Lies: Based On A True Story

Real life is fascinating, and real-life drama is gut-wrenching. We don't watch the news to find out what's going on in the world around us, but to witness real-life dramatic events unfolding. Hollywood likes to cash-in on this by giving us movies based on or inspired by actual events.

The problem is that real life, while fascinating and gut-wrenching tends to linger in the dull bits longer than we'd like. A filmmaker's job is to make the best film possible, and sacrificing a few facts on the alter of public appeal is to be expected. What's not expected is the degree to which movies lie to us. An extreme example would be Fargo, which purports to be based on a true story, but is in fact almost completely fabricated.

Or take Braveheart, Mel Gibson's gritty biopic of the Scottish folk hero William Wallace. The list of historical inaccuracies is long and detailed, but I'll give you some highlights. Some are mundane: Kilts didn't enter Scottish fashion until about 500 years after the movie takes place. Wallace was far wealthier than depicted in the film. His lover's name, according to legend, was "Marion", not "Murron". Some are a bit more important: Wallace did not invent schiltrons. The Battle of Stirling Bridge actually took place on (as the name implies) a bridge. And it's utterly impossible for Wallace to have cuckolded Edward II, since he died some six years before Edward married. And lastly, there's the downright baffling: the exclusion of Andrew de Morray, the sacking of York (which never happened), and exclusion of the Battle of Bannockburn, or the fact that the nickname "Braveheart" was actually given to Robert the Bruce.

Even documentaries lie to us. Michael Moore, who popularized the documentary as a political and dramatic medium in the 90's, is renowned for playing fast-and-loose with the facts. His first film, Roger & Me alters the sequence of events to make his argument seem stronger. One scene famously depicts Moore being ignored at a shareholders meeting, when in fact he spliced footage from the meeting together with footage of himself on a sound stage. The opening of Bowling For Columbine was almost completely staged--the bank that gives away guns never keeps guns on the premises (the "vault" mentioned in the film was some 300 miles away) and only did so for the film because they had been misled about the subject of the movie. It's a small wonder that Moore's question "don't you think it's kind of dangerous handing out guns at a bank?" isn't answered--the shot immediately cuts off.

None of this is all that surprising. Arguably it's not even wrong (in Moore's case, you can make the argument that he suspends momentary truth in search of a greater truth--I don't buy it, but you can make that argument). The problem is that so much of our knowledge of the world comes by way of our televisions. How much has COPS informed our understanding of crime? Or how badly have the CSI offshoots distorted our understanding of what a crime lab does?

If we don't understand that world, how can we live in it responsibly? And if we're constantly being misled about the way it works, how can we ever hope to understand it?

Not to be a realism junkie, but some things are more important than entertainment value.

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From The Country That Brought Us Toast...

The French may be sex-crazed lunatics, but you have to admire their pull-no-punches approach to AIDS awareness.

Take at look at this NSFW ad.

Go on, I'll wait.

Or have a look at this fairly NSFW poster (there's a full commercial that goes with it, but the poster sells it without being quite so, uh... graphic). Here we see Hitler annihilating some woman through her lady-bits. I find it rather shocking (which was, no doubt, the intention) but for all the wrong reasons. First, they got his mustache right, so well done there. Second, I'm amazed because this is an instance in which a single image manages to invoke Godwin's Law and Rule 34 in--as my mother would say--one "swell foop".

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Don't Show This Post To The MPAA

This should not be nearly as funny as it is.

But I found that if you tack the word "genitalia" to the end of a movie title, you get sometimes funny, occasionally hilarious results. There are the obvious ones like You've Got Mail Genitalia or the nonsense stuff like Braveheart Genitalia. But a random sampling of films at flickchart yielded the following:

• Mars Attacks Genitalia
• Almost Famous Genitalia
• Shaun of the Dead Genitalia
• Men In Black Genitalia
• Sleepy Hollow Genitalia
• Ocean's 13 Genitalia
• Saw Genitalia
• The Forgotten Genitalia
• Superbad Genitalia
• Observe and Report Genitalia
• The Forty-Year-Old Virgin Genitalia

And perhaps my favorite of all: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Genitalia.

Endless fun.

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Some Courts Are More Supreme Than Others

By now you've not doubt heard about the Supreme Court's ruling that campaign contributions from corporations can no longer be limited. The ruling was that limiting campaign contributions constitutes a violation of the first amendment on the grounds that a corporation is a person and money is speech.

No, really.

The whole point of the first amendment is to protect (amongst other things) freedom of speech for all people. Now the whole point of a corporation is to make a profit and provide a liability shield for its members. In fact, a corporation can be found in violation of its charter if it performs actions that negatively affect its profitability.

Therefore, in certain cases, a corporation may actually be breaking the law if it doesn't spend enough on campaign contributions to sway the outcome of an election away from the good of the people in its own self-interest. This legal necessity arises because of an amendment that is supposed to protect people.

Does this strike you as paradoxical? It does me! But I have a theory about paradoxes. A paradox is, by definition, something that can't exist in the real world, so when they arise out of our models of the world, it means that there is something broken about the model. The Greek philosopher Zeno introduces mathematical paradoxes that wouldn't be solved until the time of Newton, but in the end, even with these famous paradoxes, it turned out that the model used to describe the world was simply inadequate.

In the case here, the obvious flaw is the notion of corporate personhood. A corporation is treated as a legal person, and has been for over a hundred years. I think this idea needs to go, partly because it's antiquated, but on more broad ethical grounds.

Namely, if a corporation is a liability shield, why does it get all the freedoms of a person. Why should it get the same freedom but less responsibility?

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Gay Rights And Heartless Idiots

The gay marriage debate in the US rages on. I've said it before, but I'm happy to reiterate: "If you oppose to gay marriage, it's because you're a heartless fucking idiot." And here's why:

Your opposition is unconstitutional. Thanks to a little something called the 14th Amendment, you're not allowed to give rights to one set of people and deny them to another. It is for this reason that federal attempts to block gay marriage have always taken the form of a constitutional amendment.

You are being used by politicians who don't share your values. Not to be overly cynical, but the GOP didn't care about gays one way or the other until about mid-way through the Carter administration when they discovered that WASP's could be manipulated by way of hot-button issues like gay rights and abortion. Do you need any more evidence than George W. Bush? Twice he ran on a platform of banning gay marriage and abortion, but his legislative career was defined by tax cuts and the War on Terror. Apart from a paltry attempt at a marriage amendment (that was soundly defeated), he made little effort to ban gay marriage or abortion--at the very least you, it was a low priority in his White House. But you just went along with it. Why?

Because you're a heartless fucking idiot, that's why.

There is no biblical definition of marriage. But based on anecdotal evidence of righteous people throughout the Bible, a good working definition might be this: "A marriage is a relationship between exactly one man and however many women he can afford".

You're in great company. The traditional enemies of America are Nazis, Communists, and Muslim Fundamentalists (of a terrorist bent). What do they all have in common? They all oppress(ed) homosexuals.

Homophobia is not biblical. The biblical case against homosexuality is thin, at best. Leviticus and Numbers call homosexuality an abomination, but they say the same about shellfish and poly-cotton blends. Paul condemns homosexuals, but in the same breath he condemns fornicators and drunkards--two things that an overwhelming number of Christians also are or have been. There is some homosexuality in the story of Sodom and Gammorah, but when Ezekiel recounts it, he doesn't list "sodomy" among Sodom's sins. Instead, he complains that they "did not help the poor and needy", which is in line with the teachings of Jesus--who never, never, not once, says anything about homosexuality.

Not that any of this matters, because the Bible is full of things that you ignore anyway. Christians eat pork and hate their enemies. I've never known a Christian to sell off half of their possessions and give the money to the poor--which was something that Jesus recommended if memory serves. You say that you oppose gay rights because you follow the scriptures, but you are lying through your wicked teeth. The truth is that you cite scripture because you were already a bigot.

And a heartless fucking idiot.

Homophobia kills. I was originally going to go with the child-murderer argument, but that's somewhat disingenuous. It's an emotional appeal and it severely underplays the amount of death that homophobia causes. I alternately could have invoked Godwin's Law and brought up the 5,000-15,000 homosexuals killed during the Holocaust. But even that misses the gravity of the situation.

Instead, let's talk about AIDS.

AIDS has now killed over 25 million people. In 2007 alone, it killed over 300,000 children. It has decimated the populations of several sub-Saharan African nations, and continues to do so. It has killed over a half a million Americans. It is a pandemic. The illness was identified in 1981 and recognized immediately as dangerous, but it went largely ignored by health officials and politicians. Ronald Reagan wouldn't even mention the disease publicly until 1987. Why?

The public thought of AIDS as a gay problem. In 1982 the CDC showed that AIDS could be spread through heterosexual contact and lobbied to stop calling it "GRID" (or Gay-Related Immune Disease). But the perception was this was a gay disease, and Reagan would have lost face with his Christian base if he'd brought it up. And Republicans continue to vote against funding AIDS research even now because a little of that "AIDS = Gay" stigma lingers.

You and your ilk have sat on your thumbs for thirty years and allowed a disease to spiral into an out-of-control pandemic (and don't kid yourselves, it's still out-of-control) because at the time it seemed that that disease only affected homosexuals. At a certain level, "heartless fucking idiot" just doesn't carry enough bile to convey how loathsome that is. It makes me wish there was a WASP-Related Immune Disease, so that 20 years from now the rest of the world would be free of your lamentable, negligent, murderous bigotry.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly...

You're going to lose, eventually, anyway. Gay rights are slowly advancing, even if it's in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way. Gay marriage is just the latest link in the chain. Today's legislators were raised during a time when homosexuality was regarded as a soul-crushing illness that must be stamped out. Small wonder that people like Larry Craig end up as closeted self-loathers. But the culture has changed and will continue to change. Sixty years from now, no one will understand the culture war that went on or how anyone could be against gay marriage--just like it's impossible for us to conceive of a world in which interracial marriages were illegal.

So let's recap. You oppose gay marriage, despite the lack of biblical justification, in defiance of the US Constitution. Your opposition has been leveraged to pass fiscally irresponsible legislation and start unjust wars. Your opposition is rooted in a phobia that you share with Nazis and Muslim fundamentalist terrorists, and it's the same phobia that people use to justify the murder of children and the negligence that is at least tangentially responsible for the greatest pandemic in generations. And your best-case scenario is to postpone the inevitable.

I'd say "heartless fucking idiot" sums you up pretty neatly.

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God(less) Billboards

Surely you've seen the white-text-against-black billboard messages from God. There were like 17 of them, and they say cute, pithy things like "We need to talk" or "C'mon over and bring the kids" or "My way is the highway", etc. It's a cute campaign, but it sets a precedent that we can't afford to ignore.

For instance, the sayings that are attributed to God aren't exactly biblical. Someone made it up, attributed it to God, and put it on a billboard because they thought that was a good idea. So this got me thinking. If just anyone is allowed to make up sayings and attribute them to God, why can't I? Here are some prototypical ideas:

• "There's a reason I let Hitler live as long as he did." -- God
• "Praying isn't going to change my mind about giving you cancer." -- God
• "Remember that time I killed all those first-born sons in Egypt? That was soooo rad." -- God

And why stop at God? There are plenty of mythical figures whose mouths we can put words into:

• "Why won't you return my call?" --Cthulhu
• "I did love you, but I've changed. I need some space." -- Jesus
• "I told you so." -- Cassandra

I think there's potential here.

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Translator? I Barely Know Her!

Fact: There is a movement to re-translate the bible in order to make it more conservative.

These are the goals (with my comments below in red):

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

Honestly, I don't know what this even means. How does one intend to provide a framework in a translation? That's more of an architectural thing, I should think.

2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, "gender inclusive" language, and other feminist distortions; preserve many references to the unborn child (the NIV deletes these).

Does this include feminizing references to "Sofia", which is normally translated as "wisdom"?

3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level.

Most of the bible is written in relatively primitive language. The reading level you translate to is sort of dealer's choice.

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent; Defective translations use the word "comrade" three times as often as "volunteer"; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle".

I love that the perceived change in the meaning of the word "peace" is considered actionable.

5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as "gamble" rather than "cast lots"; using modern political terms, such as "register" rather than "enroll" for the census.

Casting lots is a lot more like drawing straws than shooting craps.

6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

That's twice now that the author of this list has called for more biblical logic. Is that maddeningly anachronistic to anyone else?

7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning.

As we all know, Jesus loved capitalism.

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story.

But including the interpolated passages that support the myth that Jesus was real.

9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels.

Again, I have no idea what people think this means.

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word "Lord" rather than "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" or "Lord God."

This is where conservatives forget that words mean things! Jehovah and Yahweh are different words and represent different concepts (specifically, Jehovah represented a melding of two different concepts of God: Yahweh and Elohim). You would lose that richness because in your demented worldview "wordy" = "liberal"?

Buh.

So yes, the bible, the beacon of conservative dogma since who-knows-when, apparently could use a little improving by the people who love it so much.

I dare say the serpent has swallowed its own tail.

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The T-Rex Is A Lie

It's bothersome how much we count on movies for our knowledge of the world. Consider the velociraptor. You, I, and everyone we know got their understanding of the velociraptor from the 1993 movie Jurassic Park. And we conceive of them this way: they're about as tall as a man, vicious, and incredibly smart.

It may surprise you then, as it did me, to learn that raptors were actually about two feet tall, feathered, and stupid.

Some of this knowledge was speculation on Crichton's part, some of it simply was not known--when the book was published it was still believed that raptors were featherless, but the knowledge of their feathers was available before the movie was made. And at no point was anything that height ever called a velociraptor.

The liberties taken with the T-Rex also demonstrate a bit of artistic license. The notion that a creature that side could move at 30 mph on land, bipedal, is pretty laughable, especially one whose vision is based on movement (which isn't true, but it was a plot point). Besides, the thing has no arms, so if it were to trip at that speed, it would die. It would just die. It's skull would be caved in, and it would cease to be. They knew this when making the movie--they had to engage in some trickery with the animation to make it appear to move as fast as it did, because they could not pull it off believably with their digital model.

Now, on the one hand, Jurassic Park is science fiction. At no point were we ever to take it as fact, regardless of the reality that people base their dino-understanding on that film. But any other action film is just as bad with the misinformation. The way certain medical devices work (defibrilators, for example), the ability of a human to walk away from a car wreck or a gunshot wound--all of these are stretched thin by our entertainment media, to the point that our knowledge of these things is completely off base.

This has a feedback loop effect, since our perception then goes on to effect further entertainment media. We come to expect in any movie that a spy agency will announce its presence by giving you a litany of information about yourself--despite the fact that it is illegal for American agencies to spy on Americans (wiretaps notwithstanding--things have changed in the past few years). Or consider this: in every movie with sword fighting, why does the sword make a metal-on-metal sound when it is pulled out of a leather sheath?

Because it would sound strange to us if it didn't, right?

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Maybe They'll Make A Blue Statue

So Avatar is the big winner from the Golden Globes and looks to be a big contender for the Oscars.

Le sigh.

It's not that Avatar wasn't good. It's that Avatar wasn't great. It was spectacular, in that it was comprised almost entirely of spectacle, and it's a shoe-in for the would-be do-gooders, because it is to the environment what Crash was to racism (that is, an underwhelming movie about a severely dated issue).

So, I guess it's bound to win. In a way, I'm kind of glad that I don't so much follow the Oscars anymore.

It's not that they're meaningless, it's just that they're extremely light-weight. Although, against my better judgments, I'm starting to kind of want to see it in 3D. I have yet to see a live-action movie in 3D, and there are some technical issues that I'd like to get a better, ahem, focus on.

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You Killed My Childhood, Prepare To Die

So Robert Zemeckis is working on a 3-D CGI version of Yellow Submarine, a movie that under no circumstances ever needs to be re-made.

Zemeckis, who apparently went to the George Lucas school of modern film-making, has decided that a classic acid-trip of a film by a group that is now, literally, half-dead, needs to get the same dead-eye treatment that he gave to beloved classics The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol. While it's good to see him branching away from holiday movies... Yellow Submarine? Really?

Abby is doubly traumatized, because she grew up watching the original cartoon, and she was a pretty big fan of the Muppets' take on A Christmas Carol. In short, she fears that Robert Zemeckis' goal is to go through her entire childhood and ruin it frame by frame. Over dinner the other night, we joked about what his next film should be, if his aim is truly to destroy her sense of nostalgia. I suggested The Neverending Story and Abby's little heart broke right into her sandwich.

She looked like I'd just eaten a puppy in front of her.

Of course, the scary thing about TNS is that it's ripe for updating, and the idea of remaking it in 3D CGI is just plausible enough to makes it all the more frightening to her.

So, Mr. Zemeckis, if you're reading this (...and I suspect that he is), my wife is a frighteningly vengeful woman, and your long-term life expectancy would benefit from never remaking The Neverending Story. And while we're making ultimatums, for me, keep your goddamn hands off The Princess Bride.

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When Nostalgia Backfires

This is all true, by the way.

So, back in early 2006 I decided to look up an old friend from grade school. I don't know what it was that compelled me, I might have just been feeling a wave of nostalgia. And it's not like I had any romantic inclinations towards this girl, but I had this urge to reconnect.

So I Googled her and found some site that gave an e-mail address for her or something. Anyway, I wrote her up and said "Hi, you may not remember me, but we used to be friends and I was hoping to reconnect," etc, etc, etc. And she wrote back that very same day--I was thrilled to hear back. And then I felt somewhat deflated when I opened the response and read the following:

Wdup, Kurt!

You don't have to remind me of who you are... I contacted you several months ago in the same way, remember???

Well, I hadn't remembered. But it was starting to suddenly come back to me. I hope, when I die, that I'm remembered as being friendly and smart, despite being horribly, horribly absent-minded.

Guess this means I'm getting old.

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Pat Robertson Is An Asshole--What Else Is New?

Pat Robertson has managed to get the Twitter-sphere all abuzz, making himself temporarily relevant again. If you haven't seen the video, you can find it here. In it, on national television, Pat Robertson says that Tuesday's devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti--the estimated death toll of which is in the hundreds of thousands--was the result of a Haitian pact with the devil to overthrow the French.

Classy.

Not surprisingly, the response has been varying degrees of outrage. People can't believe that he would say something so insensitive and are hurling invectives his way. And this, frankly, befuddles me. I mean, it's Pat Robertson. What were you expecting? If Glen Beck went on television and compared Britney Spears to Hitler, would that be news? Of course not, it's what he does. Similarly, there's no reason to be all up-in-arms over Pat Robertson being an asshole regarding Haiti--it's pretty much what he does for a living.

Let's take a deeper look, yes?

Robertson is a television evangelist. His job is to deprive the well-meaning from their money and get them to spend it on a TV show. It's not like he's convincing them to feed the hungry or donate to AIDS research. He gets people to squander their charitable feelings on him and his TV program and whatever "ministries" they happen to be supporting. There's sort of a rogue dickish-ness already built into the profit model--and Robertson knows this.

He knows it so well that he once felt justified in threatening to sue NBC News for having the gall to call him a "television evangelist" based solely on the evidence that he a) is an evangelist and b) is on television. This was in the wake of the Swaggart/Bakker scandals, when he was gearing up for a presidential bid.

And what a platform he was promoting back in 1987! He wanted to ban pornography, dissolve the Department of Energy, and force the US to operate with a balanced budget. Banning porn is at worst laughably unrealistic, but you can't say the same for his other ideas because they are also frighteningly stupid. Enforcing a balanced budget? Even the ultra-conservative Reagan--the namesake of "Reaganomics" was a self-proclaimed Keynesian (for those of you playing along at home, Keynes first posited the need for deficit spending during the Great Depression). Get rid of the Department of Energy? Really?

Keep in mind that all of this was after the world didn't end in 1982, as he predicted it would back in 1976. Maybe he thought he could hasten the world to its end through mismanagement, but I doubt it's anything that nefarious. I get the impression that he is a simpleton who wishes to drop his uneducated world-view on the rest of the planet. It's a small wonder, then, that he also favored eliminating the Department of Education.

But he's not just stupid, he's also mean-spirited. He got in trouble in 1999 for calling Scotland a "dark land overrun by homosexuals", and by "got in trouble" I mean that it put a halt on the venture he'd entered into with the Bank of Scotland. More recently, he publicly called for Hugo Chavez's assassination and called Ariel Sharon's failing health an Act of God.

Dick-moves.

And here's a bizarre caveat to it all. Before the Greek salvation religions (which is where Christianity first emerged), theology basically came down to this: if you're a good person God will reward you, and if you're a bad person God will punish you. One of the developments of Christianity that separated it from other religions (like, say, pre-Christian Judaism) was that it an afterlife. This meant that bad things can happen to good people--troubles in this life were meaningless because there would be infinite reward in the next. What does this have to do with Haiti?

The Earthquake in Haiti happened because sometimes shit happens. Christian doctrine allows for this--and that was a major advancement over what came before it. That simple fact, so central to Christian faith, seems to elude Pat Robertson. According to Christianity, if bad things happen, it doesn't matter because the faithful will be rewarded in paradise. According to Robertson, if bad things happen to Haitians, obviously it's because they made a pact with the Devil. And that's sad really--that someone can be so ignorant and mean-spirited and shallow in the name of a religion that he doesn't seem to understand. In the industry, we call that sort of thing "irony".

So don't be mad at Pat. He can't help being an idiot, and nothing in his life history gives any indication that he has a conscience or even an ounce of good sense--you might as well be mad at your dog for eating his own droppings. All you can do is clean him up, pat him on the head, and give him a treat to keep the shit off his breath.

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Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

So I lopped off all of my hair over the weekend, taking it down from shoulder-length to less than an inch. I then had to trim my beard (because it was longer than my hair) and I decided to go back to contacts for a while.

I do this sort of thing every now and then. I'll get a picture up on Facebook by the end of the week.

But yesterday/today I had fun surprising friends and coworkers with the new 'do. They keep asking me when was the last time I had short hair. But here's the funny thing: I had short hair when I started this job (not this short, but not a whole lot longer). I then went a year without cutting it, but it was only about an inch, inch-and-a-half on top when I was hired, and nobody remembers that.

People don't believe me. I had one coworker tell me that she couldn't have even imagined what I would look like with short hair, despite the fact that she had seen me like that.

But it's the old boiling-a-frog metaphor--people don't notice gradual change. They see me with long hair, they don't remember me ever changing it, their brain assumes that it's always been long (even if they consciously know differently). Maybe that's the reason I like to make drastic changes from time to time--so they'll be noticeable.

Or maybe I just like that I get to be the center of attention for a day.

Who's to say?

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Movies I've Seen Recently

Rather give unpaid reviews (not that I expect to be a paid critic, but because I have a great deal of respect for paid critics), lately I've been giving loose impressions of films I've seen rather than actual reviews. I don't know if there's a real difference there, but I like to think there is.

Well, since my back has been out of commission, I've done lots of movie-watching, and not a whole lot of blogging. So here are my brief impressions on several flicks I've seen in the last couple of weeks.

Julie & Julia - I was pleasantly surprised by this novelty dual-character study. It's well acted, thick with snarky and snooty wit, and it works almost exclusively because the actors hired to portray married couples have such a rich chemistry together. Also, Meryl's Julia Child is spot-on.

Jennifer's Body - The whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts... there are several amusing vignettes all strung together into a resounding "meh" of a film that almost sort of works. I never wanted to turn it off, but I'm glad it's behind me now.

Paranormal Activity - It's a genuinely creepy film that illustrates better than anything else how much fear truly resides in the imagination. Kind of a Blair-Witch-but-done-better sort of thing. Watched both the theatrical and alternate endings... not sure which I prefer.

Avatar - Big and fun and 'splody, but yeah, it's Pocahontas with smurfs. It doesn't quite live up to the hype, but it's still a fun ride.

Up In The Air - Re-affirms everything I've grown to love about George Clooney and Jason Reitman. An open and honest exploration of things that trouble real people.

Sherlock Holmes - Downey is great, Law is great, and it's nice to see Ritchie not sucking. The film overstays its welcome by about fifteen minutes and I would have appreciated more resolution and less setting up for the inevitable sequel, but I had fun.

The Quick and the Dead - Okay, this is a fifteen-year-old Western that my wife insisted I watch. It's an interesting story, albeit it has all the grace and subtlety of... well, of a fifteen-year-old.

Daybreakers - This was actually an incredibly fun (and gorey) take on the vampire stories that have been romanticized to death by Twilight and True Blood. Vampires have taken over and are now facing overpopulation. Very inventive and well-executed with some good ideas, good splatter, and a handful of decent scares.

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Eddie Izzard

Ten years ago, at a New Year's Eve party (yes, that New Year's Eve party), I watched about a half hour of Eddie Izzard's Dressed to Kill comedy special on HBO.

I was completely enamored.

His blend of absurd and surreal story-telling and editorializing was the funniest thing I'd seen in a good long well. So I found out what it was and scoured HBO looking for show-times, which I could never find. Ultimately, I was able to buy a crappy VHS tape of the show off eBay, and it jittered and sputtered, but the humor was intact.

I finally ended up with a copy of the DVD a few years ago, and it has been through many viewings in the ol' DVD player. My friends have all seen it, and we frequently make references to it: "Fuh-lag", or "Hookah, hookah, hookah... lobster" or "Cake or death?" or "Ciao"... etc...

So Saturday we went to see Mr. Izzard at the Fox for a stop on his "Stripped Too: The Big Intimacy" tour. It started around 8:15 and wrapped up at around a quarter to 11, with about a twenty-five minute intermission in the middle. He started with how Apples are better than PC's, went straight into how there is no god.

A man after my own heart, in other words.

From there the jokes just got weirder and weirder, culminating with Buzz Aldren on the moon where he met God, a giant squid, the squirrel that survived Noah's Ark (after the lions and tigers ate the rest), and a jazz quartet consisting of a chicken, a donkey, a frog, and a Persian cat, managed by a velocirapter.

Highlights included the aforementioned "Jazz chicken", "Charles Darwin's Great Expectations, about an amoeba named Pip", a whole bit on velociraptors, how to sing opera, and perhaps the best line of the show: "Go amuse yourself with sponges."

Good times,

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Soy What?

This May will mark the 10 year anniversary of my conversion to vegetarianism. That's a long time without meat (excepting the occasional sushimi or crab rangoon). At a couple of points in there, I dabbled in veganism, but it never took--I love my eggs and cheese to much. But one interesting artifact of that trek was me losing my taste for milk and developing a taste for soy milk.

And I recommend this to anyone. Because soy milk will last for months and months in the fridge.

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Insert Star Wars Joke Here

So if you haven't seen the 7 -minute amateur lightsaber duel, you should watch it now-ish. I can think of no better testament to the way technology has changed the world in the last decade than this video. Ten years ago it would have been prohibitively expensive for amateur film-makers to produce. Today, it exists purely as a demo reel for the film-makers.

If you've done any reading on DIY film production, the go-to example is Robert Rodriguez's The Mariachi, which was made in 1992 for $7,000, shot on film, and is not nearly as well-known as its sequel, Desperado. That Rodriguez was able to make a film for that little was nothing short of miraculous--for comparison, look at Kevin Smith's 1994 debut Clerks, which cost $32,000 to produce and had lower production values.

Nowadays, you can get everything you "need" to make a film for under $3,000, you can post your resume online with free hosting via YouTube, and use the same equipment over and over again until you run out of hard disk space.

Right now we're seeing a growth of "middle-class musicians", artists who make a modest living making music without the aid of a label or professional production. We're just now starting to see something similar in film, and frankly, I'm excited to see where it might go.

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News To You

So I heard a rumor that Microsoft is hoping to pay news sites to de-list themselves from Google with hopes that Bing can become the go-to for news queries.

Yes, Microsoft, that'll work. While you're embracing dying technologies, let me see if I can interest you in a little idea I like to call "Pager Search".

Call me,

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No, YOU'RE History

You know, I've really come to hate the History Channel.

It used to be, well, exactly what you'd expect from a History Channel: a seemingly unending stream of World War II documentaries. And I was fine with that. And they branched out into other things, and started adding shows like Mail Call, which all seems to celebrate the military, but you know, I can be fine with that too.

Their new tactic seems to be playing the perennial Johnny-come-lately.

Remember when The Da Vinci Code was big and new and controversial? The History Channel ran a program called Da Vinci and the Code He Lived By. In 2004 the movie Troy came out, so the History Channel ran a program about Troy. Some of this you can forgive, because even though the Trojan War is more literature than history, it has important historical significance. And codes aside, Leonardo Da Vinci was an important historical figure.

I can't for the life of my give them the same lenience for running programs about the Mayan calender and the end of the world in 2012.

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...And We're Back

Back sprain in a not-quite-healed-but-much-more-manageable state, meaning that I can sit at a computer for reasonable lengths again. And just in time for me to go back to work, too.

At any rate, this means that the blogging will continue. So, Happy New Year, everyone. Depending on how you index your arrays, we are in the first or last year of the decade, and I think we're all pretty set on making sure 2010 kicks 2009 right in the ass. My first resolution: stop blogging on weekends.

Seriously, five posts a week is plenty.

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