I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. Most of them are the sort of laundry I don't care to air on this blog, but I will admit to and apologize for this one.
When I was a freelance writer trying to make my name, I sold out my integrity as a movie reviewer, Star Wars fan and as a writer by penning a good review of Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones in exchange for the chance to see the movie a week before the rest of the world.
I'm so very sorry.
This is not a return to blogging, just reposting the Facebook meme here.
25 Things You May Not Know About Me
1. I like listening to Country music. Commercial country, old country, whatever. The cheesier the better. Hank Williams, Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Loretta Lynn, Brooks & Dunn, Carrie Underwood, Charlie Daniels – all on my iPod right now.
2. I am an Eagle Scout, and it is the one thing I have on my resume / CV from before college. It is also the oldest thing I have on my CV that isn’t my name, as I first put it on there when applying for a job in high school.
3. Although a flaming liberal in almost all of my opinions (by American standards, anyway) I believe strongly in the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms. Part of this comes from the belief that if there is a populist, communist or anarchist revolution, we stand a much better chance of success if we’re armed with fully automatic weapons.
4.I have suffered from (and been treated for) depression on and off for my adult life. In the last six months, I’m doing better than I have been since I was in my late teens. The prior six months were probably the worst in my life in this regard. If you’re depressed, seek counselling. It will help. I promise.
5. I thought Grand Theft Auto 4 was an unfun piece of shit. I thought Grand Theft Auto 3 was an unfun piece of shit. On the other hand, I thought Vice City and San Andreas were awesome. Go figure.
6. I called the last of the Final Five Cylons a year ago. I also used to infer from clues what mythical creatures or pulpy homages Mulder and Scully were facing on the X-Files before they were revealed. Often during the opening teaser.
7. I’ve been bungee jumping, and it was the closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience.
8. Speaking of, I envy people who have strong religious convictions as I have none whatsoever. It’s not that I disbelieve in a higher power (an atheist I am not), but I have seen no compelling argument for belief in one either – even though sometimes I desperately want to. One of my friends is a very devout Jew and many of my family members are devout Christians, and I look at their experiences and faith and wish I could believe something so strongly as well.
9. I enjoy playing through old classic adventure games from my youth. I play through Hero’s Quest and King’s Quest 6 at least once a year.
10. I was terrible with math in school. Algebra II was my worst subject (and as far as I made it down the Great Highway o’ Math), and was my only D in high school. The one exception to this was the semester in Geometry that focused entirely on proofs and theorems; during that time, I scored higher than 100% with all the extra credit. To this day I’m not sure why I was much better with Geometry.
11. I cannot abide working with people who I feel have nothing to offer me, especially when they are in positions of authority. I want to work with people from whom I can learn, or with whom I can be creative. When someone is neither, they’re wasting my time.
12. There was a point in my life when I watched Jerry Springer daily.
13. I own a full-on (and about 90% authentic, in terms of the materials and clothing patterns) pirate costume for cosplaying, but have never used it for cosplay – yet.
14. I have purchased more pairs of shoes for myself in the last year than I have in the previous seven.
15. My favourite superhero is either Captain America or Hellboy, and I like them both for many of the same reasons.
16. As a kid, I had strep throat a lot. I’m not sure how many times but if I had to hazard a guess it was thirty or so. I have never had it since I was about 13, despite having been exposed to it several times. I secretly believe this is because I am now immune to every strain of strep on the planet.
17. I have a recurring nightmare where my friends or family are in trouble, typically from some massive threat (zombies, war, etc.) and I’m trying to tell them to run or prepare and they ignore me until it’s too late. Yes, I’ve told my shrink about this nightmare.
18. My ideal video game is a sandbox-style Jurassic Park game, where you could play as a variety of dinosaurs as well as a human. Why someone hasn’t made this yet I don’t know. Dinosaurs! Guns! Vehicles! Missions! Come ON, people!!
19. I am an optimist, almost to a fault. My optimism has only increased since moving to London and seeing some of the incredibly nice things people have done for total strangers in such a large city.
20. The very first ‘adult’ (i.e., not intended for a younger audience) novel I read was either The Lord of the Rings or The Hunt For Red October – I cannot remember which, and I read them right around the same time.
21. I love watching horror movies but cannot watch them alone as I get genuinely terrified.
22. Although I’ve never made a secret about this, I don’t actively talk about it either. So a lot of people don’t know that I interned for Michael Moore on the second season of his TV show “The Awful Truth.”
23. Which is because it was my dream to become a filmmaker. I made my first movie when I was about 8 or so. I made movies throughout high school. Now, I’m in PR and occasionally I do PR for other people’s movies. Sigh.
24. Similar to #1, I also enjoy hardcore gangster rap, but only when it’s political in nature. I think Eminem’s political rhymes are some of the best rap of the past 10 years.
25. I enjoy memes like this and I was secretly hoping someone would send it to me so I could do it. In fact, I was probably going to do it anyway just for the hell of it.
I was discussing art with the Beautiful Competition over a lovely dinner of Italian food, pink Champagne and lemon gelato last evening (it's a difficult life, isn't it?) and we got on the subject of film. I've been thinking a lot about The Dark Knight lately, which I've reviewed before, as a cultural touchstone or artefact: that is, something that captures a certain kind of zeitgeist. I realized that I like Dark Knight for many of the same reasons I like another artefact film: Fight Club. They're excellent films to examine side-by-side.
Fight Club came out in 1999, and managed to capture the late Clinton-era zeitgeist in a way that no other film can claim. The notion of office workers, bored by their jobs and betrayed by promises that they would be ‘rock gods or movie stars' turning to small-scale domestic terrorism to show their dissatisfaction reflected a growing ennui among the young professional class. It was a film born from economic safety, a remote threat of real terrorism (can you imagine Fight Club being released after 9/11?) and a view that the villain is not only likable, he's something to which we might aspire as he's just an aspect of us.
Other images I associate with this time are almost straight out of the film: the pictures of the impotently-smashed windows of Starbucks' and McDonalds during the so-called Battle of Seattle WTO protests. Rather than striking at the true culprits, it's as though the anarchists decided upon direct action for direct action's sake, vandalizing franchises that represented something tangentally associated with the targets of their rage. They struck against the same coffee shops where they purchased their own tall skinny soy lattes, as if what they hated the most was something inside themselves.
Then consider Dark Knight, where a much more separated hero battles a villain who is more like a force of Nature. Bruce Wayne is the military-industrial complex, a do-gooding rich person who feels that the best way to alleviate crime is not to redistribute wealth or fund educational programs, but to physically beat criminals and purchase hotels by writing personal checks. His superpowers consist of nothing more than access to the latest military weapons technology that in turn fuels his vast personal fortune when he's not using it to hit escaped mental patients.
On the other side is the Joker, a literal wildcard who makes quite clear that he wishes only to cause destruction and chaos. He has no logical plan or reasoning – he is, by his own admission, a ‘dog chasing cars, and wouldn't know what to do if [he] caught one' – acting entirely on instinct. His villainy comes not from any rhyme or reason; in fact, it's difficult to even call it evil as it doesn't appear to be motivated by a need to cause harm other than the opposite of the established order. In a way, it's a perfect and safe Western dream: good people in the military-corporate network keeping us safe from forces of darkness that cannot (or we simply refuse to take the time to) be understood.
Don't get me wrong; I loved the Dark Knight but its overtones are difficult to ignore. It's interesting to compare the two films as far as what they indicate of the national mindset, what makes a ‘hero' and what's acceptable both for heroes and villains. In fact, are the villains actually us? How much are we like them? These questions are nothing new to comics or stories, but the ways in which the answers change are very indicative of how our mindset shifts, however subtly. In this case, I think it reflects a growing cynicism, that the ennui of the late 1990s was replaced first with a renewed optimism and faith in leadership, government and military which was the squandered and eventually taken advantage of, creating a reaction possibly more cynical than the previous one.
Oddly enough, it's not the heroes in these films that are the most accurate reflections of the times but the villains themselves. Tyler Durden's rage against the corporate machine manifesting as minor acts of terrorism and simple human empowerment with material denial is a perfect model of the aimless feeling of basic dissent we exhibited at the end of the 1990s. Clinton lied, but he lied about getting blowjobs. The economy looked pretty good. We weren't involved in any foreign wars, and had the full backing of NATO and the UN in Kosovo.
The Joker is us now, rage without focus, the anti-structure. Whatever's in place is bad, because it's inherently corrupt and probably going to screw us anyway. Piles of money in shipping containers? Just stuff to be burned, because hey, the guys at the top have been bleeding it out of the good citizen of Gotham anyway. And we should probably be punished in some way because we're complacent in putting these power structures in place to begin with. The commoners are as much to blame as anyone else, and it's better just to burn it all and start again.
It's hard to imagine a Joker smashing a Starbucks', but it's also hard to imagine Tyler Durden forcing commoners and criminals to face a prisoner's dilemma. And it's hard to imagine us accepting either doing those things, exactly because it would be so out of context of the times.
I realize I’m doing one of the single-most boring things a person can do with a personal blog: review a film. But I just got back from The Dark Knight and I wanted to share my impressions, because films often change in my mind and I want to record exactly what I’m thinking now.
I loved it. Absolutely fucking loved it. It’s been a long, long time since I sat in a movie theater and thought, yes, I’m glad I’m seeing this in a theater because I’m having a great time. And it’s been a long, long time since I walked out of a movie theater and though that was an incredible experience.
The Beautiful Competition and I were discussing the film afterwards and I said that I liked it better than Batman Begins and probably better than any superhero movie before. True (at least, as of right now, give me a while and I’ll probably get lost in the film’s flaws.) It wasn’t a perfect movie, but is there such a thing? It was a fantastic Batman movie. I had to check to see if Jeph Loeb had anything to do with it (he didn’t.) It was a great superhero movie, and it was a fantastic film.
One of the things I like to explore both as a reader and as a writer is the way moral codes and philosophies survive at extreme conditions. Oddly enough, the best to cite about this is Elie Wiesel’s Night, a book I did not particularly enjoy but the crux of which was the very absolutist view that no morality can survive in the most extreme of conditions – in that case, the Holocaust. I’ve never thought that thesis was particularly true, except perhaps on a meta level, but lives are not lived and decisions are never made on the meta level. They are individual things. And that is exactly what The Dark Knight addresses, head on.
Heath’s Joker is probably my favorite villain in a comic book movie, because his crusade forces Batman’s hand. At first, it seems he’s playing the same game as the rest of the mobsters that Batman’s been fighting: why else would he want to work with them, to ask for their money? But it eventually becomes clear his motivation really is, well, utterly unmotivated by anything except a desire for absolute anarchy. There’s a brilliant scene where Bruce Wayne and Alfred discuss The Joker’s motivations and how to get in his head and stop him. Bruce says that it’s easy for Batman to stop the other villains because in the end, they are motivated by money and fear. Even dyed-in-the-wool psychopaths like the Scarecrow (who makes an awesome cameo, by the way) are motivated on some level by these same sorts of things. But how does Batman deal with a criminal who is only interested in causing chaos and destruction? Something that’s more of a force of nature than a motivated human being? And is it possible to deal with someone like that in a way that allows you not to compromise your moral principles?
There’s a brilliant bit of foreshadowing, where the characters discuss the Romans and their practice of handing over power to a dictator in times of crisis. In all instances but one, the dictator (eventually, the historian in me says!) resigned his position and returned power to the Senate and People. But it only took one - Caesar – to annihilate the Republic and create the Empire. Batman cannot win his battle without a compromise, and the one he decides to make is just as interesting as the other moral situations in the film. Even better is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is ripped straight from Game Theory (and, I should note, Matt Mason at The Pirate’s Dilemma covered quite eloquently.) As Mason notes, that scene is where The Joker slips and where The Dark Knight truly shines as an exploration of morality in extreme conditions. The outcome of the situation (I won’t spoil the particulars) actually left me quite stunned, but in a pleasant way. And it did give Batman the chance to beat The Joker, after all!
But this complexity is the greatest pleasure I can take from a film or a book. It’s simply an abstract form of what I like so much about horror movies, specifically zombie films – which are in and of themselves just the next iteration of post-apocalypse films. It is being forced to make decisions when confronted with the absurd. The day-to-day decisions aren’t so important: decisions made when faced with the most absurd and extreme of conditions – a ferry full of prisoners and a ferry full of normal people, with each holding the other detonator; a motivationless psychopath who won’t stop killing; the dead returning to life to feast on the living – these are all things that remove a person from the norm and force them to look at things in a new way. I use the word ‘absurd’ in a loaded fashion, because it’s exactly how Neitzsche, Heidegger and specifically Camus refer to what life and meaning are in the first place: ways to deal with these extreme conditions that, in the end, are something we must make and be responsible for on our own.
[Note: I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that Harvey Dent / Two-Face actually progresses from being responsible for his decisions to his infamous coin-flipping, leaving choice and more importantly responsibility up to fate as the movie progresses. Which is really an entirely different essay, but adds a good deal of flavor and another layer of depth to the film.]
So there I am: The Dark Knight impressions. Holy freaking crap it was a good movie.
The problem with wearing your pants twice in a row to save on laundry is that sometimes you see something that makes you mess yourself in more ways than one.
Take, for example, the trailer for Hellboy 2. Does it contain:
Seth and I went to see Beowulf tonight, a movie that strikes me as remarkable for two reasons: first that for a time the most popular movie in the US was based on one of the oldest stories in the English language and second that it's basically a two-hour video game cutscene. I don't mean the last to be derogatory - I enjoyed the movie immensely - but turning everything into a CGI effect was more distracting than it was cool, as opposed to say 300 earlier this year.
They took some liberties with the story, but understandable liberties; overall it wasn't something that took anything away from the overall enjoyment of the "Beowulf is a fucking badass" premise of the story. You could argue that they aren't liberties at all, because Beowulf was a spoken poem long before it was ever written down and passed through several iterations before it reached the oldest known written form we have today. Oral stories change. Written stories can change. So adapting it to the screen and changing it a bit isn't bothersome at all - it fits completely the spirit of the original type of text. It also added another interesting dimension to the tale, the human side of the hero - which has been so overdone in comics recently it's drifting into cliche territory and Neil Gaiman was one of the writers, so take from that what you will.
I enjoyed it. I cheered for Beowulf, marveled at the effects, drooled at Angelina Jolie, and had a great time. That a poem 1400 years old can inspire that is also remarkable. If you have a chance, check it out.
"We want you to make a viral video!"
If I hear this one more time, I think I'm going to slap someone.
To paraphrase Me2: viral is not a strategy, it is an outcome. You don't make viral videos, you make videos that become viral. You may want them to become viral, but there's no magical spell/potion/Harry Potter wand that turns a viral video into the next LOLcat.
That is all.
A web-based widget on the website for the Simpsons movie lets you create your own Simpsons avatar.
I expect to see yours on your blog soon, Puppeteers.
This one's been sitting on our TV stand for some time, and working from home yesterday sending out 100+ emails individualized emails to different blogs, I popped it in to play in the background towards the end of the day. Liz came home from campus a little early and we both got to enjoy the majority of the movie together. I'd never seen it before, but I realized why it's on so many people's "best-of" lists. The Last Picture Show is probably one of the best movies I've ever seen.
Shot in stark black and white and as nihilistic as The Graduate, which it reminded me of on several counts, it's as true a portrait of life in a small Southern town as you could hope for. The dusty Texas-Oklahoma area near Wichita Falls, the sense of boredom and disaffection that even though the small town is a trap it's still sad when it starts to crumble, everything fit together perfectly. It's unusual to say, but there wasn't a single wasted shot or line of dialog. The editing tied everything together almost magically. It didn't bar any holds when it came to the seething teenage sexuality that comes from having nothing to do and no exit. But this is no Sartre play; it's harsh reality (as "real" as a movie about the death of a movie house being a symbol for the death of a town can be "real.")
Driving in this morning, I turned to Liz and said "that was a fucking great movie." She agreed, and we spent the rest of the drive talking about it.
If that isn't a sign of a great movie, I don't know what is.
Alright you chuckleheads, I realized my last post wasn't as clear as I needed to be.
I loved the South Park movie. It was the Holy Grail of South Park. After that, everything has been a mere shadow on the wall of the South Park cave.
Make sense?
28 Weeks Later.
Pirates 3.
I'm just not excited about Spiderman 3.
That's my list. Anyone got anything else I need to watch?
Oh yeah, and the Simpsons movie. But part of me doesn't want to go. After all, the South Park movie was the point where that series jumped the shark for me.
Of course, the Simpsons did it like seven seasons ago.
Last night, I caught a late show of Grindhouse. Grindhouse is Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' homage to "grindhouse" cinema, the late 1960s and 1970s b-movies that were shot on a shoestring, featured crazy and often nonsensical plots, gratuitous violence, sex and gore, and are just plain fun. There were fake trailers for more grindhouse-style films (most of which were awesome), and the movie itself is a back-to-back feature. The first segment is "Planet Terror," directed by Rodriguez, and the second was "Death Proof" by Tarantino.
"Planet Terror" was the most fun I've had at the movies in a long, long time.
"Death Proof" pretty much cemented my belief that Pulp Fiction was a fluke, and Tarantino is a talentless hack.
Rodriguez "got" the idea. His movie was an homage to the genre, well-paced stupid fun that makes you laugh out loud at the sheer hilariousness of what's happening. Tarantino's movie was 45 minutes of insipid Tarantino-style dialog, followed by 5 minutes of action, followed by 30 minutes of even worse insipid dialog, followed by (I admit) a fucking incredible car chase. But the payoff wasn't worth the time I put in to get there.
And, I'm now ready to admit to myself I feel the same way about Kill Bill: the ending fucking sucked compared to the rest of the movie. A four-hour buildup to a shitty five-minute fight that was over before it started? Screw you, Tarantino.
Also, while I'm at it: Kevin Smith can't edit a film to save his life. Worst. Pacing. Ever.
UPDATE: Liz sent me an EW.com article where critic Mark Harris agrees with me, but does it far more eloquently than I did above. Money quote:
The Soldier Blue poster in the background, the wry Robert Urich and Lee Majors name-checks, even the long, long raunchy-girl-talk conversations are just a series of attitudinizing postures — lots of ''Nigga, please!'' (way too much, in fact) and the like, as if women have nothing better to do all day than compete in a never-ending coolness contest.
Is Grindhouse itself just part of that contest? And why devote so much energy to proving your superiority to such inferior material? Tarantino clearly gets high on trashy film rediscoveries. The thing is, when you're high, your definition of genius slackens as your riffs get louder, wilder, and less supportable. Grindhouse is one of those riffs.
Although certainly not being discussed at the moment in the same way PR efforts are, marketing and advertising efforts to place products in films and TV shows is a far older discussion. If you can spot a product in a movie, chances are the company paid to put it there.
My favorite director weighs in:
And here, Puppeteers, is why you shouldn't try to re-enact what you see in movies in real life.
I saw 300 yesterday with Brook (more on the movie itself later), and it was better than I expected it to be. Good enough to inspire me to take out my copy of Robin Lane Fox's The Classical World and read up a bit on Sparta, and to dig out Alexander so I could watch a historically-accurate battle scene.
It was also good enough that this morning, I attempted to re-enact one of the seminal scenes from the movie. As I was taking out the recycling bin, the front door was open but the storm door was not. Liz, being the helpful soul she is, asks if I need her to open the door for me. I reply, "No, THIS IS SPARTA!" and give the door a solid kick. Like in the movie.
It seems to work for a second, but as I step out, the door reaches the apex of its forward motion, catches on the springs, and slams back into the recycling bin, spilling the bin's contents all over the sidewalk.
Sparta indeed.
And that is why you shouldn't try to imitate art.
At the risk of turning this blog into a video aggregator, I wanted to post a follow up. Stemming from the video of "Diana's Piano" from earlier in the week, I found this: the "Valse Triste" segment from Allegro Non Troppo. Allegro is an Italian animated film that's almost like an anti-Fantasia; most of it is only so-so, but this segment, particularly if you're a cat lover, is emotionally impacting in a way not many cartoons are. The "small screen" doesn't really do the visuals justice, but since this can be pretty hard to find (it was only put up on YouTube yesterday), here ya go.
So last week Angela and I took in a screening of INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch's new movie. I've been holding off writing about it because I wasn't sure what I thought yet. I'm still not sure what I think, but I'm going to write about it anyway.
Bottom line: I thought the movie was good, but I'll be the first to recognize that David Lynch movies aren't for everyone. Local bloggers Seattlest didn't care for it that much. As this interview in the Times says, "it's about ideas." And that's exactly what it was about. Ideas. Feelings. Impressions.
Lynch's movies have always been interesting to me, because narrative is often secondary to the "art" of the film. Lynch was trained as a painter and sculptor first, and found film only as a way of experimenting with "moving paintings" or "moving pictures," much as film was originally intended to be used. His earliest short film, from his art school days, was projected in an art exhibit like a painting but with sound. Fair warning: it contains a siren that can be very repetitive.
Fair warning: I am ignoring Leah's advice and writing something not-wacky here.
Yesterday, Liz and I took a Family Circus (ie., wandering and directionless) trip around town after a wonderful breakfast at Alexa's. We ended up at Best Buy (which, I might add, had a whole skid of PlayStation 3s - so if you want one, go grab one. Incidentally, no one wanted one in the half-hour we were in the store.) I grabbed a copy of Idiocracy on DVD, Mike Judge's new movie that was kept out of theaters. Sitting close to it was An Inconvenient Truth, which I had fully intended to get around to buying eventually. So I grabbed it. Liz and I watched it last night.
Upon second viewing, I actually liked it more than I did the first time. The things that annoyed me in the movie theater as far as pacing was concerned, didn't annoy me nearly as much from my couch. But this isn't a film review.
After grabbing the movie and heading to REI to grab a backpacking sleeping bag I got on the cheaps, Liz and I were talking about global warming (or global climate change, if you prefer - potato, potatoe, but climate change is to global warming what complexity theory is to chaos theory, I suppose.) Specifically, Brandon made a post the other day about a school board decision down in Federal Way that requires "an opposing view" on global warming be presented when teachers show An Inconvenient Truth. "Score one for the skeptics," Brandon says (non-Seattleites: Brandon is one of my good friends, and although he tends to be at the opposite end of the political spectrum, we don't really let that get in the way of our friendship, much like me and Bobby or me and Meghan. I also want to make it quite clear that I'm not attacking or upset with my buddy in this post, I'm raging against a guy named Frosty. You'll meet him in a moment.) The AP story, which Brandon quoted in full on his site, is here.
But the story has another chapter. The AP story was really just a blurb, and wasn't local, so I thoguht I'd try to find what the Seattle rags had to say about it. A little Google-fu revealed a Seattle PI story about the decision. The PI story reveals some interesting context around the parent who lead the fight to the school board that lead to this decision, one Frosty Hardison:
After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film. The movie consists largely of a computer presentation by former Vice President Al Gore recounting scientists' findings.
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."
"Whether God created the Earth in a millisecond or whether it evolved over billions of years, the issue we agree on is that it needs to be cared for today," said Rich Cizik, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 45,000 churches.
I can't necessarily say that Robert Altman was one of my favorite directors, but I've certainly enjoyed everything of his that I've seen. The movies lost a good one today.
This weekend I embarked on a cinematic voyage into unexplored (for me) territory, by renting one of the finest films I've ever seen. By "renting," I mean "got from Netflix," and by "finest films I've ever seen," I mean "This is Spinal Tap." Yes, it's true, Spinal Tap is in that era of movies where stuff came out that was Rated R and I didn't see it at the time because I had parents who actually gave a shit what their kid was up to (a good thing, mind you), and haven't gotten back to since.
All I can say is, that movie goes up to eleven. It's pretty unusual that I finish watching a movie and think, "yeah, that's pretty much one of the best movies I've ever seen," but that's certainly what happened this weekend.
So what did you do with your extra Daylight Savings Time hour?
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