unmitigated disaster.

2010-01-05T19:35:00.001Z

My new love has given me a Christmas gift that I just have to share with all of you. This ROCKS!

2010-01-05T12:42:00.007Z

MOVIES- AVATAR

As far as a movie, AVATAR is a pretty typical James Cameron movie; which is to say that it’s an excellent action movie. Cameron’s gift has always been to make the most outlandish settings simply vibrate with verisimilitude. TERMINATOR had convincing cyborgs. ALIENS had a plausible futuristic alien war. The ABYSS showed us what an underwater drilling rig might be like. TERMINATOR II expanded on the CGI of the ABYSS to go from “solid water” tentacles to “liquid metal” robots that somehow never strained your suspension of disbelief. And TITANIC showed people what it might have been like to actually witness such a disaster.

AVATAR takes this visual veracity two steps further. The first amazing thing about AVATAR is the not at all realistic but completely believable world of Pandora. From the plants and animals to the 10 foot tall blue humanoid natives, the sections of the movie set on this alien world showcase some of the greatest animation ever put to film. So often CGI has a sort of unreality that reminds your hindbrain that you are seeing something that doesn’t exist. Here the plants and animals almost never exhibit the subtly wrong lighting, unnatural physics, or strange blurring that so often telegraphs a CGI sequence. And in the most amazing part of this tour de force of animation, Cameron and his crew of artists leap the uncanny valley in a single bound. If the humanoid creatures of Pandora ever exhibited for a moment the kind of dead-eyed, cadaver-skinned characteristics that have plagued Robert Zemeckis’ last several films, the jig would be up. But they never do. The computer generated world so brims with the feeling of the real that you not only buy into it as being as real as the scenes shot on soundstages, you even buy into such patently absurd ideas as floating mountains, plants with fast twitch reflexes, and dragons. Peter Jackson was able to come close to this level of CGI with the RINGS trilogy and KING KONG, but smartly desaturated his palate to hide some of the weaknesses of the technology. Cameron, on the other hand, gives Pandora a vivid, at times luminous, color palate and sets most of the scenes in bright sunlight. And like his films ABYSS and TERMINATOR II, he creates another evolutionary step in computer special effects. It is truly worth going to see AVATAR just to visit the world of Pandora.

The second step toward making you buy into the movie is the 3D. I don’t really know if it’s a breakthrough in 3D filmmaking. It’s only the second 3D movie I’ve seen (not counting Captain Eo) and the other was BEOWOLF- perhaps the ugliest movie ever made. Personally, I think that 3D is a gimmick that adds little, if anything, to a movie. The technique is better than it was in the 1950s, using polarized glasses rather than red and blue lenses, but the techniques for using that depth is really pretty much the same. Stuff sticks out of the screen or flies toward you or gives you environments that tunnel away from the viewer. Cameron uses the depth to good effect and few shots give you the idea that the considerations making an eye catching 3D shot were more important than the considerations of staging and composition as they relate to the story. About an hour into the thing you forget that you are watching a 3D movie and just start watching a movie. That’s where Cameron creates a new paradigm in 3D moviemaking. He makes you forget about it.

Of course, since it’s a Jim Cameron movie it has all the typical shortcomings of his other movies. The plot isn’t original. I’ve heard it called “Dances With Aliens” and that’s all the plot synopsis you really need. Another problem is Cameron’s tendency to “borrow” ideas from other creators. IO9 has already mentioned the similarities between Pandora and some of the fantasy artwork of artist Roger Dean but I didn’t really understand how much of Dean’s work Cameron had “borrowed” until I saw the movie (I come to find out that this is not lost on Mr. Dean since the front page of his web site now includes this link.) I’d always been skeptical of Harlan Ellison’s claims that Cameron had ripped off the Outer Limits episodes DEMON WITH A GLASS HAND and SOLDIER that he wrote*, but somewhere around the halfway point of AVATAR I actually was taken away from the movie because I got so pissed off at how blatantly Dean had been ripped off. Floating mountains with waterfalls, blue people, biological creatures with mechanical characteristics, mixing spirals with landscapes, gigantic world trees, none of these are original creations of Roger Dean, but when you see the way Cameron visualizes these motifs there is no question that he was familiar with Dean’s art.

And if you aren’t familiar with Roger Dean’s art then you should visit his web site and treat yourself to some of the most lyrical and beautiful fantasy landscape watercolors ever done. Dean became famous during his long association with progressive rock group Yes, for whom he did numerous album covers. He first came to my attention one Sunday when I was listening to that group’s Relayer album. While listening I looked at the album cover and suddenly realized that the three songs on the album related in a very visceral yet completely tangential way to the image I was concentrating on. A limited edition signed print of that painting hangs over my desk downstairs right now. It got me interested in watercolor as a medium in my own art and prompted me to buy his retrospective book Views and his later book Magnetic Storm. Dean’s artwork is sublime and if Cameron is going to be a thief at least he has the good taste to steal from Dean and Ellison.

And while Cameron has made a spectacular 3D movie, he still hasn’t mastered some of the problems of the format. The first thing is that he’s still filming with a normal camera’s depth of field in some shots. This results in objects in the very near foreground being out of focus. In a normal 2D movie this gives the viewer a sense of depth. But in the real world whatever you look at, whether near or far, is in focus. That’s one of the magical things the eye does without us realizing it. When you are watching a 3D movie you should have the same sort of natural ability to look wherever you want on the screen and see things clearly. But sometimes you don’t. This is like early CGI of human movement. Every character walked like a robot because they hadn’t yet figured out that human joints and limbs compressed slightly when they moved. Eventually this problem was realized and appropriate compensations were made. Sooner or later somebody is bound to figure this out and start using some sort of multiplane process in 3D movies.

But you can’t expect James Cameron to get everything right in one fell swoop. He got so much right and made yet another classic film. Isn’t that enough? If you haven’t seen this movie you should go see it tomorrow. I’m going on Wednesday to see it in IMAX 3D so I can take more time drinking in the visual spectacle. That’s what’s so special about this movie. It’s a throwback to STAR WARS and BLADERUNNER, a SF film that wows viewers with the visuals in spite of decades of becoming jaded by one after another films that tried to do it and failed.

* I love, simply LOVE Harlan Ellison. I’ve always had a soft spot for hella smart, smart-assed, take-no-prisoners, agent provocateurs and Ellison has been those things all his life in spades. He’s also a damn fine writer. I personally consider Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman to be the finest short story of the last half of the twentieth century. But Harlan sometimes does go overboard. And when he does he does it like he does everything else- overboard over the top. He threatened Cameron for Terminator II because he seems to think he invented the idea of soldiers from the future coming to our time to fight and cyborg warriors. He didn’t. He also had a famous feud with Gene Roddenberry over changes to his script for the original Star Trek’s most celebrated episode when, in reality, the changes that were made were minimal. In fact, like many artists, he isn’t aware of what his actual strengths are. Harlan isn’t a great inventor of ideas. Truthfully, most of his most famous stories have central ideas that are more archetypal than inspired. He’s written masterful stories about things like: the last few people alive being played with by a sentient supercomputer, a post apocalyptic world inhabited by youth gangs, going back in time to talk with yourself when you were a child, a man who finds out that being irresistible to women isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, a fellow who is always late, etc. Hell, I’m no writer but even as a child I fantasized about being visited by my adult self. No, Harlan’s strength isn’t his ideas, it’s his prose. He writes about the same sort of things that other writers of fantastic literature write about, he just puts words together better than most.

REPOST- This I Know

2010-01-01T20:49:00.001Z

This is a repost from the first day of last year. I had hoped to extend the list but it's the same so I guess I haven't learned anything in the last year.

............................
I thought I’d start the year with an infodump. Here are some of the aphorisms I’ve picked up or written over the years that have helped me to understand the world. Hopefully you will find something helpful for the New Year.

God is far too fond of irony.

Spirituality is inversely proportional to self-righteousness.

Over the long haul, correctness is proportional to doubt.

Quae nocent docent: Things that injure- teach.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained as stupidity.

Common sense is not so common.

Never assume that everybody else is like you.

Argue with a fool and there are two fools arguing.

One of the primary purposes of religion is to separate people into us and them. One of the primary purposes of enlightenment is to break down barriers between us and them.

All too often, Christianity isn’t the religion of Jesus; it’s a religion about Jesus.

The opposite of love is fear.

You quit learning the minute you stop thinking that you might not be wrong.

Expecting gratitude when you help someone is ridiculous.

The more you love, the less you care.

The Democratic fallacy is that everybody’s opinion has equal worth.

Everything in the world conspires to keep you from actually being in charge of your own life. Including you.

Lotto is a tax on the mathematically challenged.

The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

The only thing in the world you can be sure that you can change is your reaction to it.

We are stone-age brains dealing with twenty-first century technology.

The police work for the status quo. They are not employed to protect or serve the citizens.

Human society is an outgrowth of human nature.

One of the earliest things children learn is possessiveness. Lying is another.

Being sure is not the same as being right.

Psychology derives from biology, sociology derives from psychology, thus sociology derives from biology.

You are never in control as much as you think you are.

If you don't believe in luck, flip a coin and prove it.

It is never a bad idea to look for more evidence.

All governments eventually become malignant.

Gender roles were not imposed on either sex. They were inherited from biology.

No matter how wrong an idea is, there will be smart people who believe it, conversely there is no idea so right that it doesn’t have some idiot involved. (The popular expression of the second part of this is “even a broken clock is right twice a day”.

No person can be more than 50% of a relationship. A 50% correct relationship still gets a failing grade.

It may not have been your fault, but thinking that teaches you nothing.

One of the best courses in psychology you’ll ever have is driving in traffic.

Mentally retarded people rarely get angry. Stupid people get angry a lot. Smart people get angry less and control it better.

Democracy isn’t a system for making the best decisions, it’s a system for correcting the worst ones.

By the time they reach adulthood most people have figured out if they aren’t beautiful, athletic, or rich. However, they will go on thinking they are smarter than other people for the rest of their lives.

Insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results.

Class warfare has been being fought since the invention of money but it’s only called that when the poor fight back.

Life is a school. If you don’t learn the right answer to a problem you will keep seeing that problem repeatedly until you do get it right. This is why your cable keeps being turned off.

If you worry more about being respected than you do about respecting others, you’re doing it wrong.

Usually, not always but usually, when people are about to do something they shouldn’t do, they know it.

The golden rule isn’t “do unto others” it’s “love one another”.

We tend to dislike things in other people that we don’t want to admit about ourselves.

Spirituality is about making yourself better, making other people better is their job (not to mention impossible for you to do).

Unwanted help is always “unwanted” first and “help” second.

In college they taught me:
A class in statistics
And that generalizations were bad
These things are mutually exclusive.

VIDEO- Free Hugs

2009-12-10T02:55:00.004Z

I was genuinely and deeply moved by this silly little video. What a wonderful idea!

A life is a little soap bubble. It might sometimes bump up against the other little soap bubbles and even stick for a while. But the advantage that soap bubbles have over lives is that no matter how close your life comes to another persons, the bubbles never merge.

MOVIES- Primer

2009-12-03T15:34:00.003Z

The first thing I have to say is- SEE THIS MOVIE! It’s available for instant viewing on Netflix.

So many movies nowadays are not so much dumbed down as downright stupid. You’d think that even if you are a moron, if you are going to spend 100 million dollars (or 200 or 300 million) making a movie then you’d want to spend a buck ninety-five on having somebody with a couple of neurons to rub together have a look at it to make sure you weren’t being stupid. But the great advantage of stupidity is that it makes it’s own circuit- it’s both conductor and insulator. So every year the majority of movies made are of an intellectual level that makes the average Marvel comic look like Dostoevsky. Even most SF movies, movies modeled on the literature of ideas, are abysmal logical failures.

Primer is exactly the opposite. It’s challenging. In fact, it’s a mystery that doesn’t tell you the solution. It’s also the first movie I’ve seen in a long time that I watched twice in the same day. After having done so I can vouch that the movie is at least internally consistent and that it makes perfect sense. I wasn’t sure at first. I was so used to movies that you had to make excuses for rather than having to understand. But trust me, the answer is all there.

But it isn’t plain. In fact, it’s purposefully not plain. That’s one of the problems. Another is that the main motivation of the characters is rather weak. And there are characters referred to that are never (or only briefly) seen and that further muddies the narrative. There are even loose ends that are never explained and can’t be deduced from the clues provided. Finally, some of the pivotal action takes place off-screen and has to be inferred. I’m sure all of this was intentional on the part of the writer-director-star of this first attempt movie. But considering how convoluted the story is and how involved the central conceit is to start with, it’s perhaps too much. Had the story been told as plainly as possible it still would have required far more from the viewer than the average movie.

Without giving away too much (because this is a movie that simply has to be experienced) I’ll set the stage. (A plot synopsis would be impossible.) A group of engineers who work for a high-tech company are working on a side project trying to build a new technology in their garage so they can form their own start-up company. At first they think they’ve found a way to deflect gravity, and spend some time trying to figure out practical applications of the new technology. But while they are doing that they realize there is an unexpected side effect. Gravity isn’t the only thing affected by the machine they have built. Things inside the machine also have their passage of time changed. (The rate of the passage of time is affected by acceleration and gravity so it makes perfect sense. Einstein, bitches!) Without trying to, they have invented a time machine. But one that only lets the object inside cycle between the time the machine is turned on and off. If you put your watch into the machine for a minute over 22 hours passes during that minute for the watch. But if you put a person inside the machine he can leave at the moment the machine was turned on, no matter how much later he enters.

It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the basic premise. So, what do you do with a machine that will let you relive any amount of time that’s passed since you turned it on? From this simple (?) beginning the story starts to twist in unexpected directions and take on multiple levels.

My own problem with the story was that I couldn’t believe the motivation for the characters. The event that most of the movie centers on is rather trivial compared to the lengths the characters go to in order to change it. They even as much as admit it at one point. But if you can accept that it’s important to them then you can go on to delve into the more interesting parts of the puzzle.

And it is, basically, a puzzle. The movie was made by a fellow named Shane Carruth for $7000. As a first attempt by a fledgling director/writer/actor it is a tour de force. Even if you don’t cherish the intellectual puzzle box that he’s built, the movie is involving and while it starts slow, it continues to build gradually until you find yourself sucked into the lives of the characters. But be prepared. There are scenes that are poorly focused, others that have overlapping dialog that makes it hard to tell what’s going on, and the whole thing indulges in poor color balance and editing tricks that obscure an already obtuse narrative. In spite of this it has the many of the benchmarks of good independent cinema. Compositions are strong, dialog is naturalistic, and the acting is understated and realistic. But while most independent films rely on emotion and drama to make up for expensive production values, this story relies on internal consistency and rigorous ideas to make up for lack of special effects. A SF movie without a single alien, explosion, space battle, or fantastic vista yet is more SF than a dozen or a hundred such movies usually manage.

This isn’t a movie for people who think SF is Star Whatever (Wars or Trek). This is a movie for fans of Phillip K. Dick’s writing, Cornwainer Smith’s stories, and who aren’t afraid to test their powers of observation and reason to gather the reward of a little neocortical exercise. I can’t believe how much I loved this movie. I wouldn’t want every cinematic experience to be this one, but when you’ve seen too many GI JOES and toys that turn into cars and robots in the last year it’s nice to find a movie that actually challenges you rather than simply appealing to the reptilian need for sex, carnage, and bright colors.

Have you noticed a tendency for me to swear for emphasis in my writing? I hope not.

SEE THIS FUCKING MOVIE!

TELEVISION- Neverwhere

2009-12-01T10:56:00.004Z

Neverwhere is a television series Neal Gaiman wrote for the BBC that originally aired in 1996 and is now available on Netflix. Like most geeks I’ve had affection for Gaiman’s writing since he was working on Sandman. But to be perfectly honest, his writing has never really grabbed me the way it does some people. Watching Neverwhere I was reminded of why.

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed the program. Considering how much really dreadful SF and Fantasy gets produced and put on TV, it was nice to see something that was interesting and didn’t insult the viewers’ intelligence. True, it has that “BBC look” that has come a long way in the last few years but was still pretty dreadful in the mid-1990s. You know what I mean- the sets look like they were built by a repertory troupe in an abandoned warehouse somewhere and everything is lit blue on one side and green or red on the other like the only lighting equipment they had was left over from some discotheque of the 1970s. Occasionally there will be a matte painting and when there is you almost can’t see the line where it begins. Still, the production values are much better than the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series’, or the earlier Dr. Who programs’ where often things looked so bad it would interfere with your enjoyment of the story.

The acting is also an obvious intermediate step between what passes on BBC genre television today and what they were doing in the 70s and 80s. It isn’t quite as natural and what they are doing on Dr. Who nowadays, but it’s far better than the line readings from a decade earlier. I won’t say that anybody here is exceptional but Patterson Joseph, who plays the Marquis de Carabas, does stand out.

But now, back to the heart of all this. What is it about Neil Gaiman’s writing that keeps me from considering him as great as my all time favorites? Tell me if you’ve heard this one: an ordinary fellow makes an unusual decision on the spur of the moment and as a result meets someone who takes him on and amazing adventure into a world he was completely unaware of, filled with strange, dangerous characters that are vaguely familiar yet oddly different from the way one would normally think of them.

I’ve just told you the plot to everything Neil Gaiman has ever written.

Oh, he does it well. In Death: The High Cost of Living it was easy to get caught up in Death’s personality and how different and appealing it was compared to any other personification of Death. In American Gods it was fun traveling all over the country visiting with the aged visages of familiar deities, some who had gone sour and weird in their dotage. In Sandman it was intriguing to see Morphius travel from heaven to hell in the DC Universe visiting with familiar characters of the macabre who were all as fun-house (of Mystery) distorted as he himself was from the guy in the 1940s with the gas-mask and squirt gun we remembered The Sandman as being.

But I digress.

In Neverwhere we watch a clerk in some soulless London company help a homeless girl lying on the street, drawing the ire of his yuppie shrew girlfriend who stomps off and leaves the pair to draw a door on a brick wall (Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!) and step into a journey through the London Underground (Subway for us Yanks) that will wind up determining the fate of an angel. (Ghad! I ought to write blurbs for book jackets!) Along the way we will meet a pair of eternal assassins, the owner of the cat named Puss-in-Boots, a cadre of female vampires, the traveling miracle fairs of the underground, and lots of other stuff that is imaginative and strange but really doesn’t have anything to say about anything other than “Look at us! We’re imaginative and strange!!”

In fact, the closest thing to a moral in the story is ‘how you can’t keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree’ (or in this case the London subway system), or ‘you can’t go home again’. That is if there is a moral at all, which really there doesn’t seem to be. And the cleverest bit of allegory is that the Undergrounders can travel in the world of normal London because the mundanes “don’t pay any attention to them”, which makes them effectively invisible. It’s clever and glib, which is better than most television, but still not much.

It seems even to me that I’m being unduly harsh. After all, it’s just a friendly romp through a fantasy landscape. And at six half-hour installments, it moves quickly and has way more structure than crap like Lost and Heroes that just meander around everywhere in hope of doing something interesting eventually and take an investment of a significant piece of your life for you to get anything from them. In fact, I think this format- shorter (3-6 hour) self-contained stories as miniseries- is a much better way to tell genre stories on television. And if you have Netflix then it’s free through their streaming service. So if this were a review I’d recommend it. And if this were a critique I’d be wondering if Neil Gaiman has anything else up his sleeve.

POLITICS- Political Reality

2009-11-28T23:22:00.002Z

Well, I was going to sit down for a few minutes and meditate before going to work, but I made the mistake of seeing if Matt Taibbi had said anything lately and- poof- no meditation for me.

Read the article for yourself. Basically what Matt is saying, better and more specifically, is what I’ve been saying for years: both the political parties in America work for the same people and those people aren’t the American Middle Class. Whether you are Obama supporter or Tea-bag Republican, if you think that the primary purpose of your party’s elected officials is to advance your agenda then you don’t perceive enough about how politics really works in this country to be shooting your mouth off about anything.

For years the Red States had both houses of the legislature and the presidency. Do they have an anti-abortion amendment? Flag burning amendment? Organized prayer in schools? The Ten Commandments in public buildings? A stop to illegal immigration? Lower taxes?

Hell no.

And the Blue Staters, who took the presidency and both houses last fall. Are they any better off? Has the surveillance of America e-mails, phone calls, bank records, and (for heaven’s sake) library use stopped? Are the troops out of Iraq? Is Guantanamo closed? Are gay rights being strongly protected by new laws?

Hell no.

It may sound cynical, but in modern America the opposite of cynicism is naivete. It isn’t paranoia if they really are out to get you. And it’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s paying attention that the rich and powerful in this country have been strengthening their powerbase for the last few decades. At the expense of the rest of us, many of which have been manipulated into endlessly arguing with each other about issues that don’t really matter to the people in charge. And while we’ve done it, they’ve been robbing us blind. Both parties are engaged in a classic game of “Let’s you and him fight” with the American people so they can pick all our pockets and put the necessary fortifications in place so that when we do finally wake up and realize that the house is on fire we won’t be able to do anything about it.

BLACK FRIDAY- Sit on the porch and feed all the kangaroos

2009-11-27T23:20:00.002Z

It was this or the latest crop of pyromaniacal videos of turkey fryer accidents.

Random Quickies

2009-11-25T15:48:00.002Z

Fast roundup of some cool stuff from over the last few days.

David Saltzburg is a name you might not know, but he’s the science advisor for the most nerdtastic sit-com since everybody on Gilligan’s island was waiting for The Professor to build a working shortwave out of coconuts and Tina Louise’s spaghetti straps. The Big Blog Theory is a great basic science blog and I think you’ll be surprised how far we’ve come since those seven stranded castaways were on the TV show Lost. FWIW, the comic book and sci-fi geek stuff is just as accurate.

The perfect gift for that multi-tasker on the go who you don’t like very much- The Laptop Steering Wheel Desk! Notice the later pictures of the product and the user comments.

Tennessee passed laws earlier this year to allow guns in restaurants, parks, and bars. I’ve given a lot of thought to what kind of mindset it takes to think you need a gun on your hip no matter where you go. No conclusions yet, but it’s been interesting to wonder what the world looks like to these people.

Am I the only person that, when told that a medium movie popcorn has the same caloric and nutritional value as three Big Macs, immediately thinks- well, what the hell, might as well have three Big Macs?

I also wonder if I’m the only person who watches the Apple computer ad campaign and thinks that John Hodgeman is smart, funny, and cool and that Justin Long is a dimwitted hipster douchebag? Learning that Apple computers are such soap bubbles that they can be broken by a little cigarette smoke only reinforces this idea. And learning that Apple voids your warranty if anyone has smoked in the house with your precious little computer-like status symbol just reaffirms that the douchebaggery goes all the way from the user to Steve Jobs in an unbroken line of vinegar and water.

And the iPhone sucks (bandwidth).

When I think of the Shroud of Turin I immediately free associate pareidolia and a line from the first Ghostbusters movie, “No human being would stack books like this.” Oh faith, why are you so faint?

What is the chance that two old women in Kentucky would try to decide for everybody else what books should be in the library? About the same as the Alaska governor thinking she was elected to tell people what to read. That is- about 100%. Here’s a hint, if you don’t read books and you don’t want anyone else to read them you are not contributing to the advancement of humanity.

Don’t believe in evolution? I’ve got news for you, nobody cares what you believe. The great thing about science is that no belief is required for it to work. Guess you also don’t believe in Doberman Pinschers.

MOVIES- Zombieland isn't bad

2009-11-22T14:22:00.001Z

Not since SHAWN OF THE DEAD has there been a funnier and more unserious movie about the unserious idea of a zombie apocalypse than ZOMBIELAND. A lot of reviewers didn’t care for the tone and I wasn’t impressed by the ad campaign but I found myself amused and pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t just a long tribute to mayhem. In fact, if you’re in the right mood it’s a pretty entertaining couple of hours. True, if any of your critical faculties are engaged you are going to be frustrated- where do they get the unlimited supplies of gasoline they seem to have access to and why does the electricity still work after everyone has been turned into the cannibalistic living undead- but if you simply take the movie on its own terms it has a pretty good mix of pathos and carnage, just a little teenage angst, and a wonderful turn by Woody Harrelson playing what could be easily imagined as a version of his breakout character, Woody Boyd, driven insane by the end of the world. The direction is unremarkable, the acting is fine, the dialog is predictable and not terribly witty, and the special effects are anything but special. Yet I didn’t find myself getting bored and the movie managed never to insult my intelligence too much. And there are times when it’s actually funny. (Rule One for surviving a zombie holocaust: Cardio!) Not a great movie, but for a mindless romp through a decimated civilization that never tries to be anything else the damn thing worked! If you have an evening to kill and a big bag of microwave popcorn then give it a try.

PERSONAL COMEDY- Just Dessert

2009-11-10T23:00:00.003Z

I have no plans to talk about my ongoing divorce. It's not that I feel it's private or that I'm embarrassed, it's just that I don't really have anything to say. But a friend sent me this and it's funny enough to share. (FWIW, the line about not being a "licensed therapist" is especially funny in light of the fact that she's been lying on her resume for as long as I've known her about having a BA in business when she never finished high school and flunked out of community college because she couldn't pass remedial algebra.)

BIG QUESTIONS- The Meaning of Life (part 1 in a series)

2009-11-10T11:17:00.003Z

I think I’m in love.

Oh yes, definitely I have fallen in love. She’s funny, smart, uncompromising, and very nice to look at. I admit, she’s picking the low hanging fruit. But even the staunchest Christian has to admit that there’s nothing more tempting than an attractive woman picking fruit. And I have always had a soft spot for smart asses.

As I’ve said previously, I frequent the HairyFishNuts blog, mostly because the writer is often knee slapping funny. But over the years I’ve watched him fight a tireless battle against religion. I admire his stamina, but watching the non-believers who wander into the site from time to time and often following them home to their blogs I’ve come to believe that he is, as the bible would say, kicking against the pricks. (works on so many levels;-) Of course, he isn’t alone. The Internet is full of people like him- K-rina in the Youtube.com video above, endless Fark.com flame wars, it seems that every time religion is mentioned the same types show up to offer the same arguments that Voltaire and Thomas Aquinas voiced centuries ago and said far better.

I also reflect on my own personal discussions concerning things like science and evolution with believers. And my conclusion is that the problems isn’t so much that members of the two sides have been convinced by differing information and might change their minds if they came to understand the other side of the argument, it’s that the people on the two sides of the divide have fundamentally different ways of looking at reality and are completely intransigent. I think that a lot of these debates are held for the benefit of the people who are debating- to sure up their own thinking- and the only people who might be swayed are the spectators who haven’t made up their minds yet.

When I look back on my life I’ve got to admit that I’ve always been of a scientific mindset. Not only in the case of being fascinated by science and learning all I can about the world, but also as a matter of intrinsic philosophy. I can’t remember a time when, even as a little child, I didn’t question things and discard ideas when convinced that they were erroneous. Long before I had been taught the scientific method in school I was already a devout practitioner. I question everything, especially my own conclusions. And I'm a firm believer that Voltaire was right when he said that you can tell more about a man from his questions than his answers.

But, having said that, I also can’t remember a time, even as a small child, when I wasn’t fascinated by religion. I was a born seeker, looking for answers, and religion claimed to have them. I’ve explored a great number of religions. And practiced a number of them to ‘try them on’ as it were. I feel that I can see both sides of the debate. But I can’t help being logical and questioning. I understand the need to feel like part of something grander than yourself, and I deeply feel that connecting with other people is part of being human. As far as we can tell, humanity is the only creature on the planet that can feel empathy. And that's the basis of religion- feeling for others. Jesus called it loving your brother as you love yourself.

So for the next few posts I’m going to retrace the steps that I’ve taken to come to my (tenitive) conclusions. Perhaps an even handed exploration by someone who isn’t antagonistic to either side is a good idea. There seems to be far too much acrimony in the debate. Both sides show their worst sides as they contend with each other. It's time for a dispassionate look at the question from the middle.

SCEINCE- Carl Sagan ADDENDUM

2009-11-10T11:04:00.004Z

I watched a couple of episodes of Cosmos yesterday and was once again taken with the beauty of Sagan's ideas and the poetry of his writing. The video posted in the last entry is genuinely moving. If you didn't watch it, you should. I came across a couple of other things he said that I thought were interesting and wanted to share them here. Over the next few postings I'm going to be exploring a few big questions which my mind was set turning around while watching his program. These might set the tone.

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise
But a galaxy rise
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns
Rising with the Milky Way

A couple more pertinent quotes from Carl Sagan-

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
- Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World

You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.
- Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?....For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers.
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

SCIENCE- Carl Sagan

2009-11-09T12:53:00.004Z

A couple of months ago I was browsing through Half Price Books in Lexington, Ky and came across an almost complete library of Carl Sagan’s writing in hardcover. I had read several of his books in high school but had long since lost the copies that I had owned, so I decided to buy the store clean. Within a couple of weeks I noticed that the Science Channel was sporadically re-broadcasting the old Cosmos television show and had my TIVO start trolling for it. But I didn’t realize until this morning that today would have been his 75th birthday if he were still alive.

Carl Sagan remains to this day perhaps the greatest popularizer of science in my lifetime. Since his death there are others who have attempted to fill his shoes- Neil Degrasse Tyson comes immediately to mind, along with Bill Nye, and even the Mythbusters, although personally I think Timothy Ferris comes closest to his style and range of subject material- but no one has really come close. In addition to explaining science he was widely known for his views on history, politics, religion, superstition, skepticism, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the human condition. His was a popular guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (of all places) and even debated William F. Buckley after the original showing of Nick Mayer’s movie about nuclear war, THE DAY AFTER. (Famously saying that the nuclear arms race was like two men standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches and the other with five.)

His books included:

Dragons of Eden- an exploration of the evolution of human intelligence that explained the triune brain architecture, dividing the brain into R-Complex, Limbic, and Cortical levels and explaining how each controlled different sets of behaviors and expanded on the lower levels.

The Demon Haunted World- an examination of the evidence for the paranormal, including everything from UFOs to ghosts, and a plea for using the same tools of logic and reason to evaluate all claims whether they seem natural or supernatural.

Broca’s Brain- about his love affair with science. A book that opens with a rather macabre anecdote about his trip to the Musee de L’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris where, while exploring a room filled with jars containing human heads, he chanced upon the preserved brain of Paul Broca- the foremost expert on the anatomy of the brain in the 19th century.

But perhaps Sagan’s crowning achievement was the television series Cosmos. Produced for PBS in 1980 and capitalizing on the popularity of STAR WARS, Cosmos put Sagan on the bridge of an imaginary spaceship by which he could explore the wonders of the universe. But it was no dreary travelogue of roadside attractions throughout the galaxy. Sagan used it as a platform for everything he found interesting, from history to philosophy. In the first episode he recounted the story of Eratosthenes calculating the circumference of the earth over two hundred years before the birth of Christ by measuring the shadows of two sticks, one in Alexandria and the other in Syene; conducted a tour of the universe through the solar system, galaxy, neighboring galaxy M31, and the local group; discussed pulsars and light years; visited a fictional inhabited planet in the Orion Nebula; flew down the Valles Marinaris on Mars; toured the ancient library at Alexandria during its height; and condensed the history of the universe down into the space of one year.

And that was the first episode.

The second episode told the story of life on Earth, explaining evolution through the example of Heike Crabs, which seem to have the faces of Samurai on their shells, and touched on biochemistry and biology. Episode five told the story of Mars, including both Percival Lowell and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Episode nine explained atomic physics with an apple pie and went on to talk about wormholes in space and remind us that we are “made of starstuff”.

And that’s one of the things that set the series apart from most science documentaries. If you are used to the standard History or Discovery channel docs then you are in for an awakening. This is not an hour of your life spent watching two teams of scientists using PET scanners to unlock the mystery of whether or not early Etruscan wine mugs were designed to be right or left handed. This is a 13 hour exploration of the universe as we understand it and man’s place in it as we might conceive it to be. And it’s written with poetry, perspective, and passion. Under Sagan’s probing eye we see even the most mundane things in a new light. He called libraries “communal repositories of memory”. And on the subject of books he said:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree, with flexible parts, on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you are inside the mind of another person. Maybe somebody dead for thousands of years, across the millennia, an author speaking clearly and silently inside your head, only to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions. Binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. Books are proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Cosmos episode 11, The Persistence of Memory

And in the last episode he contemplated the final destiny of our species. In the late seventies the great threat of annihilation was a full-out nuclear exchange between the superpowers. But even here, Sagan’s thoughtfulness went beyond that possibility to examine the underlying danger.

I saw east Africa and thought a few million years ago we humans took our first steps there. Our brains grew and changed. The old parts began to be guided by the new parts. And this made us human, with compassion and foresight and reason. But instead we listened to that reptilian voice within us counseling fear, territoriality, aggression. We accepted the products of science but we rejected its methods.
Cosmos- Who Speaks for Earth?

It’s hard to put it more succinctly and beautifully. Today we might not fear an attack from the former Soviet Union, but the forces of ignorance and superstition are even more active now than they were then. Trying to destroy our society by turning their backs on the science that allowed it to become great, turning the technology that science gave us against it and us.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Sagan.

Cosmos is available from hulu.com for free and on Netflix streaming if you are a member. Sagan’s books are in your local library and available from Amazon.

WTF- Of All the Videos Online

2009-11-08T07:46:00.001Z

...this is the funniest one I've seen in a long time.

MOVIES- Seven Pounds

2009-11-07T05:50:00.000Z

Will Smith seems to have settled into a rhythm. Every three movies he does includes a Sci-Fi movie, a comedy, and a serious film. There’s no question he’s done all right with the sci-fi genre. Sure there is crap like WILD, WILD WEST and I, ROBOT. Crap that would be unforgivable if not for MEN IN BLACK, and INDEPENDENCE DAY. Well, OK, not so much INDEPENDENCE DAY. But I didn’t think Hancock was too bad. And I AM LEGEND wouldn’t have been so bad without the focus-group ending the studio tacked on.

His comedies like HITCH and, well, MEN IN BLACK have been entertaining. Although he was pretty much just a straight man for Kevin James in HITCH, and we’ve already used MIB once already so it really doesn’t count. And OTOH there are such non-classics as BAD BOYS- with or without Roman numerals- and the aforementioned WWW.

Well, at least he’s made some serious dramas such as ALI and SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION. But when you really think about it, ALI wasn’t really a high point for either him or director Michael Mann even though it was a dearly held project for both of them. And SIX DEGREES is really more of a party game than a movie- talk talk talk talk talk. And every other serious thing he’s attempted isn’t really very serious. LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE is a milquetoast example of what somebody once called the Magic Negro genre. ENEMY OF THE STATE isn’t bad but it’s Bruckheimer and Tony Scott so you could have put Ben Affleck in the role instead and nobody would have noticed. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS got a lot of props from Oprah. But if she had James Frey back on for a public bitch slapping over A Million Little Pieces being a bunch of BS, then she should have saved a few backhands for the makers of this “based on a true story” film which completely ignores Chris Gardner’s infidelity, drug use, child abandonment, and spousal abuse and which takes the “magic Negro” idea to a new level.

Wow, now that I think about it, Will Smith hasn’t made many very good movies.

Don’t get me wrong. He also hasn’t made many bad movies. None of the films mentioned are actually bad. And I think they’ve usually made some money. But if you take out MEN IN BLACK they are a steady run of three out of five stars. Pure mediocrity. Nothing challenging, nothing inspired, no great breakout performances, just a long string of nice movies.

And that seems to be the secret of Will’s personal success. He seems like a nice guy. Not a great artist, doesn’t vanish into a role, just shows up on time and does his job. And boy, has it ever worked for him. He’s done 13 movies in the last decade and his name is attached to 25 projects in development!

Well, there’s the secret of success boys and girls: be nice.

Of course it doesn’t hurt to be good looking, tall, well built, and have a little talent as well.

Being lucky as hell is also a good idea.

Which brings me to his most recent movie SEVEN POUNDS, which is available for streaming via Netflix. I’m not going to say anything about the plot for fear of spoiling any tiny surprises there may be. Smith is charming, he plays a really nice guy, and some melodrama ensues. If you like Will Smith’s movies then you’ll probably like this movie.

But it could just as easily starred Ben Affleck.

HALLOWEEN 2009- Dracula vs. Frankenstein

2009-10-28T14:09:00.001Z

There are really two classic monsters- Dracula and Frankenstein. They both touch primal urges in humanity and make those things into archetypal horrors. They bookended the 19th century and spoke to themes that would dominate the 20th. They both were novels that made their authors famous. One was written by a first time author who penned an immediate success while the other was from an established writer and took years to find its audience, And despite superficial similarities it would be harder to find two more different characters or novels. I read both novels when I was in the fifth grade and was immediately taken at what a classic subject for the compare and contrast essays we were writing at the time.

When he wrote Dracula Bram Stoker was an established writer who was also manager of the Lyceum Theater in London. It was published in 1897 during the early days of what would become an increasingly mainstream literary genre- the fantastic. But it wasn’t immediately popular, perhaps being overshadowed by other such novels. Jules Verne had been publishing primeval science fiction for decades and H. G. Wells The Invisible Man was published the same year as Stoker’s magnum opus, while Wells classics The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds were published two years before and one year afterward respectively. Yet the novel was unique enough that it was able to survive until a new artform- movies- would make Dracula known to almost everyone.

Critics were mostly favorable to Stoker’s work. The novel is beautifully written in a epistolary style that immediately brings the reader into the heads of the main characters. This style also makes the story seem more immediate than a first or third person narrative since you never know if a particular character will survive past the story’s end. Stoker spends the first part of the novel building suspense and setting the stage. Jonathan Harker’s trip to Castle Dracul, where he meets the count and his three undead brides, is classic gothic horror. A modern man on a business trip that goes horribly wrong yet is exotically erotic and mysterious. The latter half picks up the pace and delves into themes of science vs. mysticism, the threat of the barbarian invasions into the newly industrial world, the changing roles of women, and the uses of modern technology (a telephone call plays an important role in one scene).

Stoker did years of research for the novel. Modern myth has connected the character with Vlad the Second (Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Tepes- pronounced “tepish”, with the accent on the first sylable) but there is evidence that even if this historical character was the basis for Count Dracula, which is likely, Stoker had little actual information about the historical person. Still, his research filled the novel with real places and their mythology and served to ground the character in a sort of verisimilitude.

But Dracula probably wouldn’t have become so memorable simply because of its structure or historical grounding. Stoker’s prose was a big part of the novel. Much gothic horror to this day owes a debt to his lyrical and evocative writing. It is a truly pleasing read and every page drips with atmosphere.

Dracula wasn’t the first vampire novel, but it was the one that all such novels, before and after, would be measured against.

Unlike the assiduous research that Stoker would do for Dracula, Mary Shelley (nee Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) was a nineteen-year-old girl who wrote Frankenstein almost on a dare. The story of the genesis of the novel is almost as famous as the novel itself but some latter day myths have arisen. Mary was basically raised by her father because her mother died not long after her birth, and grew up with an unusual education for a woman at the beginning of the 19th century- seeing such radical thinkers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Aaron Burr entertained in her home during her formative years. She was widely traveled and took up with poet Percy Bisshe Shelley while he was still married to his first wife. On a summer trip to Geneva, Switzerland in 1816, before their marriage but after the birth of their first child, they found the weather unusually cold due to the eruption of Mount Tambora (1816 is often referred to as the year without a summer) and had to stay inside rather than enjoying normal lakeside summer pastimes. Their additional company consisted of Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. The result of such educated company and plenty of indoor time was numerous high-minded discussions. One of which turned to the new experiments of Luigi Galvani into animal electricity, or animism.

Galvani had recently caused dismembered frog’s legs to jump by the application of an electric charge. The combination of this line of though and its implications, along with other late-night conversations on the writing of horror fiction, was the genesis of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. On of the myths that has grown around this story is that the group had seen a presentation of Karl Kapek’s play, R.U.R.. and that had spurred Shelley’s creative muse, but even passing research shows that Kapek’s influential work (it’s credited for coining the word “robot”) wasn’t presented until almost a century later. Nevertheless, Shelley was obviously influenced by the new advances of science over mysticism and from that she wrote a novel that has been as influential for our time as any of Shakespeare’s plays.

Comparing the actual novel to the popular zeitgeist of it is enlightening. Shelley was able to tap into themes that would resonate into our world of biotechnology and computer science as well, if not better, than William Gibson would be able to prefigure global corporations, world wide computer networks, and economic feudalism that would occur a mere twenty-five years later. In the book, Victor Frankenstein is a dedicated experimenter trying to unlock the mystery of death- surely the ultimate goal of medical science that we still ascribe to. Unfortunately, as the subtitle The Modern Prometheus foreshadows, he is brought low by his quest to control powers over life and death that only the Gods have dominion over. Isaac Asimov talked at length about the influence of Frankenstein in this aspect. He said that his own novels about robots, which remain the most influential in the realm of artificial intelligence and may go down in history for all time as the most influential with the advent of Honda’s ASIMO robot, were a direct response to both Shelley’s and Kapek’s dour visions of the consequences of making a humaniform intelligence that is both more powerful and smarter than humanity. Shelley was not unkind to the experimenter trying to expand the boundaries of both technology and human longevity. Her Victor Frankenstein is not so much the ‘mad scientist’ of popular wisdom but instead himself a victim of trying to control forces beyond the purview of man. Asimov tried to balance this with his three laws of robotics but latter day movies such as THE TERMINATOR and THE MATRIX show that humans have an unrelenting fear that they may be sowing the seeds of their own destruction in their endless pursuit of technological advancement. Indeed, an entire philosophy had grown up in the computer science community that the next evolutionary step in the history of earth may not be biological, but rather the successor of mankind may be of his own devising.

But as a novel, aside from the themes of unintended consequences and scientific hubris, Frankenstein is not well written. The plot is better than one would know from the movie adaptations that have been made. Most of those give short shrift to Victor Frankenstein’s attempt to do right by his creation and the climactic destruction of his creature and himself in the wastes of the Arctic. But Shelly’s writing is clumsy and the structure of the novel is amateurish. Almost nothing happens as the stage is set for the first four chapters and then in the fifth chapter Victor gathers his implements of life around him and re-animates his creature. For the rest of the novel the reader is constantly presented with poor prose and bad staging. Yet the novel’s themes of the modern Prometheus and the misunderstood monster continue to resonate.

At first glance it would seem that we are obsessed with vampires. They have become our alter egos in a society fixated on youth, beauty, and sex. No longer an undead creature that inspires horror and dread, the vampire has become hero, a creature to be envied, completely selfish, living forever by night in a world of sexual conquest. Not even the real life horror of AIDS is enough to squelch our love of what the vampire has come to represent. There are even groups of people who have taken vampirism as a lifestyle choice. But while twenty-somethings may be having veneers put on their teeth to accentuate their canines you don’t see anyone having bolts surgically implanted into their necks. Nobody wants to be an ugly, misunderstood giant that is hated by people in spite of his gentle soul. But the Frankenstein myth remains frightening in a way that Mary Shelley could never have imagined. We no longer fear reanimated dead flesh but the idea that our technology may be the end of us is more real than ever. The Frankenstein monster has become biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and robots and the likelihood that such technologies might cause the end of our civilization or even our species is far greater than the readers of 1818 could have ever imagined.

SCIENCE- Lightning Strikes Twice

2009-10-28T13:56:00.000Z

Here’s an amazing statistic: of all the people killed by being struck by lightning in the United States between 1995 and 2008, 82% were men! Now, while men have more iron containing molecules in both size and density (men have higher average values of both hemoglobin- the molecule that contains iron and carries oxygen in the blood- and hematocrit- the amount of iron bearing protein per unit volume of blood- in addition to having more blood in total) that’s not the reason they get struck by lightning more often. (And, yes, for those of you paying attention, the reason blood is red is because it’s rusty. The iron in blood combines with oxygen to form iron-oxide. In other words- rust! That’s also why venous blood is blue, the color you think of regular, non-rusty metals as being. It has been deprived of oxygen for use in the cells that blood feeds.) No. The reason most men are struck by lightening by such a wide margin is the same reason they drive fast cars and try to make a lot of money.

And that reason is to get laid.

It seems that the genetic imperative for women is safety. This allows them to care for offspring, since they have a greater reproductive imperative to live so that they can see their children reach adulthood. Children which they have invested nine months in gestation before they are even born. Men, OTOH, have a genetic imperative to impregnate as many mates as possible, so they are far more invested in attracting mates. And that involves impressing women with their bravery. Ergo, men are far more likely to stay out in a little inclement weather rather than show cowardice by running for cover. Thus, they get struck by lightning far more often while pursuing pastimes such as golfing, fishing, and other pursuits where they wave a stick in the air during lightening storms.

Thus men get struck by lightning in a whopping over 4 to 1 ratio to women.

Think about that the next time you are about to bitch that your male co-worker makes more money than you do.

Source- Popular Science, October 2009 issue.

PERSONAL- Divorce

2009-10-27T20:36:00.004Z

A quick personal note before launching into a longer, more Halloween-appropriate article.

Sometimes the only way you can know where you’ve been is to get to the end of a journey and turn around. Relationships are often like that. And relationships, like everything else in the universe, are of finite duration. There’s a song I particularly like that was written by Cardew Robinson and Roger Whittaker called The First Hello, The Last Goodbye. The lyrics go:

They say when you gain a lover
You begin to lose a friend
That the end of the beginning’s
The beginning of the end
They say the moment that you’re born
Is when you start to die
And the first time that we said hello
Began our last goodbye

We know each summer’s coming
Means the winter’s waiting there
And gold would not be precious
If we all had gold to spare
You only know how low is low
The first time that you fly
And the first time that we said hello
Began our last goodbye

If I could live forever
It is certain I would never know
Another single second so sublime
At the moment of our meeting
When our hands first touched in greeting
How I wanted to hold back the hands of time

When they begin the overture
They start to end the show
When you said: I’ll never leave you
Then I knew that you would go
The sound of all our laughter
Is now echoed in a sigh
And the first time that we said hello
Began our last goodbye

Yesterday I had to tell the woman who is and forever will be the love of my life that I was divorcing her. It isn’t because I don’t love her. I’m as crazy in love with her as I’ve ever been. But there comes a time when you have to give up. I truly believe that the opposite of love isn’t hate. Love and hate sit too close together. No, the opposite of love is fear. Love is brave enough to be vulnerable, giving for the sheer joy of pleasing, intoxicating as any narcotic, consuming like a fire. Fear is protective, greedy, sober. Love is expansive while fear turns inward. Love throws caution to the wind. Fear is caution when none is needed. Love can be the most painful thing in life. Fear avoids pain at all cost.

I’m not going to go into the specifics of my relationship. But looking back at it as I am now from the end, I do have a graphic representation that pretty much explains why I have to finally give up in spite of all the love I have for her.

No matter how much Charlie Brown loves the idea that Lucy is eventually going to do the right thing, sooner or later he’s going to give up. You can only be lied to so many times.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog reprise

2009-10-01T08:29:00.005Z

The Return of Dr. Horrible

I’ve been remiss on the blog at not mentioning the Emmys, or more especially a particular segment of the Emmys. I’ve mentioned Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog here previously. I have to say that my fondness for this little 45 minute musical has only grown in the intervening months. In fact, I’d have to say that it’s probably my favorite thing that I’ve found on the net this year. The songs are catchy and well sung. The performances are spot on. The humor is truly funny (not the sad clown antics of Will Ferrel, the retarded man-child humor of Adam Sandler, or the Charlie Brown shtick of Ben Stiller) and grows naturally out of character and situation. And it makes fun of a few things I hold dear- geek culture* and silly romanticism. If you haven’t seen it yet- Shame On You! Go to the previous link and watch it right now. You’ll be glad you did. And if you have but you missed the Emmys, here is the funniest thing in a very entertaining broadcast (for an awards show).

(For those not in the know, I’ll explain a couple of the geekier jokes. (Hey, explaining the obvious is what this blog is all about!) Fill(Capt. Hammer)ion’s comment about CSI: Miami is because he’s currently starring in a show on another network at the same time. It’s titled Castle and I can’t comment on it because I haven’t seen it. Dr. Horrible actually won the Emmy for “Outstanding Special Class - Short-format Live-Action Entertainment Programs” whatever-the-hell-that-means. (It also won a People’s Choice Award.) “Athletic yet luminous hosts” is NPH (figure it out, couch monkey) referring to himself, the host of the Emmys. And at least two (I don’t know how many you actually see on the net) of the pauses for buffering were in the actual Emmys telecast (it was a joke, see?).

Whedon (apologies for spelling it wrong all over the first post on the subject) has said there will be a sequel and that there might even be a movie. I can only hope, since it’s the best thing he or any of the cast has ever done as far as I’m concerned.

*I had a conversation about the terms “geek” and “nerd” with a good friend a few years ago and realized that even though they have become synonymous in common parlance the actual meanings have somehow reversed. I attribute this to the movie REVENGE OF THE NERDS for some reason that I can’t back up. For the record. Geek is the term for a social outcast with antisocial habits. It comes from carnival geeks who were known for biting the heads off chickens in sideshows. Nerd is a term for someone who is also a social outcast but shows unusual single-minded expertise in science or technology. It was actually invented by Theodor Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, in his book “If I Ran the Zoo” published in 1950.

Where else can you get such an encyclopedic knowledge of useless facts? I may not be able to remember my own phone number if asked, but if I’ve read it in a book thirty years ago I’ll never forget it.

POLITICS- The Public Option is Dead; Long Live the Public Option

2009-10-01T06:34:00.001Z

The Public Option is dead. And the Democrats killed it. Even though it was their idea.

The Democrats have a real problem. In the wake of their recent actions on health care- the destruction of the public option, the protection of the insurance industry by mandates and giving government sanction to the disavowal of claims, and their collusion with big Pharma to make sure their profit margins are protected- this problem is becoming a catastrophe. Simply put, democrats aren’t morons. Republicans have solved this problem by expunging anyone with an IQ higher than their age from their voting block. As a result they can depend on their constituents to do things like support paying bonus money to banking industry thieves in spite of their having decimated both the retirement accounts and the value of the homes of those very supporters. They can expect their voters to riot against a president trying to give them health care because it’s too expensive after spending a decade defending massive spending on insane wars and cutting taxes on the people who profit from the economy most. They can somehow convince their mostly fundamentalist Christian followers that government torture, the very method used to kill their savior, is something to support and glorify while at the same time convincing them that taking care of the common good and including the poorest members of that society- something that very savior espoused at length- is the height of evil.

If only the Democrats could have enlisted the dumbest people in the country to their side first!

But unfortunately they didn’t. And unfortunately they took power and decided that they could continue with business as usual, the exact same business the Republicans are engaged with, of selling our government to the wealthy and powerful. I guess they thought that the people who elected them were exactly as blind to their own expectations and best interests as the Republican supporters at the tea parties. They thought that their supporters wouldn’t notice that, in spite of having a majority and then a supermajority, they weren’t really interested in passing the very legislation they had run on. (Hey, the Republicans have been running on things like prayer in schools and criminalization of abortion for decades without having anyone realize they never did squat about either.) They thought that their members would be willing to accept piss poor legislation that didn’t fix anything but instead only solidified the status quo rather than losing to the ‘other side’. (After all, the Republicans had called gutting industry air pollution mandates the “Clean Skies Initiative” and passed huge health care giveaways to big Pharma, in spite of their small government talk, as the Medicare Drug Benefit.) Ah yes. The shuck and jive that the Republicans had sold for years was the way they thought they’d deal with health care, blaming the other side for everything while they screwed their own supporters deeper and harder then ever, and that nobody would notice that their calls for bipartisanship were merely a plea for the Republicans to bail them out of having to do what they had said.

But unfortunately for the Democrats, their supporters aren’t brainless nitwits who are motivated by the same kind of fervor that allows sports fans to support teams in their home towns in spite of decades of disappointment. Their supporters aren’t religious zealots who have abandoned reason in favor of the same understanding of the natural world as desert dwellers 4000 years ago. The majority of citizens who elected the Democrats those few short months ago aren’t committed to the party and it’s current members the way Southern bigots are committed to hating the fags, blacks, and uppity women they feel the other party is comprised of. No, the democrats won because so many Americans were tired of being lied to while their democratic government acted as if they had been appointed by the Plutocrats who were making campaign contributions.

We aren’t any less tired of it now, Democrats. And we aren’t going to support you no matter how badly you serve our interests. Too bad.

The current state of the two parties are like the Pepsi Challenge- choose between two worthless products that are bad for your health and will take your teeth if you let them.

MOVIES- Pauline Kael

2009-10-01T01:15:00.002Z

In case you aren’t a student of film history, Pauline Kael was one of the most influential critics of film in its history. She came on the scene just as film was entering a period as the dominant American art form, writing for bastions of American literary tradition such as McCalls, The New Republic, and The New Yorker magazine. She attempted to bring film criticism to the level of criticism of literature or art- a scholarly examination of a creator’s attempt to create art that was complexly satisfying. In fact, she lost her job at McCalls for panning the saccharine THE SOUND OF MUSIC as the high fructose corn syrup that it was long before the chemical sweetener had become a staple of the American diet. She would inspire latter day critics such as Roger Ebert that film criticism might actually elevate the art form, and was no doubt an influence on Gary Groth when he founded The Comics Journal to do the same thing to a new medium that he loved.

I’ve been reading abridged versions of Pauline Kael’s movie reviews for the last two nights and I have to say that, in spite of her historical importance, based solely on her writing, she makes a good example of why film critics are considered both superfluous and irritating more often than enlightening. Getting past the New Yorker’s wildly pretentious style (and even though she was criticized for being ‘too lowbrow’ for the magazine- how times have changed!), her reviews of movies that have stood the test of time are rooted deeply in the periods of her life when she was in touch with the zeitgeist- the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. But as she grows older she gets more and more out of step with the culture and thus the art of movies until one has to wonder if she’s just an anachronism that has burned out on cinema, or an old woman who was a bitch to start with and has grown crabbier and crabbier with age. Perhaps the point of no return was Renata Alder’s review of her compilation of reviews When the Lights Go Down in which it was said that her work after the 1960’s contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility," In typical faux revolutionary obsequence to fallen idols, Salon.com derided this twenty years later. Obviously without looking at the reviews in question.

The straw that broke the camel’s back (and drove me to write this) was a phrase in her review of John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982): “Carpenter seems indifferent to whether we can tell the characters apart; he apparently just wants us to watch the apocalyptic devastation.” It seems almost impossible to believe that someone who spent their life watching and writing about movies could make such a completely oblivious statement. It’s almost like she wrote the review without seeing the movie.

The other thing that leaps out about Kael’s reviews is that there are damn few movies she likes. It’s the writing of a deeply cynical person, and that’s coming from someone who usually considers cynicism a virtue. Not so much in this case. Reading her reviews makes one think of music criticism written by someone who’s tone deaf or reading literary critique by someone who had their love of books quashed by spending too many years studying them in college. She sees sarcasm where none was intended. And she sometime misses the entire point of a movie. The irony is that she’s a caricature of movie critics herself. She decries bad writing while her writing is clumsy to the point of being almost indecipherable. She faults directors while exhibiting almost no narrative flow in her own prose. She, for fuck’s sake, can’t tell that John Carpenter spent almost the first hour of THE THING trying to establish the characters before the real monster shenanigans started! Yet she calls the 1951 version “wonderfully well staged” and “naturalistic”. Yeah. James Arness, Sheriff Matt Dillon for over twenty years on the television show GUNSMOKE dressed as a giant space potato is “naturalistic”.

Putting all that aside, there are movie insights here. Kael spent her life living in Hollywood and writing about movies, and obviously has an excellent education in literary criticism. She rightly intuits that The World According to Garp is about mutilation rather than sex (either the act or the gender). Instead of fawning over the scope of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns she comments that the director can’t do anything else- even scenes shot in small 19th century hotel rooms look cavernous, as if they were cathedrals (something parodied, whether knowingly or unconsciously in the first indoor scenes of Tarentino’s GLORIOUS BASTERDS). She acknowledges that the main cinematic idea in George Lucas’ STAR WARS was pace rather than special effects. She spots Mel Brooks YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN as being far more coherent than BLAZING SADDLES and thus Brooks’ best comedy. (And I’ll give her props for at least realizing that David Lynch’s movie ERASERHEAD is about a man’s sexual history, something many people who see the admittedly obtuse movie often miss). True, she did champion some movies that later were understood to be seminal- Altman’s NASHVILLE and MASH and Walter Hills THE WARRIORS, but truthfully I have to say that after reading a couple hundred reviews I was left with almost no new ideas about the movies she reviewed or movies in general.

There are basically two kinds of movie reviewers: those who simply recommend a movie because they liked it or didn’t (unfortunately most, your friends included), and those who attempt to illuminate a creator’s vision by expanding on themes and uncovering connections not obviously apparent. The former are usually disdained by the very people they write for as being unnecessary and irritating, since their readers are trying to decide what movie to see and probably already have a pretty good idea what they think they’ll like. And because their reviews are padded by plot summaries and rarely contain more than passing reference to what the movie actually has to offer since they are hobbled by not being able to discuss anything that might actually be interesting in the movie for fear of giving it away- the SPOILER ALERT syndrome. The latter are best read after having actually seen the movie. Like literary criticism, they are a discussion of a work, not a recommendation of it. Plot summaries have no place in this kind of reviewing, if you are unfamiliar with the work then the review probably won’t mean anything to you. The two are as different as telling a friend to go to a movie and having a conversation with a friend just after you’ve seen a movie together. Kael falls firmly into the second category, but falls with such a splat that one wonders if her impact was due more to her magazine’s importance that her own.

PERSONAL- A Late Night Alone: Three Songs

2009-09-23T04:28:00.000Z

A late night alone. I sit in a favorite chair, one that has held me so many times that has learned my shape well enough for us to blur together. The lights are off. And in the dark the music coils around me like wafting smoke. I can look inward, into the depths of my soul, and outward, to the heights of infinity.

Once during an interview Mick Fleetwood said that he and John McVie used to stand in the wings and cry every night while Christine sang this song. It’s easy to see why.

Life is sweet. I’ve never understood people who say that hell is here on earth. Someday not too far away, I’ll be gone. I want this song played at my funeral. This rendition is especially sweet. James and Carly were still very much in love when it was done.

And as usual, Steely Dan has said it better than I ever could. Looking back on life you can’t help but think about the things you miss. Fagan and Becker realize that talk comes before sex and that cars and houses are nice but the bridge reminds us that looking back and having loved someone completely, even if “by morning she was gone” makes life worth living.

PERSONAL- The Nail That Sticks Up

2009-09-16T04:12:00.004Z

I’ve just finished reading John Scalzi’s articles for AMC back to the beginning of the year and I highly recommend them to anyone who is interested in fantastic films or the ramblings of a great Sci-fi author. As usual I was “late to the boom” in becoming aware of Scalzi, but that’s OK because it allowed me to pick up his first three books all at once. Since I read far faster then most people write (and who doesn’t?) this gave me almost a week of Scalzigasm as an introduction, and I’ve been a fan ever since. His novel Old Man’s War is as good as it gets in Sci-fi, an interesting premise, memorable characters, scattered insight into both military culture and life itself, and a plausible universe if you can believe the incredible luck of the protagonist. The follow-up novels weren’t quite as good, but it’s a rare work that is. Nevertheless, finding a new author who writes in classical SF style so well is always a treat and Scalzi was that.

Just like his blog (one of the older and most read on the net), his column for AMC bounces around a lot, but no matter what the subject he’s entertaining and thoughtful. A few of the better columns deal with things like what makes a Sci-fi movie Sci fi, why 3-D movies don’t work, some of the EPIC FAIL in the design of the STAR WARS and STAR TREK universes, and even a Father’s Day scorecard of SF fathers (titled Who’s Your Daddy? and including an evaluation of Darth Vader’s parenting skills).

But while the AMC column is fun and lighthearted, it’s a particular entry on his blog that is the kind of thing that endears him to me. “Being Poor” is a blog entry that everyone, simply EVERYONE, should read.

Read it now, I’ll wait.

No really, READ IT!

I know all about being poor. When I was nine years old my mother finally left my alcoholic, abusive father; bundling up my seven year old brother and me and taking us to a different state in the middle of the night. It isn’t exaggerating to say that everything in my life changed. I went from living in a big city to living in a small town. I went from a predominantly black neighborhood to a place where black people were almost nonexistent. I went from being a child prodigy who had been tagged to be in the first group of students to go to an experimental school for advanced children to being placed in a class for developmentally challenged children when the officials at my new school misunderstood my mother’s explanation of the “special” school I was supposed to go to. But the biggest change was that I went from being a middle class kid to being poor.

When you are a kid for the most part such things don’t mean that much. The world is what it is and you don’t make fine distinctions. But even given that, it’s hard not to notice when you go from being a little bit better off financially than most of the kids you go to school with to barely having enough to eat and sometimes not having that. And, no doubt, the change was exacerbated by the southern small-town culture that I found myself in. In a small town everybody knows everybody and in the south everybody knows where they fit in the social hierarchy. Being poor and without a father in the home back then got me labeled as “white trash” immediately. I noticed it right away the first time I walked into the local 5 &10 cent store. The wizened crones that served as clerks only had two questions for me. “What fer ya, boy?” and “Who’s yer daddy?”. This was the same store that had been the highlight of my summer vacations every year when we visited my mother’s family. You see, this dime store had a table full of comic books with the covers half torn off that they sold for 5 cents each, and every year my father would take me there and let me pick out all the comics I wanted, which would then be hidden away in my parent’s closet until Christmas. But after my parents split up the store was different. Now I wasn’t buying a dollar or two worth of comics with my father watching. Now I was a poor kid who would pour through the pile trying to find which of books was worth the investment of my lone nickel or dime, watched over the whole time as if at any point I might suddenly scoop up an armload of the precious (presumed destroyed) books and bolt from the store, thus plunging it into financial ruin.

But the biggest change in my life wasn’t my new caloric intake or even my presumption of guilt whenever I walked across the threshold of a local merchant. The biggest change in my life was at school.

Even after the mistake of putting me with the “slow” children was rectified (a mistake that, looking back on it, was probably abetted by my mother also having to register my brother, who was profoundly mentally retarded, at the same time) (and, yah, we called it “retarded” back then) I was still never looked at the same way again. Luckily the people teaching the “special” class were a married couple of graduate students working on their PhD’s in education who caught on in a couple of days. It took me a week to confront one of them and ask what was going on (I’d been raised to respect my elders but by that time I knew that either some kind of mistake had been made or all the stereotypes I’d heard about inbred southern morons were horribly true). They administered a series of tests and soon my mother was faced with the idea that they wanted me to skip to the 10th grade. Rightly or wrongly, mom figured that I was dealing with enough culture shocks without suddenly finding myself with kids five years older than I was, so she vetoed this plan and I was moved to a regular fifth grade class. But being poor still was what most of my teachers saw.

The Fall of Empire- America as Rome- Talking to the Police

2009-09-02T09:43:00.009Z

The other day at work I had a particularly stupid woman say to me that she wasn't worried about the government looking into her private life. She had nothing to worry about because "I've never done anything wrong." You have to realize that this woman is someone who believes that the world was created in six twenty-four hour days, thinks that a hotel she stayed in once near the equator proves corolis force because two sinks in her bathroom drained different ways, and has been a nurse for over thirty years without knowing what the different sounds a lung makes on auscultation are. The infuriating thing about this moron is that she talks to everyone in a condescending tone without realizing that she is little more than an idiot. Making what Harlan Ellison said about arrogant stupidity all the more relivant.

("There's nothing worse than arrogant stupidity;
arrogance you can tolerate,idiocy you can get around,
outsmart,
but both together are inscrutable," he said.)

I've debunked her ideas about coralis force by siting Snopes.com without depending on the common sense argument (Common sense is not so common.- Voltare) that her two hotel sinks would have to straddle the equator perfectly to display such a thing even if the laws of centrifugal force didn't apply. I've read medical texts to her about lung sounds only to be told that the words "didn't mean that" even though they were plain. Yet here I am again trying to reason with a person who is, obviously, immune to logic. Thus is the fate of someone with more than a high-school-dropout mentality attempting to live in modern America. Every day you have to "suffer fools gladly" in spite of the fact that they are FOOLS.

But on the subject that innocent people are protected by our American system, I defer to a person who is far more aquainted with the workings of the law than I am. Here is what a law professor has to say about talking to the police. Listen to it and remember it if you have any dealings with the law. I've been a police officer and I can tell you that if you think the cops are looking for the guilty you are as naive and gullible as my friend at work.

WTF- Anti-corporatism, District 9, the Economic Meltdown, Basic Math, and Matt Taibbi. Kitchen Sink Optional.

2009-08-18T04:44:00.008+01:00

Another brief moment on District 9, but not really. Actually this is something I rarely do, that popular blog format- the point by point snipe. But it isn’t actually that either. It’s just that something reviewer Daniel Engber wrote in his review of District 9 for Slate.com well and truly pissed me off:

“And so the film abandons any pretense of exploring the dynamics of social upheaval. Instead we're treated to yet another take on the evils of corporatism. Could there be a more egregious sci-fi cliché? In Moon we had Lunar Industries Ltd.; in Wall-E it was Buy N Large; Blade Runner featured the Tyrell Corp. And let's not forget the executives from the bio-weapons division of Weyland-Yutani, who cause all the carnage in Aliens.
…
It's a little odd, if you think about it, that District 9—and the whole sci-fi genre—should be so hung up on this one issue. Especially since creatures that arrive from another planet so clearly stand in for humans who arrive from another country: space aliens, illegal aliens. On the io9 blog, Charlie Jane Anders has argued that the archetypes of science-fiction are refugees; indeed, a long list of sci-fi novels explore the theme of immigration in great detail.”

Duh! Most Golden Age SF was written by Jews and the genre emerged just before and after the second world war. How oblivious can Mr. Engber be?

“Film directors, too, have in the past used stories of marooned aliens to examine race relations (e.g. Brother From Another Planet, Alien Nation) and assimilation (e.g. The Man Who Fell to Earth, Superman). Yet recent sci-fi cinema continues to dwell on the corporate menace.”

Obviously the answer to my previous questions is: completely. Personally, I don’t find anything odd at all that SF is interested in corporatism. Corporations as they exist in the modern world are a virtually unparalleled organization in human history. Huge completely amoral social structures, without geographic boundaries, immensely influential and wealthy, often more powerful than governments, with no motive other than avarice, and a organizational structure which is basically a meritocracy where merit consists of being Machiavellian in the pursuit of personal ambition and power.

In fact, it seems that if corporations didn’t exist, SF would have had to invent them.

Corporate intrigue really hit mainstream SF with the advent of Cyberpunk. There had been cautionary tales of large business interests in SF before that- Cyril Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl’s classic The Space Merchants pretty much laid the groundwork for the idea that business interests would surpass both government and religion as the dominant organizational structure in human society. But with Cyberpunk, corporations became a SF staple right along with space travel, aliens, and technological advancement. It makes perfect sense. Corporatism has that wonderful Frankenstein monster duality that drama depends on. As technology becomes more complex it requires more resources to improve that technology. Yet as society progresses we expect government (naively) to become more responsive to the citizenry. Thus we become caught in a catch-22 of high-tech capitalism requiring decisive innovative organization while high-tech democracy requires more slow moving bureaucracy. In a Darwinian sense it’s easy to see why the natural selection of the marketplace, which reassesses feedback four times a year, would result in more powerful social organizations than government which are naturally and contrivedly resistant to change even in a democracy.

The result seems to be the system we currently find ourselves in. I haven’t commented for awhile on what Matt Taibbi has been writing in Rolling Stone over the last two months but it is the most cogent and clear explanation of the economic situation over the last 12 months that I’ve found. If I were to consider myself a diminutive Diogenes, Taibbi is perhaps the last honest man I’ve found in the media. He is non-partisan, hellishly smart, unrelenting in his pursuit of a story, and perhaps the funniest writer anywhere in the mainstream media. He often gets compared to Hunter S. Thompson and rails against the comparison. And for good reason. He may be as funny and irreverent as Thompson, but what he is practicing isn’t gonzo journalism- it’s real journalism. It’s just that in our Pepsi drinking, McDonalds eating, GAP wearing, plastic culture, where real debate is ignored and faux debate is ubiquitous, where “news” reporting has the same relationship to real news that the WWF has to real sport, he’s an oddity. Someone who looks deep into the world and reports on what he sees and is flabbergasted that his society is so completely stupid and gullible.

A couple of months ago he wrote an article for Rolling Stone that pretty much laid out one (just ONE) aspect of how the government came to give so much of the American population’s money to a few obscenely rich private organizations for no reason other than that they were a big part of the status quo that is turning this country into a slave state. Since then he’s been shouted down by any number of corporate shills (slate rears it's ugly head again- who says there aren't callbacks in my writing?) defending Goldman Sachs for both infiltrating our government and taking TRILLIONS of dollars out of taxpayer’s pockets. Now it looks like Taibbi may resemble that character in DISTRICT 9 awaiting trial for revealing his company's illegal business.

A democracy cannot stand without an informed electorate. And the lack of basic math skills in America is apalling. Here is a short primer of what you are being told without realizing it:

There are about 330 million people in the US.

An average family consists of 4 people.

So there are 82.5 million American families.

A trillion dollars is a thousand billion dollars. And a billion is a thousand million dollars. So a trillion is a million million. (Yeah, I know this is stupid, but what are you going to do?)

So every time you hear the word trillion, if you are a member of the average America family needs to think, “They just used TWELVE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE of my dollars.

That’s right but even that may be a little abstract. So instead, every time you hear trillion on the news remember that your family just bought somebody a 2008 Honda Accord!

(Look it up on kbb.com, the Kelly Blue Book site. I put in parameters for several cars and was non-plussed that last year’s Accord, at the base level, with 60,000 miles (as my top number- basically unlimited mileage on a one year old car), in good shape, resulted in about 13 thousand dollars. It seems a wildly low number. But OTOH I have a confession to make. I’m a middle-aged single man who makes what I consider a decent living and I can’t understand how an average American family lives on 50K a year with kids in school and cell phones for everybody. So I sure can’t realize how our government indebts every family for a year old Honda Accord for every trillion dollars they spend when the average family can’t afford to DRIVE year old Honda Accords.)

Anyway, a trillion dollars is every American family buying a car for somebody who already has more money than they could ever dream of. Last I heard, 50% of the wealth in this country is now controlled by the top 1% of the population. It is nothing short of obscene feudalism. And of all the corporate media, I’ve found only Matt Taibbi and a couple of others with the wavos to call our “representatives” out on it. Read his articles. Read his blog on True/Slant. He’s trying to clue you in.

Anyway, we’ve traveled far and wide in this post. And that’s why this blog has degenerated to movie reviews and random insaneness. The world is a complex place. And to really examine the problems in it takes complexity. A blog may not be the format for that and there may not be any place for it in an America that not only thinks there are simple answers to complex questions but can’t understand complex answers in the first place. Who knows. Matt is trying and SF continues to present cautionary tales of our own excess.

Next: facts about health care and the best superhero movie ever made.

Stay tuned…

MOVIES- District 9 Review

2009-08-17T06:59:00.003+01:00

ALIVE IN JOBURG- Neill Blomkamp’s original short film

Bookending the Summer Sci-Fi Sweepstakes, DISTRICT 9 presents a counterpoint to STAR TREK’s optimism and shiny, polished Starfleet Academy 90210 story with a gritty, documentary style action film. Also, ironically, DISTRICT 9 tries to give lip service to the kind of allegorical SF that the Star Trek television show was famous for but the movie didn’t bother with. Unfortunately the lip service is brief. Contrary to a lot of the early buzz, the movie isn’t really about apartheid, first contact with aliens, soulless corporate avarice, the similarities between black market commerce and the legal kind, or any of the other issues touched on. Because the only thing the movie does is touch them while it’s on it’s way to a conventional man-on-the-run-from-the-law plotline. The first twenty minutes are excellent, evoking the feeling of a sympathy for the prejudice against the aliens while still making them seem unreasonably downtrodden. But as soon as the plot gets rolling the mood is buried under a hail of shell casings. It’s not an uncommon flaw in low budget SF. Children of Men also established an interesting SF premise only to abandon it for the sake of making a chase movie. So I guess I can’t gripe too much about it. You have to take a movie on its own terms.

And as an action film DISTRICT 9 is pretty damn good. Neill Blomkamp does a fine job in his feature film directorial debut. The movie is exciting and you don’t really know what to expect next. Yeah, there are a number of silly plot holes (when you are framing an employee, making him the most wanted man in the city, remember to revoke his access to your top-secret lab) and some tired SF cliches (the magic of CGI still hasn’t liberated imaginations from humanoid aliens and if I see one more giant robot in a movie this summer I’m going to scream), but it also has some nice touches (I especially liked the blurb about one interviewee awaiting trial for revealing his company’s illegal experiments) and the pace never slows down. The token attempts to give the movie a little heart to go with all the carnage come off more as jokes than pathos, but Sharlto Copley does an excellent job of transitioning his character from an inept bureaucrat to a desperate man on the run who is literally losing everything, even his humanity. And what the hell, you really came to see people explode like water balloons dropped from the Trump Tower when hit by a lightning bolt from an alien weapon anyway, didn’t you?

So if you’re looking for serious SF that makes thoughtful statements about apartheid with aliens in the role of the oppressed minority, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you want a popcorn movie that has some great special effects and cool Ratchet and Clank weapons then line up and buy a ticket.

TELEVISION- The Most Common Things in the Universe are Hydrogen and Irony

2009-08-17T05:06:00.003+01:00

Apparently there is actually a television program where teen-aged girls seduce older men online and get them to come to their house where the men are then publicly embarrassed on television and then arrested.

And it’s called Dateline.

Which I think is also the name of a local singles hotline I occasionally see advertised on late night television.

Can anybody confirm this?

MUSIC- Big Noise, New York

2009-08-14T14:16:00.003+01:00

I found Steely Dan at about the same time I found David Cronenberg and William S. Burroughs. I became a believer in synchronicity immediately. Sure, I had been aware of their hit songs while in high school, but while I admired the artistry of songs like Hey, Nineteen, Gaucho, Do It Again, Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number, and Josie, it was at a dance at a friends house that I really turned on to them for the first time. Peg had everything a pop song should have and that includes the depth to make a music geek take notice. I owned a few records but the release of their catalogue on CD was a tipping point. Rarely has popular music demanded the clarity of digital reproduction, but digital masters of Steely Dan’s music revealed myriad nuances. Since then I’ve owned everything they’ve done, introduced every musically inclined friend to their music, and seen them live at Fiddler’s Green in Denver (annoying the poor people in front of me by singing along to every song). Becker and Fagen are sublime, together or apart, like Lennon and McCartney or Elton John and Bernie Tauplin. A musical duo with catchy tunes and real chops.

So I found this on YouTube and nowhere else. I would love to buy the track but can’t find it anywhere for sale. Such is the power of the internet to enhance old business models. There are several chord progressions that are reminiscent of other Fagen tunes here, but the song is still great.

Enjoy.

Since you left me darling
The city doesn't feel right
On the street the music stopped
And the light seem half as bright
Without your love
This old town's no fun at all
Without your love
I only hear the loudest voices
The one's with something new to sell
And now it's all
Big talk, big name, big noise, new york

I walk from the river to west broadway
Every stranger spoke your name
Every sign read 'yesterday'
Without your love

This old town's no fun at all
Without your love
I only see the drifting shadows
Of the losers and the lost
And now it's all
Big talk, big name, big noise, new york

There was a time
When the night was just for dancing
Till the sun rose over the skyline
But now you're gone
And the fear of winter grows
Just a place where the money flows
And there never was a springtime

Another season begins fast and loud
It's supposed to be a party
But to me, it's just a crowd

Without your love
This old town's no fun at all
Without your love
I'm left with all the memories darling
Of words I thought were true
But it was all
Big talk, big name, big noise, new york
Well, it was all
Big talk, big name, big noise, new york

Addendum on 08152010- the original video was taken down so here's another that preserves the song without the wonderful video made by a fan. Unfortunately, the internet can only route around so much censorship as damage. Every immune system eventually succumbs.

MOVIES- A Serious (Man) Trailer

2009-08-05T04:13:00.002+01:00

Ah, the Coen Brothers. Undoubtedly the most innovative and versatile directors working in film today. Is there a genre they haven’t turned upside-down and inside-out? They’ve made cult films (Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski), comedies (Raising Arizona, Burn Before Reading, The Ladykillers), Musicals (O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?), modern westerns (No Country For Old Men), crime dramas (Fargo, Miller’s Crossing), modern satire (Intolerable Cruelty), and period pieces (The Hudsucker Proxy). About the only thing they haven’t done is a Science Fiction story (unless you count The Man Who Wasn’t There) or had a movie that falls neatly into any of those genres (Hudsucker is comedy, No Country and Blood Simple are crime drama, Lebowski is modern satire, O’ Brother is period, etc.) There are only a few filmmakers who are able to stamp their films with a signature that is easily identifiable without resorting to certain stylistic mannerisms. To be unique, identifiable, and somehow completely different in each film seems impossible. Yet the Coen brothers manage it again and again. You might be able to connect Arizona with O’ Brother, or even Hudsucker. You might think that Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and No Country were all made by the same creators. The connection between Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn’t There might be obvious. But to think all these movies were made by the same two people simply boggles the imagination.

There has simply never been a filmmaker like the Coen brothers. (And if you think I messed up the tense of the verb then simply watch the interviews with cast and crew on their disks. The most common statement is that they seem to be two people with the same mind.)

So now we come to the trailer for their next film- A Serious Man. Like most of the trailers for their films you come away with a feeling for the film but no idea what it’s going to be like or about. Just enjoy a preview that doesn’t telegraph every important plot point (as so many trailers made by merchandising departments do nowadays) and stands on its own as a little piece of cinema verite.

Personally, I can’t wait.

POLITICS- You Might Be a Republican If…

2009-08-05T00:46:00.001+01:00

...you don’t immediately see what’s wrong with this.

I mean, really. You have to wonder if Bill is this stupid or he thinks his viewers are this stupid. But I’m sure that I’ll think about it the next time I hear some Fox News/Rush Limbaugh supporter rail against long-haired, pin-headed, college-edjumacated know nothings. The worship of stupidity in this country and the arrogance of people, both stupid and smart, who don’t think that actually knowing what you are talking about and being able to use reason and logic to come to a decision is worthwhile. As Thomas Jefferson said, education performs the same purpose for intelligence that sharpening does for a knife. A dull knife is a worthless tool. And no matter how smart you are if you haven’t honed your mind by learning it does you no good.

Bill could stand to have his mind whetted by some basic math.

ART- 3D Hamburger Art

2009-07-30T07:27:00.001+01:00

This is pretty cool. It’s a presentation of 3D images projected on the façade of the Galerie der Gegenwart, the third of a trio of buildings which comprise the Hamburger Kunsthalle, an art museum in Hamburg, Germany.

555 KUBIK_ extended version from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

TECHNOLOGY- James Randi Debunks the Audiophiles

2009-07-30T06:56:00.004+01:00

I’ve ranted about the silliness of some high markup accessories sold in electronics stores before but I thought this was interesting.

FWIW, I’ve been an audiophile ever since my best friend in high school’s brother introduced me to the concept. I watched records become eight-tracks become cassette tapes. I bought one of the first CD players in the mid 1980s and took it to the electronics store I managed at the time to let my employees see the new paradigm in audio reproduction. I had Dolby surround when nobody knew what it was, owned a second generation VHS machine, bought a six foot projector when the light output was dismal that it required a curved glass beaded screen to be watchable, owned a few Laserdisc players, Betamax machines, DVD players and now two Blu-Ray players and an HD-DVD (that I have one movie for). In short, I’ve been around the block a few times.

But finally the quality got so good and the bullshit got so deep that I gave up the quest for the best thing out there. Nowadays pretty good is actually pretty damn fine. And while I still like for things to look and sound right I can’t work up any enthusiasm for upgrading my 720P DLP theater projector and will probably have my 1080P 72” rear projector in the living room for years, in spite of the fact that it’s almost 20” deep.

A lot of this is due to the overabundance of silly crap in audiophile circles. It’s always been there. Whether it was phonograph cartridges with exotic materials, or tube amps, or later edging your CDs with magic marker. But the reverence for high end cables has always taken the cake for me. How in the world would anybody be stupid enough to pay as much for a cable to hook up a disk player as they paid for the player itself? But in spite of simple logic (Do you think your $400 Blu-Ray player has $400 wires inside of it?) or numerous double-blind tests that prove even the most golden eared ‘philes can’t hear a difference, people still do.

So James Randi, famed magician and debunker of paranormal claims for over 40 years, has finally made the ultimate challenge. Prove you can tell the difference between a regular set of speaker wires and a set of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables and he’ll give you ONE MILLION DOLLARS! The challenge has been out for three years now and nobody has taken the money.

Or, to quote the cut Googlephonics from Steve Martin’s album Comedy is Not Pretty:

I bought a Stereo! Wow! With two speakers!

But then I heard the quad with the four speakers and I was like this is it, so I got rid of the stereo and got the quad.

I’m listening to this thing and I’m like “Hey this sounds like SHIT!”

So, I got rid of that and got the dodecaphonic with the 12 speakers.

This was more to my liking…for a while.

But the ear gets pretty sophisticated pretty fast and I got rid of that and got the milliphonic with the 1,000 speakers.

And I’m listening to that one and I’m like, “Hey, this sounds like SHIT too! The other one was SHIT one, this one is SHIT too!”

So, I traded that in and got the googlephonic, which is the highest number of speakers you can have before infinity.

Sounds like SHIT!

So, then I said, “Hey, maybe it’s the needle!”

I had the typical diamond needle. I searched around got the moonrock needle, cost me 3 million bucks, but what the hey. So, now I have a googlephonic stereo with a moonrock needle.

It’s okay for a car stereo, I wouldn’t want it in my house.

POLITICS- Dennis Prager Has 10 Questions About Health Care

2009-07-29T05:05:00.004+01:00

Dennis Prager has written an article that asks 10 questions about the health care debate and postulates that no one can answer them. I haven’t said anything about health care because I’ve been waiting to see not if the Democrats were going to screw it up but how the Democrats were going to screw it up. If you think the Dems are any less beholden to money they get from the Insurance industry than the Reps are then you think the Dems weren’t equally responsible for the banking meltdown or the Iraq war. I’ve got news for you, both parties are working for the same people and those people aren’t the American public at large. That’s why Dems keep talking about needing a Bi-Partisan plan even though they have enough votes to do it unilaterally. They need some cover for the crap they are going to build into the bill to protect the insurance industry!

But Prager is just a moron. So here are the answers to his idiotic questions.

1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea?

Since this question (and the other nine for that matter) isn’t a question but a group of questions I’ll take each one in turn. (I used to listen to Prager’s radio show in Denver so his inability to count isn’t surprising to me.) First of all, it isn’t a “government takeover”, it’s an alternative to having a quarter of the country without health insurance. And it’s a way of having some control over costs that we are all paying anyway.

> What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget?

This is a good point and why I’m not completely without sympathy for the Tea Party Revolutionaries and anyone else who thinks government isn’t the first, best answer to most problems. Unfortunately, we only have two choices: (1) deal with the problem or (2) ignore the problem. We’ve been ignoring the problem and that has escalated costs anyway. Unless you are happy that if you aren’t rich in our society then eventually you are going to get a major illness and when you do it’s going to take away everything you’ve been able to acquire during the course of your life then you realize we have to do something.

> Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to "pay for itself," let alone get smaller rather than larger over time?

Because insurance companies are profitable. Saying that you don’t think the government can do it is not the same as saying that it can’t be done. Insurance companies do it.

> Why not simply see how the Democrats can reform Medicare and Medicaid before nationalizing much of the rest of health care?

Medicade and Medicare are in trouble because the population is aging. Having a universal health care system would actually help these systems by including the younger wage earning population. It’s called “dispersed risk” and it’s the reason insurance was invented in the first place.

2. President Obama reiterated this past week that "no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition." This is an oft-repeated goal of the president's and the Democrats' health care plan. But if any individual can buy health insurance at any time, why would anyone buy health insurance while healthy?

Because they were required to. Like they are required to buy car insurance.

> Why would I not simply wait until I got sick or injured to buy the insurance?

See above answer.

> If auto insurance were purchasable once one got into an accident, why would anyone purchase auto insurance before an accident?

Because they are required to. Why is this so hard? If you want to drive a car, you have to have insurance. If you want to live in a country where health insurance is considered a right, you have to buy health insurance. It’s no different than wanting the roads paved or the military to protect us from invaders. We all pay for the things we decide are necessary for the common welfare. It’s the purpose of government in a democracy.

> Will the Democrats next demand that life insurance companies sell life insurance to the terminally ill?

Straw man. Nobody is talking about life insurance.

> The whole point of insurance is that the healthy buy it and thereby provide the funds to pay for the sick. Demanding that insurance companies provide insurance to everyone at any time spells the end of the concept of insurance. And if the answer is that the government will now make it illegal not to buy insurance, how will that be enforced? How will the government check on 300 million people?

Uh, the way they do with taxes? And you notice that here he does realize what ‘dispersed risk’ is even though he pretended not to earlier.

3. Why do supporters of nationalized medicine so often substitute the word "care" for the word "insurance?"[?]

I don’t know why either. What we are talking about is a government run health insurance plan, not government run health care. I’m sure the Republicans would have called it something more attractive.

>[I]t is patently untrue that millions of Americans do not receive health care. Millions of Americans do not have health insurance but virtually every American (and non-American on American soil) receives health care.

And that’s the whole problem. These people are being cared for and we are all paying for it. The only difference is that we have no control over that. And the result of having no control is that most of that care is being delivered in Emergency Rooms. If you don’t have health care you don’t go to your local doctor- he’s going to tell you to fuck off. You go to the Emergency Room where they HAVE to take you. The result is that when you show up in an ER you sit in the waiting room bleeding while the treatment room you should be in is filled with the child of some welfare mother who waited until her child had been throwing up for three days before seeking treatment. Giving people who rely on ER’s for standard treatment an option, and making them use that option is the only way to keep the system working.

> No one denies that in order to come close to staying within its budget health care will be rationed. But what is the moral justification of having the state decide what medical care to ration?

Because the state has to be responsible to the whole citizenry while the insurance companies only have to be responsible to their stockholders. Do you think care isn’t rationed now? Are you familiar with the word “triage”? This claim is simply more rhetoric without understanding. Something I’ve found Prager to be full of. (As well as the other thing he’s full of.)

4. According to Dr. David Gratzer, health care specialist at the Manhattan Institute, "While 20 years ago pharmaceuticals were largely developed in Europe, European price controls made drug development an American enterprise. Fifteen of the 20 top-selling drugs worldwide this year were birthed in the United States." Given how many lives -- in America and throughout the world – American pharmaceutical companies save, and given how expensive it is to develop any new drug, will the price controls on drugs envisaged in the Democrats' bill improve or impair Americans' health?

This is the same argument the republicans use to prevent taxing the rich. If you tax the people with all the money they won’t invest it. BULLSHIT! In fact, this is bullshit squared. First of all, European drug companies were suddenly working in an environment where they didn’t have to develop new drugs to get paid, they could just import drugs from America and get paid for them. By making the European drug companies compete on a level playing field with American companies you not only spur development on both sides of the Atlantic, you stop Americans from having to bear the brunt of all the R&D for the whole world. When the rest of the world stops being able to profit from American research subsidies perhaps they will get back into the business of developing drugs and treatments.

5. Do you really believe that private insurance could survive a "public option"?

Ah! Finally we get to the heart of it. This isn’t about what’s best for America or Americans or even the world. This is all about protecting the insurance companies obscene profits.

6. Or is this really a cover for the ideal of single-payer medical care?

Huh? Personally I’m a proponent of going back to the system we had before the end of the second world war. If medicine wants to compete in the free marketplace, then let them get paid the same way everybody else does. I don’t have plumber insurance, or furniture insurance, or television insurance. When I want one of those things I pay for them. Likewise, fifty years ago if you wanted to see a doctor you paid him out of pocket. It kept costs in check. It established a meritocracy (truly great doctors could command a premium payment). And it was a free market. Is that what the conservatives want? Hell no.

> How could a private insurance company survive a "public option" given that private companies have to show a profit and government agencies do not have to – and given that a private enterprise must raise its own money to be solvent and a government option has access to others' money -- i.e., taxes?

Duh. The whole debate is about whether there should be a middle-man in healthcare who decides who lives and dies and whether they should have any accountability to the average citizen or just to making money off the deal. Leave it to Prager to miss the whole point. If insurance companies can’t compete then tough. They shouldn’t have gamed the system until they broke it.

7. Why will hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies do nearly as superb a job as they now do if their reimbursement from the government will be severely cut?

Because half of more money than you should have is better than none? Because if they wanted to be whores for money they would have been political pundits, not doctors? Because caring for the sick has always been a calling while being a propagandist for your rich masters was always a job for wanton whores?

Dennis, everybody ain’t like you. Some of us have a conscience. There have always been doctors, even when getting rich wasn’t part of the equation.

> Haven't the laws of human behavior and common sense been repealed here in arguing that while doctors, hospitals and drug companies will make significantly less money they will continue to provide the same level of uniquely excellent care?

Again, everybody isn’t like you. Some of us think that there is more to alleving human suffering than making a fat paycheck.

8. Given how many needless procedures are ordered to avoid medical lawsuits and how much money doctors spend on medical malpractice insurance, shouldn't any meaningful "reform" of health care provide some remedy for frivolous malpractice lawsuits?

My answer to this has been the same since I was in college twenty years ago in Florida, when doctors were getting out of the profession because their malpractice premiums were skyrocketing. Fifty percent of the malpractice claims at that time were against four percent of the doctors in the state! Which is easier? Getting rid of the four percent who were making all the mistakes or driving all the good doctors out of the system?

Frivolous lawsuits? Often the only way we have to weed out bad doctors is through the civil courts. You want to take away the last check and balance in a health care system run by doctors who wont censure their own even when there is compelling evidence that they are incompetent?

9. Given how weak the U.S. economy is, given how weak the U.S. dollar is, and given how much in debt the U.S. is in, why would anyone seek to have the U.S. spend another trillion dollars?

Given how we’ve gone into debt to fund a worthless war and to fund a bailout for Goldman Sachs and the other richest people in the country, how can we insure the plebeians? Agro-business subsidies? Sure! Corporate welfare? You betcha! Why is it that the Republicans always draw the line only when some regular citizens might get some good from it?

> Even if all the other questions here had legitimate answers, wouldn't the state of the U.S. economy alone argue against national health care at this time?

Again, WE ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR THE UNINSURED! Do you think when someone uninsured gets treatment that the Health Fairy pays for it? Your health care costs and insurance payments go up to pay for the treatment! The only difference is whether you want to pay a 1-2 percent surcharge for Medicare’s overhead or a 20-30 percent surcharge for the insurance industry’s overhead.

10. Contrary to the assertion of President Obama -- "we spend much more on health care than any other nation but aren't any healthier for it" -- we are healthier. We wait far less time for procedures and surgeries. Our life expectancy with virtually any major disease is longer. And if you do not count deaths from violent crime and automobile accidents, we also have the longest life expectancy. Do you think a government takeover of American medicine will enable this medical excellence to continue?

Sorry, this is just more Prager bullshit. We pay more than almost every other industrialized nation as a percent of GDP, we don’t have the longest life expectancy, and we don’t have the most access to treatment. Don’t trust me- look it us for yourself!

TELEVISION- Shatner on Palin

2009-07-29T04:20:00.003+01:00

I hate to perpetrate a silly internet meme but this is JUST TOO GOOD.

And she might have been president!

TELEVISION- Craig Ferguson's Monologue Last Tuesday Night

2009-07-27T07:19:00.001+01:00

Rarely do you get to see something this true on network TV.

Craig hints at another truth. Young people are also EASIER to sell crap to because they tend to be more impulsive and more prone to folly than older people.

I used to have a young friend who once said, “I’m never going to lose touch with what’s going on in youth culture as I get older.” I pointed out that being interested in the same things when you are 40 that interested you when you were 20 can be a kind of failure. As you grow older (and hopefully wiser) your interests should change. If not, you wind up being that old guy at the club who everybody else makes fun of because he’s kind of creepy. At some point you go from “still cool” to pathetic. Youth culture is only revered by the young, the dysfunctional, or people who want to sell things that more discerning adults either don’t have any interest in or time for.

MOVIES- Knowing is better if you don't know, you know?

2009-07-19T02:51:00.005+01:00

Here there be Spoilers. If you can spoil this movie by giving away any of the plot points, which all telegraph themselves so clearly as to be anticlimactic. No, the pleasure of this movie (and there is some pleasure to be enjoyed watching this movie, even if it is guilty pleasure) is simply by sitting back, putting your mind in a jar for the evening, and watching it transpire.

KNOWING is the same kind of movie that Hollywood has made a lot of lately. Pseudo-serious, pseudo-smart action flicks that try real hard to look like they have something profound to say but don’t have a single idea in their itty-bitty heads. Adaptations of Phillip K. Dick stories sort of started this trend. MINORITY REPORT, PAYCHECK, and the Cage vehicle NEXT were all examples of this type of movie. Lift the central conceit out of a Phil Dick story, ignore all the subtlety and ambiguity to dumb it down for a moviegoing audience, and fill it out with standard movie clichés (the dead wife, the estranged father, the protagonist playing the part of Cassandra as the rest of the world thinks he’s crazy, a couple of chases). Dan Brown’s DA VINCI CODE was a better-done version of this, while The National Treasure movies were among the dumber examples of this mini-genre. Take a fringe idea like that the Founding Fathers of the US were Masons and that Masons are in league with the Illuminati and the Tri-lateral Commission to run every government in the world and they put a treasure map with the location to the Masonic treasury on the back of the Declaration of Independence. (Or something. Who the hell knows what the mish-mash the plot of NATIONAL TREASURE was?) Drop in the parent sub-plot and some car chases and VIOLA! You’ve got a movie.

The “idea” in KNOWING is two-fold. First, it eschews the Cassandra motif to directly rip off the Cassandra story. Nick Cage knows the future but no one believes him and he can’t change it in spite of his foreknowledge. But that’s just smoke and mirrors for the grand larceny of the payoff. This is what science fiction readers call a “Shaggy God” story, one of the most egregious SF cliches there is. Yes, after two hours of father-son angst, scenes of someone watching late night TV with a liquor bottle in their hand as shorthand for the grief and loss of having a spouse die, Nick Cage screaming at people, rushing from place to place very quickly for no apparent reason, etc, the payoff is “And she called him Adam, and he called her Eve”. There’s even a capping scene where the future parents of mankind are running through a golden field wearing white homespun smocks toward a lone, iconic tree. All that’s left out is a serpent, which is another aspect of the “shaggy God” story- a tree of knowledge without an adversary. The story is a complete waste of space. There’s no real drama; people just say what they’re feeling. There’s no clear-cut through-line; the movie jumps from sci-fi to horror to mystery instead of taking an idea and running with it. There’s no sense of real people being informed and changed by the events of their lives; every character is the sum total of their relationship with their parents, their job, and whatever traumas they have had.

None of this is anything new for director Alex Proyas. His career has been a litany of visually interesting movies that are ambitious in concept but completely oblivious to cliché. Ironically, I still continue to watch his movies because they are so visually interesting, not because there’s going to be any meat beneath the skin. But at least he tries, which says more about how worthless most commercial films are than how great his films have been. He first came to attention with THE CROW, an adaptation of a graphic novel that was basically I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE with bad art and purple prose and enough supernatural bullshit thrown in to make it palatable for comic book sensibilities. In those aspects, the movie was a faithful adaptation of the book, except with better visuals. Next was Dark City, a better-than-average SF film that was dark and moody, brutal with it’s characters, and ultimately ended with a SF cliché that was already old when John Campbell was still editing Astounding. Then came the much maligned (and rightfully so) I, ROBOT. Again, this was him taking Campbellian SF and putting its central concept (the Three Laws of Robotics) out so he could put it through the sausage grinder of commercial movie stupidity. All these are genre movies that are visually arresting but so mired in mediocre stories that they can only manage to be a little better than average. It’s not an uncommon problem with SF films. There have been numerous SF films about the earth being hit with a comet or meteor: ARMEGEDDON, METEOR (both the 1979 and 2009 versions), and DEEP IMPACT to name a few, but nobody has bothered to adapt Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s incredible Lucifer’s Hammer. Why keep making inferior (vastly inferior) stories when such an excellent story about the scenario has already been written?

So the bottom line on KNOWING is that it’s not a bad popcorn movie but it isn’t a particularly good one. It has a good airplane crash in it, and I have a personal failing that if a movie shows me a good plane crash I feel more generous toward it than I should. (I used to have recurring dreams about seeing a plane crash when I was younger so I guess there’s something Freudian there.) And at least Proyas doesn’t lead up to the destruction of the earth and then have it saved at the last minute. (Oops, spoiler. But only if you aren’t the kind of person who would tune in for a good look at the end of the world. If you are, and I am, then it’s actually not so much a spoiler as a teaser.) Don’t expect much (And how much could you expect? Nick Cage is in it, for God’s sake! Is there a better litmus test for low expectations than that?) and you won’t be disappointed.

MOVIES- Watchmen on Blu-Ray (Twice, like Dr. Manhattan)

2009-07-10T00:34:00.002+01:00

WATCHMEN* is being released on Blu-Ray in a couple of weeks. It’s billed as the Director’s Cut but in a strange piece of pissing-right-there-in-your-Wheaties marketing an advertisement for the Ultimate Double-Secret Super Director’s Cut is included in the box! At least there’s a $10 coupon for the more complete edition included. Or is it a coupon for K-Y Jelly?

It’s easy to be snarky about DVD marketing. Rarely is a movie released nowadays that doesn’t have at least two variations on disk. First there were the widescreen/pan-and-scan variants (disk has two sides = problem solved). Then there were the theatrical/director’s cut flavors (DVDs have this thing called Branching technology that allows them to random access different parts of the disk so different versions of the same movie can co-exist on the disk). Then there was just the constant re-release of movies, often with little or no difference even in the special materials, just new cover art. I believe much of the problem of slow acceptance of HD disk formats such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is due to consumers having been so burned that they figured it was just another way for Hollywood to re-sell them movies they already owned again. After years of VARIANT COVER nonsense even comics fans figured out they were being played for fools (thought Marvel and DC are still in there swinging at the low hanging fruit), can movie fans be that much stupider?

I used to say that if I wasn’t buying a movie on DVD, just licensing it’s use, then whenever a new edition came out I should be given that version either gratis or at a substantial discount. After all, I already hold a license to use it.

And that’s why it’s easy to be snarky, but it isn’t exactly fair to be, when it comes to the new WATCHMEN release. True, Warner Bros. isn’t exactly advertising that they already plan for a bigger version of the same movie to be released in less than six months but you can’t really blame them for that. And they are softening the blow for anyone unaware of the later edition by including the coupon (which harkens back to my “I already own a license” idea). There are some value-added advantages to owning the earlier Blu-Ray- such as participating in the 2009 Comic Con showing via BD Live, in addition to satisfying the childish ‘I want it NOW’ feeling we all succumb to from time to time. The special features look fantastic, it does include 24 minutes of added footage (although not the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story from the graphic novel) and Amazon is even sweetening the pot by allowing you to watch the movie via internet on the day of release if you’ve pre-ordered the disk.

My first impulse was to wait for the expanded edition. I’ve vowed that I wasn’t going to repurchase any more movies that I already own except in extreme circumstances. (Do you have any idea how many copies of Terminator 2 or Blade Runner I’ve bought since owning them on LaserDisk? Neither do I.) But since buying the version with the Black Freighter included and commentary by Dave Gibbons** is a certainty and since the net cost of the first version is only $13 on Amazon when you consider the coupon, I have to say that somebody will be getting a slightly used copy of WATCHMEN- the Director’s Cut on BD for Christmas and I’ll be buying two copies of the same movie this year after all.

* Original review of WATCHMEN here. I honestly have never figured out what all the hate was for this movie (except for the possible reasons mentioned in the review). Sure, it’s not Citizen Kane, but it’s a damn fine comic book movie and had it not been an adaptation of such a revered graphic novel I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t have done better. I loved Dark Knight, but Watchmen was everything everyone said about DK- moody, serious, literary, visually fantastic, morally ambiguous, and nuanced- only more so. Sure, I could quibble too. The soundtrack was much maligned but nobody I’ve read picked out the biggest soundtrack mistake I noticed- that if you were going to play Simon and Garfunkle over the Comedian’s funeral scene you should have played The Boxer rather than Bridge Over Troubled Water. Watchmen is one of the ten best comic book movies ever made. (In no order they are: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, X-Men, Iron Man, SpiderMan II, SpiderMan, X-Men II, Superman II, and Road to Perdition.) If you can’t enjoy it then you need to examine why.

**…and all I have to say to Alan Moore about being such a party pooper about the whole thing is that I would have loved to hear you talk about the movie on the audio track and I would have been proud for you to be financially improved by a small bit of the money I’ve spent and will spend on the fruits of your imagination. But seriously, you’re taking yourself way too seriously. You wrote some entertaining comic book stories and, yeah, you may even be the best writer comics have ever seen. But get over yourself. Lighten up. The world would be a much better place if self-important assholes like you would just try to contribute to the total amount of fun that exists instead of going all teen-aged angsty and pouting for the last half of your life. William Faulkner went to Hollywood and wrote screenplays! Sure, he was a drunken reprobate, but in my experience drunken reprobates are more fun than egomaniacal goth “wizard” shitheads any day of the week. Why don’t you crawl up J. D. Salinger’s ass and then have him crawl up the ass of James Joyce’s rotting corpse so all of you can consider yourselves kings of infinite space there in your nutshells? In short- Fuck you, Alan Moore. What a crybaby!

POLITICS- Rush Limbaugh hates America.

2009-06-15T13:45:00.002+01:00

In case you had any doubt that the right wing has no love for this country except when they can control it, and in case you have any incredulity left as to how far the right wing is willing to fall into the depths of stupidity- get this: Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt are calling for a boycott of General Motors! Plainly their opinion is, “Screw America, Screw the elected government, screw our fellow American workers, and screw everybody who isn’t a mindless zombie follower of whatever we decide is conservative in this country.” Hard to believe that just a few short months ago these heinous trolls were calling anybody who didn’t pledge unconditional fealty to a president (who started two wars, sat numbly for minutes after being told of 9/11, instituted rules allowing the government to spy on and incarcerate American citizens without due process, and presided over the ruining of the economy) un-American and un-patriotic! Now JUST because the guy trying to save the American auto industry is on the other side politically they want to wreck the country. (Yeah, JUST. If you think Rush Limbaugh gives a damn about socialism for any reason other than that he backed the other horse then you believe it when fat, rich, white guys tell you that fat, rich, white guys aren’t the problem. Or that the Republican party cares anything about Christianity even though they did nothing but pay lip service to that constituency the whole time they were in power. The man, and obviously the party, has no scruples!)

It was OK when Bush handed out hundreds of billions to bankers with no strings attached even though they had ruined the economy, and millions of American's 401Ks in the process. But let Obama try to save GM by winding up with a controlling share for a few years in the hope that the company can pull itself out of their current troubles and that Americans might even be able to recoup their investment while keeping their jobs and Rush is ready to boycott an American company owned by the taxpayers to make sure it doesn't work. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! Face it Dittoheads, Rush would rather you all starve than see Obama do anything good for the country.

PERSONAL- The Vampyre Lifestyle

2009-06-15T12:19:00.003+01:00

Working nights is the perfect schedule for someone who doesn’t mind sleeping all day, being up all night, and spending a lot of time entertaining themselves. Commonly referred to as people “with no life”, these independent souls tend toward careers in writing, art, the convenience store industry, and corporate security. My father was a night shift worker in the Colonial Bread bakery in Indianapolis when I was a kid. But he worked every night and was up every evening by the time I got home from school so it wasn’t so different than having a dad who worked in the daylight and slept at night. Except when I would wake up in the middle of the night and hear the voices of him and a couple of his friends in the kitchen- drinking and talking. On nights when he didn’t have friends over I have no idea how he entertained himself. Back then there was no Internet, no cable, and the three local TV networks signed off around midnight after playing the national anthem. (In fact, for years when I was a kid I thought that there was some kind of law that required playing the national anthem after every late night horror movie, since I only got to stay up that late on Saturday night to watch the weekly creature feature.) When I look back on it I suspect that most of dad’s time was spent drinking. But I don’t think he spent that many sleepless nights. Mostly because the drinking he did in the evenings on the days he didn’t work usually found him passed out by bedtime.

Anyway, if you don’t drink and you work nights then the Internet is a Godsend. Even nowadays television in the wee hours is a wasteland even by the typical wasteland standards of television. 300+ channels on DirecTV and by 2:00 AM most of them are showing infomercials for naked girl vids, miracle cures, exercise plans, or pee-pee lengthening pills. It makes me long for the days of slow fades from flags to jet planes to war memorials with the Star Spangled Banner playing in the background followed by a screen of calm, blessed static. But the Internet changes the game. It’s a true 24-hour business. Anything you can do online in the middle of the afternoon you can do 12 hours later with little or no difference. The Internet has no circadian rhythm, just like night shift workers! Finally an end to the disenfranchisement of the chronic insomniac!

So what have I been doing online for the last few weeks while working nights?

Watching television ONLINE!

See, the other thing that working nights does is leave most people chronically fatigued. Regular night shift workers either acclimate or get a day job. (Or die, I read somewhere that working nights takes 7 years off your life.) I could be writing, or playing videogames, or painting, or exercising, or even going down to the Wal-Mart (the only place open 24 hours in my small town) to watch the virtual circus side show of customers who wander in there in the middle of the night. But all those take a surprising amount of energy when you can’t sleep but have been up for 36 hours straight. Instead I find that mostly I read, listen to music, and watch television- basically anything that requires a minimal amount of concentration and a near non-existent amount of movement. Usually I’ve been too tired to even write reviews of the movies I’ve seen lately. When I do have a couple of days off I jump into the car and get the hell out of the house, snapping up as much sunshine, activity, and regular human contact as possible.

Anyway, spending a lot of time web-surfing isn’t all bad. As I hope to demonstrate by sharing some of the videos I’ve found online.

So lets start with one of JoCo's latest masterpieces, which is so appropriate that I've been playing it a lot. Go to his website to listen to (and buy) the fully arranged version which is better and has some wonderfully recorded bird sounds too.

PERSONAL- Roads Not (yet) Taken

2009-06-15T09:03:00.002+01:00

Within the first few weeks after I moved to Colorado there was a story on the news of four people in a Jeep Cherokee going off a mountain road and falling 1500 feet. That's right. 1500 FEET! Nevertheless, our own Wrangler was destined to log thousands of miles off-road over the next several years. And although there were times I wasn't sure we had enough traction or even room for the wheels (once we followed a four-wheeler trail for over ten miles before we found out that it wasn't a road) there were only a few times when I was in actual fear for my life.

Can't wait to vacation in La Paz so I can travel this road.

Various Stuff

2009-06-10T15:18:00.004+01:00

The newest thing in beauty treatments. Although at $250 a pop (heh-heh) it does seem overpriced. Anyone wishing to try this please contact me personally and I'm sure we can work something out.

Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the web when he put the first webserver on a neXT computer in the summer of 1991, has begun to study the web itself. He conserned with a host (heh-heh) of issues from how the web is changing the basic paradigm of human interaction to emergent properties that we may be unaware of. According to Tim, there are currently about as many web pages are their are neurons in the human brain. Although the comparison is basically apples/oranges it is interesting.

One thing he might study is the election of a representative of the Pirate Party to the European Union's Parliament. This may be the first time a political party based on an internet issue (in this case file sharing) has ever been elected to a governing body. Harbinger of things to come.

And on a connected note, when Tim Berners-Lee changed the internet forever with the hypertext transfer protocol he made this story inevetable. AT&T is shutting down their Usenet servers. For those of you too young or not geeky enough to know what Usenet is, that's one of the ways people communicated with each other over the net before webpages and webforums existed. Newsgroups were giant forums where people who shared a particular interest could discuss whatever they wanted to about that interest. If you were a fledgling bagpiper you could subscribe to rec.arts.bagpipes and get information from other bagpipers about which reeds lasted longest or such minutiae. There were thousands of newsgroups on virtually every subject from alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die where haters of purple singing dinosaurs could gather to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated where Michael J. Straczynski was perhaps the first SF television creator to communicate directly with his audience as the show was being aired (similar to what Ron D. Moore did with his Battlestar Galactica podcasts except a lot more interactive and with more typing). AT&T isn't the first big ISP to give up Usenet, Comcast and Time Warner did so almost a year ago, but it's another reminder that the time when the net was the domain (heh-heh) of techies and geeks is long since over. Viva la Endless September!

Unix is 40 this year. It would be almost impossible to state how important this little OS was in the development of the computing technologies we use today. And once again, written by a couple of geeks in their spare time. You have to wonder why more companies don't follow the lead of Bell Labs in the 1960s. Hire smart people and let them invent smart things! Put your management and marketing departments where they belong- in a subordinate role to the creators! I honestly think when the history of the last 20 years is written they will attribute the fall of the American empire to the shift from the way we did things in the 60s and 70s to the rising predominance of management and marketing based thinking. As Frank Herbert once said, "Any bureaucracy immediately establishes as its primary goal the administration of itself." I'm looking at you, Sony.

And a prime example of this is how businesses routinely ruin social networking on the web with their ubiquitous advertising.

Two months ago I gave up cable TV (actually it was satellite) so I thought this article on HULU and web video was interesting. The convergence of home video and the web seems just as inevitable as the death throws of Usenet. The bigger picture may be that the net will actually save mankind. When you consider the economies of scale derived from transitioning from atoms to bits (as Nicholas Negroponte explained so well in his 1995 book Being Digital) it's easy to imagine that the internet may wind up being the greenest technology of all. We already get most of our music over the net. Books are not far behind (I have two friends with Kindles and it is as cool a technology as I've ever seen. I was telling one of these friends about a book I was reading the other day and she pulled out her Kindle and downloaded it while we were talking! It's just a little too fresh in the early adopter phase on price and screen performance for me. ) When we finally figure out what a waste it is to make everybody come downtown every morning to sit at computers and do tasks they could just as easily do at home we will go a long way toward fixing both our dependence on oil and the traffic problem. (Not to mention going back to a family lifestyle that allows families to be together a lot more. The way our agrarian forbears had it for most of human history.) Ditto hi-def teleconferencing and jet travel. Education should be transformed in a similar fashion- no more carting kids back and forth every day. Maybe we'll even decide that the net's peer-to-peer paradigm is the way to generate energy and give up large centralized power generators for individual solar or wind or geothermal generation. Everyone could generate their own energy the same way most people used to grow their own food, using what they needed and selling the rest to the neighbors. The technolgy is coming or already here, the problem is political. People who crave power don't like decentralization. Big Brother likes all of us to drink from the same well (as long as he owns the well). But if we play our cards right the future is going to be more pastoral, local, social, and free-market than it ever has been.

Since 2007 the Japanese spacecraft Kaguya has been orbiting the moon gathering data to determine its origin, among other things. Yesterday it finally crashed into the surface. But as the probe's orbit has decayed it has sent back some extraordinary hi-def video of the moon from very low orbits. This is one such video. (Remember, this is not a computer simulation, this is actual video.)

MOVIES- Appaloosa

2009-06-05T16:30:00.003+01:00

APPALOOSA is a pet project of actor Sam Harris and as pet projects of actors go, this one goes pretty well. The APPALOOSA of the title isn’t a horse, as you might expect, it’s a town. And this isn’t just a vanity project, it’s a real movie. It’s a character driven, ambiguous, suspenseful western which makes it three times unusual (four if you consider Westerns unusual in themselves nowadays, which I do). It has all the trappings of John Wayne westerns with good guys and bad guys, gunfights, horses, landscapes, and dripping in machismo. But in the end it’s driven by the characters and the dialogue, which adds a fifth and sixth unusual thing. Nowadays if you can find six unusual things in a movie then you should see it.

You should see this.

The veracity of the movie is wonderful. Viggo Mortenson wears the kind of facial hair that would have been verboten in earlier westerns. (There is one story of Gary Cooper showing up for the first day of shooting of HIGH NOON with a period mustache and being told that modern audiences wouldn’t accept him with such ridiculous facial hair so he had to shave it.) The eight-gauge shotgun doesn’t exist anymore but it plays such an important role that it’s almost another character. Everything from costuming to the saddles they use is authentic. That kind of veracity gives the movie a real grounding in reality that serves the story well and never pulls the viewer out of the story.

Hand in hand with that is another thing that sets APPALOOSA apart from so many modern westerns- it isn’t revisionist. It doesn’t plaster over its ideas with modern sensibilities. As a result, it is able to tackle some issues in a way only SF is usually able to. Women are considered different than men; strength is cherished; violence is unapologetic. It’s the story of hard men doing hard things in a hard land. Yet in spite of a lack of post-modernist angst, the story and characters are complex and nuanced. The tone is set in the first couple of scenes. Before the title has even rolled there is the first killing, in cold blood, without a moment’s hesitation. Then we get almost 10 minutes of the story being set up before the second, third and forth killings. Both times the violence is sudden. One minute two people are talking, the next a gun has been fired and someone is dead. This aesthetic carries over from the action to the dialogue. There are long periods when nothing is said between the two leads. When the dialogue comes it is short and to the point.

Make no mistake, this is a buddy picture. But not in the common mold of two smirking goofballs trying to one up each other with silly one-liners while vying for the same woman as if she were nothing more than the faux-Rolex in a mechanical claw machine. These are serious men who are professional killers and the movie never lets you forget that or cartoons the violence for easier consumption. Here the silences tell you as much about the characters played by Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as the dialogue does. When they do talk, they talk like men- they say what they have to say and move on. Despite this brevity, you feel that you get to know these men and their affection for each other far better than you do in most “buddy” movies. And there is humor, but it’s genuine humor that grows out of character and situation. Nobody ever tells a “joke”, but there is a gentle ribbing inherent in the dialogue that is the kind of humor serious men use to bond. In one scene, after a gunfight between six men which in a lesser movie might have taken 20 minutes of screen time but here is over with in less than a half minute, the two leads are lying on the ground. Mortensen’s character, Everett Hitch, says, “That didn’t take long.” To which Harris’ Virgil Cole replies matter-of-factly, “Everybody could shoot.” Two lines of dialogue that cap the scene, explain it, release the tension, and make you laugh while also making you realize that most of the western gunfights you’ve ever seen in movies are overblown and tiring in comparison.

But don’t think that because the movie isn’t pretentious and overly modernized it doesn’t have anything to say. There are themes of the arbitrariness of legal justice, the effect of politics (both governmental and sexual), the penalties inherent in real love, and the cowardice of the business world when faced with a choice between principle and greed. But the main theme that anchors the story is the relationship of the two main characters. Men devoted to each other both professionally and personally. Who take the phrase “bros before hoes” out of the drunken fratboy lexicon and bring it back to the roots it must have come from. APALOOSA is a western that gives you all the set pieces you expect but turns your expectations upside-down by being more involved with character than action, more dedicated to truth than excitement.

So the script and acting are superb, but this is, after all, a western. And one of the expectations audiences have of the modern western is to be shown some beautiful photography (ironically). In addition to the usual challenges of shooting on location, having an actor-director is a special challenge for a Director of Photography. Since the director is in front of the camera it falls to the DP to be the ersatz director while filming commences. DANCES WITH WOLVES proved that Dean Semler was more than capable in this situation and here he shows that it wasn’t just a fluke. While this movie doesn’t have the kind of grandeur and outright beauty of DANCES, Semler’s keen eye and extraordinary ability to shoot incredible pictures of natural western locations makes the movie a visual treat. This wasn’t just a return to westerns for Semler, it was also a return to film. Like most DPs, Semler has been shooting on digital video of late. But for this film Harris’ decision was to shoot on, well, film. I can’t really tell how much effect it has on the look and feel of the film, but there is a sort of “old timey” western vibe to the whole thing that could be attributed to the widescreen anamorphic format as much as anything. In any case, there are numerous shots where both bright sunlight and dark shadow are in the same shot but the movie never hints at the difficulty of shooting such scenes. At least not in the Blu-Ray translation that I watched both on my front projection system and my 72” rear projector. Any shortcomings you find in the BD are probably a result of your home display technology rather than the film as shot or the transfer.

Like AUSTRALIA, this is a movie designed and shot to be seen on the widescreen. Few scenes show the kind of composition that was common in the 80s and 90s, where you could almost see the 4x3 aspect ratio intruding on the shots. While not as involved as AUSTRALIA with medium shots that show a full figure on screen, the movie is photographed like a western of the 1960s. Westerns were damaged by the need to shoot with a television aspect in mind and you might even go as far as to say that such limitations contributed to the death of the western. Perhaps big, bright, widescreen displays will contribute equally to its resurgence.

There was a time when the western was the quintessential genre for the American film industry. In the last several decades technological change, urbanization, and societal mores have caused it to be replaced by other genres such as SF. But those genres are not inherently American. (Perhaps SF should be but Japan’s brush with science-fictional technology in 1945 coupled with America’s prevalent anti-intellectualism has caused that not to be the case.) Perhaps more films like APALOOSA might change that, but considering how many films of any genre aren’t as good as APALOOSA I’m not betting on it.

2009-06-05T16:16:00.000+01:00

AUSTRALIA has ambitions to be a grand epic in the mold of such films as LAURANCE OF ARABIA and DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. But where David Lean was able to take such larger-than-life stories and imbue them with such a sense of realism that the audience was able to get caught up in the drama while still enjoying the spectacle, Baz Luhrmann lets you know right away that it’s going to be hard to take this movie seriously. The first scenes jump back and forth, introducing the characters like the opening song of a musical where everyone steps up in front of the chorus and sings a few autobiographical lines. This kind of shorthand is fine when you are there to hear the songs and don’t expect much in the way of drama, but when the drama is the point it defeats the purpose.

Not that there is much drama here in the first place. AUSTRALIA is pure melodrama. The antagonists are evil, the protagonists are noble, the plot is simple, and the comedy is broad. For almost the first hour it seems like you are watching a movie from the 1930s remade with the same techniques but using modern technology. Characters frequently look straight into the camera. The acting consists of mugging and broadly histrionic gesturing. There is even one matte shot where someone is obviously running in place beside a stationary truck while a moving background scrolls behind them. All this artifice and eye bugging prevents you from taking anything seriously. Perhaps this is intentional, since the movie is set in that time period, but it is jarring for the audience. And one wonders if it is entirely intentional when the background goes in and out of focus from one shot to another, a common problem that often signals the transition from a live shot to a composited one.

Later, as the movie attempts to become more serious, the tone changes. The characters are placed in jeopardy and the beginnings of the Second World War enter the story. There are fewer instances where a scene is deliberately artificial. But even then there are shots where the foreground and background are so mismatched that you are reminded more of the special effects in WIZARD OF OZ (which is heavily referenced in the film) than what audiences are used to seeing in this age of modern computer special effects and digital compositing.

Again, I can’t help but think that this is intentional. But just like the references to THE WIZARD OF OZ, it lacks subtlety. (Get it? Oz- Oztrailia? Ozzyland? You will because you’re going to have been beaten severely over the head with it by the end of the movie.) But if you can get past your willing suspension of disbelief being constantly challenged there is much to like about AUSTRALIA in spite of all this. The movie is beautiful. Luhrmann has an eye for composition and the photography of the Australian outback is breathtaking. The advent of HD widescreen has freed directors from needing to compose shots for later reduction to a 4x3 aspect ratio and Luhrmann takes full advantage of this. He also backs the camera up to allow for more wide shots, allowing the viewer to feel the expansiveness of the environment. The performances also follow the arc from pure artifice and melodrama to ambitions of seriousness. Nichole Kidman is the most obvious in changing from clownish to charming as both the story and her character change. Hugh Jackman isn’t given much to do but play the standard leading-man part that this kind of film requires, but he does so with appropriate sensitive machismo and (as usual) looks so good while doing it that you forgive a lot. David Wenham (Faramir in the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy) plays the main bad guy, Fletcher, and in one scene will either appall you or give you a vicarious thrill as he repeatedly slaps a child actor across the face in classic Simon Legree fashion. While there have been a few kid sidekicks in movies that I have wanted to slap myself, the actor who plays Nullah, Brandon Walters, never seems to be annoying. His beatific smile and spunky portrayal keep him from being tiresome. And it’s a good thing since he’s in the movie as much as Kidman or Jackman.

Perhaps the one unsung hero of the production is Director of Photography Mandy Walker. The integration of studio shooting and computer compositing leaves a lot to be desired, but her ability to film on location, sometimes directly into the sun, is astounding. Had the movie been shot entirely in camera, she surely would have garnered a nomination from the Academy. As it is, her abilities combined with Luhrman’s musical staging results in numerous scenes where a character is shown in full figure (as on a stage) and is able to interact with something on the other side of the screen. When viewed on a large enough screen the effect is mesmeric and satisfying.

In the end, AUSTRALIA is a mixed bag. If it wanted to be a grand epic (and there is every indication that was the intent) it was hobbled by it’s director’s self-conscious cleverness and overwrought stylistic sensibilities. If it was meant to just be an overblown western it was hurt by its length and simplicity. Is it a David Lean movie filmed by Yahoo Serious or a kinescope shot with modern production values? I couldn’t tell. By the end of the first hour I was ready to do a Rifftrax sound track for it but by the time the credits rolled I had been entertained and caught up in the grossly manipulative presentation in spite of myself. It is undoubtedly an auteur theory film. Luhrman and wife Catherine Martin share between them credits for writing, direction, production design, costume design, and producer. The movie stands or falls on their artistic sensibilities. Whether it stands on the strength of the performances and the beauty of the presentation or falls because of the distracting special effects or self-conscious presentation is up to the individual.

MOVIES- Terminator: Salvation

2009-05-27T21:07:00.001Z

A Review.

It’s really a shame that since Cameron left the franchise each TERMINATOR movie has gotten steadily worse than the last. I don’t know how much potential the series really ever had. The second movie was arguably better than the first but only because it was a remake of the first with an appropriate budget. The set pieces didn’t change much (Arnold steals somebody’s clothes, gets a motorcycle to look cool riding around on, has a number of car chases where somebody chases a car on foot, somebody drives a truck through stuff, various vehicles blow up real good, some cyborg gets alternately fried and frozen) and while the first was inventive, the second was impressive. Then Cameron figured that continuing to do the same movie over and over wasn’t really the way he wanted his career to go. Other, less talented people didn’t feel the same way. The third movie had desperation written all over it. “Lets give John Connor a love interest!” “Howsabout we have a girl terminator this time?” “Don’t forget the truck chase, it’s tradition!” But at least the third movie tried to add a little to the mythos with the surprise (yawn) ending of having the war start while emo John Connor and his squeeze (a totally wasted Claire Danes) twiddle their thumbs at the bottom of a bomb shelter.

The fourth movie couldn’t even be bothered to do that. Instead it’s just a lot of blowing things up and running around fighting a war that is surprisingly little seen. I actually caught myself nodding off in the theater! All the set pieces are there, even a completely stupid scene where John Connor hijacks an automated motorcycle sentry by using a trick that was old when they used it in 1920s westerns, and then pulls something off the top of it and drives away on it. Did nobody wonder why an autonomous motorcycle would have controls to allow a human to use it? But they didn’t seem to put any thought into anything else in the movie, so why start there? The storyline consists of pulling bits and pieces off the first two movies and reshooting them. Even little bits of business like a terminator driving a truck with a broken windshield and pushing it out so that he can see the road. And if you are looking for a war movie where a rag tag group of freedom fighters squares off against a horde of artificially intelligent killing machines, rent the ANIMATRIX and watch THE SECOND RENAISSANCE parts 1 and 2. It’s much better and actually had some thought put into it.

Director McG and writers John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris don’t limit themselves to only stealing from the first two Terminator movies and old westerns, they also lift from the Abyss and even include a giant Transformer that appears to be made of junk and can’t shoot worth a damn. Christian Bale also steals his performance from a block of wood, never managing to evoke any sympathy or charisma for his character. Not that there is much chance for that to happen in the script. The one thing that the filmmakers didn’t bother to steal was Cameron’s attempt to put a human face on the conflict. There are no character defining moments like the love story in the first movie or the boy gets mechanical killing machine surrogate father subplot in the second. Even when there are places where such relationships might grow they are announced and then discarded. (Mostly because they don’t make sense. Tell me, are you honestly going to fall in love with somebody right away and then remain faithful to your feelings when you find out he’s a robot designed to kill you? Talk about abusive relationships!) The result is that the movie has as much soul as Skynet itself. With no characters to care about and nothing interesting in the plot it seems more like spending two hours at a combined gun show/Nascar race than a movie.

It seems obvious why the movie is called TERMINATOR: SALVATION. It’s nothing but an attempt to salvage a dying franchise. Obviously nobody gave a damn about making a movie, just putting the corpse of the previous movies on life support until they could harvest the organs. And they are so sure there is still money to suck out this cadaver that it even ends with a flock of helicopters flying into the sunset and a John Connor voiceover that basically says, “Tune in next time for more thrilling adventures.” Too bad nobody connected to the film bothered to give anyone any reason to see this movie or the inevitable sequels they have planned. Almost everything J.J. Abrams did right in his reboot of Star Trek, McG ignores in this retread. It’s dead, Jim.

MOVIES- Star Trek lives

2009-05-13T05:07:00.001Z

(Might be spoilers here, but not of plot points.)

So, I finally saw Star Trek at the 10:20 PM show at the local cinema. I was surprised by a number of things, not the least of which was that it was almost a private showing. I saw Watchmen twice the first week (one digital and one IMAX) and the theater was packed both times even though both were matinees. Last night there were only two other people in the theater. I did pick the last showing on a Monday night to avoid the crowds, I just didn’t expect to be that successful.

It’s gonna be hard to discuss this movie without giving anything away that might ruin it for anyone. But the novelty of having a Star Trek movie that actually has the potential to surprise anyone is so unique that it’s worth preserving. Episodic television is perhaps the most formulaic and cliché prone form of entertainment in history. So usually TV shows rely on soap opera or the likability of the cast to attract viewers. The problem with doing that with SF is that it has not traditionally been character driven, instead depending on strangeness to draw an audience. Shows like Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 have tried to overcome that by placing more emphasis on character and striving to have plotlines that actually change the status quo over the course of the seasons. But back in the 60s the constraints of television were to rigid for the latter, even though Star Trek was perhaps the first genre series to attempt the former. When Roddenbury, and perhaps even more importantly, Gene Coon, established the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate as action-intellect-emotion (or id-superego-ego for you Freudians) it was one of the first times in SF TV or movies that the characters were anything other than their job descriptions. Sure, it was two-dimensional, but in a format where one-dimensional was the norm it was still a whole lot better.

Which isn’t to say that the show wasn’t full of cliches. We all know better. You could write a book on all the plot devices ST beat to death- Kirk’s cosmic libido, Spock’s raised eyebrow, driving computers mad with illogic, planets that parallel earth in every aspect but one, last minute technological solutions as a literal deus ex machina, beam me up, I’m a doctor not a -, fascinating, godlike alien menaces, people in other people’s bodies, time travel, the list goes on and on. OTOH, for every cliché they made famous it seems there was a new (for TV in those days) idea somewhere too. Multi-cultural crewmembers, women in positions of power, a military that was more diplomatic corps than fighting corps, continuing setting SF with aspects of the anthology series’ morality plays, aliens that weren’t monsters but instead just thought differently than we did, a non-imperialist philosophy of non-interference, heck, even the idea of taking it all seriously was different. It’s hard to imagine it now, but ST’s main competition was LOST IN SPACE! LOST IN for God’s sake SPACE! A “space family Robinson” with kids and a pet mad scientist and robot comedy team, marooned on a planet made from cardboard rocks that was visited every week by a space aliens which ranged from pirates to sentient rutabagas. And the ratings were neck and neck!

But because they took it seriously, it’s hard not to say that ST was the most influential SF in history. Computers you could talk to, Space “Shuttles”, communicators that look like cell phones (or vice versa), medical equipment built right into beds, there’s a lot of our world in that crazy old television show. And perhaps that’s a lot of the problem. The new things in ST became cliches as well. Until just about all that was left after six TV series and ten movies were the cliches. So Paramount gave the franchise over to J.J. Abrams for a restart.

If you’ve read the reviews you know that they have been almost universally positive. Rotten Tomatoes has a composite score or 95%. There’s no basis for comparison between this and previous ST movies since the tomatometer only goes back to 2002 and the only other ST movie is Nemesis (at a deserved 35%). But considering first weekend grosses and all the praise, this looks to be the most successful movie in the history of the series, beating out ST IV- So Long and Thanks for All the Whales.

The problem is that the movie doesn’t really deserve it. It isn’t a great movie. Hell, it isn’t even the best movie of the series. I suspect that a lot of the praise is the result of closet fans, who had grown so tired of the cliches that they just couldn’t go there again, being relieved that they could come back through the door and keep their self-respect. Not that the movie is bad. For a Star Trek movie it’s in the top three. And not that Abrams didn’t do a hell of a job walking the tightrope he had in front of him. Most of the roads taken by other reboots in the last years weren’t really open to him. Had he stunt-cast Spock as a woman or shown us a dark, gritty, morally ambiguous Federation I have no doubt that he would have been burned at the next ComiCon as a heretic. More than that, he would have made something that wasn’t Star Trek. Trek was never really science fiction; it was space opera- Roddenberry’s western in space. It took itself seriously but never too seriously. It wasn’t afraid to have a little fun on the way to places no one had ever gone before. Abrams greatest success may be that he kept that lightheartedness intact.

Abrams ST isn’t so much a reboot (though it is that in a literal sense which is one of the most clever things about it) as it is a remake. And ironically for the prodigal fans who think they can now return to the fold, all the cliches are still there. ALL the cliches. But it’s OK because they are all turned just enough to make them seem fresh again. The whole movie is an odd combination of familiarity and disorientation. You’ve seen it all before, but you have no idea what’s going to happen next. Once again, for the first time, there’s a sense that you can be surprised by what’s about to happen and it allows you to actually give a damn again. And that’s what’s been missing from Trek for a long time.

So it’s still Star Trek. Ah, but therein lies the rub. It still has all the old gotchas plus a couple of new ones. Star Trek has always been something you had to take at face value. If you start asking questions like “Doesn’t transwarp teleportation make spaceships obsolete?” or “Howcum Checkov knows more about using the transporter than the transporter crew?” you start to treat it as a real movie rather than as Star Trek. Just as I suspect a lot of the praise if born of relief that it’s not a failure, I suspect that as soon as the shine starts to wear off a lot of fans are going to go back to that age-old tradition of picking the nits. I’ve always felt that was one of the enjoyable things about ST. It wasn’t afraid to make fun of itself so it invited the fans to poke a little fun at it as well. So, in that spirit, a few other questions and observations that occurred to me.

Again, doesn't transwarp teleport make spaceships obsolete?

And why do the innerds of every spaceship look like a water treatment plant or metal refinery?

Why levitate spacecraft over the Iowa plains when you could, I dunno, build them in orbit? It's a cool shot but doesn't make much sense. Plus, the enterprise would have to be built out of neutronium to support it’s own weight in a gravity well.

Just how big are these spacecraft anyway? The Kelvin had 800 crewmembers on board? Then how many does the Enterprise hold? It’s the new flagship, so you’d imagine it was bigger. No wonder everybody runs everywhere in the corridors. Thing’s probably a half mile long.

And what’s with the magical technology like "Red Matter" that creates quantum black holes. Set the doubletalk generators to kill. I also have a problem with the inertial dampeners on the transporters. If you can’t account for gains and losses of potential and kinetic energy then a lot of crewmembers are going to materialize only to fly off the pad and hit the opposite wall of the room like a water balloon dropped from the Sears Tower. Somehow you can beam from a planet to a ship going hundreds of times the speed of light without a problem but when you beam up someone who is falling you can take away just enough of their kinetic energy to keep them from being killed hitting the floor but not enough to keep them from hitting the floor altogether.

Why does everybody know more about transporter technology than the transporter crew? Checkov (Checkov, for pity's sake) has to leave the helm to show the transporter experts how it's done. OTOH, I can live with Scotty reinventing transporter technology from a character point. He always was a whiz with those things (like the way he saved himself so he could do a guest shot on TNG) but Checkov?

Sulu can't remember to take off the parking break!

Gravity sucks, inverse square law be dammed. And the final escape is a silly as TOS Kirk driving computers insane with bad syllogisms every three months. I’m not going to say how they did it but it was stupid and implausible in every way.

The new costumes are kinda ugly. The new Enterprise is kinda ugly. The new bridge is kinda ugly. I know they had to put their artistic stamp on the look of the movie, I just don’t agree with some of the aesthetic choices. One of the things that set the original series apart was the design. The Enterprise wasn’t really like any other spaceship before it and had the kind of clean simplicity of design that has survived near infinite variation for over 40 years. This one looks like just another fan drawn variation for variation’s sake. Likewise the new bridge is a mess. The pleasing design and simplicity of the round, split level design and the strong lines and shapes have been replaced with a crowded mess. Why is there somebody in a phone booth over Kirk’s right shoulder? Is the thing actually round or what, you can’t really tell. And what the heck are those red gee-gaws on the helm? They look like the taillights of a 1950s Buick.

And did they actually put a big picture window in the front of the bridge? Even if it doubles as a viewscreen, a window?

Bottom line? It's a good Star Trek movie. Go see it. But don't expect it to be a great movie.

POLITICS- Dejon Mustard

2009-05-11T02:28:00.006Z

Cummon. Is this the best the party of William Buckley can do nowadays? You’ve convinced the majority of Americans that you are completely incompetent. Are you not willing to stop until you’ve convinced everyone but your idiotic followers that you have gone full retard? You never go full retard! But there is no way else to interpret this

“On the May 7 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Steyn said of Obama's condiment selection: "He's amazing, Obama. This coverage -- he's a regular guy. He eats a hamburger with Dijon mustard -- Dijon mustard. John Kerry couldn't get away with that stuff, but he makes it seem like just like a regular thing to do. Now there's -- I see that some of the left-wing commentators are saying, 'Why are people making a fuss about the Dijon mustard?' but that's just an example of the way Obama is able to enlighten us."

[I pause here to say that (a) no left-wing commentator that I am aware of has said this and (b) how fucking stupid do you have to be to think that you can be "enlightened" by mustard? But this answer to the latter is obviously "as stupid as this guy".]

Later in the program, Steyn stated: "I deeply resent Barack Obama crashing in as the Grey Poupon spokesperson, because that has been the lifesaver for non-American voiceover artists in this country for years -- getting the gig doing the Grey Poupon voiceover." He added: "[I]f you can't outsource Grey Poupon to foreigners, what can you outsource? And instead now he's apparently the big Grey Poupon spokesperson, putting it all -- putting it all over his hamburger. Barack Obama -- that was -- what was that? That was yesterday, Barack Obama had a hamburger. I don't know what he may do today to prove -- to pass for human."

So Obama isn’t human because he likes mustard that isn’t pure yellow- like Rush Limbaugh and his stooges- (Dijon mustard- the commie!) rather than ketchup on his burger! Is there any evidence that the right wing wants to tell you what you can and can’t do on the most intimate level than this? Submit! Only we know what is the proper condiment to have on your food. If you thought freedom was having the government tell you how to worship the creator, who you could love and marry, what words you could say, and look at the books you took out of the library, how you used your credit card, what conversations you're having on the phone, and what you should write in e-mails wasn’t enough, now the rich, fat, white guys who have made a living telling you that rich, fat, white guys aren’t the problem have decided what the proper garnish is for your hamburger.

Really? Tell me Rush, am I holding my dick the right way when I take a piss? I’m sure you hold yours with tweezers but somehow I can't seem to manage that. Perhaps that’s why I don’t think I should be interested in WHAT FUCKING CONDIMENT PEOPLE USE ON THEIR FOOD!

All this talk about personal freedom and tyranny and all these shitheads want to do is tell everybody else how to live. It's the same thing with gay marrage. There is a simple reason I don't care if gay people want to get married. I’M NOT A HOMOSEXUAL. In fact, the only way I can imagine being interested in gay men, in any way other than to thank them for taking themselves out of the competition for women I might want, is to be friends with them because they are decent human beings. I’ve got news for you Rush and all you right wingers who think you ought to be telling everybody else how they can live their lives- self-confident people DON’T CARE! I asked a gay friend several years ago why so many men were so threatened by homosexuality. His answer, without a microsecond of hesitation, was that they were fighting their own impulses to take it in the keister. Truthfully, I couldn’t understand that anymore than I could understand hating gay people for their sexual preferences. It actually doesn’t come up in casual conversation with even intimate friends. “So, Bob, you’ve been married for 15 years. Do you do it doggy style or what?” just hasn’t been a conversation I’ve ever been a party to. In fact, I’ve only discussed my sexual preferences with a sexual partner, and then only in bed (or on the couch, or the floor, or the woods, or in the car, or…well- you get the idea). If you really think sex is something sublime and sacred and intimate then you don’t discuss it in casual conversation. And if you think it isn't anything but a pleasurable pastime you don’t need to be talking about God in the same sentence unless you are screaming his name in the midst of the act. OK, Rush (and Hannity and all the other anacephalics at FOX who are going through withdrawal because they have quit being taken seriously because of all the inane shit like this that they've said over the last decade) I understand that you are still plumbing the depths of the stupidest redneck element of the American population. The kind of people who will turn out to protest a tax hike on people making over a quarter of a million dollars a year even though they just got a tax break and would have to think for a few seconds before they could tell you how many zeros a quarter of a million has (and the answer, from the teabagger’s turnout, seems to be less that .005. I wanted so badly to take my videocamera and ask the local protest of mentally and mathematically challenged sheeple how many of them made over $250.000 annually and whether they realized that they had already gotten a tax cut from Obama, but unfortunately I had to work.)

But anyway, back to the important point- which mustard is the most patriotic? Personally, I like Dejon mustard. In fact, I like the brown mustard that has horseradish in it. So obviously I must be a socialist-fascist-terrorist. Nothing else would make sense. It can’t just be that I like a little spice on my burger. My burger has to be a symptom of deeper hatred of America. Yeah, that’s it. My taste buds must hate America. And I wasn’t even aware of it! Thank you for pointing out that my taste buds are traitors and that you are marginally smarter than they are. Not as smart as my dog, but a little, little bit smarter than the papilla on my tongue.

Imagine how many votes you could get if you were as smart as the neurons in my big toe!

I don't want to be accused of advocating violence but truthfully, if you have been taken in by the right wing rhetoric for the last few years, do the species a favor and take one of those guns you love so much an put it in your mouth. After you pull the trigger you will have done the best thing for mankind that you have probably ever done. You will have raised the average IQ by a small, but measurable percentage. I know you love to think, talk, and post about how liberals are stupid but it's not them that's buying the bullshit. The saving grace of being a moron is that you get to think you are as smart as everyone else because you aren't smart enough to tell the difference. And while the kind of mustard you like isn't indicative of anything but the kind of mustard you like, thinking it might be, even for a minute, is sure an indicator of teh stupid. God, it even sounds like a National Enquirer article- "The Kind of Mustard You Like Reveals Your Personality!".

Think about the gun in the mouth thing. If you think liking Dejon mustard is a political statement then the taste of hard, blue gunmetal is the only solution.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog shows Mamma Mia How It Should Be Done

2009-05-10T23:23:00.006Z

So who says they can’t make a 46 minute superhero musical that is cool and rocks? Well, I guess nobody ever said that, now that I think of it. But IF “they” had said it, “they” would have been WRONG.

Yah, I know. This is old. It was first released almost 10 months ago, which is about five and a half years in dog time and roughly that much in internet time as well. (Its funny, until the internet the only people who worried about being the first to check out new media were high school and college age kids. Grown-ups were busy with unimportant stuff like career and family and knew that if you saw a movie or read a book you could talk about it with other people who had enjoyed it for months, if not years afterward. Now everybody is texting and twittering and the discussion space on the net has shrunk to only a few days. The result is that everybody now has the attention span of a 12 year old.) In those ten months the film paid for itself (almost a quarter of a million dollars- in case you thought you could be an internet video sensation without big name stars or a sizable wad of cash and without being hit in the nuts in a new and entertaining way), and won a Hugo and a slew of other awards (including being #4 on Time Magazine's list of best television in spite of never being closer to a television than your computer monitor- new media, who knew?). Neil Patrick Harris is a known singer, having been in numerous Broadway shows such as CABERET and RENT, but if you are only familiar with his TV appearances you might be surprised at his vocal power. Other surprises are Nathan Fillion’s (from Firefly) ability to sing and the smaller part of Moist played by Simon Helberg who plays Wallowitz on the sitcom THE BIG BANG THEORY (and who here portrays a supervillan with the most useless power since Marvel Comics’ Black Hole in Howard the Duck, who had the rallying cry “The Black Hole SUCKS!”). It also features Felicia Day, an excellent singer who has those kind of accessible good looks that geeks go nuts for. And Judd and Zack Weadon, brothers of Joss Weadon and masterminds of this madness, as the Cowboy henchmen singers singing one of the best lyrics ever written:

The Evil League of Evil
is watching so beware,
the grade that you receive’ll
be the last we swear,
so make the Bad Horse gleeful
or he'll make you his mare...

Not since Slim Shady rhymed orINges with syrINges has there been a more inventive rhyme than “evil” and “receive will”.

Anyway, to the folks who read this blog (all two of you) I encourage you to see this if you already haven’t (and if you are reading this blog you probably haven’t because looking to me for what’s new on the web is like asking your grandmother about sex- she might not know the newest positions but she has a pretty good idea about what works and what doesn’t). We strive for quality, not novelty.

And because NBC has decided, for reasons only bureaucratic managers could understand, not to allow SNL to be embedded, you have to click on this link. Even if you don’t like people pretending to play musical instruments you should stay for the punchline.

MOVIES- The Wrestler

2009-05-07T13:13:00.002Z

During the last winter I watched quite a few movies, but didn’t write much about them. And during the springing of spring I’ve been too busy with a new work schedule and enjoying time in my 350Z convertible tanning bed to do much writing either. (One recent trip started as an expedition to invesigate the mysteriously named town of Ozone, TN and wound up instead encompassing parts of TN, KY, and VA before arriving home long after dark. All that meandering and I never wound up actually making it to Ozone. In spite of a desire to walk into the local café and address the people there by saying, “Ozonians! Take me to your leader!” in my best Darth Vader voice.)

But time on the night shift, the release of the Best Picture nominees on Blu-Ray, and almost two weeks of rain have allowed for some rumination. As always, my reviews are not so much reviews as examinations and, as usual, are long after the fact.

One of the most affecting films I’ve seen lately is THE WRESTLER, the story of an end-of-the-road entertainer who acheved fame in the 1980s in what would eventually be referred to as “sports entertainment”. Mickey Rourke, in a title role it’s hard not to say he was meant to play, was nominated for an Oscar for his work in this film. If his performance wasn’t such as tour de force it could easily have been obscured by the parallels with his own career, but that doesn’t seem to happen because he is so powerful and perfectly cast. Instead his acting seems informed by the similarities of his career and the story of this aging has-been. Rourke gives an understated, sympathetic, touching, and brave performance here. And did I leave out believable? I shouldn’t have. I haven’t seen Sean Penn’s turn as Harvey Milk yet, but if it’s better than this it should go down as one of the greatest pieces of acting in the history of cinema because here Mickey Rourke so completely vanishes into his character that you sometimes forget you are watching a movie. As I’ve said, such a self referential role should have you constantly thinking of the path that must have led from the handsome, stylish rogue who seduced Kim Basenger in 9 ½ WEEKS to the battered, worn, down on his luck non-fighter who fills the screen in this movie. It’s a tribute to pure acting that you don’t.

The funny thing is that Rourke isn’t the only comeback in this movie. Marisa Tomei was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress. My first guess would have been that the Academy was finally through punishing her for her win as Best Supporting Actress for MY COUSIN VINNY, but truthfully I think it’s more that the work she does here is also so powerful that they simply couldn’t ignore it. Not only is she the sexiest woman in a movie last year, in spite of being long past Hollywood’s typical ‘Use By’ date for female actors, but she is charming, funny, and nearly naked a great deal of the time. Sure, she’s beautiful. Sure, she’s aged far better than most of the women of her generation. Sure, she was gifted to start with. But here she not only proves her chops as an actor, but also throws shit in the plastic faces of so many other cowardly women who have succumbed to the fear of aging and allowed themselves to be mutilated into walking characatures. As a man who once talked his wife out of having bags of goo shoved into her chest because he felt that changing her amazing natural beauty could only be vandalism, all I can say is- You Go, Girl.

But I can’t help but feel that in the hands of a less gifted director this would have still come out as a superficial melodrama. Luckily Darren Aronofsky was up to the task. I liked his feature film debut, PI, but thought that it was rather contrived. The visual style and techno editing style were interesting, and perfectly in tune with this rather disjointed narrative but I didn’t find it moving. Likewise, in THE FOUNTAIN he also indulged himself in a directorial vision that was appropriate but almost too clever for it’s own good. But here he shows that appropriateness was always his intention, rather than just showing off by drawing attention to himself. Here he approaches a film from 180 degrees the other direction. Oh, the artifice is still there. But as he moves the camera in an almost documentarian fashion, following the characters through their arcs as he frequently follows them literally, shooting their backs as they walk from place to place, he accents the realism of the performances and script by carrying that realism forward almost subliminally. The cinematography is harsh, the set dressing is exquisite, and the camera never draws attention to itself. For instance, in one scene he shows Randy (The Ram) Robinson at a convention of Professional Wrestling greats held in a VFW hall. The folding tables are set in a semi-circle to allow the adoring fans access. Numerous over-the-hill wrestling ex-greats sit behind stacks of posters, tee-shirts, and VHS tapes to eek a few more dollars from their dying legacies. As Rourke’s character scans the room and realizes how many of the other “celebrities” are in wheelchairs, or are damaged, or are just plain old, the camera takes his POV to show the audience what he sees. The effect is subtle, but profound. A master stroke from a director who isn’t as interested in drawing attention to himself as he is in telling a story and drawing the viewer into an alternate reality. Shots like this one fill the movie. Randy working behind the counter at the deli in the grocery store. Randy alone in his trailer. Randy at the strip club. Randy being uncomfortable in the second hand clothing store. Aronofsky never takes you out of the lead characters mind for a moment. And as a result, he leads you to that character’s fate as if it was your own. Before this movie I was afraid that Aronofsky was too impressed with his own intelligence for his own good. Now I see that he’s just too smart for his own good. But you’ll see me in the front row on opening night of his next movie. Hellishly smart directors might not be mainstream successes but they get my business every time.

So if you are the kind of moviegoer who likes things dumbed down to rating movies by the direction of thumbs, or the number of stars, or some other kind of arbitrary graph, well, you probably aren’t the kind of movie buff that would ever come to this site. But if you want to see masterful performances, stories that are more involved with the human condition than explosions, or great experiences and tales told in a way that only film can tell them- see THE WRESTLER and marvel at how involving these things can be when everyone involved is at the absolute top of their game.

And if you want to know what it will be like when you approach the half century mark and your life is losing the shine of youth but you still have to live in a world where youth is valued over wisdom and the young still grapple with lessons life has long since taught you, see THE WRESTLER.

And if you think that life is over after the kids have grown up and you realize that you never been an astronaut or discovered the cure for cancer and so your life was wasted, see THE WRESTLER.

And if you are young and think none of those things could ever happen to you, see THE WRESTLER.

And if you find yourself in Hollywood Video and just want to see a great movie, see THE WRESTLER.

MOVIES- The Spirit is Weak

2009-05-05T06:59:00.000Z

I had looked forward to the Spirit movie last year but I was ill for the week it was in theaters so I didn’t get a chance to see it. I wasn’t a great fan of the original material but I respect Eisner’s contribution to the art of sequential narrative (comic books to people who never read the Comics Journal) and had been a fan of Frank Miller’s work since Daredevil. If you carefully parse the tenses and voices in that last sentence you’ll get a pretty good idea of where I stand on this movie.

No spoilers this time because there is simply nothing to spoil. I doubt that Miller will be given a chance to make more movies after this one, but if he does we have a director that rivals Ed Wood in creative potential. And this movie should be seen for the same reasons that one watches Wood’s movies- the joy of indulging yourself in a bad movie for the joy of watching it crash and burn. The same guilty joy one gets from rubbernecking at a car wreck on the highway. In fact, the setting where the Spirit meets the Octopus is so reminiscent of the graveyard set in Plan 9 From Outer Space that one wonders if Miller isn’t in some stage of his career where he is attempting to deconstruct his own work. Dark Knight Returns Again (or whatever it was called) and All-Star Batman and Robin are compelling evidence that’s what is going on. It’s just a shame that, in the process of pissing down his own leg, he wound up pissing on Will Eisner, one of the truly great comic artists of all time. And one of the few who was able to continue growing as an artist and keep himself from being eaten by his own style, unlike such comic greats as Neal Adams, Gil Kane, and Miller himself.

For the fan of Miller or Eisner or comic history, the movie does have some interesting bits. Firstly, Miller has completely abandoned Eisner’s style and substituted his own. Secondly, Miller has taken the idea of using his comic work as a storyboard, an idea used well in Sin City and 300, to its ultimate conclusion. Third, Miller has given us the ultimate realization of what comic book writing is like when displaced into another medium. And lastly, Miller has given us a stronger argument against the “cinematic comic” than Alan Moore did in Watchmen, and done it from the other side. All of these are fascinating glimpses into the connection between comics and movies, although it is debatable how many of them Miller was actually trying to accomplish.

This movie is not Will Eisner’s The Spirit. Not any more than the movie called Issac Asimov’s I, Robot was actually anything like Asimov’s robot stories. There are characters who have the same names as the ones in Eisner’s work (though Ebony is mercifully absent) and the situation is superficially the same. But Eisner’s lighthearted tone isn’t there. The only evidence of his work is the influence it made on Miller. What is abundantly evident is the style of Miller’s later negative space, black-and-white work. The visual style is also straight out of Sin City as well. Gone are the flowing prose, bright colors and wry humor of Eisner’s work, replaced by “Frank Miller’s The Spirit”. Eisner’s work was truly cinematic. Panel sizes didn’t change much, but perspective did- here they don’t. Movement was translated to the static page by moving the POV of the camera rather than invoking movement through the frame- here it doesn’t. And even the trademark Spirit logo, which took on a different architectural aspect in every story, is reduced to a vaguely three-dimensional font supported by bricks. Eisner’s art is forced through the strainer of Miller’s latter day simplicity and the result is that all the blood is drained out of it, leaving only the bare bones and little meat behind.

Frank Miller’s The Spirit is basically a moving fumetti. Not only does it use the black-and-white-with-a-single-spot-color style of the Sin City comic, but it is basically filmed in static shots. When the camera does move it’s usually a horizontal pan, lengthening the frame in the same way Miller’s work often uses grossly wide or tall panels to evoke movement. The result is that if you take a still frame from each camera set up you basically have the storyboards with nothing missing. All the Miller clichés are there- women with their asses stuck out and one breast in profile, silhouette cityscapes with a wooden water tower on every building (sometimes two or three on a single rooftop), faces that scowl up through knitted eyebrows, characters standing in front of static impressionist backgrounds doing nothing. The movie includes every Millerism but the kitchen sink (no, wait, the Spirit actually throws a kitchen sink at the Octopus in one scene, and if there was any evidence of subtlety in the entire movie I’d think it was a nod to Kitchen Sink Publishers, who reprinted the Spirit comics in the 1980’s, but there isn’t so I don’t).

As much as the movie looks like a parody of a Miller comic, the script sounds like a parody of Miller’s comic writing. The opening monologue where the Spirit waxes moronic about his love affair with his city (“She gives me everything I need.”) is so full of purple prose that it rivals the infamous line from All-Star Batman and Robin- “I’m the goddammed Batman!” You can get away with this kind of shit in a comic book where the whole thing requires an exaggerated sense of willing disbelief. After all, the words are often, for instance, coming out of the mouth of an alien who flies around under his own power wearing a bright blue skintight suit with big red boots and a bath towel around his neck. But try to read even good comic book dialogue out loud and it quickly becomes obvious that, as the actors in Star Wars said about Lucas’ script, “You can type this stuff but you can’t say it.” Miller fills every mouth with words that can only be considered as camp but never allows anyone to put their tongue in their cheek while they are saying it. Camp is hard to do because if the audience doesn’t get it, it just looks stupid. Luc Besson did it almost perfectly in The Fifth Element (and a lot of folks still didn’t get it), Mike Hodges did pretty well by turning Flash Gordon into a gay pride parade, and even in THE SPIRIT the film comes close toward the end. But I’m afraid that by that time most people have lost the thread. The woman I saw it with turned it off after the first half hour, and she’s sat through some pretty weird movies in her day. It doesn’t help that the look of the film is so close to the movie Sin City, with it’s over the top film noir. Perhaps if Miller really wanted to do more lighthearted camp he might have stayed closer to Eisner’s look and color palate. As it is, it just comes off as bad.

So Miller’s SPIRIT winds up, in some ironic way, being the fourth movie in a quatralogy of movies in the last year that have basically encapsulated the path of comics over the last forty years. Iron Man was the best iteration of a Stan Lee’s Marvel of the 1960s- a path set forth by Sam Rami with the Spider-Man movies but made lean and mean by comic novices Farveau and Downey. The Dark Knight carried the torch into the 70s making the Batman of the movies as real and gritty as possible as the one envisioned by O’Neil and Adams. Watchmen went further (perhaps further than movie audiences were willing to go) by translating the greatest superhero comic into an equally ambiguous tale of superheroes and why they would have to be damaged and psychotic in the real world. And now Frank Miller takes the oldest comic creation of them all, one who was the first to combine cinematic techniques with comic sensibilities, and makes Moore’s point in Watchmen from the other side. With Watchmen, Alan Moore set out to make a comic that used every comic book trick to the effect of completing a work of narrative that could, in essence, never be translated to the screen. In THE SPIRIT Miller takes every comic book cliché that he has popularized over the last thirty years and translates them to the screen intact. And in the process he reveals them for the superficial and unrealistic tricks that they actually are. It’s all there- the exaggerated poses, the static shots, the silly dialogue, the unrealistic plot, the retarded prose, the pointless violence, the elevation of style over substance. It isn’t as worthless as badly done comic book movies. You don’t want to run from the theater screaming as you might with the Schumacher Batman movies, or WANTED, or DAREDEVIL, but you still have the idea that the director has no reverence for either format: comics or cinema.

I’m struck with cynicism about Frank Miller’s directorial debut. The same way I was at Neal Adams redrawing and recoloring of his classic Batman comics for their hardcover release. It’s just an artist wanting to get paid for his previous work by shitting on that work with no thought for the people who loved that work back when they first did it. It’s also the work of an artist who has given up any artistic principles. Who has been co-opted by the business interests so completely that they have decided that being paid is more important than their fans or their legacy. At least Adams wiped his ass on his own drawings. Miller has decided to do his paperwork on the legacy of another artist who isn’t around to defend his artistic vision anymore. And unlike the National Lampoon replacing the face of the Mona Lisa with a chimp for comic effect, Miller has decided that, like a visit to the monkey house, anyone who still has any reverence for the classics of his media deserves to have his shit flung at them. He’s deficated on his greatest triumph twice with DKR and All-Star Batman, and now he’s branched out to leave a steaming pile on Will Eisner.

We get it, Frank. You hate yourself and the very work that made you famous. You wish you had done something else with your life than entertaining 12 year olds. And you think those 12 year olds deserve to be punished for ever making you famous in the first place. Be an artist. Or just go away. Don’t try to get even with them for ever being childish enough to like your work. Take all that self-loathing and become a hermit. Don’t shit on our childhood the way you shit on your life’s work. The way Walt Disney had to show himself as a fascist bigot and capitalist swine because he couldn’t stand the wholesome facade he had built his fortune on. We get it. You hate yourself for being successful in a medium you hate. But Will Eisner never got to that point. He continued to break new ground with works like THE CITY until the day he died. For you to drag his good name down with you and the love your fans have for your early work is a shame.

Shame on you, Frank Miller. And shame on me for saying that everyone should see THE SPIRIT. If nothing else, to see what happens if you have dreams of being an artist and succumb to the self-loathing that drives artists to create. THE SPIRIT is a cautionary tale of what happens when a once ground-breaking creator is devoured by his creation and his own demons. He becomes a caricature of himself.

SCIENCE- RELIGION- Science and Religion in the Crosshairs

2009-05-05T04:45:00.001Z

I’ve wound up in another of the endless debates that infect the internet like kudzu, on whether or not there is a God and whether or not He speaks with his children through religion. It makes sense that this, perhaps the oldest debate humanity has engaged in, would be a recurrent theme on the newest and freest of the ways man has invented to communicate. After all, the first thing that archeologists look for when probing the earliest origins of man is how he dealt with the dead. It seems that man existed for thousands of years in recognizable form before he started to develop civilization and that fledgling civilization had several interesting changes from the way people lived before. Man started to draw images on cave walls (the development of language), he started to live in larger groups (society as opposed to tribalism), he started to control his environment (the control of fire), and he started to have some sort of religion (ritual disposal of the dead).

The interesting thing about all these developments was that man had been around in recognizable form for about 100 thousand years before they came about. And then, about 70 thousand years ago, they all sprouted in a relatively quick fashion. This is what prompted Arthur C. Clarke to hit upon the idea for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Something- God, monolith, inspiration, a particularly compelling meme- changed mankind from a hairless ape to the creature that would cover the earth in an unprecedentedly short time. Something about us changed. We went from being just another animal to being human. With all the questions, abilities, and contradictions that entails.

And the basis of that seems to have been religion.

Nowadays many people want to denigrate religion. They say that belief in the unknown and unknowable is a throwback to superstition. They may be right. It took thousands of years after the development of religion to come up with the very idea of science, then called ‘natural philosophy’. As far as we can tell, it was the Ionians who first hit upon the idea that the world could be understood without resorting to supernatural explanations, but through observation and reason. It wasn’t something they hit upon through sheer intellectual abstraction, but was a direct result of their landing on a particularly barren Greek isle and having to develop a maritime economy to be able to feed themselves. Contact with varied cultures and mores led them to develop a rather practical and open-minded worldview. And the result of that was that they came up with the first philosophy based on observation and measurement rather than basing their society on charisma and heredity. For perhaps the first time in human development, capitalism, trade, and personal merit started to drive human development rather than heredity, strength, and tradition. The Ionians developed the first vestiges of the scientific method- though without the experimental rigor we associate with it. Nevertheless, their society affected the other Greek islands through their success and trade. It wasn’t long until Greece was the center of human knowledge. The Greeks seemed to be able to deal with the inherent dichotomy between belief in higher powers (gods to you and me) and the exploration of natural phenomena, perhaps largely because they dealt with nature the same way we deal with religion- everybody pulls a theory out of their ass and then everybody else judges it on how good it sounds to them. Remarkably, they found out some pretty groovy stuff about the physical world in spite of their disdain for testing their hypotheses’ through experimentation. Pythagoras developed geometry and music theory, Aristostenes not only deduced that the earth was round but calculated its circumference with astounding accuracy, and the Greeks in whole gave us the first reality based philosophy to understand the universe around us. They also invented democracy, and served as the basis for the Roman Empire- our own psychic progenitors, for those who think that only things in the US have any worth.

But lately religion has been falling out of vogue. The advancement of certain religious viewpoints and the political power they have gathered in the US, has made apparent the shortcomings in any world view that doesn’t take into account observable reality. The percentage of people who call themselves atheists has almost doubled in the last twenty years. But while I find myself firmly on the side of those who espouse objective observation over emotional fantasy, my contrairian roots cause me to remind our more vocal advocates of reality that there are limits to human knowledge and the thoughtful person has to admit that the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is still in doubt.

All BELIEF SYSTEMS seem uninformed at best and silly at worst to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to them. Some say that religious belief isn’t an intellectual endeavor, yet a believer would say that a belief system based on the intellect alone was obviously limited. Science is a great way to find out things, but any physicist will tell you that there are hundreds of “constants” in physics that seem arbitrary. Yet unless they were set at the precise values they have, the universe as we know it would simply not exist. Values for the gravitational constant, the four primeval forces, the weight of sub-atomic particles, and dozens of other “givens” in the universe have to be precisely set for the universe to support the formation of stars, let alone life complex enough to ask such questions as “Why do stars form in the first place?” And there is no theoretical basis for any of these ‘constants’ to have the values that they have, either in Einsteinium, quantum, or string theory. Lee Smolin has come up with a theory that universes evolve and every singularity (black holes to the layman) is the genesis for another roll of the cosmic dice, and the anthropic principle implies that we might just be the outcome of one stable configuration of such chance. Hell, even without the exotic thinking of physicists, mere astronomers postulate such imaginary concepts as ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ to explain why our observations have only uncovered about 1/20 of what seems to be the entire universe. And they aren’t looking at things like the Copenhagen Interpretation or the multiple dimensions inherent in string theory.

The bottom line is that we are intelligent and rational (sometimes, at our best) but we have no guarantee that we can understand the universe we can observe. As Einstein said, the most amazing thing about the universe is that we can understand it at all. To assume that we might understand it is no more arrogant than to assume that the creator (if, indeed, the universe is an artifact) might want to communicate with us on some level. Perhaps Buddha was closest to the truth when he said that contemplation of such questions is a waste of time since you will never know the answers in this life. But that isn’t satisfying. We are curious creatures. We WANT answers. And in spite of the fact that the chances that the universe would exist in the way it does (1 x 10 exp233 according to Smolin- a chance against the universe existing that is greater than the total number of sub-atomic particles in the universe) we think that our brains (containing neuron connections somewhere on the order of 10 exp66- still greater than the number of atoms in the universe, but woefully simple nonetheless) can find answers to these questions. Science has claimed preeminance over spirituality since we started making fire with flint rather than simply gathering it from the lightening strikes provided by the ‘gods’. But we still know so little that either side is basically incapable of explaining either why the universe exists or even why we want to know.

Tiger gotta hunt, bird gotta fly, man gotta ask: why, why, why?
Tiger gotta sleep, bird gotta land, man gotta say: I understand.
Kurt Vonnegut

NSFW- It's the First of May...and You Know What That Means

2009-05-01T19:04:00.005Z

I am an unabashed fan of Jonathan Coulton! I discovered him a few years ago, bought everything he's ever done, even wrote him a fan email (how embarrassing) which he replied to very nicely. There have been lots of humorous songwriters but few are able to combine musical variety, musicianship, laugh out loud funny, and thought provoking poignancy the way Coulton does (only another John, John Prine, comes immediately to mind). Check out his sit e if you haven't already and lighten your Paypal or credit card account for the lousy $70 he wants for everything. He'll let you listen to almost everything for free, but be a mensch and buy it. You'll be glad you did and you'll have the added bonus of supporting a genuine artist who decided to give up the cubical jungle in favor of pursuing his dreams. You'll also remind the RIAA that hell is way to good for them and that the people who love music and the people who create it don't need them anymore.

If there is anything that resembles tradition on this blog then posting about Jon every May Day is certainly going to be it. This was the first song of his I ever heard. It's not my favorite, it's not even the one that really turned me on to him. But it is sweet and funny and not a little irreverent. Like almost everything he does.

(Second new tag of the day. (WTF being the first.) And I really mean it. If you are offended by single syllable synonyms for sex then don't click the video. )

WhyThatFrown- Four Horsemen to Run in KY Derby

2009-05-01T17:43:00.003Z

Well, again I’ve been away from the blog for awhile. Accelerating workloads and new challenges in the “real” world have limited my online musings to the occasional trollfight on HairyFishNuts or an email to Chez over at Deus Ex Malcontent, or comment my own brand of snarky self-indulgent blather on the excellent Science Avenger’s blog, and reading Badtux and Matt Taibbi (but not commenting much).

FWIW, if you don’t read everything Taibbi writes you are missing the most cogent, funniest, most insightful writing since Hunter Thompson was whoring for Matt’s current main employer, the Rolling Stone. Writing the truth in a time when satire is reality is the perfect job for someone of Taibbi’s talent and missing him is nothing short of criminal.

But while logging on to update myself about the fall of civilization, circa the start of the third millennium of the Common Era, I had to make a few brief comments about the world outside the window.

I’ve been saying to friends and astonished acquaintances for the last several years that the fundamentalists might be right about one thing- we seem to be heading to a confluence of catastrophes that cause one to wonder whether the four horsemen are racing in this years Kentucky Derby. Eight years of Republican rule have solidified the opinion that I arrived at during the Regan years (and to be honest about the whole trajectory, my first wife was a Regan delegate from TN at the 1980 convention- we both had it bad- and I’ve never really given up my Libertarian leanings) that while the small-government, free-market, personal liberty platform of the GOP is attractive, all the thugs are actually good for when they get power is starting wars and wrecking the economy in an orgy of unbridled avarice. I’d bet that had you polled thoughtful people whether or not we would ever elect a president less honest than Nixon, less charming than Regan, and less competent than Bush I they would have said that even the American electorate couldn’t manage that. Then we went and elected Dubya TWICE. And what did he do? Started not one, but two wars, with ambition to house them under the big tent of a never ending state of warfare that would have made Orwell vomit in his own mouth, and wrecked not only the domestic economy but did it in such a way that he brought the world economy to the brink. While at the same time denying the biggest environmental crisis in the history of human civilization because it would have hurt the bottom line of his domestic and foreign oil buddies. Thus presiding over the rapid loss of the ice caps with an idiotic Alfred E. Newman “What, me worry?” grin. And in the process wiped his ass on the constitution, tapped American’s phones, read our emails, studied our library and credit card records, castrated Habeas Corpus, and…

Well, I digress.

So the end times Derby watch goes on. War has taken and early lead into the first turn, with Famine being ridden by the spectre of climate change hot on his heels. But wait, there’s a dark horse coming up from the rear.

Pestilence is coming on strong. Being ridden by a jockey named Swine Flu. This new contender may not be able to hold this pace until the backstretch, but the betting windows are still open and the odds are changing. The World Health Organization just placed a sizable bet on him coming from behind.

While it’s a sad thing to watch the end of the world, I have to say that there’s a part of me that understands some of that apocalyptic fervor that grabs the fundamentalist. If you’re going to the Derby this weekend, or just an interested spectator of the human race, remember that the most exciting place to sit is the front row near the finish line.

BUSINESS- Pay Me or I Won't Let You Pay Me

2009-04-30T16:55:00.001Z

As French romantic novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr famously said, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"- the more things change, the more they stay the same. Certainly anyone who thinks that crashing the world economy is going to change the absurdity of what passes for American business management style nowadays should keep this quote in mind. Business seems to have completely abandoned the idea of growing their profits by developing better products, providing superior customer service, or engendering customer loyalty through fairness, in favor of gaming the system and finding new ways to charge customers for simply doing their jobs in the first place. For instance, when banks started implementing ATM machines it was a win-win. Customers had greater convenience and banks saved money because maintaining an ATM was much cheaper than employing a bank teller to do the same job. So what did the banks do? They charged their customers extra for something they had been doing for free and were saving money doing differently. Brilliant! Nowadays grocery stores are in the process of weaning customers away from the idea that their checkout should be done by a store employee by implementing “self-checkout”- basically making their customers work for the privilege of buying from them. But this story has to be a new low in managerial inventiveness to get paid extra for doing what you are in business to do in the first place.

US Airways president Scott Kirby has decided that simply paying a fee for the privilege of having a change of clothes with you on a trip- something that is the airline’s business and was previously free, isn’t enough. He would also like to be paid extra for letting you pay the first fee. Yeah, you read that right. In addition to paying $15 to check your first bag and $25 to check the second one, Scott now wants you to pay $5 extra if you check your bags at the terminal. Basically an extra charge for reaching out and taking your money.

Way to go, Scott! I wonder what you plan to do as an encore. Is charging me an extra fee to pay for my ticket far behind? Or is that too much douchebaggery even for US Air?

MOVIES- Synecdoche, NY

2009-03-21T14:19:00.000Z

Spoilers? Oh yeah.

We love a competition. Winners, losers, that makes simple enough to understand. Takes all the complexity and difficulty out of things. A bunch of amateurish tone-deaf singers who if they were performing in a bar you’d walk out on ‘em. But call it American Idol and make it a competition… A bunch of assholes that would make you ask for a new table in the restaurant if you were sitting close enough to hear their inane blather while waiting for their meal, but call it Big Brother… Watching people eat bugs is entertainment for kindergartners, but call it Survivor… So to try to entice you into a challenging film that is well worth your time even if there are no car chases or explosions, I’ll mention that the Rotten Tomatoes score for this movie is 62 and that two of the first half dozen blurbs include one from Chris Carpenter of the Orange County and Long Beach Blade which says “one of the worst films of 2008” and Robert Roten from the Laramie Movie Scope who writes, “This might be the best film of 2008”. Any time you have that kind of disagreement among critics, the movie is almost always worth seeing.

SYNECDOCHE, NY is about a middle-aged writer-director trying to make sense of the existential issues of being a human being through his art as the clock both winds down and speeds up. That’s also the plot of the movie. Charlie Kaufman builds a wildly complex artificial world in which we see everyone from both the outside, inside, and in the interpretation of the other characters. That’s also what the protagonist does. The movie is about a play within a play. The play in the movie is too. The movie is an attempt by an artist to make something real and true through his art. That’s also the background for the story of the movie. SYNECDOCHE, NY is the movie equivalent of both a hall of mirrors and a Russian nesting doll. It is simply the most demanding and rewarding and deep movie made in the last several years.

If you finish this movie and don’t immediately want to watch it again then you’ve missed the boat. If a movie has ever demanded repeated viewing to mine its depths, this one does. This isn’t new territory for Kaufman. Every one of his movies throws so many unexpected twists at the audience that, like a good book, they can’t all be digested in one sitting. The movie follows the life of a man, who could be any man or woman, through the last half of his life. To begin to follow what is happening you have to face both the idea that the second half of a life is profoundly affected by the reality that you have less time ahead of you than you have behind you and that, as my high school band director once warned us when we were far to young to understand, every summer is shorter. Over the hill is an apt metaphor because not only are you past the mid-point, but things are accelerating in an uncontrollable fashion. So you start with the abandonment of the classic three act structure in favor of the kind of subjective time sense that causes you to say “my god, is it Thursday already?” and leads to “my god, are you already 50?” and then add the juxtaposition of objective reality, subjective reality, memory, real people, your perception of people, your perception of events, how your memory differs from actual events. This is a movie where looking away from the screen for a couple of minutes might cause you to lose the momentum of the story the same way waking in the middle of the night causes you to lose contact with the dream you were living in just a moment before.

“Knowing you don’t know is the most essential step to knowing, you know?”

The first scene in the movie sets the tone and tries to ease you in to what is about to happen. Caden Cotard wakes to his clock radio telling him that it’s the first day of fall. On the radio a literature professor is being interviewed about the melancholy of autumn. She quotes part of Rilke’s poem, Autumn Day:

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters into the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

The scene continues, superficially having the slice-of-life feeling of many independent films. But little things are happening on the periphery that tell us what is really going on. Caden wanders downstairs to get his first cup of coffee. His wife passes him in the hall. We see his daughter and wife discuss her morning bowel movement. Something has changed with it- it’s green. Perhaps it is a symptom that there is something wrong. The phone rings. Caden doesn’t answer and his wife leaves his daughter to talk to her friend as he gets his coffee. The radio, which continues to play in the background as we eavesdrop on the wife’s telephone conversation, tells us it is October 8. Caden mentions that he doesn’t feel well as he goes out to get the morning paper. As Caden fetches the paper we see a man watching him from the other side of the street. We don’t know it at the time but this is Caden’s alter-ego, watching him from a slight distance in the same way you watch yourself in dreams, apart yet connected. Along with the morning paper, Caden gets the mail, which includes a magazine called “Attending to Your Illness”. He seems puzzled why he has a subscription to this. As he opens the newspaper at the breakfast table we see that the date is October 14 at the same time the radio tells us that it is October 15. Time continues to compress. The newspaper, now dated Oct. 15, 2005, says famous American Playwright Harold Pinter is dead. However, Pinter did not die on that date. The “mistake” does mirror Pinter’s own obsession with ambiguity and the unreliability of personal memory, which further leads us to believe this narrative is subjective and perhaps a memory rather than any kind of objective set of events. On the television (again a background item touched only briefly by the camera) is a cartoon where two talking farm animals are discussing viruses. All of these clues occur in the first five minutes of the movie.

SYNECDOCHE, NY is so dense that it requires a lot from the viewer but that attention is rewarded with the kind of real insight into the human condition that only the best books can provide and few movies even attempt. Everyone’s perception of the world is forced through the funnel of their understanding, and, like Jorge Luis Borges realization that any truly accurate map would require that the map be the same size as the area it represents, we realize that our understanding of events around us is basically reductionist to the point of uselessness. In perhaps one of the most poignant and troubling scenes in the movie, Caden Cotard finds the daughter than was taken from him at five years old. She was taken to Germany when her mother left Caden with a female friend who would later becomes the daughter’s lover. Caden sees his daughter again when she is ten years old, featured in an art magazine, naked and tattooed from head to foot. But in spite of searching for years he only is rejoined with her as she lies in her death bed, dying from an infection caused by the tattoos that had outraged him years before. When he finally meets her she asks him to beg for forgiveness for him abandoning her and being homosexual. He tries to explain that he isn’t homosexual and that he didn’t abandon her, she was taken from him. Her reply is that the lover that she shared with her mother said that he would say that. Trapped in a situation where he has no choice but to put his daughter’s needs ahead of his own, he asks for forgiveness for leaving her (which he didn’t) and for being homosexual (which he isn’t). Then, she refuses to forgive him with her dying breath. It’s a powerful scene and disturbing in a number of ways.

Which is the bottom line on the whole movie- powerful and disturbing. I can’t actually say it’s a great movie because it is so relentlessly unhappy. There are funny turns of phrase and funny situations but they are small and things never stop being uncomfortable. I realize this is what Kaufman was going for, but it’s hard on the audience. I don’t know what the feel good movie of 2008 was, but I’m pretty sure this was it’s antithesis. Yet, it is so unique and affecting that is simply must be seen by any fan of film.

POLITICS- The Court Jester (still not Danny Kaye) part two

2009-03-14T02:36:00.004Z

As I said in the previous post, last night Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was the scene of the best television interview on the boob tube perhaps since Frost sat down with Nixon. The Blogosphere has been buzzing, a few of the large corporate news outlets have mentioned it (Moneyweek, for instance had an article that missed the point so far that you would think it was a NASA Mars shot), and the television media completely ignored it. The last is especially telling about the corporate media and their love of whoring themselves out when a story means nothing
but their complete timidity to report any story where us dumb old Americans might actually hear a little truth. As the TVNEWSER article linked above mentions, one of the foremost apologists for anyone with money and power, Joe Scarborough, was happy enough to play “lets you and him fight” when he thought that Stewart was going to be nice and funny. But when our national Court Jester said what so many of us have been thinking (no matter which side of the aisle you sit on), that the national media is nothing but a conglomeration of whores who will say anything as long as it pleases the people leaving money on the nightstand, he literally proved the point by not mentioning the conclusion of something he had been yapping like the dog he is about for the past week.

So, goodbye, NBC networks. You have showed your true colors and spent your credibility for the sake of a quick buck. Joe Scarburough needs to go on his show Monday morning and felaciate a goat as a visual representation of his “journalistic integrity”. ABC is owned by Disney (the biggest purveyor of child porn in the history of the world- fifty years of enabling middle aged men to ogle pubescent girls since Annette Funicello through Brittany Spears to their current sex slave Miley Cirus. (And Billy Ray, I never believed that people should burn in hell for their mistakes but selling your daughter into sex slavery for another lousey 15 minutes of fame sure qualifies your more that a thousand lifetimes of consensual sex with the same gender ever could. And that excuses you for writing and singing that shitty Achey Breaky Heart song.) CBS emasculated the story that our previous president dodged the war in Vietnam and didn’t even fulfil his National Guard service by doing such a crappy job of investigation that they missed the fact that the documents they “exposed” used laser printer fonts rather than typewriter fonts which would have been time appropriate (and crucified their news reader, Dan Rather, making their penance a joke). And now, finally, NBC has laid to rest any concept of journalistic integrity by being caught with their pants down, in bed with the very Wall Street theives that have literally wrecked the world’s economy, and then hoping nobody noticed rather than facing their shame. They say their job is to report the news. Instead they have all made it obvious that their job is to be the propaganda arm of the plutocracy that runs this country.

Take it from Memphisto, Hell's gonna be packed with so many "journalists" that you won't have to worry when the coffee break is over.

POLITICS- The Court Jester (not Danny Kaye)

2009-03-13T17:32:00.003Z

The court jester, or court fool, was a unique character in the medieval royal administration. Perhaps this is best evidenced in Shakespeare’s plays where often the role of the fool was exemplified as the one person able to comment on the action, on the follies of the characters around him that were driving the drama with their own seriousness and failure. Only the character of the fool could say what everybody in the audience was thinking. Only he had liberty to speak the truth because no one had to take him seriously. After all, he was just a clown, meant only for amusement.

In a world where everyone is participating in the drama by saying whatever they think is to their advantage and all proclamations must be parsed for the actual aims of those making them, it’s easy to question whether you have been overwhelmed by cynicism (which is ABSOLUTELY NOT pessimism, as I often hear it mis-described). The professional cynics in a free society are supposed to be the news media. The “fourth estate” as Thomas Carlyle put it in his book On Heroes and Hero Worship. Since then it has come to mean almost a fourth branch of government. The one without civil power but with ultimate oversight on the other three. The final check and balance of power in a system where, ultimately, the people are expected to rule. But since our democracy has become a plutocracy the actually government has been bought and paid for by the rich and the fourth estate is outright owned by them, the only people left to tell the actual truth are the fools, the jesters.

Witness this last night.

Part one

Part two

Part three

Those three videos, in a form only slightly longer than the actual program as aired, are perhaps the most shocking news interview I’ve seen in the last decade if not longer. And that’s saying a lot when you consider how often the GOP vice-presidential candidate was allowed to show her true colors on network TV over the last several months. But it’s one thing to turn on the camera and have someone show themselves as an idiot in response to a few innocuous questions. Republicans chided the “media” for attacking Sarah Palin when in fact they hardly asked a question harder than “has your stupid ass even heard of any Supreme Court decisions other than Roe v. Wade?” Last night we saw what the press might be like if they took their adversarial role with the government seriously. And it wasn’t from some bloviating anacephalic bully’s self proclaimed “No-Spin Zone”, or from some pretentious Edward R. Murrow wannabe’s “Special Comments”. It wasn’t from a nightly network news broadcast or a (gag) serious newsmagazine. It was a simple case of a court jester asking an expert who claims to be a journalist why he didn’t say anything about a situation that anybody with half a brain saw coming. I’ve mentioned several times on this blog before that if you think people can own homes that cost half a million dollars with a mean family income of a tenth of that, you aren’t a financial expert, you are an idiot. And I’m sure as hell no expert. I just had basic math in school.

Thank you, Jon Stewart. You’re gonna get heat for this. The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes has a fake ending. If it had been truthful it would have ended with the loud-mouthed child beaten to death by the crowd for being unpatriotic. A few years ago you called out Tucker Carlson for being a lying, fatuous douchbag and if it hadn’t been for the internet no one would have known. So far I haven’t seen the reaction from the media but it’s going to be even more telling than your one man stand for speaking the obvious truth. (I don’t watch Joe Scarburough in the mornings because I have better ways to start my day that to have fat, rich, white guys wake me up by screaming at me about how fat rich white guys aren’t the problem. And I think that Mika Cadillac, daughter of Zibignew Cadillac, doesn’t even have the qualifications for being a woman who reads aloud on TV in the morning. If I wanted a horse-faced idiot to greet me every morning with a combination of superiority and stupidity I wouldn’t have thrown my ex-wife out of the house a couple of years ago.)

But thank you, Jon Stewart, you motley fool. Here is one insignificant Diogenese who appreciates that there is at least one honest man left.

MOVIES- Watch the Watchmen

2009-03-07T21:00:00.008Z

This is what it might have been...

Thirty years of comic book evolution in one year of superhero films. Unbelievable.

In the 1960s, Stan Lee decided to take the ridiculous idea of superheroes and try to give them a little more veracity by having them live in real places, like New York, and deal with real problems, like having to pay rent or getting the flu. Last spring IRON MAN was perhaps the perfect cinema translation of that idea. It was fun and funny and had just enough veracity to keep you from being reminded every minute that it was patently impossible.

In the 1970s, Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams upped the ante on realism by making superheroes deal with the limitations of the actual world. They turned Batman from a campy joke into a criminologist, gymnast, and marshal artist. They had two second tier heroes, Green Lantern and Green Arrow, deal with problems like race relations, Native American angst, Appalachian poverty, women's issues, and overpopulation. Believable politics and social situations entered the world of superheroes for the first time. Last summer THE DARK KNIGHT showed us that a man might dress up in a costume and fight for justice and it was so layered with psychology, sociology, politics, and terrorism that it never occurred to you that this man wasn’t affected by the world around him.

In the 1980s, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons finally wrote an actual novel in comic book form that centered around superheroes. Not only did they interact realistically with a realistic world, they had all the complexity of characters in a novel- moral ambiguity, self-deception, motivations such as lust, hunger for power, greed, cynicism, obsession. These superheroes were anything but paragons of virtue. They were the kind of people who were screwed up and egomaniacal enough to think that they should change the world to suit themselves. Or they were just sadists. Or they were just crazy. And the world they populated was just as complex, with societal decay, threats of nuclear war, government interference, and popular opinion all affecting their self endowed missions. In addition to these important pieces of verisimilitude, the novel had complex structure, layered narratives, allegory and metaphor, and not a small amount of science fiction. It was widely considered the best superhero comic book ever made. It’s still widely considered the best superhero comic ever made over twenty years later.

And in the late winter of 2009 the cinematic adaptation of WATCHMEN hit theaters. Unlike IRON MAN and THE DARK KNIGHT, this movie is a straight adaptation. And considering the place the source material holds in the history of the genre it is perhaps one of the most literal adaptations of a book into a film ever made by Hollywood.

And it may be the best superhero movie ever made.

Zach Snyder has followed his last comic book movie, the literal adaptation of Frank Miller’s superficial and stylized 300, with a film noir with superheroes in it. The movie is complex, sexy, exciting, cynical, and incredibly violent at times. The movie is almost three hours long and never slows down for a minute. I can only imagine how overwhelmed any viewer must feel if they expected Superman or Iron Man, or even the Dark Knight. Many of the best scenes are lifted directly from panels of the comic. Much of the best dialog is verbatim from Alan Moore’s original work.

Of course, there are going to be detractors. Some will be like this critic for The Hollywood Reporter who seems to think the movie’s financial prospects have something to do with it’s artistic accomplishment (to be sure, it seems to be The Hollywood Reporter’s editorial policy to equate artistic success with profitability). The real irony in the review is that at one point he says, “It's all very complicated but not impenetrable” apparently unaware that his review has at least a dozen mistakes in it relating to either the movie or source material. He doesn’t even get the name of the group right. This isn’t completely unexpected. Many a comic fan has given a copy of Watchmen to someone as an example of the best of the format, only to have them be completely unable to understand the complexity of the story.

The other side of the coin is the fatuous fanboys who will pick the movie apart because it isn’t their biblical interpretation of the source material. There is a legitimate complaint that the ending of the story has been changed, but even the author has said that the original ending was weak and, while I won’t give anything away, the new conclusion is logical and flows from the story. In fact, for fans of the original story it may be the only point of suspense in the whole film. Needless to say, while I loved the original graphic novel, my opinion is that anyone who thinks this isn’t a reverent and excellent adaptation is missing a real opportunity to love something that has turned a fan favorite that almost everyone agreed was unfilmable into an enjoyable and exciting cinema experience.

In addition to Snyder’s obvious reverence for the original story and art, there are several other aspects of the movie that rise to the level of excellence that even rabid fans should be able to find no fault with. Casting comes immediately to mind. There simply isn’t a discordant piece of casting or a bad performance in the bunch. In fact, the performances are amazingly spot on. I was going to wax poetic about each actor and how much they were dead ringers for their comic counterparts, but every single one is so outstanding that it would just be a laundry list. If you could cast Rock Hudson as Superman or Clint Eastwood as Batman from the Dark Knight Returns then you might approach the bulls-eye that this movie hits with every single role. The special effects are just as seamless. I can’t remember a single scene where my (admittedly obsessive-compulsively cynical) willing suspension of disbelief was challenged.

Even the music is impressive. Dylan, Hendrix, and the inspired use of an abridged version of Phillip Glass’ score for Koyaanisqatsi during the section that covers my favorite of the original twelve comic series (a look into Dr. Manhattan’s Einsteinian POV) makes the movie one of the best to use popular music since American Graffiti.

Yes, even at close to three hours there is a whole lot left out. But to call that a fault of the movie is almost on the same level of criticism as saying the movie is flawed because the characters don't have heavy black ink lines around them and that you can't see the color dots from the original printing if you look closely.

There’s nothing left to say. Comic book fans have been gifted with a remarkable adaptation of the most exceptional and complex work ever done in the genre. We should all go to our graves knowing that nothing we’ve ever done in our lives is worthy of the last year in comic cinema.

Go see this movie. Take everyone you can drag to the theater. Give it a standing ovation when the credits roll. Thank God that you were lucky enough to live to see it. Nobody thought it could be done.

UPDATE: The line from the Hollywood Reporter review that originally read " The opening murder happens to a character called the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who was once a member of a now-banished team of superheroes called the Masks." now had been corrected to " The opening murder happens to a character called the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who was once a member of a now-banished team of superheroes called the Watchmen." And the chocolate ration has been increased too!

MOVIES- Mamma Mia

2009-03-06T02:17:00.002Z

While I watched MAMMA MIA I couldn’t help but think of THE LORD OF THE RINGS and STAR WARS. They all fall into the same genre- fantasy. They’re just gender specific. There is nothing less implausible about Hobbits, Jedi, Elves, and space battles than there is about 60 year old women with 20 year old daughters they had 40 years ago finding true love with ancient boyfriends while whole villages or people break into spontaneous choreographed dance numbers and sing in perfect harmony. Hell, there are even magic rings in two out of the three.

I have to say that MAMMA MIA is a fitting tribute to the music of Abba. In case you don’t know, Abba was a Swedish pop band in the 1970’s that had several hits in America. They didn’t speak English, so all their songs had to be learned phonetically, and the artistry and production was top notch for the disco era. An era that replaced wood with woodgrain plastic, sugar with high-fructose corn syrup, and music with highly produced plastic high-fructose corn syrup. Compared with Abba, the Monkeys were musical geniuses on par with Beethoven and Mozart. Likewise, MAMMA MIA is a classical musical the same way that the band on the Free-Credit Report dot Com commercials are a driving force in music today. (With the exception that the Free-Credit band is a whole lot better.)

The first problem is the plot. A twenty year old girl is getting married and she uses the occasion to steal and read her 60 year old mother's diary, only to discover that mom apparently slept with every boy who could find his way to their secluded Greek island home during the summer of love. Not being too bright, she assumes she is the product of one of these many liaisons rather than the far more probable likelihood that she is the bastard child of one of the smelly sponge fishermen that are indigenous to the island. Pretending to be her mother, she sends a letter to every man mentioned in her slutty mom’s diary inviting them to the wedding. Of course, none of these men have been able to find happiness since visiting her mother’s well trod cooze in the forty years hence, so each of them drop what they are doing to rush to the island in an attempt to revisit their long lost teenage lives (since everybody knows that the joys of career, marriage, child-rearing, and emotional stability are just a sham that replaces the true joy of momentary teenage sexual fumbling). In addition to these three male infants, her mother invites her two childhood girlfriends to the island for the wedding. These two old friends have found happiness in the intervening four decades through pursuing a succession of vapid but rich male Peter Pan syndrome types, and have learned that the true fulfillment is measured by the bulge in a man’s pants. Not the one in the front, but the one over his wallet. All female reunions are measured by how many bats are driven to fly into the rocky cliffs of the Greek isle in acts of self destruction by the ultrasonic shrieks the women use to express joy when meeting. Then we are treated to a soap-opera where everybody judges every event in terms of what they find the most flattering to their own egos, interspersed with absolutely ghastly covers of songs that were at best forgettable thirty years ago and at worst poor commercial jingles merchandised as popular music. The absolute low point is letting Peirce Brosnan’s weak voice fill the soundtrack with inane warbling. The musical equivalent of a million fingers scraping down a quarter of a million blackboards. Truly, he makes me long for Richard Harris to talk his way though the soundtrack of Camelot one more time. Meryl Streep fares a little better, but honestly the only people who can actually sing among all the primaries are Christine Baranski, here reprising her role as the template for cougars everywhere, and Julie Walters as the short, fat friend. When these two sing together the audience is given a brief taste of what the movie might have been if the casting and merchandising departments had not run the show. Otherwise, this remains a fantasy movie, not so much like the sublime Lord of the Rings trilogy brought to life by Peter Jackson as like the abysmal DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS movie. The songs are insipid, the dance numbers are ruined by having “Hollywood stars” rather than real dancers front them, and the plot is recklessly stupid. If you liked this movie, or more importantly, it you are a woman who dragged your male partner to see it, you should spend a weekend playing Magic the Gathering dressed like a slave girl as penance. And the next time you want to go all high and mighty on your significant other just remember, he’s no sillier than you are.

Maybe a whole lot less.

MOVIES- Vacant Strangers

2009-03-02T18:03:00.002Z

(My drawing of Hitchcock may never have been more appropriate or inappropriate as the banner for the subject of movies.)

I’ve never really been a fan of horror movies. In fact it may be the only genre that I don’t like. Not that I can’t appreciate a good horror movie, it’s just that so many of them are so predictable and repetitive that I don’t find anything worthwhile in them. See if you’ve heard this one before- a small group of people take a holiday in a secluded spot and then when darkness falls they start to suspect that someone is trying to kill them. They attempt to deal with the situation by taking several incomprehensibly stupid actions which only cause them to start to disappear one at a time. Eventually only one of them are left and that one either escapes by single-handedly defeating the person or persons who have exterminated the entire group without breaking a sweat. During this process several things will dependably occur- someone will lose one or several articles of clothing, someone will be startled by one of their companions and kill or almost kill them thinking they are the villain, someone will have sex, many loud noises will happen at unexpected moments, and things will jump out at people.

Remember, snuff films are illegal only because of the murder involved, not because they have any different appeal than any other horror movie.

Now, to be clear, I’m probably not talking about actual horror films. I’m talking about that sub-genre commonly referred to as slasher films. Actual horror builds psychological suspense and a sense of dread through canny manipulation of ancient fears buried deep in the human psyche. These films have the same relationship to that kind of horror that jumping out from behind a corner and yelling BOO has to telling a well crafted ghost story. In fact, that’s probably the best description of them. Jumping out and yelling BOO cinematically.

The best thing on the whole disk of THE STRANGERS is the first thing director Brian Bertino says on the documentary about the making of the film. “This is something that’s never been done before.” I laughed out loud. Had he watched a movie called VACANCY, released the year before, perhaps he would have been more aware of the irony. The movies are virtually identical. Both involve a couple having relationship problems who wind up in a secluded area and are beset by a group of masked people who intend to kill them. Apparently not being married is the 21st century’s equivalent of what having teenage sex was in the eighties.

Both of the movies are reasonably acted and directed. Things go bang, people enter stray light beams slowly from dark backgrounds behind the main characters, people hide in closets, phones ring and there is no one on the other end. Both movies are completely devoid of an original idea but if I had to make a choice I’d probably give a slight edge to VACANCY simply because it spends a little more time setting up a plausible scenario and building tension. And because neither of the protagonists take off their shoes at any point. That’s important to me. If you are being attacked by a group of killers, put on your shoes so you can run. If you don’t have that much brain then I have a hard time believing you deserve to get away in the first place.

MOVIES- Confessions of a Superhero

2009-02-28T20:51:00.000Z

Let’s say that you’re a young person who wants to be a star. You get out of high school, buy a bus or plane ticket, and head to Hollywood. But you don’t know anybody and you’re surrounded by literally thousands of other young people who have the same dreams and have done the same thing. Perhaps you are attractive, talented, and lucky enough that lightning strikes and you start getting roles. Perhaps you aren’t. Either way, you’ve got to find a way to make a living while things happen. What do you do?

You might find a job as a waiter, or in a McDonalds, or any one of the million other jobs young people do when they are starting out. But that isn’t going to help you. You need to be seen. You want to find some way to act. You want some way to get in front of the public.

Maybe you dress up like Superman, or Batman, or Wonder Woman, or the Hulk and go stand out on the Hollywood walk of fame and have your picture taken with tourists.

CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERHERO is a relatively unknown (OK, I’d never heard of it) documentary about people who dress up like comic book character and hang out on Hollywood Blvd so tourists can take pictures with them for tips. Nobody hires them to do it. They aren’t licensed by the owners of the properties and legally they can’t even ask for money for what they do. They just make a costume and take off. CONFESSIONS shows you a snapshot of the lives of four of these people.

There’s Chris, a Superman who has been doing this for years and may have become a little too obsessed with the role. He does look sort of like Christopher Reeve, if somebody had left him in the oven too long. The film follows him to Metropolis, Illinois for the annual Superman Celebration that’s the little town’s only claim to fame. I don’t want to give too much away, but we get to know a lot about Chris during the movie and some things about him are strangely ambiguous.

Max is a self-professed “George Clooney lookalike” who dresses in a Batman Costume and has anger management issues. Max also has a colorful past, though, like Chris, there are questions about what that past might really be.

Max and Chris are pushing middle age, but Jennifer, who dresses up like Wonder Woman is in her mid-twenties. She came to California from a little town nobody has ever heard of in Tennessee and still has most of her dreams intact. But life is what happens while you make other plans and during the course of the movie she has some life happen.

And Joseph, the most un-Hulklike Hulk you could imagine. His transformation from a slightly built black man to a giant green monster is accomplished with the help of a full head mask and a head-to-toe green muscle suit. Joseph sold his Nintendo to buy the bus ticket that got him to California from the small Southern town he grew up in and landed in town the second day of the Rodney King riots. He’s probably had the hardest time of the four since he hit the coast, but things are looking up.

Sure, these people might be a little odder than most, but if you aren’t you don’t go to the coast and try to be an actor. But, then again, they might not be that different at all. During our 90 minute stay with these folks, director Matthew Ogens shows us one getting married, one divorced, one arrested and one landing a role. My immediate feelings about the strangeness of these people was replaced by understanding and sympathy. The movie is more affecting that I ever thought it would be. I found myself rooting for these strangers who spend their days standing in the California heat dressed up in silly costumes in the hope someone will give them a few dollars to have their picture made with them. And hope to become rich and famous actors someday. Like most superheroes, it’s the people behind the masks that make the story interesting.

The question of whether or not what they do is panhandling comes up a couple of times in the movie, but I don’t see how it could be. They render a service for the money they are given and it’s a far more honest way to make a living than attacking someone’s car at a redlight with a squeegee and a bottle of windex.

Ogen has made a half-dozen documentaries before this one, a couple of them for television, none of them which you’ve probably ever seen either. But perhaps that’s why he seems to have such compassion for these people. Like them, he obviously takes pride in his work and is looking for his big break. The movie is professionally shot and edited and doesn’t suffer from the bad lighting, poor sound, or shaky-cam problems that plague a lot of low budget documentaries. He never lets his direction and camera work get in the way of telling the story of these four people.

CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERHERO is available from Netflix on DVD or through their instant download service and is well worth seeing if you are a fan of superheroes, struggling actors, documentaries, or just getting a glimpse into the lives of four people trying to make a way in the world. It has several surprises and is well worth the time.