BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: August 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Why I Quit Watching TV
This isn't exactly why I haven't watched TV in 2 years, but the decrepitude of the Bay Area's 2 professional football teams was certainly a contributing factor. Here's a quote from the recap of the Oakland Raiders' most recent "game."
OAKLAND, Calif. -- Coming into the third exhibition game, the New Orleans Saints and Oakland Raiders talked about how this game would be a dress rehearsal for the season.
Consider Drew Brees and the Saints' first-team offense ready, while the Raiders may not have enough time to fix what's wrong in Oakland.
Brees completed 14 of 17 passes for 179 yards and drove the Saints to touchdowns on all three drives he played, leading New Orleans to a 45-7 exhibition victory over the Raiders on Saturday.
...Those three drives went so well that coach Sean Payton pulled most of his starters early in the second quarter instead of playing them into the third quarter as planned.
Moore's touchdown gave the Saints a 21-0 lead with 13:53 left in the half and brought an early end to Brees' day and loud boos from a Raiders crowd that has seen plenty of bad football during a six-year stretch when Oakland has lost an NFL-worst 72 games.
...The Saints were able to move the ball with ease even without top running backs Pierre Thomas (knee) and Reggie Bush (calf). Mike Bell started, but Lynell Hamilton got the bulk of the work with 16 carries for 95 yards. P.J. Hill added 89 yards and two touchdown runs.
...The Saints outgained Oakland 344-60 in the first half, posting 19 first downs to three for the Raiders.
I was never a 49ers fan and not a Raider fan either, once I got past a youthful, "They're bad boys and they wear black!" phase (that many men fail to mature beyond). But the fact that pro football used to be my favorite TV to watch, coupled with broadcast rules that dictate that the vast majority of NFL shown on TV in the Bay Area features and Raiders and 49ers, and the fact that during the 6+ years I've lived here the 49ers have ranged between mediocre and dreadful, while the Raiders have posted the worst six-year record in the history of the NFL, certainly hasn't done much to nurture my desire to crack a beer and sit through some Sunday afternoon f'ball.
Total lack of posts lately, a situation that may begin to change next week. I didn't have time/inclination to post my first few days visiting the parents in San Diego two weeks ago, and then the last 4 days there I was up in Anaheim, doing Blizzcon stuff, which was pretty much constant Diablo 3-related toil. Sunday I was back in SD, but spent all day interacting with parents (including tennis and swimming), with my free time typing up interview transcripts and posting tons of Blizzcon D3 news.
Sunday night I flew back, and had some lovely R&R at my new semi-girlfriend's house. She's suggested "Elle," a deviation of her middle name, for a name I could call her on the blog. But I'm not sold on that one, since my long time coworker on Diabloii.net and now the D3 site goes by "Elly," short for "Eleanor," which might lead to confusion amongst long time readers. (The new semi-gf's middle name is not "Eleanor," at least.)
At any rate, I visited Elle's house on the way home from the airport Sunday evening, and after a delightful and relaxing interlude, I headed home in the wee hours, and was met with my cat rejoicing upon my arrival. I'd been gone for 8 days, and while I hired a cat sitter to come in three times to play with the beasts, and my next door neighbor was able to scoop the boxes each day, that was still much less interaction than the animals had grown used to, over the 2 months I'd had all 3 of them here.
Monday was spent doing tons of website work, with some house work and pet interaction. I put off shopping trips since I was just too busy, and survived on canned goods and frozen stuff. And lots and lots and lots of tomatoes, since my front porch jungle of romas finally hit their stride during my week away, and there is now a veritable Edenic garden of dangling red globes of delicious delight. I picked something like 30 romas and at least that many yellow cherrie toms yesterday, and that hardly scratched the surface of my crop. Plus my next door neighbor, to whom I gave a half dozen of my extra plants, has as many or more growing over there as I do in front, and has been giving me a huge basketful every week or so, just to thin our her production levels.
It's nice the later growing season up here; my mom and dad both had toms growing in their backyards, but they were almost done for the season. Their plants were no more than chest high and had been cut back as the top limbs all went yellow and died, and while they still had some production going, their days were clearly numbered. While my plants up here are just hitting their prime, are soaringly-high (I've tied them to the overhead trellis for support and they're growing up and over it.) and have tons of yellow blossoms still on their upper limbs, while the body of the plants is in full speed production.
I didn't have toms until a month or so later than they did in sunnier, hotter SoCal, but I'll have them 2 or 3 months later, and probably in much greater total abundance. The lesson here, for my future days, is to plant toms in a variety of growing areas. Some in full sun for faster early production, others in afternoon or slanting sun for larger plants, longer growth, and later season delights.
How I digress.
So, Monday was work. Tuesday Malaya and her husband came over to pick up their cat. Well, cats. I never quite got around to blogging about it, but I got a second cat back in December. Kyo, by name, and she's about the best cat I've ever interacted with. Super friendly, loves to play, very affectionate, not afraid of strangers, etc... to humans. To other cats she's bitchy, passive aggressive, fond of sneak attacks, hisses a lot and gets scared for no reason, etc. Basically exactly the opposite of her behavior towards humans.
She and Jinx have been together for almost all of the past 9 months, and they've never grown to do more than tolerate each other. Jinx isn't the aggressive one, and while she's not as sulky or shy as she was back in December and January, she tends to pout or hide when Kyo swipes at her. More suitable to cohabitation with Kyo is the third cat, which was formerly the IG's cat, and then became Malaya's cat, when the IG needed to give him up and she/I were still besties. Malaya lamentably calls him "Bela," named after the famed Hungarian actor of the silent movie era. Pronounce it all butchy and Dracula style. "Beh-lach."
That's fine and all, but 1) Malaya never actually says it that way, and 2) my mom's had a female cat named "Bella" for several years. And yes, Bela is neutered, but still, do you gotta rub it in by giving him a girl's name? And no, it doesn't matter if Bela was a masculine male name in Transylvania in 1882. It's a girl's name now, and the cat deserves a little more respect than that. So I've been calling him Bruno, named after the alter ego of a much more famous Eastern European entertainer of the modern era. The cat responds equally to either name, as well as any other word you choose to use as a form of address, so it's going well, I think.
Oddly, the only way I found to truly interest in (with words, not fud) is to sing along with hair metal. Seriously. I recently had a fit of nostalgia and added some early Van Halen and Motley Crue to my 500+ song WinAmp list, and for whatever unknown feline lima bean brain reason, when I sing along to Panama or Public Enemy, in an appropriately 80s style falsetto voice, Bruno always perks up and runs over to stand up on his hind legs and put his front feets on my chair. He'll often leap into my lap on especially high notes. He has never exhibited such behavior with any other type of musical sing along. And when I'm working I find myself singing along to a lot of music. Hair metal kitty?
At any rate, Malaya picked up Bruno, and took Kyo as well, on Tuesday. They kept Kyo and Jinx last winter, while I was out of town for a week, and Bruno (who then had yet another name) was still living with the IG. Predictably, they fell in love with Kyo, as does everyone, since she's the most friendly cat I've ever known. The contrast was more marked since Jinx hid under the bed the whole time, since while she's very friendly and fun with me, she fears almost everyone else. Including Malaya, her little lima bean brain having long since lost any memories of where or who she lived with during the first 4 years of her life.
Bruno and Kyo don't get along all that much better than Jinx and Kyo, except that Bruno is rather dog-like, for a cat. Big, clumsy, abrupt, and strong enough to knock you over with head rubbing. He's also kind of oblivious, so when Kyo does her crouching and hissing thing, or swipes at him (in an entirely ineffectual, half hearted paw batting sort of way) he just ignores it. Literally ignores it, like sometimes he doesn't even notice that another cat is swatting him in the ankles or the tail. So it doesn't upset him when it happens, and he doesn't try to avoid it. Jinx knows it's coming, stays out of the way, and pouts when it does happen. Hence while Kyo would actually be by far the happiest living alone, and while Jinx and Bruno got along fairly well (they'd sleep on opposite sides of me in bed every night), Malaya and her husband think of Bruno as theirs, and if Kyo is going to live with me and Jinx or them and Bruno, she's happier with them and Bruno.
Jinx, for her part, has been transcendent in her delight at being an only cat (or at least being free of Kyo) for the past few days. Tuesday evening, shortly after the other cats were spirited away, she started racing around the apartment, sprawling in odd places, barking and chirping in her weird, meow-less voice, and acting very affectionately towards me. She's kept that up for the past 2 days, and has slept as long as I wanted to sleep in the morning (not getting up and being restless as she did when sharing a bed with Bruno), has been much more playful and active, is following me from room to room, and generally seems far happier than at any point since the summer began. She's not a cat cat, and she's not a people cat. She's apparently only a Flux cat?
I've not had that much time to play with her though, since I've been super busy with continuing post-Blizzcon website stuff, and have spent some time on the usual "I've been out of town for a week" activities. Shopping, clothes washing, miscellaneous errands, etc. And now, just as I'm catching up on things and the weekend is approaching, there's a new complication, of the most delightful sort. Elle (not Elly) is driving up here (she lives south of SF, about 35 miles distant) tonight after work, and is staying the night, before returning Saturday afternoon. I've been looking forward to this all week, and it's helped me be diligent and productive on website stuff. Since I knew I had a weekend recreational treat, I could toil ceaselessly during the week. It's an attitude I hope to extend to my fiction writing, once this huge bolus of website work has been squeezed out and the D3 site schedule has returned, more or less, to normal.
In other news... not so much. I've hardly surfed this week, and haven't had time to even think about watching movies or finishing up/posting more reviews. Next week, perhaps.
Not blogged lately, and the backlog of reviews I wrote weeks ago and put into the script to appear every 3rd day has expired. I think. It's not like I check this stuff.
My excuse, such as it is, is that I've been busy. And out of town.
The busy came from a new semi-girlfriend, and preparing to go out of town. The out of town had me in San Diego visiting the 'rents since Sunday. Now I'm up in Anaheim, in the Marriot next to the convention center, where Blizzcon gets underway tomorrow morning. I drove up here Wednesday night and stayed with an online friend, in preparation for Thursday's "fansite summit" at Blizzard HQ in Irvine. It was more than expected, but less than it might have been. I wrote a bit about it on the diablo site, but my report is almost all about the short D3 demo we saw, rather than the visit itself. If you want some superficial and pointless writing on the visit, here you go.
I was going to write some more about it tonight, but I took an hour to bang out a detailed report on the d3 demo this evening, and never had time to get back to write another report. After I posted the report I did some forum stuff, then endured long lines for Blizzcon badges, got back and took photos of the goodie bag, uploaded images, did some more comment moderation, and then we were off to dinner. Bliz Europe hosted about 10 fansite peoples for a huge dinner in the steakhouse off the lobby of the Marriot, and my god did we eat. Well, did I eat. Better, it was all free and no strings. I had a greyhound with tanqueray, and pepsi with grey goose, and a raspberry collins, before a good sized glass of Cabernet Sauvignon with my dinner, which was exquisite. I don't know what the total bill was, for 13 of us and all having the huge entree and at least 2 drinks, but I'm glad I wasn't paying it.
They even had 2 full boxes of additional goodie bags, and passed out a few. I didn't want one; the selection this year is dire, with only a few decent items, and a ton of pretty ads. We fansite peoples did get a nice framed and signed print of the Blizzcon 3-game artwork, which I'll value beyond price, at least until someone offers me some $ for it.
Tomorrow morning the show opens, supposedly at 9 for press into the press room, with the actual opening ceremony at 11:30. They're going to announce the new WoW expansion, and perhaps some new Diablo 3 stuff too. I came to the show fully believing that we'd see a new d3 char announced, but based on the body language and averted eyes of the Blizzard people I talked to this afternoon, I'm now thinking that's less likely. Much to my chagrin.
Best of all, this weekend, from my perspective, is my return to the Bay Area sunday evening. My semi-girlfriend (newly met, newly smitted by) was quite glad to invite me to stop by sunday evening on my way home from the airport, and if there's any better way to wrap up a busy travel week, and kick off a long week of work at home catching up on d3 website stuff, than by rolling around with her for a couple of hours on a padded, horizontal surface, I don't know what it might be.
Details to not follow.
And yes, I wrote this whoel thing sitting in bed, mostly with my eyes closed, as the 4-5 drinks I had tonight are just blitzing me. And I need to be up at 7am in time to get breakfast and talk media strategy with co-workers and get over to the show before the doors opena at 9am. Goodnight.
Wonderful Days. (Wikipedia. ImdB.) A gorgeously-animated feature-length anime with a great sci-fi concept, sadly burdened with zero characterization, an inconsequential plot, a confused theme, and generally bad writing. Scores, first:
A gorgeous, visually-pleasing film. It's all CG, 3D figures and backgrounds animated on computers, but they do most of the figures in a faux-2D way, so they look hand drawn into the scenes, rather than appearing as fully 3D figures in the world, video game style. Essentially it's CG done to look like actual cell drawn artwork, and it took a huge team 3 years to produce, and cost a damn fortune. Pity they didn't spend some of that on a writer.
While watching this one I found myself thinking about the same question that always comes up when I'm viewing bad anime. Who wrote this? And why did they commit to all the drawing, artwork, computer work, etc, when the story was so lame? I've seen dumber, less interesting anime, but this one had a good plot concept and setting. It just did nothing with it.
The whole plot felt like something a couple of guys had brainstormed on the back of a napkin at a bar one night, and then never advanced any further. My quick summary:
"So it's like, 100 years in the future. At some point, the world got all polluted and there was an apocalypse of some kind. One huge technologically advanced city was built before the doom, and it's where everyone smart lives. The city is semi-sentient, and it fuels itself by consuming garbage and pollution. But what happens after like a century of this, when the earth starts to become clean again? The city has to have pollution to function. What do the people who live in it do? They're a ruling class, more advanced and privileged than the teeming masses, but their power comes from the city's energy. Could they create more pollution just to keep the city running? Would the masses try to stop them?"
That's a decent framework for a story. The problem, as I said, is that nothing more is done with it. I'd like to blame the translation; perhaps the subtitled version I saw was not very well done and it missed the nuances of the plot and characterization? But there wasn't any evidence of that, since the visuals matched the dialogue and plot as presented through it. The characters are worse than the unfinished plot, and seem even more hurriedly sketched out. Perhaps on the back of a match book, since a napkin wouldn't be required for their non-detailed selves.
"Okay, so we need a hot girl. She's like, one of the security officers for the city. And we need conflict with the insurgents. So maybe she likes the main terrorist guy who breaks into the city to break into the city to hack into the CPU? Oh, I know! He's one of the ruling class, who left the city years ago. He and the girl were childhood friends, but there was some kind of tragedy and he left the city and grew up in the slums. And now he wants revenge! Oh, and there's a love triangle. The girl is in love with another of the guards, and he was also a childhood friend. So he and the girl are all conflicted if they should kill the terrorist, since he was like, their hero when he was young."
That's it for the characterization, and trust me, it's a lot less interesting than it sounds from that sketch, since none of the main characters have any personality. They're entirely defined by what they do, by their type. The character design is done poorly too, since the girl and the terrorist are obviously about 21, but the third guy in the triangle is a commanding officer, and he has white hair, and there's never any indication of special feelings between him and the girl. I assumed he was about 50, and didn't realize that he felt anything more than a soldier's duty to the girl. It wasn't until a flashback scene showed the commander as a child with the other two, all of them about 10, that I realized he was their age, and just happened to have white hair. And it wasn't until the very end that I realized he was supposed to have some kind of romantic attraction to the girl. So no, the love triangle thing wasn't all that well delineated.
Other than those three, there are lots of faceless city guards, various criminals/freedom fighters attacking them, Total Recall style, a cute little boy who is the sexy terrorist dude's adopted younger brother, an exiled scientist from the city who wants to destroy it, etc. None of them have any more personality than you see in their first on screen appearance, though. They're all types, doing whatever their role requires to advance the plot, without standing out or creating any viewer sympathy. Furthermore, the plot doesn’t advance beyond the initial idea. I guess the city was destroyed in the end, but when it shut down the skies cleared (it was always raining before then) which didn't make sense, since the city was described as a machine that was consuming the pollution, not creating it.
There were also plans discussed by the ruling faction to blow up a bunch of oil wells to create new pollution, but despite various scenes of soldiers moving out under orders to launch that plan, we never saw if they did so, or heard any reason why not. The only combat and action was in the city, as the insurgents invaded, so presumably the soldiers sent off to destroy the oil fields were unopposed in their mission. Which they didn't carry out, because um... they just didn't.
There was also a weirdness to the vehicles in the film. All of the city people used single passenger, enclosed motorcycles, which looked a bit like sexy golf carts. But on two wheels, just so they'd be unstable and impractical. Dune buggies, guys. The ruling city people had flying machines, but they were very small, basically aerial motorcycles, and the guards only used them within the city. So any time they had a mission out in the concrete jungle around the city, they'd ride out in a long train of motorcycles, which were slow, perilous to operate on wet roads, and very vulnerable to any sort of attack. No trucks, no helicopters, etc. (The insurgents had a truck they used to drive 20 of them into the base at once; a far more effective technique than trying to sneak in 20 motorcycles.)
When the city commanders wanted to destroy the oil fields, they sent out soldiers, presumably on a fleet of motorcycles. Why don't they just fire rockets? Or bombs? They have fantastically advanced technology, but nothing that flies? Or qualifies for the carpool lane?
I mention these examples since they're illustrative of the overall weirdly thoughtless nature of the film. Lots of good ideas and concepts, great animation, but such dumb plot and events, and boring characters who take turns giving speeches, but never really interact or effect each other with conversation. A tenth, a hundredth as much time spent on the plot and story as on the technical details, and it could have been a really good movie. Instead it was just another beautiful, 3D anime without any characters worth remembering, or a story worth telling.
Very disappointing. The first of the Disney classics I've seen so far that was clearly and obviously written for children. Robin Hood was released in 1973, and was the second film in a decade and a half of Disney animation efforts that are much less warmly remembered than those that came before and after.
The wikipedia entry talks about the cheapness of the production, with much reused animation (both within the film and from earlier films), but that didn't bother me so much. The overall quality of the animation was noticeably poorer than in earlier films, and the quality varied during the film. Some of the early forest scenes had backgrounds as good at those in Snow White and other masterpieces, but other sets, especially those in the castle, had far less detail and looked hurried. The real problem was the writing and the plot, though. First, the scores:
This was the first film I ever saw in theaters, or so I've been told. My grandfather took me to see it when I was very young, but like almost everything else before about age 7, I have zero memory of it, and know of this event only from hearing it talked about in later years. I did see this one at some point since then, since most of it was familiar to me. Perhaps in a rerelease, or on TV at some point. At any rate, I had memories of it, and they were fond ones. I was looking forward to this rewatching, since I've always liked the Robin Hood myth, and my recollection of this one was of lots of action and clever hijinks by Robin and Little John, as they outwitted the evil Prince John and his various animal sidekicks.
The film does have that, but everything exists on such a childish level that it was hard to enjoy. Things are just too simple and uncomplicated, and all the characters are drawn in such black and white terms. All the villagers of Nottingham are adorable cute animals, and all either prey animals, or cute, domesticated types; rabbits, hedgehogs, hound dogs, owls, etc. All of the soldiers and guards are bad and evil, or at best unthinking brutes. So of course they're all huge, scary, predominantly-African animals: wolves, vultures, rhinos, elephants, crocodiles, etc.
The world is very, very small, too. There are usually just one or two characters on screen at a time (faster to animate that way), and they don't really interact with their surroundings. Trees or chairs or other things are just background, with the characters posing in front of them, and seldom using any of the props, or interacting with anything other than the ground they usually seem to float slightly above. There are very few angles or varieties of views either; no big overhead shots to show the scale of things, few moving camera views to show the amazing depth created by the multiple glass pane effect used so well in earlier Disney films. As a result, everything seems small and depopulated.
An early scene has Robin and Little John in disguise as gypsy fortune tellers (I doubt they had such things in England in that era, but much of the film is gleefully anachronistic). The evil Prince John is instantly taken in by them, and he stops the march of his guards and treasure chest to enjoy a private reading in his curtained palanquin. During the reading Robin is inside, and Little John is outside, and the dozens of guards shown a moment before are just sort of gone. Little John can steal the "solid gold hubcabs" off of the wagon without being noticed, and then he can even walk up to the huge tax chest and drill a hole in the bottom of it with his dagger without anyone noticing. Now this chest is large enough to hold two well-folded Asian girls within, and it's being carried on long poles by 8 uniformed rhinos. None of whom are shown during the drilling process, when they are presumably looking somewhere else?
This kind of thing happens all the time, too. In the later archery contest scene Little John is able to walk up and sit down beside the King of England without a single guard in sight. There are numerous scenes of the castle, but there's never a servant or commoner within; just guards. There aren't any farmers, hunters, trackers, or travelers on the road. No rich merchants, no nobles, no ladies of the court, etc. The instant Robin and any of his associates, including dogs on crutches and tiny children, run into the trees, they vanish from the face of the earth and none of the king's guards make any effort to pursue them.
It's just an eerily empty, entirely unrealistic world, a fact which wouldn't be noticed by the six year olds this film was written to entertain, but which is distractingly obvious to adult viewers.
The ultimate plot is quite lame as well. The whole point is that Prince John is a dildo, and is only ruling because King Richard is off on Crusade. So the people are always hoping Richard will return and kick his thieving, cruel, tyrannical brother off the throne. And eventually he does... off screen, with no confrontation or any kind of "in the nick of time" drama. I was amazed by that, since I had clear memories of him showing up in time to save Robin and the villagers. I must have imagined it, my youthful mind writing a better version of the movie (which any 5 y/o could do).
In the actual film, there's a big finale scene with Robin and Little John breaking all of the villagers out of the jail in the castle, and stealing back all of the gold in the process. They are discovered before they can get out, there's a mad rush for escape, some stupid bunny child gets left behind, Robin goes back to save it, is trapped inside, and ends up leaping/falling from the burning tower into the moat. He then does the famous "breath through a reed" trick, avoiding the arrows and swimming to safety. Once on the far shore he hops out and taunts Prince John, who is unable to send any of his hundreds of soldiers to pursue the heavily-laden procession of fleeing sick, lame, villagers because... I dunno. He just gives up once Robin is out of the castle.
The film then fades to black, and the next scene has John, his snake retainer, and the sheriff of Nottingham chained up and working at hard labor, while the voice over explains how King Richard returned and set things to right. We only see the king (a lion, of course) as he's standing in the church doorway, when Robin and Marian come out as newlyweds. And then they ride off to happily ever after, with some bad jokes about "an outlaw for an in-law!" I couldn't believe how lame that ending was. How could they not have had a fight between brothers? A dramatic rescuing return by King Richard? Where was the moment when Prince John sucked up his evil animal cunning and fought for what he'd stolen?
This one reminded me of lots of modern day 3D animation, where the visuals are amazing and there was obviously a ton of work put into the look and concept of the film, but apparently it was written by the texture animators and texture artists on their lunch break, since the characters are flat and boring, and the story sucks. The characters in Robin Hood weren't that boring, but they were all very predictable and archetypal, (the Sir Hiss evil snake was kind of cool, actually) and the story was awful. Even for a children's movie.
This one did serve one useful purpose. It conclusively demonstrated to me how easily children are entertained. Because I actually remember liking this, and never having any inkling of a thought about how simple and stupid the plot, characters, setting, etc, were. Lots of other stuff, books and comics and video games I liked as a kid, I've sampled in adulthood and found my childish enjoyment of them understandable, if not repeatable. This film? Not so much.
It's been a long time since I wrote about movie reviewers (I'm not seeing very many films in theaters anymore, not paying that much attention to cinema, and therefore not doing advance-scouting via reviews.), but since Ebert's Journal post today took on that topic, I got curious enough to do some reading on the issue.
Ebert's post (on his blog, not his movie review site) is about Armond White, the film critic for the indie paper, the New York Press. The subject was White's (who is black) negative review of the new film District 9, which has received fairly unanimous critical acclaim. As Ebert relates, at the time White's review went up, District 9 had a 100% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, out of 49 reviews. As his was the first negative review posted, it attracted a lot of attention. Furthermore, White is alleged to have a long history of disliking almost every movie other critics (and fans) do like, and of frequently giving perversely high scores to fairly rotten films. His detractors, of which there are hundreds in the RT comments on his review, accuse him of being a contrarian simply for the sake of being a contrarian. And as the thumbnail to the side shows, they might have a point.
Ebert's journal post was a defense of White, and especially of his right to be outrageous and overly-literary in his reviews. I would certainly support the first right, and I can't really argue against the second either. But, as Voltaire is credited to have famously alluded, one can hold those views while still thinking that Armond White has horrible taste in films. (Which I'll say of anyone who hated Wall-E and Up.) Or that he's fundamentally dishonest in his reviews; that he chooses to dislike movies simply because he knows they'll be crowd pleasing and popular. (At least he says he dislikes them; perhaps he is just a provocateur?)
I can't judge the man's mind or heart. I can hardly judge his reviews, since I was not aware of him before today. However, since I just took the time to read a few, I do have some opinion. And I'm afraid to say that it more or less jibes with the vast majority. He writes scattered, faux-literary, allusion-filled, largely useless reviews that are comprised primarily of disparaging references to other popular films. That last aspect is what makes me suspicious of his motives, since he seems to go out of his way to revisit his disdain for other well-regarded films. A quote from his thumbs-up review of G.I. Joe, for instance.
G.I. Joe must be understood as an authentic measurement of our cultural values. Its appeal to the pop-commercial synapses also demonstrates livelier filmmaking than such utter banality as Iron Man and Star Trek and Harry Potter’s Half-Blooded Chintz.
RT critical mass for those four films: GI Joe, 40%. Iron Man, 93%. Star Trek, 95%. Harry Potter 6, 83%.
Ebert points out that his overall agree/disagree with the RT "Tomatometer" is 50%. I don't see any way to view all RT critics sorted by their tomatometer percentage, but I'd think that disagreeing with what everyone else thinks half the time is fairly high. Just to quickly survey a few other critics. Ebert, who liked District 9, is at 77%. More relevantly, out of the 74 (so far) reviews of District 9, there are 5 negative scores. One by Armond White. The other four are by critics with a 66%, 78%, 74%, and 70% agreement with the Tomatometer. So it's fair to say that White's 50% makes him a contrarian even amongst contrarians.
In fact, that tendency is probably what's spurred most of the revilement the RT readers seem to feel for White. That he reliably hates the most liked movies. Aside from the aforementioned Iron Man, Star Trek, and Harry Potter 6, here's a quick listing of other recent films (White has 290 reviews ranked on RT) that earned at least 85% on the tomatometer, that White wrote negatively of. Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, 500 Days of Summer, Tony Manero, Up, Hearts and Minds, Hunger, Gamorrah, The Wrestler, Hellboy 2, The Dark Knight, There Will Be Blood, Sweeney Todd, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Zodiac, Gone Baby Gone, Michael Clayton, Eastern Promises, 3:10 to Yuma, and Knocked Up. He did agree with the critical consensus on a fair number of other 85+ percent movies, but those were almost invariably obscure, artsy, indie type films.
This, more than anything else, makes me suspect his honesty. That he generally agrees with other critics on most great films that are well outside the mainstream, but somehow happens to dislike almost every well-reviewed mainstream film. Furthermore, he does like quite a few big budget crap-fests, and that last seems an intentional stick in the eye to the masses. "Not only do I hate the action films you people think are good, but I like the ones that suck. Take that!"
Update: Malaya pointed out to me that Ebert has updated his post, and that after viewing some more of White's reviews, deems him a "troll."
I saw a bit of news footage of Reagan's assassination (attempt) tonight, and while thinking how long ago it looked, I started to wonder. How old can something be, right now, and still seem current?
To me, in my mid-30s, the 1940s are ancient. When I think of that decade I see B&W archive footage of WW2 and Hitler and Churchill. It seems a century ago, and the muddy trenches cut into some European killing ground hardly look any different than ancient footage of those comical WWI tanks grinding across muddy fields.
The 50s are approaching the modern era, but it still very antique; Red Scares and McCarthy and tail fin cars and sock hops and other quaint dance fads that seem almost coterminous with 1920s flappers, in my mind's eye.
The 1960s start to seem modern; Kennedy isn't a forgotten figure and the civil rights marches don't seem that long ago. There's even some color news footage, and while it's all grainy, I've seen that effect recreated so many times in contemporary movies, especially ones showing Vietnam helicopter jungle scenes, that it seems fairly modern.
The 1970s seem fairly recent, but they're so affected and corny that it doesn't seem like reality. Hippies fading into polyester leisure suits and other really bad men's fashions.
The 1980s are almost modern era, and men's suits look more or less modern, but women were in early versions of female suits, with huge shoulder pads and big hair, and they seem like extras from Barbarella. Also, all the USSR panics seem so quaint now that it's hard to take them seriously, and Reagan always looked 150 years old, like a man out of time. And the music of the 80s is all ridiculous hair metal type crap that sounded dated even when it was new.
So for me, the 1990s feel like the beginning of the modern era. Grunge music isn't entirely obsolete and obscure now, Bill Clinton is still a current figure (The Big Dog barnstormed NK and brought home Gore's Asian girls just last week.), fashions and hair aren't totally dated, and classic 90s movies don't seem like "classics" yet.
Now obviously this is an extremely superficial and America-centric survey of recent decades, but it wasn't meant to be a thorough historical summary. It's entirely sutbjective; what popped into my head when I thought of a given decade, with a mixture of world events, politics, and pop culture.
My question then, is what do other people think of with recent decades, and how long ago do they seem? I think it's likely to vary by your age. I think of the 90s as the first modern decade, and not-coincidentally that's the first decade in which I was an aware adult. A person in their 50s or 60s would, I bet, think of the 60s and 70s as modern and contemporary, with earlier decades lost in the same sort of historical blur though which I view the 40s and earlier. I'd also bet that the current decade fades out as you age. I'm sure the 40s and 50s are much more "real" in the memories and thoughts of a 90 year old than anything that's occurred in the last 10 years.
None of that, however, addresses the "seems contemporary" issue. Won't the 70s always seem odd and old and distant, compared to the decades after them, with the silly fashions and inconsequential politics and world events (as compared to the 60s or 80s)? Then again, if you're 58 now you were 20 when the 70s began, and that was your first real decade, so it's probably still fixed strongly in your mind. All the things that seem ridiculously quaint and silly from my perspective are real and grounded to you.
As for the current decade, it's not over yet, so I lack perspective, I also lack any sense of the unifying theme. There's nothing that really screams "2000s!" to my memory, the way some of the things I mentioned about the other decades do. The 9/11 NYC attacks are memorable, but they seem really long ago and recent at the same time. More like something from the 90s. Maybe Dubya and the Iraq Attaq, but that already feels like it's well in the past, even though it's not over yet. It's faded so rapidly from public attention though, thanks to Dubya leaving office in disgrace, his legacy more or less obliterated by negligible approval ratings and the massive rejection of his party and ideas in the 2006 and 2008 elections.
How the 00s will be seen/remembered/viewed in 5 or 10 years? I have no idea. They look like they're on track to be fairly anonymous, at this point. Nothing of any real significance has occurred culturally; musically there's been nothing as unifying or memorable as grunge, rap, hair metal, big band, etc, were in earlier decades. The post-9/11 reaction and Iraq Attaq will probably seem like an enormously foolish and panicky overreaction, with the wisdom or the years. Obama's legacy seems like another potential, but think about it. He was elected in 08, and if he goes 2 terms and leaves office popular and powerful, the way Reagan and Clinton did, he'll be memorable... but he'll be thought of with the 2010s, not the 00s. Six years there, two here, and it's quite possible that the 2010s will seem to have begun in 08, with the shameful exit of Dubya and the electoral repudiation of his legacy.
It's possible that the 80s or maybe the 90s were the last real thematic decades we'll see. Everything in modern life, since about 1998, has become too scattered and fragmented for unifying themes to emerge? There are now too many cable channels, internet options, niche music and movies, etc, for any real cultural consensus or movement to form.
Movie Review: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
World War 2 was a bad time for Disney animation. They had labor troubles (the underpaid artists were on strike), the closing of European movie theaters had deprived Disney of needed revenue, much of the studio's talent had been drafted, and the US government was demanding that much of their continued production go towards morale boosting propaganda. As a result, production on full length features was halted for nearly a decade. Bambi was released in 1942, but after that Disney's theatrical releases during the rest of the 40s were all package films; glorified shorts cobbled together to theatrical length just to keep the studio running.
Ichabod/Toad wasn't one of those, but it's only a short step above. It was released in 1949, and must have been the project the studio worked on as they got back to full strength after the war. Cinderella came out in 1950 and Alice in Wonderland in 1951, for the sake of comparison.
Toad/Ichabod is only about an hour long, and it's two stories of equivalent length; an adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and a short but representative bit from The Wind in the Willows, with the English gentleman Mr. Toad losing his manor to the weasels, then fighting to reclaim it. Each segment is narrated by a famous actor (Basil Rathbone and Bing Crosby) and since they're only 30 minutes long, they get right to the point. There's very little characterization or plot development; these shorts leap right into things and run with it, with the narrator providing most of the exposition.
Neither of them is any good, but neither is horrible. Scores, averaged between the two:
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949 Script/Story: 4 Characters/Performances: 8 Concept: 6 Action: 7 Eye Candy: 7 Fun Factor: 6 Replayability: 4 Overall: 5
Each segment is fairly entertaining, but limited by the length and format. Since they're so short, they don't really have a plot; just a series of quick, very action-heavy events. The animation is pretty good, both of the characters and the backgrounds, and they're both visually pleasing and occasionally exciting to view. They're just insubstantial and forgettable, since neither really has a plot.
Ichabod Crane's segment is much the worse of the two, since it not only lacks a plot, but cheats the viewer of the payoff. The story is simple; Ichabod is a new school teacher in a rural area, who is trying to court the gorgeous daughter of Van Tassel, the richest local merchant. His competition for the girl is the town stud, a blustering bully who looks exactly like the bad guy in Beauty and the Beast. Same big chest, black hair, Bluto-shaped body, cocky BMoC mannerisms, etc. He's not just similar, he's identical. Take this guy out and put him into B&B and there'd be no change. It was eerie to watch, since I saw Beauty and the Beast before this one, even though it was released 42 years later.
At any rate, there are some minor antics with the tall, goofy, and freakishly skinny Ichabod getting the better of the hulking brute Brom Bones. Things come to a head with a big party at the Van Tassel estate, when Ichabod out dances and out maneuvers Brom, but when it comes time for story telling, Brom gives a virtuoso performances of the Legend of Sleepy Holly, starring the Headless Horseman.
Ichabod is very superstitious, and is scared shitless by the tale. When he eventually heads home (alone, despite there having been about 50 people at the party) his imagination starts to work, and he hears footsteps behind him, starts at every shadow, etc. Eventually the Headless Horseman bursts into sight, pursuing Ichabod madly and slashing at him with a sword. Much comic action ensues, with Ichabod finally escaping over the bridge that's said to be the boundary of the Horseman's range. The Horseman stops there, his horse rearing, and hurls his head, a flaming jack-o'-lantern, after Ichabod. It hits the "camera" and the screen fades to black.
Then the story jumps to an afterward, with Brom marrying Katerina, and Ichabod never seen again. Except in the epilogue, when he's shown with a plump little wife and about 15 kids. Which is fine, but who was the Headless Horsemen? I assumed it was Brom in disguise, and that he'd reveal himself once Ichabod was scared away. No such reveal is shown, so we're left to wonder if it was all in Ichabod's imagination, or if there really was a murderous ghostly figure haunting the woods, one who only attacked Ichabod, despite there being dozens of other party goers in the woods that night.
I don't mind ambivalent endings, but this one felt like a rip off, since the story built up to Brom playing some dastardly trick on Ichabod. And maybe he did, but it's not made clear one way or the other, nor do we know if anything actually happened, or if we got the ultimate "it was all just a dream" cop out.
The other story was slightly better, but only just. I probably read some amount of The Wind in the Willows as a child, but I had no real memory of it, and nothing in this short made me want to seek it out at this point. The introduction to the segment has much narration about how Mr. Toad is the greatest character in all English fiction, and his rich world of invention and animal antics is unsurpassed, etc. And then the cartoon starts and Toad is a hyperactive asshole noble, whose inherited wealth shields him from the consequences of his reckless actions. Eventually he signs away his manor for a stolen car, gets caught in the car, and is sent to jail when he can't prove that he "bought" it fair and square from a pack of thieving weasels.
Naturally, Toad breaks out, returns to his friends, and they help him sneak back into his manor, which has been overrun by the thieving weasels. Madcap antics ensue, as the numerically superior, murderous weasels try to kill Toad and company, who are there to steal back the deed he'd signed over, since that will prove his story, which the court rightly laughed at in the first place.
Spoiler time! They recover the deed. Yes I was shocked too. With it back and the weasels conveniently disappeared, everything appears to be happily ever after, until the epilogue when Toad now has an aeroplane and is bombing around the countryside in reckless madcap fashion, just as he formerly did with a wagon and then with the hot ride.
I'm not sure who this miniature double feature of a film was targeted at. It's not really a childrens movie, not in the way some of the other very immature Disney animations are. The adapted literary properties are fairly mature works, but the adaptations are so superficial and action-heavy that anyone who loved the original stories would be bored and disappointed by the cartoon. I suppose the films could serve as something of an introduction to the novels for children, but even that's iffy, since the films are enjoyable to young children who couldn't read the stories, and teens or mature kids who would like the books would be bored by the infantile, one-note films.
Oh well, Disney had to do something during the War, I guess.
I saw a link to this on Eschaton, and found the quoted bit interesting enough to repeat/print.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data reveal that the likelihood that a car wreck will take the life of someone before age 18 is about one in 10,000. Take away teen drivers, it’s about three in 100,000 for children 14 and younger.
Child abduction by a stranger, perhaps a parent’s worst fear?
“Of all the dangers to children, this is the one most alarming and the most frightening and probably the least likely to ever happen,” said Paula S. Fass, a University of California-Berkeley professor who wrote “Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America.”
The odds are about 1.5 in a million.
“We live in a nation where dramatic things capture our attention” Fass said of our fears about children. “They are sensationalized by the media and by our imaginations.
To restate that confusingly-worded math, 1/1,500,000 kids under 18 are abducted by strangers. 1/10,000 kids under 18 die in car crashes, or 150/1,500,000. So a minor is 150x more likely to die in a car crash than to be abducted by a stranger, and that's death. Some considerable % of the abducted kids are returned, safe and sound, hours or days after they were taken. Even if you remove the under-18 driving deaths by teens who were driving (and are presumably past the age at which parents do much worrying about them being kidnapped) and you get 3/100,000 kids 14 and under killed in car crashes. Or 45/1,500,000, i.e. you are 45x more likely to have your child die in your own car than have them abducted by a stranger.
I wonder how many kids have been killed (much less seriously injured) by parents who were driving, saw one of those Amber Alert signs on the freeway, lost concentration, and rolled their minivan?
This is fairly simple human psychology. We all like to feel that we're in control of things, and we feel that when driving, rightly or not. Someone unknown taking our kid = lack of control. Same reason far more people die falling in their own bathtub than are killed by terrorists, eaten by sharks, etc, but which do people worry about, and which does the media focus their exploitative, unblinking lens upon? I also find it illustrative the death stats for means of transportation. Multiples more people die in car crashes than on trains, buses, and planes combined, but when some train derails or a site seeing chopper goes down it's huge news, while the dozens of automobile fatalities in your town every week aren't even noticed, except when they come with exceptional circumstances.
All that said, even the basic premise of the news item is flawed, since the vast majority of child abductions are not by strangers. They're during custody fights, weird uncles, family friends, etc. As with murder victims, concerned parents have almost nothing to worry about in terms of stranger. It's almost always someone you know, quite often someone you're sharing a bed with tonight, who will kill you or take your child.
Pinocchio was the second feature length animated film by Disney, and was first released in 1940. Its story is one of the best known of all the fairy tales Disney adapted, and the story events, as well as the characters, have become archetypal, showing up in numerous other movies and books since then. This detracted a bit from my appreciation of the film, since so much seemed familiar to me.
It's probably unfair, since I think a lot of the elements and characters that were familiar were familiar since other films ripped them off from this one. Sadly, I couldn't empty my mind of all such knowledge, and I thus saw parallels and seemingly unoriginal events/characters all through the film. To the scores:
More a score on merit than on actuality. This one was the hardest to score fairly of all the early Disney classics I'm now reviewing, since I knew the story fairly well. Like all of the others, I think I'd see the cartoon when I was about 8, and never since. But Pinocchio is such a commonly recreated story, with elements of it showing up in so many other movies, that it didn't feel fresh or surprising to me.
That's partially the fault of the film, for being so linear and focused. I remembered the plot of Snow White and Peter Pan and various others, but was still surprised by small aspects of them. How wacky, or silly, or serious they were, or how some minor characters acted, or how their themes and tones were handled. Pinocchio had very little oddball surprising stuff, since it was probably the best "story" of all these early Disney cartoons. No pointless comic relief diversions or digressions, no extended slapstick sequences, no weird, distracting subplots, etc.
It was a very disciplined story, with all events serving the same purpose and building towards a coherent whole. This made it a solid tale with actual narrative weight and dramatic tension, but also made it non-surprising to my adult eyes. So I didn't find the viewing experience that exciting, since I knew where things were going at all times. I wish I'd forgotten more, actually.
One thing that surprised me early on was how accepting of his suddenly living puppet Geppetto was. He carved lots of marionettes, and then one night one of them is alive and walking around and talking? Geppetto is surprised for a moment, but soon enough he's dancing and singing, rather than looking for a hatchet, or calling for an exorcist. And then the next morning he's like, "Well, off to school you go, Pinocchio!" and he gives him some random book and an apple, and shoves him out the door.
Okay, so how the hell does Pinocchio know how to talk, much less read? He's like, six hours old. How does he know where school is? More importantly, how does Geppetto think other people will react to a sentient wooden puppet? He's not in NYC in 2014, he's in some peasant town in Europe in the pre-industrial age. They will burn him! I'm not a real strong advocate of home schooling, since it's mostly a way for religious nuts to keep their children from encountering the real world until they've been so brain washed that reality won't intrude. But in this instance, I think perhaps a few weeks or months of tutoring in the puppet shop might be a good idea.
Predictably enough, Pinocchio is immediately waylaid by some conmen and sold to the puppet show/circus. Jiminy fucking Cricket is supposed to be his conscience, and the film plays it as though Pinocchio is to blame for his various downfalls, but he quite literally doesn't know any better. He's not ignoring his better judgment or being naughty, since he doesn't have anything to ignore. He's unformed, morally, philosophically, and he's had zero experience in the world. Of course he'll believe anything anyone tells him in a convincing tone of voice. It's all Geppetto's fault for sending him out unprepared, and Jiminy Cricket's for being condescending and judgmental.
The other scene that stuck in my head was the transformation of the delinquent kid into a donkey. I remembered that the bad boys turned into animals, but the actual scene is shocking. Frightening. The transformation is werewolf like in its violence, and the horrified boy's reaction to his downfall. He's pissed and furious about it, and lashes out in just the sort of frantic panic any of us would feel if we found ourselves transforming into a beast of burden. Tables and chairs get kicked to kindling and walls are knocked over as the donkey boy rages in terror.
Later, there's a scene where the transformed boys are selected to be sent to the salt mines, and its' stark in its cruelty. The donkeys retain human memories and intellect, but their bodies are fully transformed, to the point that they can only bray in protestation at their degradation. Their masters care not, whipping them and sealing them into crates to be transported to their doomed fate of hard labor. Only the boys who are transformed, but who can still speak, are held back, until their vocal cords have lost all human function, presumably since the boys are being sold to donkey drivers who don't know of their human origin. The whole sequence has echoes of the horror of involuntary committal, ala One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I have to think that generations of young children have been scared shitless by that portion of the film. Which was, no doubt, the whole moralistic point in it.
Pinocchio is routinely held as one of the best animated films ever made. I can't dispute that, and I think it's the best of the Disney films I've seen thus far. Maybe not the most enjoyable to watch, but in terms of having a coherent plot and structure, strong, detailed characters, and not losing momentum or credibility (especially in the eyes of an adult viewer) by descending into long scenes of slapstick or absurdity, it's the best. I just wish I hadn't remembered so much of it, since that kept me from reviewing it as objectively as I have the other Disney cartoons I'm watching, and probably lowered its overall score.
I've been enjoying the Kings of Leon for a week or so, since the last Entertainment Weakly had a typically superficial and pointless one-page article about them. So yeah, useless article, but I was curious enough to YouTube them, and it wasn't awful; kind of punk rock country blues, at first listen. So I grabbed all of their albums, and while they're a mixed bag, I'm enjoying them. The first and third albums best, then the second, and the fourth and most recent is my least favorite. That one contains their one big hit (thus far) Sex on Fire. That's a good song, but it's by far the best one by far on that album, is about the only uptempo song on that album.
On the whole, their music is catchy and lively, but not very original. Unless a fusion of lots of disparate sounds is original, in your book. The penalty rock fans pay to passing decades is that all new music eventually sounds just like something you remember from 10 or 15 years ago. That's certainly the case with Kings of Leon, and I constantly hear pieces of songs that sound exactly like a tune I'd heard, liked, and forgotten during the first Clinton administration.
The slower songs sound like Paw mixed with a less gospel-ly Black Crowes, the shorter punkier ones have White Stripes type guitar riffs with Green Day pacing, and on the whole they're fairly interchangable with various other contemporary white boy indie/soul bands, like Secret Machines and/or Cold War Kids.
I enjoy the shorter, faster, louder Kings of Leon tracks, and have listened to a play list of 18 or 20 of them at the gym the last 3 nights. Tonight, for some reason, Head to Toe insinuated it into my consciousness, and I must have listened to it 15x in a row while lifting weights, clicking back to replay the 2:06 track each time it ended. The song isn't actually very good, but I just love that crackily voiced jangily chorus, and it has a good thumping rhythm for weight lifting. It worked for me, anyway.
Better yet, the first return when I searched it on YouTube was the song edited over the twist contest scene from Pulp Fiction, and it's even got the song lyrics subtitled in. There was no way I couldn't post that combo, so here you go.
I'm not sure I wanted to see the lyrics; I think I enjoyed it more when all I heard was the guy babbling random words in that Gilbert Godfried-esque rasping squawk:
Oh he suka suka fama hed dah'ah tos! Oh he suka suka fama hed dah'ah tos!
Honestly, is "Ah he's such a sucker from her head to her toes." really an improvement over my misheard version, for sheer sonic revelry? I think not. It's like listening to a Rammstein song; you're better off not knowing what they're talking about, or even being able to discern the German into individual words. Better you just regard the voice as another instrument, mixed into the rest of the music.
Famed "new atheist" author Sam Harris wrote a recent NY Times editorial about why esteemed scientist and fundamentalist Christian Francis Collins was a poor choice to head up the National Institutes of Health. Harris' oped has, of course, become quite controversial, since he essentially argued that a devoutly religious Christian was unfit for a high scientific office, since (by virtue of being a devout Christian) Collins chooses not to think scientifically about large elements of his life and the world around us, and has written extensively about major areas that science can not and should not be applied to.
Collins isn't a Young Earther, or even an ID proponent. His superstition only comes into play when he talks about the ultimate beginning and end of the universe, and in elevating humanity above biology. And since Harris is a neuroscientist as well as an atheist, he sees those traits of Collins' as disqualifying drawbacks, in regards to being the head of the multi-billion dollar NIH.
I bring this up since Harris has posted a much-expanded version of his initial NY Times editorial, and it's an excellent read. Here are a few quotes, selected more because I enjoyed reading them than because they fit together to produce a particular argument.
After being destabilized by his patient’s faith, Collins attempted to fill the God-shaped hole in his life by studying the world’s major religions. He admits, however, that he did not get very far with this research before seeking the tender mercies of “a Methodist minister who lived down the street.” In fact, Collins’ ignorance of world religion is prodigious. For instance, he regularly repeats the Christian talking point about Jesus being the only person in human history who ever claimed to be God (as though this would render the opinions of an uneducated carpenter of the 1st century especially credible). Collins seems oblivious to the fact that saints, yogis, charlatans, and schizophrenics by the thousands claim to be God at this very moment, and it has always been thus.
...
There is an epidemic of scientific ignorance in the United States. This isn’t surprising, as very few scientific truths are self-evident, and many are deeply counterintuitive. It is by no means obvious that empty space has structure or that we share a common ancestor with both the housefly and the banana. It can be difficult to think like a scientist (even, we have begun to see, if one is a scientist). But it would seem that few things make thinking like a scientist more difficult than religion.
...
Collins’ faith is predicated on the claim that miracle stories of the sort that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba -- and do not even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel -- somehow become especially credible when set in the pre-scientific religious context of the 1st century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as evidenced by discrepant and fragmentary copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts. It is on this basis that the future head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions:
1. Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.
2. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.
3. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos.
4. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.
5. In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency.
How many scientific laws would be violated by such a scheme? One is tempted to say “all of them.”
...
He claims that the human mind cannot be the product of the human brain or the human brain the product of unguided evolution: rather, at some glorious moment in the development of our species God inserted crucial components—including an immortal soul, free will, the moral law, spiritual hunger, genuine altruism, etc. This claim makes a mockery of whole fields of study—neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, among others—and, if taken seriously, would obliterate our growing understanding of the human mind. If we must look to religion to explain our moral sense, what should we make of the deficits of moral reasoning associated with conditions like autism, frontal lobe syndrome, and psychopathy? Are these disorders best addressed by theology?
...
The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying problem; the problem is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas occluded by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc.
Needless to say, I recommend that you read the whole thing.
I'm going to see Harry Potter 6 with a new female acquaintance next weekend, and amidst other email-based conversational topics, we've been talking about movie adaptations of popular novels. Especially fantasy novels. We're both fans of the LotR efforts, and Harry Potter as well, to a lesser extent. The way we're approaching them is very different though.
I saw the first 2 HP movies (my mom dragged me) before I read any of the books. I then started reading the series with some skepticism, before they grew on me as the books got better/more mature around #3 or #4. I've enjoyed the movies since then, but primarily because I'd read the books first, and knew what was going on. Plus it's fun for me to compare the films to the novels. I like to ponder what they cut, what they expanded, how they translated character thoughts and narration to the visual medium, etc.
Quite the opposite is true of my date. She's purposely put off reading the books until after she sees the movies. She prefers to enjoy the films first, her thoughts untainted by advance knowledge, and then after seeing each one she goes and reads the book. She said she had all of the DVDs as well, so apparently she enjoys the films again after reading the books, too.
Along with that conversation, we traded some thoughts about how movie adapatations work, and as you might suspect, I had a lot to say about that. Too much to presume upon her via email, so I greatly condensed what I said to her, and saved the main block I wrote to post here, where 1) you've come to read my bullshit, 2) you're bored at work anyway, and 3) I'm not trying to impress you, so I can be windy to a fault.
So... The issues and perils of adapting a 400 page book to a 120 page screen play are fairly well known, but differ between projects. I think the HP movies have been fairly good films, and fairly good representations of the books, but so much of what makes the books work is the sense of place and time and routine and repetition, and the films just don't have time to delve into that.
The structure of the HP books, one set each school year, always starting off with Harry at home with his wretched relatives, racing to school just ahead of some dire misadventure, and then diving into the comforting routine and rhythm of the school year. But before he can get totally settled in each year, some larger plot starts to occur; a new teacher or two, some peril at the school, and always the overarching quest/menace of Voldemort growing in importance throughout the series.
The movies tap into that neatly as well, and while I don't think they've done anything brilliant, they've been fairly entertaining. The structure is useful in the books, and it helps the films as well, by saving on exposition. The movies don't need to reintroduce the setting or principles each time, since the viewer can be counted on to known about Hoggwarts, Dumbledore, Hagrid, quidditch, etc. And the HP world is gorgeously visual, with all the costumes, the great architectural sets of Hogwarts, magical spells, and mythological creatures galore.
I haven't thought any of the HP movies were brilliant, but they've all been pretty entertaining, and I've enjoyed them more with additional viewings. I've never sat down and watched any of them start to finish, other than in my initial theater viewing, but the hour here and half hour there I've seen on TV has kept me entertained. I think they're better the more you know of the stories. Hoping for surprises or big shocks is pointless, and watching them before you've read the books is confusing. They're more like comfort food; better when you know what's coming, and just want something enjoyable but not especially challenging or novel.
Another recent, famed movie adaptation is Lord of the Rings. I won't go into huge detail on that one, but I'd read the books a few times, and I thought the movies improved on the books in almost every way. Besides the great casting and acting and scenery and special effects, the writing was inspired; preserving all the mood and tone and epic scope of the books, while greatly improving Tolkien's fairly lacking characterization, dropping unnecessary material, tightening up the plot, increasing the female roles, etc.
The other ongoing fantasy (sort of) series is Twilight, which I'm somewhat curious about. I might watch the movies at some point (#2 is this fall, #3 is next summer. They must really be worried about cashing in before the current craze fades.) just to see how they handled the adaptation. I went off in fairly critical terms about their visual cheapness and poor casting, as evidenced by trailers for the first two films. But giving the idea of Twilight films some more thought, it's quite likely they'll be better than the books.
Admittedly, I didn't think much of the books, but they provided enough raw material to make some decent films. The novels left enormous room for improvement, since they were rambling, repetitious, and seemed virtually unedited.
That said, so much of what makes the books work (at least for their core audience) is Bella's endless worrying, dithering, whining, moping, fretting, heart-sicking, etc, etc. Much of the books are virtually diaries in their presentation of her every activity and angsty thought, and while that's "bad" on any professional quality of writing measure, it's what (I think) all the girls and (immature?) women who are embracing it most enjoy. They want to delve into some (fictional) woman's every thought and worry and feeling of love or betrayal, and her mooning exultations over her uber-hot vampire boyfriend/true love/soul mate/destiny, etc. That's why learned critiques of the literary failings, while correct, are largely beside the point.
Less defensible is the generally wretched plotting, the overly wordy, blabbering prose, the poor characterization (everyone talks the same and the chars lack distinctive behaviors or behaviors), and the way big showdown scenes are constantly and frustratingly sidestepped at the last minute.
So, how the films will work (or not) is a matter of debate. Unlike the HP movies, honing films from the source material isn't a matter of cutting down the plot events to squeeze all the material into a less-than three hour block. There's very little plot in the Twilight books, with most of the books' length made up of Bella's moment-to-moment thoughts and worries. That sort of internal psychological struggle is difficult to convey cinematically, and I'm not at all sure the Twilight movies should even try to convey it, since it's not very good in the books (despite the fact that it's what most of the fans are so enamored of).
The essential points, which are somewhat contradictory.
The Twilight novels are easy to adapt to film, since the books are very light on content and all key plot events can easily be fit into a 2 hour film.
Unfortunately, the plots of the Twilight novels aren't actually very good, and even where the sequence of events is potentially thrilling, the way exciting events are presented in the books is very poorly done. Meyer's rudimentary writing skills are at their weakest when trying to describe physical events and actions.
However, the Twilight novels are not "about" their plots. They're about the emotions of Bella Swan, and how she reacts to events. That sort of tight focus on one character, especially on her thoughts and emotions is very difficult to translate to screen, and the way the effect is achieved in the books is by endless repetition. Very skilled screenwriting would be required to transfer that into films that were not themselves vastly overlong and boring.
I think they'd be better off almost going from scratch. Retain the characters and the plot skeleton, and make changes/improvements/modifications very liberally. And that seems to be what the first film did, judging from what I read in reviews and saw in the trailer. Were the fans okay with that? All the buzz I heard was about how hot the 14 y/o girls thought the actor hired to play Edward was, and honestly... that's a perfect macrocosm of the whole Twilight phenomena. Adolescent urges and hysteria trumping any tangible quality, intelligence, plot, etc.
I find, sometimes, when I'm reading a book with a really detailed, interesting, and crazy character study that I start taking on some of the symptoms of the character. Not always, and it depends on my own state of mind and psychological health, but it's definitely happened more than once. I don't get that sort of impact from a film; movies are too short and never as involving as literature, and music is just a garnish to my mood, never a causal agent in of itself.
It's not always bad; I find myself highly inspired and enthusiastic about life/work/everything when I read a book where there's a great triumph and success and uplifting conclusion. One odd example of that comes in Clive Barker's Sacrament. It's not a happy book, and not an especially good one (brilliant, and brilliantly-written, but the story/plot is lacking), but the ending has a character in a long coma, nearly dead, until he comes out of it with a sort of refreshed, "now I shall conquer the world" attitude. I've read the book several times over the last 15 or 20 years, and it always gives me a boost.
On the other hand, I read the first trilogy of the Thomas Covenant series earlier this year, and damn near took my own life. I have never waded through such a long, detailed, and deep portrayal of a depressed, beyond-suicidal narrator/protagonist. The first novel is the best/worst in its portrayal of the indescribably broken, beaten, and wounded Thomas Covenant.
He's so down and crushed, emotionally, physically, mentally, and the author dives so deeply into his psyche that I would not be at all surprised to learn that people have killed themselves while reading the novel. Not that it's going to drive a healthy person to that, but for someone who was already contemplating and feeling beaten by life, it could be the final straw. On the other hand, someone reading it who had their own problems could find a role model in Covenant, who keeps on going no matter how horrible things get. Furthermore, no one's life can be that bad, when compared to Covenant's, so maybe it would act as shock therapy for someone who was suicidal?
I started reading the Covenant series when I was feeling pretty shitty already, and after 2 straight days in the gym, burning through my cardio while Thomas Covenant slogged through his hellish version of Middle Earth, I actually had to take a couple of hours at home to read the rest of the book and clear my head. The novel has anything but a happy ending, but at least it provides some closure. It wasn't that I was all that caught up in the story; I didn't really care how it turned out. I was just getting pulled into a very dark place, the sort of mental prison occupied by Covenant himself, and didn't want the experience to stretch on indefinitely.
More recently, I found myself feeling somewhat depressed and gloomy while reading the narration of the eternally suffering Byron in Lord of the Dead. Following that up with the first person insanity (literally; the narrator is a paranoid schizophrenic experiencing a mental break) of Raveling wasn't a great idea either. Happily (literally), events in my personal life, which was quite depressing a week ago, have improved since then, and thus my mood has brightened for reasons unrelated to the book I'm currently reading at the gym.
Musical selections tend to go along with mood, as well. The difference, for me at least, is that music doesn't really affect my mood, though it can enhance it. So for a few days when I was (kind of enjoying) feeling really depressed I was reading a book narrated by a depressive lunatic, my only face-to-face human interactions were scowling at the front desk guy at the gym, and while driving there and back I was listening to nothing but this song. (Literally. It's about a 7 minute drive to the gym, and that song's 6+ minutes.)
Pity I couldn't channel that mood into pussy, profit, or something more productive than an uninspired blog post a fortnight after the fact.
I've long harbored misgivings about a few of the 50 somethings I see at my gym. The ones there late at night, endlessly walking on the treadmills while reading the paper are sort of odd, but on the rare occasions that I'm in the gym in the daytime, I always see a few guys who are just a little too intense. Not on their workouts, but on staring at other people, especially the rare hottie in tights and a jog bra.
One would like to think that they're creepy but harmless, but this being America, where high powered handguns are readily available to all, it's inevitable that someone eventually uses them for the purpose for which they were manufactured.
BRIDGEVILLE, Pa. – George Sodini seethed with anger and frustration toward women. He couldn't understand why they ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He hadn't had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn't slept with a woman in 19 years.
"Women just don't like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive," the 48-year-old computer programmer lamented in a chilling diary he posted on the Internet.
For months, he also wrote vaguely about using guns to carry out his "exit plan" at his health club, where lots of young women worked out.
On Tuesday, Sodini put his plan into action.
He went to the sprawling L.A. Fitness Club in this Pittsburgh suburb, turned out the lights on a dance-aerobics class filled with women, and opened fire with three guns, letting loose with a fusillade of at least 36 bullets.
The article later includes this hilariously inappropriate line:
Sodini was a member of the health club and had been there two times Tuesday before he came back at night, police said. He did not have a relationship with any of his victims, according to police.
Um yeah... that was kind of the whole point, guys.
As always, it's interesting to note that there's not a word about this guy being a "terrorist," simply because he fits the usual deranged mass murderer profile; he's a very Christian, white male. Imagine if he'd been an immigrant from say, Saudi Arabia, with the same M.O., biography, and diary? Bill O'really and Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin and all the other right wing talkers would spend a week shrieking about jihad, immigration controls, etc. But since this particular murderer grew up in the US, and didn't have a religious structure into which he could neatly fit his misogyny and nihilism, it's just an unfortunate incident with no larger societal ramifications. Go about your business, citizens. Nothing to see, here.
The classic Disney cartoon. I think I must have seen it as a child at some point, but if so it didn't impress me enough to be memorable. The ending, with the stark black/yellow/green color scheme dragon, and the thicket of thorns and the weirdly-expressive white horse were kind of familiar, but maybe just because I'd seen photos (screenshots?) of them in more recent years. Nothing else in it really stood out in my memories, but I had a strong and instant affinity for the evil witch, Maleficent.
She's just awesome; great design, powerful character, awesome presence; I had no trouble at all rooting for her to win, and she's the most enjoyable and memorable of any character in any of the Disney films I've yet seen, in my rewatching session.
It's a forgiving score, but I'm rating it as I enjoyed it, now, as an adult. I had a peripheral awareness of the cartoon before I watched it, and I knew the origin story, but I came into this viewing with a virginal appreciation, and rated it by how it worked for me now. It could be nitpicked to death. The choral soundtrack is too prominent and somewhat obnoxious, like a too-loud men's choir bellowing in your ear from just off stage, distracting you from the events of the play. There are some good songs sung by the characters though, and most of the score is excellent and stirring.
The characters and plot are unoriginal and very predictable, but what do you expect? It's a fairy tale! They're not stereotypes, they're archetypes. Brave prince. Beautiful princess. Wicked witch. Kindly fairy godmother(s). Noble steed. Evil dragon. Etc. Dinging those elements in a review would be ridiculous. If it was a new movie released today, sure, I'd hit it for being so old fashioned and unoriginal. Hide bound. But it was released in 1959, and it plays things fairly straight, while throwing in some amusing touches. The good fairies are amusing and bumbling, the hero's horse is personable, the fat king is amusing, Maleficent's minions are scary/idiot/funny, etc.
I wish they'd perked up the prince a bit, though. The princess is totally passive and beautiful and rescue-able; not exactly a good role model for girls, but she is desirable, and that's what's required of her. The prince goes through the motions of being in love and fighting to rescue his maiden, but he's an automaton in the process. He lacks even a trace of personality or originality. Total Ken doll. And that hurts things, since we're supposed to be rooting for him to triumph.
So no, while there was some character variation, it wasn't cutting edge in 1959, and it's not now. That said, it wasn't trying to be anything more than a spirited telling of a classic fairy tale, and from our modern perspective it's impossible not to be somewhat jaded. After all, we've had sixty years of fairy tale deconstruction since then. Joseph Campbell. Shrek. Rocky and Bullwinkle's fractured fairy tales. Etc. If you watch this one today expecting wise-cracking sidekicks and post modern sensibilities, it'll suck. You have to cast back your mind and appreciate it with innocent eyes. I did so, with the aid of a large glass of Vignoles, and it was enjoyable.
While I had no clear memories of the cartoon, I had read the fable upon which it was based semi-recently. The plot of the Disney movie is of course um... Disney-fied. But it retains the basic structure of the original, and creates perhaps the most impressive and memorable of all Disney villains.
In the original story the newborn princess is to be blessed by 12 good witches. Eleven have delivered blessings unto her (Good thing, after all, who needs blessings more than the unopposed hereditary monarch of the land?), when one evil witch shows up, angry that she was not invited to the christening. She curses the child to die after pricking her finger on a spinning wheel, and vanishes. The 12th good witch can't undo the powerful curse, but she modifies it so that the girl will just fall into a sleep, until a prince awakens her with a kiss. (True love is not mentioned in the story, though it is in the movie. In the story all that matters is his birthright/pedigree.)
The king burns every spinning wheel in the land (How do they make thread after that? Dunno.), but on the girl's sixteenth birthday she wanders up to some forgotten attic and finds an old spinning wheel, and of course no one has told her of this prophecy so she fucks around with it, stabs herself, and out she goes. The entire castle falls into sleep with her, and IIRC, that lasts for a century, while an impenetrable barrier of thorns grows up around the outside. Who knew the gardeners were the most important of the king's servants?
Eventually some prince happens along and cuts through the thicket and kisses her (Kind of creepy, when you think about it. You find some suspended animation girl in an ancient haunted castle full of unrotting corpses, and you kiss her? Necrophilia?) and she wakes up, slips him some tongue, the castle wakes around her, and everyone is happily ever after.
The movie version is modified, I think fairly successfully. It's made more innocent and goofy, of course. Instead of 12 witches there are 3 fairies, and after 2 of them give baby girl Aurora blessings of beauty and song. (As if a princess needs those. How about charisma to inspire and intelligence to rule?) The evil witch, Malificent, shows up after blessing #2, and she makes the movie. Maleficent is just awesome. I'd seen photos of her online over the years, but the full impact of her has to be seen in motion.
She's regal and serene, but with a crazy, scary edge to her face and expressions. Her severe black gown with the purple trim rules, and the devil horns on her head wrap are perfect. When she walks there's no independent motion. No arm swinging or visible legs; just her whole form floating along, ghost-like. And very slowly, in no hurry, utterly sure of her power and might. I clicked back to watch her scenes several times, since she's just flawlessly executed.
Check out her first appearance at 7:45 of this video (you can watch the whole movie by continuing through the related files on You Tube).
Maleficent's curse is much the same, as is the counter spell, but then the story changes a lot, as the 3 fairies take the princess to live in secret with them, in an old cottage in the woods. Details get skimmed on a great deal, since next thing we know it's 16 years later, on the princess' birthday. She thinks the fairies are her aunts, and to avoid detection they've never used magic for the whole 15 years or told the girl anything about her origin or destiny. How they're surviving is a mystery; the aunts/fairies can't cook or sew, and all Aurora does is wander through the forest picking berries and singing to cuddly, anthropomorphized animals. She's never met anyone or been to town, the fairies don't keep a garden or pigs or even a flock of sheep, and they don't trade with anyone, or produce any goods. So what are they eating? Where do they get clothing? Who keeps up their cottage?
The day of her 16th birthday is the day of the movie, and stupidity reigns. The curse is that she'll die from the spindle before sunset on her 16th birthday, so in theory if she makes it past that point the curse will be broken and she'll be safe. (Why the seemingly all powerful Maleficent can't just fly over and curse her again when she's say, 17, is not to be thought about.) So the fairies keep her under lock and key all day on her birthday, right? No, of course not. They send her out into the forest to pick more fucking berries, so they can ineptly attempt to sew her a ball gown and bake her a birthday cake while she's gone. But their cooking and sewing are as expert as their strategy, so they give into temptation and start casting spells to make the gown and clean the house. Their spells are noticed by Maleficent's raven, it alerts the evil fairy, and when the good fairies smuggle Aurora into the castle that night, Maleficent's waiting for them. She leads the girl up to an attic where she poofs in a spindle and stabs her finger. Luckily, just that afternoon Aurora had met and fallen in love with a handsome young man, who just happens to be her betrothed prince. Which is handy, since the curse can only be broken by her true love.
Now not to contradict myself and start nit picking, but what kind of fucking strategy was that? The girl is in mortal danger until sunset on her 16th birthday. So the king and the fairies have a huge royal gala planned for that evening, and they're trying to sneak the girl into the castle before sunset. All the spying by the raven was irrelevant; everyone in the kingdom knew the princess was coming to a ball that evening, to be married to the prince. All Maleficent had to do was stake out the castle, find the girl, and spindle her. Which she does, when the fairies stupidly leave the girl alone for like, five minutes.
A nicer touch is after nailing the girl, Maleficent books ass to the cottage, and is in time to catch the prince coming to meet his new true love. Maleficent spirits him off to her Forbidden Mountain and locks him up, then taunts him with a gloriously cruel story. She's going to keep him until he's old and feeble, then let him go so he can awaken his true love. But she's ageless in her sleep, so he'll be too old to do more than awaken her before he dies, while she'll awake, think it's a moment later, and see her true love as an ancient man. Now that is a nice scheme. I almost applauded.
The good fairies sneak in and bust him out though, and there's a wild escape. Then the stuff I remembered, either from a previous viewing or just seeing photos. Maleficent surrounds the castle by impenetrable thorns, which are cinematically gorgeous; all black and spiky against the green backgrounds. The expressionless prince chops through them though, so Maleficent plays her trump card, transforming into a massive black dragon, that is about the coolest dragon ever seen on film. Not that detailed, but stylized and evil, and such a great color palette; all black with a purple snake's belly pattern of scales, wreathed by green flames, with glowing yellow eyes and mouth. It's just gorgeous, as is every appearance of Maleficent in the film. Sadly, the dragon fails, pausing to laugh and taunt in imminent triumph, giving the fairies time to enchant the prince's sword, which he throws and stabs the dragon in the heart. The prince then proceeds to deliver his necromantic kiss, and happily ever after ensues.
The story is simplicity itself, but everything in it is so powerful and archetypal that it's excellent. I didn't give it higher scores since it's just so simple. It's only 75 minutes long, and that's with a lot of padding; extraneous singing, additional fairy godmother hijinks, comically-feuding drunken kings, etc. A bit more story, and a bit of personality to the prince, and it would have been almost perfect. And earned almost perfect scores.
