Sunday, August 27, 2006
Reverse, forward's tricky cousin.
I saw my second parking lot accident of the month on Saturday afternoon, prompting me to finally write about something I've been thinking on for a while. I was driving into a strip mall when I saw a minivan backing up 50 meters ahead of me. I was about to turn right, but I noticed an SUV to the right of the minivan with its reverse lights on, and just as I turned right and lost sight of them BANG, SUV thuds straight back into the minivan. Broad daylight, no obstructions, slow speed, etc. No excuses, really. Just someone backing up without so much as glancing into their mirrors or over their shoulder, since there was simply no way they could have failed to see the dark blue minivan sitting just feet behind their rear bumper.
We missed the inevitably apologetic and confused aftermath, but it reminded me of a question I've had in mind for months. Are Americans losing the ability to (safely) drive a car in reverse, or are bumpers just cheaper than they used to be?
I swear, any random group of 10 vehicles will yield 2 or 3 with large dents on their rear bumpers, usually on the corners, but plenty with a clear pole impression right in the damn middle. What's worse is that since we live in a rich area, most of the vehicles are less than five years old, and others probably get their dents repaired. Imagine if the cars were older, displaying every scar earned over their decade of life?
Is backing up without running into something really that difficult? You kind of expect that sort of thing from old people, but the cars I see with dents are usually piloted by young adults, who should, theoretically, be in their driving awareness prime. I think almost all of these problems are single car accidents too, or at least they're the fault of the person backing up, like Saturday's "SUV meets Minivan" incident. Getting rear-ended on the freeway is another issue, and one that generally causes substantial damage to both cars. I'm just talking about fender-benders here, especially of the single point of impact, leave a bumper caved in, type.
I've backed into poles twice in memory, but each time I hit them slowly enough to not leave a dent, and each time they were low posts, not visible through my back window. I should have remembered they were there each time, since I saw them when I got into my car, but once it was a yellow, knee-high post protecting a gas main ridiculously located in the center of a parking lot, and the other time I was maneuvering around a stalled Cadillac at a gas station, and thought I had a few inches more room than I did to back up and change my escape angle.
So yeah, no one's perfect, but I swear I didn't see dents like these, in such a substantial percentage of vehicles, in the old days. And contrary to my rhetorical question from a paragraph ago, I
know bumpers are better than they used to be. Most cars now have dent resistant molded plastic bumpers, which will take a hit and shrug it off. Remember those useless, headlight-reflecting chrome bars they used to put across the back of Ford and Chevy pickups? The ones that could sustain permanent dents from high speed encounters with a butterfly? That cost $1500 to repair if you so much as scratched them? I always thought those should be banned, and apparently they were.
But what's good news for the consumer in the car repair and bumper industry is a bad sign for driver competence, since if 2/3 of the bumper impacts don’t leave a visible dent, the people with mashed in bumpers must really be Helen Keller'ing it in reverse.
Speaking of, the sad story I've been meaning to tell for a few weeks relates to reverse problems. Malaya and me were heading to the local supermarket, and as we walked up we saw an old lady in a red Buick (or some similar old person sedan -- why they hired youthful Tiger Woods to endorse them is beyond me) starting to back out of a diagonal handicapped parking space right in front. Unfortunately for everyone involved, a semi old guy in a Mercedes was sitting right behind her, waiting for someone to cross the drive with a shopping cart. He saw granny backing up right towards his passenger door, and blew his horn, but she kept on going, very slowly, and crunched right into him.
Even over his horn we could hear him yelling, "What are you doing!" in a slightly comical accent. "Vhat tar yhou doo-hink!" he cried, then repeated it several times. Granny, clearly completely befuddled, pulled forward as Mr. Mercedes got out and walked around to inspect the damage. Here's where it got good/pathetic.
While he's standing there, behind the right rear of her car, bending over looking at his car, she starts backing up again! Again at about 2 MPH, basically idling backwards with the brake on. The guy doesn't see her, so focused is he on the dents she just put in his car, and she actually strikes his hip with her right rear bumper, bouncing him back before her left bumper bangs into his car again, deeply denting it about a foot further back than the first impact, thanks to the fact that Mr. Mercedes moved forward a foot before stopping.
Now he's screeching in shock, "Hey! What are you doing! Hey!" and banging on her trunk, action to which she responds by pulling forward, and trying to back up again! Again at less than walking speed, and again she thunks into his car, rocking it sideways on the springs. Mr. Mercedes runs around to the front of her car, and yells in the passenger window, which seems to finally register on her withered synapses, since she looks startled and pulls forward, then puts it in park and sits there looking shellshocked.
It was kind of funny at the time, but also depressing. The old woman was at least 75, and clearly not competent to operate a motor vehicle. You can imagine her not looking back, though it's a busy driveway and she was backing out of a diagonal spot right into the main thoroughfare. But twice? And a third time? She wasn't hitting a low target either; the guy's Mercedes was one of those crappy, Chevy-looking mid-1990s sedans, not some road-hugging sports car model. Granny clearly had no idea what was going on, and if there'd been children behind her car, or a kid on a bike, or anything, she would have just plowed right over them and driven away without ever noticing the carnage.
I'm sure she's got decent insurance, and nothing will really come of this incident; neither car was anywhere near disabled by the crash, though one might have been if she'd kept up her demolition derby action a while longer. However, I'm equally sure she'll probably lose her license, since she can't possibly pass a driving test at this point. And if you can't drive in California, or most of the US really, you're pretty well fucked. Public transportation is horrible to nonexistent here, and I can't see that feeble old lady carrying groceries more than twenty feet, much less home on the bus. She's either alone and completely dependent, or maybe her husband was even older and less capable, and she was taking care of both of them? In any event, her mobility is officially over, and while that's for the safety of the rest of us, it's still a sad end to a once-productive life.
We didn't see the whole aftermath, but when we came out of the store there was a cop there, talking with Mr. Mercedes (who had finally moved his car out of further harm's way). Granny remained in her car, sitting slumped in the driver's seat and contemplating the doom I spoke of in the previous paragraph. It was tragic, but at least she didn't pull one of those "80 y/o man confuses gas and brake pedals and mows down a sidewalk/farmer's market" fiascos. Granny's never going to drive legally again, but at least she's not going to jail.
The capper? Her bumpers weren't even dented by the incident. I'm sure there were scrapes, but his doors were softer than her fender. Which just goes to illustrate how poorly most younger people are driving, to mash in their bumpers when granny's survived her mistreatment.
Labels: driving
Chrome Shovels?
While enjoying an early dinner at Claim Jumper with Malaya on Saturday, I saw a photo on a table brochure for Claim Jumper gift certificates. From there, my train of thought ran as follows.
The photo of the restaurant on the brochure was unlike any Claim Jumper I've ever seen. The motif is usually turn-of-the-century mining camp, with wooden walls, ceiling fans powered by chains that drive conveyer belt-like strips of canvas, and other appropriate props. They've got photos of old gold miners on the walls, Old West memorabilia like mine carts and wooden saloon doors, rustic metal braces on the wooden beams, and so forth. Yet the restaurant interior pictured on the sales brochure was all glass and neon, with lots of windows and palm trees outside. My first thought was, "Is that the Vegas Claim Jumper?"
I started riffing from there, wondering what the rest of the décor was like. "Do they have polished wood walls?" I asked Malaya, rhetorically. "Chrome shovels and picks?" She shrugged, by now used to my free form thought association, and was not puzzled when I abruptly found myself thinking of those silver shovels they use for ceremonial ground breakings. The kind you see the mayor and some city councilmen holding as they till a few spadefulls of potting soil onto the site of the new power plant, or subway station, or municipal park.
Where do they get those shovels? What do they do with them after using them to pose for photos? Are they real shovels that are sent to some foundry to get dipped in liquid chrome? Do they re-use them; storing them in city hall for years and digging them out again when its time to dedicate a new little league field? Do small towns share them, since they only need to build some big new project every decade or two?
Malaya suggested that the shovels were probably custom made, engraved for the occasion, and hung on the major's wall afterwards. I think she's probably right. People, politicians especially, enjoy those sorts of useless, entirely-ceremonial keepsakes, but I guess when you're blowing $150m of the taxpayers' money, you want something to remember it by.
My next question then, was where they get such shovels? Is there some company in Ohio that specializes in them and virtually owns the market? Are there two companies that fight over the business and try to undercut each other with free bejeweled hoes or monogrammed trowels if you buy three chrome shovels at the full price? Or just anyone go order such a shovel from a trophy store? And if so, how do they make it? Take the order, run to Home Depot, bronze that puppy, etch some text into it, and pass it to His Honor when the time comes?
Labels: misc
Friday, August 25, 2006
NFL Begins
I'm going to make an effort to not clog the blog with such endless NFL talk this season. I want to spend less time watching/thinking about football (in preference to working on things of actual use) and I want to blog less about it in any event. Watching the first quarter of the Pittsburgh @ Philly game tonight though, I had a thought.
It was obscured in the whole T.O. soap opera last year, but remember when the Eagles lost in the NFC Championship like three years in a row, and everyone talked about how they'd never win until they had something resembling a reliable rushing attack? Now that Owens has taken his media circus off to Dallas, it might be time to revive the old Eagles meme. On their first drive tonight, they threw six or seven times, all short or medium range, with the only rushing play an unsuccessful draw. Can an NFL offense be successful when the opposing defense knows they can stay in the nickle package 95% of the time? I guess, if the passing is good enough, though the loss of T.O. and the fact that they replaced him with no one isn't a real good sign.
By the way, this game is reminding me vividly why I so much prefer to tape NFL games and watch them with fast forward. It's been 45 minutes, and if the announcers have talked about anything other than last year's McNabb vs. T.O. feud, or Ben Toothlessburger's offseason motorcycle misadventure, I must have missed it.
Labels: football
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Israeli War Damage
It's interesting to see the news coming out of Israel since their little skirmish with Lebannon has been on hiatus, courtesy of a (very fragile) French-brokered cease fire. It's only been a month since the fight started, and already the Israelis have
turned against the effort.
The war against Hezbollah was widely seen here as a just response to a July 12 cross-border attack, during which the guerrilla group killed three soldiers and captured two. But Israel's wartime solidarity quickly crumbled after Israel agreed to pull its army out of south Lebanon without crushing Hezbollah or rescuing the captured soldiers.
A total of 118 soldiers were killed in the fighting and 39 Israeli civilians were slain by the 3,970 Hezbollah rockets that hit Israel. At least 842 Lebanese were killed in the fighting.
With Israelis banding together during the war, approval ratings soared for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, men with little military experience who took office just two months before the fighting started. Polls Wednesday showed a collapse in their popularity as Israelis began criticizing the conduct of the war.
Support for Olmert fell from 78 percent during the fighting to 40 percent in a poll of 500 people published by TNS-Teleseker. Peretz's approval rating plunged from 61 percent to 28 percent, according to the poll, which had a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
The ex-air force general leading the attack has been heavily-criticized for focusing on bombing instead of a full ground assault early on, and he's even in trouble for taking time to sell off some stock shortly after the fighting started. Israel's president is being ruined by a sex scandal, the government's popularity has plunged, and his government is said to be crippled. All because the Israeli citizens are pissed about the way the war was fought, events during it, and the unsuccessful outcome. All that in less than a month of fighting.
I bring this up because it's enlightening to compare it to the US war in Iraq. Dubya's war has gone far worse for the US than the Lebannon one did for Israel, by almost any measure. Far higher US casualities, far greater civilian casualities, hundreds of billions more spent, oil prices driven to record highs, and all premised on a far shakier excuse. Yet look at the reaction of the US population. True, a majority of Americans have finally come to support a troop withdrawal deadline, and Bush's popularity is in the 30% range, but it took years to sink that low. Furthermore, while heads are poised to roll in the Israeli military, no one has ever been held accountable for anything about Iraq. The only army officers who were fired over Iraq were the ones who (correctly) argued pre-invasion that the planning was hopelessly optimistic. Rumsfeld is still the Secretary of Defense, Bush is still president, and there has never been anyone held accountable for the general failure in planning and execution of the war effort. And it's not about to end soon; Bush has repeatedly vowed to continue the war until he's removed from office, three years from now. (Barring any miraculous impeachment efforts if the Democrats retake the House/Senate in November.)
Leaving George "Heck of a job, Brownie" Bush's loyalty-over-competence issues aside, what's the real difference here? Are the Israeli people that much more impatient, or critical, or serious, or what? Don't they support the war on terra?! Why do they expect results and hold their leaders responsible, while the US public required 4 years to even begin doing the same?
I'd guess it's mostly location; if failure in the Iraqi war caused rocket attacks to rain down on the US, the whole clusterfuck would have immediately hit home. Literally. It's easy to overlook military deaths and civilian massacres and blank check war profiteering when it's taking place on the other side of the world, and your government is urging you to live life just as normal; telling you not to make any sacrifices of any kind, or else the terrorists will have won. It's harder when you actually have to modify or even risk your life, as you dig through the rubble that was your neighbor's home, before Hezbollah rockets smashed into it?
Labels: israel, war
Monday, August 21, 2006
Movie Review: The Limey
The Limey stars Terrance Stamp as the titular character, an Englishman just arrived in LA, fresh from nine years in prison for armed robbery. He's received a letter with a newspaper clipping about his daughter's death in an automobile accident, and armed with no more than that news and the return address on the envelope, he makes his way to the sender's house and more or less forces the guy to help him track down his daughter's killers.
The guy, a friend of his daughter's from acting class, doesn't have any reason to disbelieve the news report, but dad is positive, and he acts quickly; buying guns and bullets from some Mexican gangsters, heading to the one address he knew might relate to his daughter's ex-boyfriend, and violently taking care of business.
The Limey is a fast-paced, gritty, character-driven tale of revenge, justice, and investigation, filled with oddball characters, clever writing, and some really inventive directing techniques. I enjoyed it quite a bit.
To the scores, which are
explained here.
The Limey, 1999
Script/Story: 6
Characters: 8
Action: 6
Combat Realism: 7
Humor: NA
Horror: 6
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 7
Overall: 8
It's not a brilliant film, but it is a solid mystery/revenge thriller that doesn't fall into any of the genre stereotypes/conventions. The plot unfolds in original fashion, and the characters are not cut from the usual mold. The tough guys in the movie are older men, and gorgeous trophy girlfriend isn't the dumb bimbo we expect her to be, the mobsters are real people with real reactions to stress, the minor characters have their own agenda and goals, the cops aren't corrupt or maniacal, and the bad guy isn't bad; he's just doing what many of us would do if caught in his situation.
I saw this film just recently, when I caught sight of the DVD at the library, but it's not a new movie. It was released in 1999, and didn't make any money in the US, despite excellent reviews. It's got a 7.0 average on IMDB, and a
89% from 76 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
The plot isn't nearly as dense as lots of thriller/mystery films; in fact it's pretty straight forward, as we stay close to the father on his "shortest route is a straight line" course through the various people who dare to oppose him. What makes the film work is the writing, and also the directing and editing, which are very stylistic and involving. The clever stuff is a matter of taste though, since while I quite liked them, they were singled out for scorn by most of the negative reviews I saw on RT.
The movie plays with chronology and memories in fascinating ways; we'll see Terrence Stamp's titular character driving somewhere, and cut into the scenes of LA are shots of him talking with someone. The dialogue from that scene begins while he's still driving, with the visuals cutting back and forth, until finally he arrives, gets out of the car, and goes to talk to whoever, in the scene we saw start a moment before. It sounds confusing, but it works almost seamlessly in the film, and it's actually quite a time saver.
For another example, there are several scenes with one long exchange of dialogue, but visuals from two or three different conversations. So we'll see two people talking in a car, and as their conversation plays without interruption we get scenes of them driving, then arriving at a restaurant, then talking in the restaurant, then leaving and walking along the pier at night. All while they keep talking, until the dialogue catches up with the scene and they're in lip synch again on the pier.
It's a nifty technique, giving you a sense of how the characters interact, and how the time passed that wasn't actually shown on the screen. It was very "real," and felt almost like a documentary technique. Imagine someone talking about their day, and while you hear their voice you see an edited series of shots showing what they did; condensing hours of footage into thirty seconds while their voice gives you a sense of who they are. It's informative and interesting, and the way director Steven Soderbergh did it, the dialogue and visuals add up to more than the sum of the parts.
Another technique used throughout the film are shots of what the Limey is thinking and remembering. These are often shots of his daughter as a child, or shots of him when he was younger, and these are edited into current events. It really conveys the sense of what Terrence Stamp is thinking and remembering about his dead daughter while he goes through the motions of investigating her death. We see shots of the young girl on a beach when he's hearing about her from people she knew as an adult, showing that he still thinks of his daughter as his little girl. Something most parents do, I've been told. When someone talks about how she seemed to like danger and bad boys, we see dad's memories about the girl seeing him after a robbery. And so on.
A nice touch to the flashbacks is that a lot of them are taken from another film, one that starred Terrence Stamp when he was a young man. I don't know how else it could have been done; he's 60ish now, and shooting a flashback of him at 30 would have required a ton of unconvincing makeup, or a great deal of suspension of disbelief by the audience. It doesn't work perfectly in
The Limey, but it's an interesting technique and works stylistically, though I thought we saw about 200% more flashback shots than we needed. Trivia says director Steven Soderbergh had to leap through a lot of hoops to get the rights to use the footage, and I think that motivated him to get his damn money's worth, and perhaps go a bit overboard in terms of how many shots of young Terrance Stamp we really needed to see.
That quibble aside, I thought the film was fun, the plot and action moved along briskly, the directorial flourishes were not heavy-handed, and I definitely enjoyed the film, as did Malaya. It wasn't anything heavy, and it's not going to provoke soul searching on your part, but it's a solid ninety minutes of entertainment, with much more intelligence than most thrillers.
Labels: movie review
Friday, August 18, 2006
Skepticism justified.
A few days ago,
I posted about the by-now automatic skepticism I feel when the Bush Administration announces some new terrorism plot, and said that while the new "blow up 12 airliners over the Atlantic" scheme sounded scary, and that the British busting it gave it some credibility, I was still dubious. My main point though, was that it's a depressing state of affairs that the US leadership has told so many lies and played the "sky is falling" terror card so many times that my first thought about any foiled terror plot is, "they're lying for political gain."
Unfortunately, it looks like I was right in my skepticism, as were the commentors and other people who emailed me agreeing with my thoughts. The British did arrest a bunch of guys, who they can hold for up to 28 days without filing charges. No charges have been filed yet, and the British have said that they'll have to release at least some of them without charges, since they've got nothing that will stand up in court. (Britain hasn't placed a permanent stain on it's human rights record by creating their own version of our Guantanamo Bay gulag. Yet.)
The British authorities have released a bunch of info and evidence though (almost as if they were simply trying this case in the media), but it's as thin on content as it is thick on hype. The alleged plotters had been infiltrated and under surveillance by British agents for more than a year. The plotters had talked a lot and said things most of us would like to beat them with sticks for thinking, but they had no actual plans to blow up anything, they had no explosives, they had no labs to make bombs in, they had no airline tickets, some of them had no passports, and they had no support or connection to Osama bin Laden or any terrorist godfathers in the Middle East. In fact, the whole "blowing up a dozen planes over the Atlantic" stuff came from some guy who hardly knew the guys in Britain. He's being held (and tortured, one would assume) in Pakistan, and his wild tale of a dozen exploding planes was complete news to the British forces who had been monitoring the supposed plotters for more than a year. (
Details and links here.) On top of that, the actual process of preparing the TATP liquid explosive on a plane
sounds completely unworkable.
In other words, it sounds quite likely that we had nothing more than a few disgruntled immigrant kids in England, most of them still living at home with their parents, who made some wiseass boasts online, and sort of knew some guy who got captured and tortured until he told the Pakistanis what they wanted to hear; a wild story with no basis in anything other than wishful thinking.
I can kind of understand the nervous over-reaction of the law enforcement types. They have to take everything seriously and they can't afford to let something go because they think it's just idle talk. They have to investigate, and they should; it's what our taxes pay for. What's outrageous about this story is the calculated, intentionally panic-inducing release of the knowledge by the US and British authorities. They could have rounded everyone up behind the scenes, or kept watching and caught them in the act, or grabbed a few of them and turned them into double agents, etc. All things you'd do if you were treating this as an actual security issue.
On the other hand, if you knew it was nothing but thought it would make big news and get everyone scared and thinking about terror again, you'd authorize enormous raids on the suspects, you'd close down airports, you'd leak all the info to the media to ensure constant coverage, you'd go way over the top in apparent safety measures and ban all liquids on planes, etc. Which is exactly what the British and US authorities did, last week. Bush and Blair even talked about it days in advance, so they had no hurry.
They knew damn well, the plot wasn't a serious threat. They had no explosives, no tickets, no passports, no financing, etc. And yet Bush and Blair were cool with ruining the investigation by ordering massive raids and arrests and media leaks with extensive "how to" info for other future plotters, all but locking down UK airports, banning all carry on items in London's Heathrow, banning all liquids on US flights, causing countless hours of delays and millions in lost revenue for the airlines, etc. All for a virtually nonexistent plot the British police had well under control.
If anyone's got an explanation for this other than gross incompetence or calculated political gain, I'd like to hear it.
As a reader who wanted to remain anonymous said in an email about my last post on this subject:
[The last time this happened,] when the news reports went from blind praise of the president to actually looking at the people involved, it was a actually just a few guys who had nothing even approaching a working plan for achieving such an attack. Arresting people who are sitting in their basement smoking pot and playing the "what if we" game with their friends isn't exactly a strike against terrorism.
It's not like this is an isolated incident, either.
Last week, three men, Americans of Arabian descent, were arrested buying a bunch of prepaid cell phones. Hysterical terrorism news stories followed. A week later all terrorism charges are dropped. Turns out they're running some sort of minor scam to resell them overseas after hacking the software, but you know this would never have been in the news if they were white. Our sensationalist media gave the finding that there was no terrorism connection about 1% as much attention as their arrests got, of course.
Two days ago some 59 y/o woman with claustrophobia freaked out on a flight from Washington to London. She was immediately handcuffed and controlled, though the plane turned around and flew two hours back to Boston, with F16s in escort, for no apparent reason other than panicky pilots. What did the media say?One media report carried on CNN and major TV networks, and later denied, said the woman had Vaseline, a screwdriver, matches and a note on the Islamic militant group al Qaeda.
The FBI's search of her belongings produced no dangerous materials and no note from al Qaeda.
Guess how many US networks ran 24 hour coverage of the fact that some harmless old woman had a mental issue on an airplane, compared to how many went berzerk about the initial, erroneous reports?
Yesterday some hound dog in a hicksville airport in West Virginia sniffed furiously at some woman's drink, and they assumed it was liquid explosive, closed the airport, and talked about it nonstop on the cable news. What do you want to bet tomorrow (reported on page A17) we'll find out she spilled some trace amount of bleach or gasoline or something completely harmless on the outside of her bottle, or that the bomb sniffing dog was just having a bad day?
I'm not alleging that this is some concerted effort by the governments and the media, or some vast conspiracy. The guys arrested in Britain aren't actors or CIA double agents or whatever. They've no doubt entertained some ideas about blowing up airliners, or emulating the 9/11 events, but like every redneck with a gun rack in his pickup and dreams of personally hunting down Osama, there's a long, long distance between "wanna" and "gonna." Bush's guys don't invent these events, they just do what they can to hype them up and capitalize on the resulting fear. It worked in 2004, and they're not about to change course now, no matter how bad things are getting in Iraq.
Likewise, the media isn't in secret cahoots (Well, FOX maybe, though there it's 1) not secret, and 2) more about ideological agreement.) they're just chasing ratings and sensationalism. They're no more on the Pentagon's payroll than they are on Paris Hilton's. Or JonBenet Ramsey's alleged killers. Or Boy George's community service in NYC. It's no longer the news, it's media and entertainment, and it's not a service, it's a business. They show what people will watch, and in America, fear sells. Ratings were never higher than during and immediately after the 9/11 attacks, (Too high, actually, since the networks had to go nonstop and didn't take commercial breaks.) and I'm sure there are rating spikes when they have fresh bits of terror to cover these days. So they cover them, breathlessly reporting every minor event on a plane or in an airport in the US. Meanwhile 500 people died yesterday in preventable car accidents, 1000 died of heart attacks brought on by smoking and eating too much red meat, and you're far more likely to be hit by lightning or win the lottery than you are to be directly involved in a terrorism-related event. But who'd watch MSNBC or CNN or FOX to hear that?
As I said last week, I already find myself tuning out any "Terrorism! Terror in the skies!" reports, since it seems to be just one snipe hunt after another. I just laughed and snorted when I heard about the closed down airport in West Virginia yesterday, and I know I'm not the only one.
This is going to keep happening, with inevitably diminishing returns as the public gets bored, skeptical, and desensitized. What's Bush going to do? Will he and his guys keep trying to sell their propaganda? Will the media keep shoveling it? And what happens when there is a real threat of a terrorism event, and no one takes it seriously? Everyone's read The Boy Who Cried Wolf, right? That story didn't have an especially happy ending, you know. (And this one might not for Republicans, judging by the fact that Bush got zero bounce from this terrorism news.)Labels: terrorism
Monday, August 14, 2006
The Beauty of You Tube
Here's why YouTube.com rules. Say you wake up with an inexplicable desire to hear Billy Idol's cover of Mony Mony. In a sane world, you'd have to suffer without, or perhaps try to send itunes a dollar; except that you know damn well you're going to listen once, or maybe only 1/2, and get over your strange urge.
Fortunately, in this insane world there's YouTube, and 5 seconds later bang,
there you are. With the unexpected bonus of an incredibly cheesy clip from some 80s music video show leading things off. For dessert, the "related" menu contains a comprehensive list of Billy Idol's other "hits," 75% of which you'll undoubtedly have forgotten during the decade and a half since you last heard any of them. Who has White Wedding and Eyes Without a Face and Cradle of Love and Hot in the City digitized? Who cares enough to upload them? I have no idea, but I'm grateful to them, if only for a squandered hour of vaguely-nostalgic flashbacks.
Best of all, no one's the wiser!
Labels: you tube
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Movie Review: The Descent
The Descent is a gory, B-movie style horror pic from England. It takes place around and beneath the Appalachian mountains in the southeast US, and stars six adventurous, outdoor-type female friends who get together to spelunk a previously-unexplored cave system. It's a horror movie, so it won't be a surprise when I tell you that bad things happen once they're underground, and that lives are lost, blood is spilled, and weird monsters abound.
It's not a great film, but it's smarter than most horror movies, and the atmosphere is a great element. It really feels like you're in a pitch black, claustrophobic cave along with the six female leads, and I actually enjoyed the movie more in the early going, when they were exploring the cave before the monster movie stuff got going.
The Descent is no masterpiece, but it's an enjoyable, gruesome, exciting thrill ride -- if you like this sort of film. It was made by the guys who did the cult hit
Dog Soldiers, but aside from this one being a lot better than it could have been, I didn't feel much of a connection or continuity between the two low budget horror flicks.
To the scores, which are
explained here.
The Descent, 2006
Script/Story: 4
Characters: 7
Action: 6
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: 2
Horror: 8
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6
The Descent is enjoying some really nice reviews, and those, in part, were what convinced Malaya and me to check it out. With 119 reviews it's
got 82% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and while we largely avoided those reviews and their attendant spoilers, we knew the basic plot of the film going in. It didn't disappoint; the action was in a cave and the monsters were creepy and there were deaths and scares galore. I was a bit disappointed in the story though, since I'd been led to believe
The Descent was more intelligent and inventive than most horror films.
It's not. The characters react like real people, rather than horror movie victims, but the plot itself is cookie cutter. Attractive young people head off into the boondocks, get trapped somewhere without hope of rescue, get attacked by monsters, fight and run in terror, and mostly die. The basic formula is identical to dozens of other horror movies; what makes this one a bit better is the quality of the acting, writing, and the atmosphere. The direction isn't stylish or
avant garde, but it's solid and accomplished, and the film does a very good job of making you feel trapped far below the surface along with these women.
There's a nice sequence where the women have to crawl through a long, low, narrow passage, down into water and over dirt and gravel, and through it all the camera stays about a foot in front of one woman's face, while moving steadily backwards while she crawls forward. The scene runs for ten or fifteen seconds while the woman covers a good five meters on elbows and knees, and I really don't know how they did it. It's the most authentic cave I've ever seen, and as the camera moves back you can see the floor, walls, and roof of the hose-like tunnel. Did they did a trench in a cave floor and fake the roof? Is it a fake tunnel with a camera on the end of a long pole?
Other scenes use blackness very well, especially early on, when the women have light sources. All you can see is what they see with their headbeams or flares; it's not one of those movies where it's sort of gray and you pretend the characters can't see when they obviously can. Looking down into seemingly-bottomless pits lit only by a few jerking flashlights, or bathed in a lurid red glow from a torch is creepier than most outright scare scenes in most horror movies, and like a good submarine movie, you definitely get the "stuck in a small, deadly space" during
The Descent.
Not everything is great, of course. The opening is a bit slow to get going, with the six women all drinking and hanging out in a cabin during the "get to know the characters" section, and that sort of drags. The characters weren't bad though, no of the unknown actresses were great, but none of them stopped the movie cold, and at least they all looked the part; athletic enough to be believable in their physically-demanding roles. (If not ripped enough to believe some of their rock climbing exploits; there's no way any of them had the arms to do the one-handed pull-ups seen on screen.)
It was also refreshing to have six women and no men, if only to spare us the requisite, "couple attacked while making love in some foolishly public location," and "horny guy walks to his doom thinking the shape in the darkness is his GF," and "guys scream at each other in testosterone-laden pissing contest when under stress," scenes.
While the basic structure was very familiar to the horror genre, there were a lot of fresh ideas, and it was nice that some of the cliches were avoided. Besides the scenes the movie avoided by not having any male leads, (and not substituting lesbian stereotypes for them) the movie also avoided any ominous, toothless, shotgun-caressing backwoods locals, axe-murderers, gratuitous topless shower scenes (I wouldn't have minded that one so much), women pointlessly tripping while running from a slow pursuer, hysterical women who must be slapped to calm them during a moment of stress, and more.
The Descent has every "gotcha" scene in triplicate, where people see nothing, turn around and turn back right into the monster, or think a rock is a rock when it's a monster in wait, or don't look up to see monsters above them, or must lie still so the prowling six inches away won't sense them, etc. But at least the characters don't do annoying and stupid things once the shit starts hitting the fan.
As with most horror films, the characters and acting hardly matter anyway, since after the initial "get to know the victims" bonding stuff they spend the rest of the film struggling to survive. It takes longer than expected to get to that point in
The Descent, and the opening drags a bit, but once they're in the cave, it's all pretty good. I actually enjoyed the "women vs. nature" stuff more than the eventual "women vs. mutated monsters" showdown, but a documentary about spelunking probably wouldn't sell as well without fanged albino monstrosities in the third act.
Labels: movie review
Friday, August 11, 2006
Terror Plot Foiled?
The
big news of the day is the vast terrorism plot allegedly foiled by the British. Evil Islamofascists (as Bush calls them) were going to blow up a dozen planes over the Atlantic with liquid explosives, etc. At the gym tonight they had FOX News on one TV and it was predictably-breathless coverage, with the sort of non-stop fear-mongering required to keep Republicans loyal to the ever-expanding, completely-unaccountable war on terror.
In my time on the elliptical machine I saw two different "experts" (neither had any credentials displayed that I saw) talking about how this proves Bush has been correct in his every policy decision, and how we clearly need to keep fighting in Iraq and how the war on terror will have peaks and valleys and how it will continue for another decade or two. It being FOX no other points of view were presented, and as always when faced with such flawed logic, I wanted to talk to the TV.
What does the war/civil war in Iraq have to do with stopping terrorists in London, other than diverting resources away from places they could be of actual defensive help? Furthermore, what's going to end terrorism in 10 or 20 years, when in the last 5 years the US has done nothing but increase it? We invaded Afghanistan, kicked over a few stone houses, and then left without finding Osama (who was in Pakistan all along), and without creating a strong country, which has allowed the Taliban to regain control of major regions. We couldn't do the job in Afghanistan because we had to run off to Iraq to seize those WMDs that did not exist, and as a bonus we booted the totalitarian-but-secular ruler, as our lack of post war planning turned the stable, Osama-hating nation into a civil war-ripped nation that's almost certain to evolve into an Iran-friendly, Islamic state with strong support for the sort of terrorists who try to use liquid explosives to blow up planes over the Atlantic.
More recently we're the sole country on earth backing backed Israel during its invasion of Lebanon, a misadventure that's done nothing to destroy the terrorist organization Hezbollah, while doing a great deal to killing hundreds of innocent Lebannese and unify the Arab world behind the sort of terrorists who launch missiles into cities across Israel when they're not busy planning to use liquid explosives to blow up planes over the Atlantic.
I'm not even arguing (not in this post, at least) why these things were done, or saying there weren't some compelling reasons to do them; I'm just pointing out that all the major US/Bush policies of recent years have been disasters, if their goal going in was to "fight terrorism." So what's going to change with another 10 or 20 years of these tactics, other than further radicalization of the Arab world? Meanwhile, the march of progress ensures that increasingly deadly technology will become increasingly widely available, thus making all but certain the likelihood that it will be used against civilian targets?
Those questions aside, my thought, as soon as I heard about the foiled plot, (which certainly seems to be legit, as
more details emerge) was not just to wonder if it was real, but to wonder how many people believed it was real, thanks to all the skepticism years of Bush's lies have implanted in our brains. I'm not the strawman wingnuts like Ann Coulter inflate when they need a target for laughable comments like those
in her latest column:
Democrats don't oppose the war on terrorism because they hate Bush: They hate Bush because he is fighting the war on terrorism. They would hate him for fighting terrorists even if he had a "D" after his name.
As always with Coulter, there's that, "She's not serious with that lunacy, is she?" I mean really, is there anyone in the US not wearing a tinfoil hat who doesn't think terrorism is a real issue that must be opposed? Of course not; it's just that in the fictional world Coulter and other demagogues of her ilk exist in, if you disagree with Bush's policies in his GWoT, you must actually
want the terrorists to win.
Getting back on topic, my question was about the latest announcement of some vast, horribly-lethal terrorist plot. It certainly sounds real in the news items, but since all of them source from the US or British governments, the same people who guaranteed us that Saddam had WMDs galore, and that they knew right where they were, and that Iraq would welcome liberating US soldiers with rose petals, and that there was no history of ethnic strife in the country... yeah.
At this point, after years of Bush's Chicken Little crying wolf act, declaring terror alerts every time he needs a bump in the polls,
disregarding actual homeland security issues,
using terrorism as a political weapon, over-stating every minor event without ever correcting it afterwards, etc, you've got to be skeptical, and just because this one might be the real thing, will that just embolden them in their next lie/exaggeration?
I'd like to see a national poll, with questions like, "When you hear news from some US agency that they've foiled a terrorist plot, do you believe everything/some/nothing that they say?"
I have no idea what the results would be, and I think the skeptical % would be depressingly low, but it would be interesting to find out. Of course the real issue is that we're ruled by men so cynical and power mad that they've twisted this whole war on terror around to the point that we don't even believe the good news. With any luck the upcoming congressional elections will start to rectify that, if Democrats get a majority in either house, gain subpoena power, and return some semblance of checks and balances to American government. I'm not getting my hopes up, but Lamont over Lieberman was certainly an auspicious beginning.
Labels: ann coulter, bush, terrorism
Thursday, August 10, 2006
The Expert Mind
Fascinating article about how the mind works and learns and remembers, and how people turn that into mastery in various fields:
The Expert Mind
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
It doesn't lend itself very well to quoting, since it's a six page article with lots of good points, but the gist is that practice is the most important thing to become truly skilled in intellectual efforts. It takes about 10 years of intensive, "effortful study" to attain mastery in a field, whether that be medicine, architecture, engineering, or chess. Chess is the one they focus on in the article though, for several reasons:
Because skill at chess can be easily measured and subjected to laboratory experiments, the game has become an important test bed for theories in cognitive science.
Researchers have found evidence that chess grandmasters rely on a vast store of knowledge of game positions. Some scientists have theorized that grandmasters organize the information in chunks, which can be quickly retrieved from long-term memory and manipulated in working memory.
To accumulate this body of structured knowledge, grandmasters typically engage in years of effortful study, continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond their competence. The top performers in music, mathematics and sports appear to gain their expertise in the same way, motivated by competition and the joy of victory.
Practice, especially the "effortful study" the article discusses, is what really makes a difference. It and determination count far more than natural ability, in intellectual endeavors like chess. The article mentions a father in Hungary who homeschooled his daughters with up to six hours a day of chess; and turned them all into masters. One is now the 14th ranked grandmaster in the world. So you either believe their genetics contain some super chess brilliance gene, or you conclude that any intelligent child could become a chess grandmaster, if properly trained and motivated.
The article tries to apply this logic to other fields, and I'm sure it would apply to mathematics and such, but I don't think it would work as well with the arts. Playing an instrument, yes. Composing symphonies or writing poetry, not so much. Practice and training would certainly help someone turn their ideas into finished products, but where would the initial inspiration come from? You could train someone to be a brilliant researcher and biographer, for instance, but more than likely their fiction would all still suck. Or is that wrong, and if they read tons of fiction, analyzed why stories worked, and wrote tons of practice stories of their own... they'd eventually be pretty good at it? (Counter example; many awful authors produce a ton of material w/o ever getting any better, and might in fact get worse as they work more quickly.)
How about sports? Practice obviously helps there, but if you're the most skilled basketball player on earth and you're below average height, you'll never surpass a somewhat less driven and less-practiced player with half a meter more height and much greater leaping ability.
There's lots of other good stuff in the article, including what they've found about how people think and store information. Chess masters don't necessarily see more moves than the rest of us, they just see better ones. Grandmasters have a huge accumulation of chess moves and scenarios in their heads, memories which enable them to glance at a board and compare the piece layout to the tens or hundreds of thousands of other chess matches they've played and studied, and from those applied memories they can pick the best option in just seconds. They're not Deep Blue, cycling through millions of moves in an instant; the human masters immediately jump to the best moves for a given scenario, and pick one of them. An intermediate player could study the same board for 30 minutes and see 10,000 possibilities, but not see the best moves, and perhaps not select them even if he did.
The analogy in the article is to remembering a poem or a song. Most English speakers hear "Mary had a..." and immediately and without conscious thought fill in the rest of the rhyme. If you're asked what color Mary's lamb was, you'll say, "white as snow" cliche without hesitation. This is because you've stored the whole poem (like it or not) as a chunk of info, and you can access it immediately. This is essentially what chess masters do with a grouping of pawns, rooks, and bishops; they've seen that layout before, or one nearly identical to it, and their minds can handle the multiple pieces and their possible moves almost as one unit, while beginners have to puzzle out every single piece individually.
The article talks about various experiments researchers have run with chess masters, and the interesting conclusions. Grandmasters can look at a board
from a chess match and memorize the location of every piece almost effortlessly, while non-masters can't remember half as many piece locations, even after longer study. However when the researchers tested the same subjects with
random chess board layouts, the grandmasters weren't much better than anyone else. The grandmasters' "chunk" memory of regular board layouts in chess matches didn't help with random pieces, and chess grandmasters didn't test much higher on spatial relations tests than regular people either. They just knew a lot of chess moves.
The challenge from the article is to figure how people learn and why some are driven to continually challenge themselves, while most of us are happy just being okay at things. Researchers are also working on the best ways to get people to learn. How can you make kids put effort into learning, rather than just sighing and turning the pages of their textbooks without absorbing the information? What's the reward vs. personal determination ratio? No one really knows, but learning how people think certainly seems to be a good start.
Labels: chess, intelligence
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Motorcycle Roulette
I kind of expect everyone who rides a motorcycle to eventually die in a crash, or survive one with a severe enough injury to shock some sense into them, but one advantage of the vehicles is that with their very limited passenger capacity, you'll seldom see an entire family wiped out. Seldom
>does not equal never, though.
BUTLER, Pa. -- Two brothers were killed in separate motorcycle accidents on the same stretch of road and within just two hours of each other. One was headed to the scene of his brother's accident.
Steven Kerr, 37, of West Sunbury, was killed late Saturday when his motorcycle crashed into a speed limit sign on state Route 38, state police said.
Less than two hours later and only about 100 yards away, 29-year-old Jeremy Kerr was fatally injured when his motorcycle crashed into the rear of a vehicle stopped in traffic on Route 38, police said.
Just to elaborate, my assumed fatality rate for motorcycles is based on three points. 1) The riders are mostly young men. 2) Young men drive like maniacs, whether on two wheels or four. 3) Motorcycles are notoriously treacherous vehicles to pilot, with any minor fender bender capable of and even likely to induce death in the motorcyclist.
And yes, I mostly posted this to break up the run of review posts, which is going to get a lot longer before it gets shorter. If that makes any sense.
Labels: driving, motorcycles
Monday, August 07, 2006
Book Review: Cat People
Cat People is not a
cheesy 80s horror movie, but instead a pamphlet-sized hardcover book about people who own cats, and the particular form of madness that grips many of us. Why would we tolerate, much less enjoy, living with animals that frequently ignore or injure us, that do not leap up to meet us at the door, that deface valuable furniture, and that do nothing to deter burglars or other unwanted guests?
Good questions, and ones you won't find answered in this book. What you will find are a bunch of short anecdotes about people who own cats, none of which (the people, the cats, or the anecdotes) are particularly memorable or amusing.
Cat People, by Michael Korda (2005)
Plot: 1
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 4/5
Characters: 5
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 2
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 4
There's nothing wrong with this book (unless you consider the 156 small pages and $20 price) but there's nothing special about it either. The opening is the best part, with a brief and mildly-informative history of the domestication of felines. The book points out that dogs were domesticated when people needed hunting companions and guards, and cats once we'd developed agriculture and needed a way to protect our storehouses of grain against mice and other pests. It's obvious once you think about it, but I'd never heard it stated that way before, and that, at least, I'll remember from this book.
Other than that, it's just a bunch of short vignettes about rich people and their cats. A few are about society people, batty old women who took their cats with them when they flew from New York to Paris, or who demanded their pets be served at the table in fine restaurants, etc. After those the book moves on to short tales about the multiple wild cats and half dozen pet cats the author and his wife have entertained at their horse ranch, over the years. These cover the last 2/3 of the slim tome.
I enjoyed some of the stories, but none of the events were out of the ordinary, and they all started to blur together after a bit. A good writer could have pulled it off, infusing the mundane anecdotes with enough wit and humor to keep the reader's interest. As it is, the writing is okay and the cat stories are unremarkable, so cat lovers might find some fun, but I was frequently bored and found myself skipping paragraphs in this very brief book.
Cats have different likes and dislikes, cats puke on their carpet and sharpen claws on expensive furniture, cats sleep in different places, cats get old and die, and new cats come in to replace them. It's kind of a hamster wheel of a book, with no plot or theme or rising action or resolution. Just short pieces about a lot of interchangeable cats, written without any special insight or wit.
The authors (Michael Korda's wife is co-credited and contributes some of the material, but the writing voice is uniform throughout) aren't very clever about their cat stories, and they're far less clever about actually owning cats. In their country estate, the little dears are apparently treated as furry forces of nature, and are not controlled in any way. There are innumerable passages bemoaning the cat damage done to expensive, name-brand upholstery and fabrics, but there's never a single mention of training the cats not to scratch things. Most of the cats leap up right on the table, knock over knickknacks, chase and fight viciously, wake the house at dawn, act finicky about their food, and so on. And why not, when neither of their owners ever do anything to discipline them? Cats aren't dogs, but you can certainly train them in a few basics.
Neither Malaya or me are big on training the beasts, but our two are not allowed on my desk, a living room shelf covered in bamboo plants, or the kitchen counters. And they don't go there, a rule reinforced by clapping and shouting and chasing when (very occasionally) needed. More crucially, I clip the claws of our cats every couple of weeks, and we therefore need nothing more than some water and soap when we get a scratch from a leaping cat. The authors of Cat People mention at least half a dozen emergency room level wounds from their animals, and that's wounds to people, not just to the other cats, of which there are dozens more detailed.
Our cats get dry food, with very occasional wet as a treat, and they're happy and healthy, and they don't wake us up at dawn yowling to be fed. Dozens of pages in Cat People are spent bemoaning dawn wake ups, cats getting very fat and lazy, cats getting finicky and refusing to eat what they'd previously enjoyed, and so on. I'm not a cat training expert, but I found it hard to believe the two rich, educated adults who wrote Cat People would allow their pets to so control their lives, and to run so wildly out of control through their house.
It's certainly not a book for aspiring cat owners to learn from, but despite my criticisms, it's not a horrible book if you like cats. I got it from the library and read it in two idle 20 minute sessions, mostly with Dusty in my lap, and enjoyed it for that. If it were $5 I would give it an okay for a gift to a cat lover in your life. At the outrageous $20 hard cover price, it's simply not worth it. Find it used or wait for paperback.
Labels: book review, cats, dogs
Sunday, August 06, 2006
Movie Review: Oldboy
Unbelievably good, intelligent, provocative, powerful film. Malaya and I watched, spellbound, for the full 120 minutes. I could think of problems and find ways to pick at it if I tried, but why? It was not the best movie I've ever seen, but it was certainly in the top 5 or 10, at least based on the first viewing. My immediate comparisons are Reservoir Dogs and Fight Club, simply for the intense, gritty immediacy of those films. Neither approach Oldboy in plot and dramatic scope, though Oldboy is a bit like Fight Club in that plot twists late in the film make you want to watch it again, knowing what you know now.
Oldboy is the story of a hard-drinking Korean businessman who misses his daughter's birthday since he's in the drunk tank, and who then vanishes on the way home after being released. He's abducted by unknown persons, for no known reason, and imprisoned for fifteen years before being mysteriously and unexpectedly released, after being framed for his wife's murder. Once out he's taken in by a kind female sushi chef, and given five days, by unknown persons, to discover why he was held and why he was released. This sounds spoilery, but it all takes place in the first 20 or so minutes, leaving 100 more for the plot to unfold. And unfold it does, in ways you can hardly believe, even as you witness them.
To the scores, which are
explained here.
Oldboy, 2003
Script/Story: 8
Characters: 7
Action: 7
Combat Realism: 7
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 7
Overall: 9.5
I don't have scores for directing, or originality, or tension, but if I did Oldboy would get 9s or 10s in all of them. Those scores and other intangibles are implied and factored into the overall score, which is why it's higher than any of the individual category scores. The whole is greater than the sum, or the average, of the parts.
If I were to nitpick it would be at the plot, which is rather a house of cards, in retrospect. Too many coincidences, too many things working out perfectly (as they must) to advance events, too much foresight and calculated evil for anyone to realistically (I hope) possess. It's an outrageously over the top story, filmed in intense, lurid, stylistic fashion, and if you caught 10 minutes at some random point, you'd probably think it was ridiculous. Watching the whole thing in one sitting though, it sucks you in and builds and builds, to an outrageous, almost unbelievable payoff.
Oldboy was so great (which is different than "good" or "enjoyable" if you see my meaning) that after we watched it we got right on our computers to read more about it. Malaya hit IMDB for info about the other films in Chan Woo Park's revenge trilogy, and I went to Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critics said, and to see what the hell critics said if they didn't like Oldboy.
I could imagine someone not
liking Old Boy, since some critics are single-issue types, and it's a very, very intense film. It's Violent, it's cruel and despairing at times, it deals with intensely adult themes, and it's downright emotionally-wrenching. It's a very un-soothing film, and as I said, I can easily imagine someone not liking it. I wouldn't recommend the film to my mom or dad, for instance.
But what professional film critic could see Oldboy and not admire it for the sheer rush of a cinematic experience it provides? Compared to 99% of Hollywood productions, Oldboy is a piranha in a tank of goldfish; an electric-blue, neon-glowing, two-headed piranha. I absolutely loved a great deal of the film, and even though there were some incredible implausibilities and plot holes, they were so easily ignored in the giddy sugar rush of excitement and gore and raw power that it seems pedantic to belabor them. Like stepping off the best roller coaster on earth and complaining about the color of the paint on some of the support beams.
At any rate, Oldboy has
113 reviews on RT, and 99 of them are positive, which works out to 81% good, or more to the point, 19% clueless, gutless pussies who should find another line of work. I didn't feel compelled to read every review, but most of the bad reviewers seem to have been simply overwhelmed by the film. They think it's too stylish, or too lurid, or that it's trying too hard, or that it's too violent and gruesome, or that the plot mechanisms are too elaborate. As I said, if you can handle an intense film, you will absolutely devour this one, Pulp Fiction style. If not, it'll probably be too much for you and your defense mechanisms will find it silly, or gross, or you'll refuse to engage in the suspension of disbelief the elaborate and impossibly over-the-top revenge plot requires.
Anyway, I loved it and Malaya loved it, and we're definitely going to check out the other recent films by Chan Woo Park.
Labels: movie review
Friday, August 04, 2006
Late Summer Movies
I haven't had much to say about movies lately, largely due to sloth. We never saw Superman, but we did get to Pirates 2, and enjoyed it. I thought it felt sort of scattered, with too many plots and subplots going in every direction, but when you consider that most summer movies don't have any plot at all, that's an odd criticism. And I remember thinking much the same about Pirates 1 when I saw it in theaters, before coming to enjoy it much more after a couple of DVD/cable viewings. I'll write a full review at some point; it's half-done and sitting on my notes page with literally 25 other partial reviews of books and films. Some day I'll be in the mood and finish up a bunch of those at once.
Since Pirates though, we havne't seen anything. Malaya's been wanting to go, but Miami Vice looked too drab and boring (Cleveland Vice?), and when it got bad reviews and only made $25m (a disaster considering the $130m budget) we had no cause to regret our decision. We were looking forward to Jet Li's Fearless, but true to form with an import martial arts film, the studio delayed it another two months, pushing it back to September.
We did see an import martial arts film on DVD, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Chan Woo Park's
Oldboy, which is from Korea, but is not a martial arts film. It's got a few fight scenes, but no more than any other gritty, heavily-violent action film. It's just that the characters are Korean, hence their fighting is termed "martial arts" even though they're no doing anything special or stylized or involving nunchucks. I'd heard a little about Oldboy, that it's about a guy who is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years, before suddenly being set free, without ever knowing who held him or why. He then sets out to find his kidnappers and figure out why he was held.
Lest you think that's spoilery, you learn that in about the first 20 minutes of the 2-hour film. It's the set up, and where the movie goes from there is never less than edge-of-your-seat shocking. It wasn't the best movie I'd ever seen, but it was certainly in the top 10, and if you can take moments of intense violence and searing emotion, you should watch it as soon as you can. I'll put up a real review of it at some point, but I'll have to give this one at least a 9 or a 9.5/10 overall. It's an amazing cinematic experience.
Back in theaters, there is finally a movie coming that Malaya and me are interested in. The Descent. Malaya's really the one pushing for it, and I wasn't interested in another cheesy horror movie, until the reviews started coming in. Right now The Descent's at
83% out of 77 reviews on RT, and that score is being dragged down by uptight "major" critics. A couple of days ago the film had 38/40 positive reviews, and it's getting raves; four-star reviews from lots of people,
including Jim Emerson, the guy holding down Ebert's fort until he snaps back from his latest life-threatening cancer operation. It's got a
71% right now on Metacritic, with multiple 90+ scores from the sort of major critics who seldom give a bloody, gruesome horror movie anything better than 1-star. So that'll probably be us some time this weekend.
I've got to also mention the trailer for Borat, which I wouldn't have imagined touching with an eleven-foot pole, except that I heard good things about
the trailer, watched it, and found myself laughing out loud several times. I hate that guy's Ali G character, and knew nothing about Borat other than that the actual Khazakistani government is pissed about his parody, but it is a funny trailer. I can't imagine the whole movie is, since the trailer shows his life in his amusing 3rd world Eastern European nation, and ends with him going to America. Which makes me assume that the rest of the film is set in the US and filled with with typical madcap-yet-heartwarming antics featuring the wacky foreigner confused by our culture, and who, through his confusion, enables us to see our own absurdities in a fresh light. And those fish out of water sketches always bore and annoy me.
It's a funny trailer, though.
In other movie news, it looks like I was right about a prediction, for once. Back in January I was musing on the overcrowded slate of upcoming CGI kid's movies,
and I said:
I've been wondering when the CGI family animation crash was going to come, and honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't arrived already. The public just can't keep supporting every crappy CGI movie with bright colors and a band of anthropomorphized, mismatched animals thrown together on a wacky adventure. Can they? When do diminishing returns set in, especially given how lame most of these films are? Shark Tale and Madagascar were profitable, but can The Wild, Over the Hedge, Open Season, The Ant Bully, Ice Age 2, Barnyard, and Happy Feet, and even postmodern Hoodwinked, all possibly make money off of the exact same demographic? True, 5 year olds are very easily entertained by bright colors and textured objects moving around on a screen while making silly noises, but at some point these crappy and redundant films have got to stop making money. Right?
I didn't actually predict anything there, but my doubts have been proven out. Over the Hedge did okay, as did Monster House, and Open Season and Happy Feet (
worst trailer ever) are still in our dreadful future, but Madagasgar-rip off The Wild flopped its way to just
a 9.6m opening, Ant Bully crashed in at
$8m last weekend, and gender-confused (hornless male cows with udders?)
The Barnyard was gifted with a
$7m estimate by the usually-accurate Box Office Mojo.
No one's predicting the end of CGI hits; Cars made a fortune and Shrek 3 will surely back up the Brinks truck, and good films will always make money (I hope) but the days when you could throw any mismatched bunch of animals together, get celebs who wanted to impress their kids to do silly voices, and put 90 minutes of their fart jokes and physical comedy on screen to a guaranteed $30m opening weekend
seem to have past. Thank you market saturation (inevitable in America) for doing what good taste (rare in America) and poor reviews (trendy in America) could never have managed on their own.
Labels: movies
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
The cat food cycle of life.
As
I related last week, when the new air conditioner came in, the cat boxes went out. Well, actually they came in as well, inside the living room, but metaphorically speaking they went out... out of their former home in the box that housed the A/C unit the previous owners of this condo must have taken with them.
Neither Dusty nor Jinx were real pleased by this, accustomed as they were to pushing through the cat door into their own smelly little two-box paradise. In fact, we had a few days of concerned confusion, since we didn't see Jinxie actually use the new box (seen to the right) for like three days. We were sure she was using it; we didn't find or smell any poo/pee around the condo, and when I scooped it there seemed to be more than Dusty could have produced by himself, but she was apparently crossing her legs, biding her time, and darting in for a quick squat when we were out of the room or out of the condo.
We still had the old litter boxes, of course, but we had them sitting on the back patio with all the other post-construction junk. We're planning on moving the A/C unit out (and putting it where?) once fall comes, and putting the cat boxes back where they were previously. Besides, where else do you put cat boxes? It's not like you're going to wash them out use them for dinner plates.
The cats didn't get on the back patio for a few days after the A/C came in since it was too fricking hot to leave the back door open. Which is sort of why we got the damn A/C in the first place. It's been cooler the past half week though, and with the restoration of their unregulated access to the unfettered joys of the untrammeled outdoors, or at least the approximately 2x3 meters of them our second story patio affords, the cats were off to explore. They soon found the catboxes, and made use of the one with some litter still in it.
It was a strangely-pathetic image, Dusty, circling and then carefully aligning his ass over approximately a handful of litter... yet there he was late last week, painstakingly aiming his squattage for the 1/10th of the box that still had litter in it. Sadder yet was the sight of him trying to bury it without putting his shoveling front paw in the steaming evidence. I took pity on him, and my nose, and dumped in some more litter. Since then, he's been using the outside box every chance he gets. Sunday I was at the gym for an hour and a half, then came back and showered and went to run some errands. By the time I got home the backdoor had been closed for a good 3 hours, and when I opened it and sat down to eat my Baja Fresh tres tacos, Dusty promptly hustled his ass out there and made his first stop the old litter box.
Free range poo! Perhaps the open sky and fresh air invigorates him?
He's since made a habit of this; posting himself beside the closed back door and meowing plaintively when we return home, or when I get up in the morning. He'll use the inside one if he has to, but he seems to prefer the great outdoors. Shouldn't he feel exposed and vulnerable, or something? Stupid animal.
Jinx, for her part, got over her skittishness and has been spotted utilizing the indoor facilities on a regular basis. Odder yet, she spends more time out on the patio than Dusty, but doesn't seem to be using the outside box at all. In fact, she was inside the inside one, kicking and making bad smells, not half an hour after the successful conclusion of Dusty's latest wilderness expedition.
In other, equally unimportant cat news, the Albertson's supermarket in Lafayette is shutting down. It's no loss to us; we never shopped there because their prices are higher than Safeway's, and since there's a larger, newer, cleaner Safeway literally 50 meters from the going-out-of-business Albertson's, for those rare occasions that we actually go to the supermarket for something.
This is cat-related because... they're selling off everything for 70% off, and they had lots of pet food when we went by the last day they were open. Unfortunately all they had for cats were treats; all the canned food was for dogs. I got a can anyway, since it was like eighteen cents, and opened it up for the cats over Malaya's objections.
"How different can the crap be?" I asked rhetorically, and with the cats following me around and meowing in eagerness, I seemed to have a point.
They changed their tune once I stopped teasing them and put the food down though, and after some curious sniffing, they left it all but untouched. Jinxie actually looked offended, sniffing once and then wheeling around and actually running out of the kitchen. Dusty took a few bites, but even he, undiscerning creature that he is, wouldn't eat the stuff. And here's what the plates looked like after ten minutes.
I dumped the food and was glad to see that at least the garbage disposal was willing to swallow it. Needless to say, I'm blaming the cats for this incident, and withholding their dessert as punishment.
Labels: dusty, jinx, pets
The heat continues
I wouldn't call it schadenfreude, since I'm not cruelly-gleeful about it, but I'm definitely getting a sense of pleasure as I read the daily news stories about the horrible heatwave now hitting the US East Coast. My pleasure comes from remembering when that was me, and sighing at the refreshing 72 degree (22c) high I am now enjoying.
The article is about the rest of the US getting baked by the same heatwave we suffered through last weekend; the heat that drove us to buy an A/C unit and to consider it
the best $349 we ever spent. That cursed weather lingered over the West Coast for several days, then finally moved east, baking the mountains, then the Midwest, and it's now reached the East Coast.
Does any of this sound familiar from my complaining last week?
Commuters up and down the East Coast sweated on their way to work Wednesday and others stayed close to fans and swimming pools as the temperature and humidity climbed back up to heat wave levels after a night of little relief.
The National Weather Service posted heat advisories and warnings from Maine to Oklahoma. Triple-digit temperatures were forecast Wednesday along the East Coast as far north as parts of Maine and New Hampshire.
By 11 a.m., the heat index at Washington's Reagan National Airport was 103 -- a combination of the 94-degree heat and 51 percent humidity -- and up north in Boston thermometers read 93, for a heat index of 101, the national Weather Service said. The temperature at Newark, N.J., already had hit 95.
Even before dawn, the temperature was already above 80 in Nashua, N.H. New York's LaGuardia Airport still had 92 degrees at midnight and eased only to 86 degrees by 6 a.m., the weather service said.
If you're lucky enough not to be afflicted by the ridiculous Fahrenheit system,
100 degrees is 38C, and highs have been up over 40-42c in much of the US, with stifling humidity. It's routinely that hot in the US deserts, but usually with almost zero humidity, and the people there know to expect it.
For instance, it's
85-115 in Death Valley today, (30-46c) but 1) no one sane lives there in the summer, and 2) the humidity is 8%. In a bit more populated place, it's 105 (42c) today in Phoenix, but the humidity is 24%, and
it's always 105 in Phoenix in August. Much to
Donnie's resigned charin.
It's one of the worst heatwaves in memory, and certainly one of the longest-lasting. How often does the same weather system spread such misery over the entire US, pissing off 300 million people over the course of nearly two weeks? I wonder how I would have felt if the motion were reversed? If the East Coast had gotten it first, and I'd seen daily news items about the furnace coming west. I probably wouldn't have believed it, thinking our proximity to the cold Pacific would help, and remembering how seldom it gets over 90 here, and how there's never humidity when it's that hot. And I would have been wrong, and pretty unhappy about it.
There's more good news;
nighttime highs are ever-increasing in the US, so not only is it hotter in the day, it stays hotter at night. Yes, we're all pretty much doomed.
Labels: weather
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