Threat to Liberty Alert Levels

In the chilling spirit of Hallowe'en, here's my own variation on the "Alert Advisory Level" system. Please monitor the situation to determine just how frightened you should be about threats to your liberties and personal well-being.

The Year I Stopped Trick-Or-Treating

I was thinking today (of all days) about how my observance of Hallowe'en has changed over the years. It's gone through several phases, especially as I grew older, to the point where I am now: of the middle-aged man who spends his evening on the 31st of October passing out candy and comicbooks to kids in costumes at his front door. My thoughts were drawn most strongly to a "key" Hallowe'en, 26 years ago. That was the day my childhood ended.

(It would be more profound if I'd written about this last year, or if I faked it and said "25 years ago", but I've taken a solemn vow of blogging truthfulness, so I must say "26".)

That summer my family had moved to a new neighborhood and that September I'd started middle school. So while I had friends (I hasten to emphasise) I didn't have any who lived within walking distance. My older sister was in high school and doing teenagery things for Hallowe'en, and my younger sister was going trick-or-treating with some girls she knew from school or something. I'm not sure exactly. But I remember that as Hallowe'en approached, it dawned on me that I had no plans. I had a costume to wear to school that day, but no plans for All Hallows Eve itself.

I was 12 years old, which was a somewhat awkward age. It wasn't that I was "too old". If a friend had invited me to go trick-or-treating with him in his neighborhood I could've done that without anyone thinking it inappropriate (least of all me). But it occurred to me that I had reached the age of "old enough not to". I could do something I had never (in my memory) done. I could... stay home.

I'm not sure exactly how it happened... if I asked to, or if my parents sensed my situation and suggested it. My vague recollection is that I just did it: when the doorbell rang first rang after dinner, I went to the front door and gave a piece of candy to that trick-or-treater (no doubt a pre-schooler making the rounds by daylight with a parent or two). And I just kept doing it, the rest of the evening. It wasn't quite as fun as being on the other side of the door, but I approached it with a good attitude. It was official: I wasn't a trick-or-treater, and I knew that I never would be again. I certainly wasn't an adult yet. I was an adolescent, trying to figure out where I fit in.

It wasn't long before I started to find other things to do on Hallowe'en, such as going to a scary movie or a school dance or whatever. I went on to have some rather fun times on Hallowe'en as a teenager (such as when I wore a skin-tight Superman costume to a "theatre people" party). And there were many years when I did nothing special that night. It's only in the past several years that I've been back to passing out stuff at the front door. But to a typical kid, Hallowe'en Equals Trick-Or-Treating. On 31 October 1977, I ceased to be one of those kids, and became... someone else.

24get It...

my rating:

I was intrigued by the storytelling gimmick of 24 the first season, and watched the first 2 or 3 episodes, but the story didn't appeal to me enough to stick it out for the remaining 20-something. But I've heard enough people rave about the past two seasons, and how much they were looking forward to the third - to say nothing of the sheer improbable fact that it has survived this long at all - that I figured I'd give this year's real-time drama a look.

It didn't take me 2 or 3 episodes this time.

The show's main "hook" of real-time storytelling was barely noticeable. Maybe people complained about too much split-screen work in previous years and they've toned it down, but it really just watched like any other drama... just with more cell phones used than in shows where the characters are allowed to drive or walk places (without the camera running) to hold conversations in person. The cell chatter's probably more realistic, but that doesn't make it better drama.

My main problem is that there's just so much tension and angst piled all over the place. And most of it's whiny, pathetic personal shit: "You only got this job because of your Daddy (and the renewal clause in your contract)!" "I have emotional problems that everyone seems to see, but I don't want to talk about it!" "Someone tried to assassinate him the last time he was in town!" "She keeps accessing my data without asking first!" And all of this happening on the same damn day! It was like every character was based on Lloyd Bridges in Airplane! "Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop shooting heroin!" "Looks like I picked the wrong day to tell the boss I'm porking his daughter!" "Looks like I picked the wrong day to start trafficking in coke!" "Looks like I picked the wrong day to interrogate a this bad guy from last season!"

The fact that they seemed to be picking up a bunch of dangling plotlines from last season certainly didn't help. At least the first season they introduced nearly all the players shortly after they appeared on screen, but this time there was obviously a lot that happened last year that nobody was bothering to explain. Hell, characters even kept saying things like, "Oh, you know what I'm talking about..." But no, I didn't. And network execs wonder why it's so rare for a TV show to pick up new viewers. It's excusable for a series like 24 to be very continity-dependent from episode to episode (for which the "previously..." bits each week will help), but someone returning after a year or more away... or even just a summer in which his memory of previous plots and characters got kinda hazy... shouldn't be left wondering if "1:00-2:00pm" is the 1st episode of the season or the 2nd... or maybe even the 14th.

At the end of this first hour, I was still a bit clost about what exactly this year's crisis is. The doctor talking about a 24-hour period from infection through death in this new disease (or should I know about it from last season? everyone else seems to) is a clue, but the dangler featuring the uncoopreative terrorist/drug-dealer informant, the side plot about the president and his loving doctor, and Kiefer Sutherland's array of personal demons, add more confusion than depth to the story. It's not horrible. But it's too melodramatic to be real, and plotted too much like reality to be dramatic.

Lenin Lives!

In the time-honored blogging tradition of referring to a longer blog entry which refers to an even longer blog entry, as an exercise in lazy reductionism, here's a link to an entry on John Jakala's Grotesque Anatomy, in which a married het male atheist answers the exhaustive arguments of Eve, an unmarried bi female Catholic, against same-sex marriage. There's some interesting stuff there; go read it.

One of the most interesting (to me) points that John makes is that Eve's (and most opponents of lettting gay people marry) argument is focused entirely on the institution of marriage, and casually dismisses the individual aspect of the question. Conservatives always used to preach against the evils of (for example) Communism because it put the presumed interests of the larger society ahead of the right to freedom of the individual. Planned economies, the state deciding what you're job's going to be based on what jobs it needs filled, etc. were horrible things and would lead to either the enslavement of humanity, or the eventual downfall of that system (depending on the message of the day).

But here they are (many of the same pundits, and their ideological heirs) insisting that the state should limit who your legal spouse is going to be based on what would be better for the community as a whole. It's just a bunch of Leninist social planning.

Which brings me back to my first online comment on the topic, which I'll reproduce here rather than make you click to it: "Against gay marriage? Then don't have one."

I was Deflowered by Bugsy Malone

As I was deleting this afternoon's batch of spam enticing me to check out (among other things) the latest in digitized child pornography, I was suddenly reminded of how it all started. The whole idea of kiddie porn, that is. I mean, for me: the first time I ever had the notion that such a thing could exist. The moment I lost my innocence.

Jodie Foster and Scott Baio did it.

For those too young to remember (or too old to pay attention to it), back in 1976 the movie Bugsy Malone came out, starring the still-pretty Scott Baio and the still-tomboyish Jodie Foster (they were about 13 or 14 during filming). I was only a year or two younger. The gimmick of the movie was that it was a 1930's gangster movie, but with all the parts played by kids, and the violence emasculated by turning the machine guns into whipped-cream-splattering "splurge guns". And a musical, to boot. Good clean, G-rated fun.

Except for the sex.

OK, there were no actual sex scenes. But the film was loaded with references to classic gangster flicks, and even at the tender age of 11, I recognised that Jodie Foster's character Tallulah was a... I mean, maybe not really, but... I'd heard of Tallulah Bankhead, and... one of the songs explained it clearly enough, singing her praises as a... hostess: "No one south of Heaven's gonna treat ya finer. Tallulah had her trainin' in North Caroliner." I didn't need grass on my infield to see where that pitch was headed. Pop fly.

Now, there was nothing especially prurient about these bits. The movie got an easy "G" rating. I understood that she was just a kid playing "grown-up". Just like the other boys and girls in the movie were pretending to be adults. That was fun to watch, and I started to think how fun it would be to see more movies done this way. Not just gangster musicals, but other kinds of films. Let kids do the acting, replace the violence with harmless stuff like splurge guns, and you could do all sorts of movies that kids don't get to see otherwise!

I'd never seen a film rated beyond PG at the time, but I was aware enough of the world to know that there were movies in which people did naughty things, and even some in which adults "did it". In an instant, my mind made the connection: between Bugsy Malone and Debbie Does Dallas. Kids playing adults having sex. My mind exploded: Boom! Kids... my age. Ba-Boom!! Like Scott Baio. Va-va-voom!!!

Through the combination of innocent naivete and the childish belief that one's ideas are far more clever and original than they really are, I thought I had conceived of something completely new. I know now that it was a long way from the truth. Heck, Shakespeare staged a romance between two kids about Scott's and Jodie's age nearly 400 years earlier, and if they hadn't killed themselves they would've ended the play with more than a kiss and some poetry. And despite the greater difficulty of illicit moviemaking in those pre-Betacam days, I'm sure that had been done already. In Polaroids if nothing else.

But I can't help wondering if Scott "Bugsy" Baio and Jodie "Tallulah" Foster might have planted the same concept into the heads of other young moviegoers attending matinées across America, while Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford vied for the presidency and the country celebrated its Bicentennial. And if that might explain some of the flood of sites promising to really show me what I first imagined a quarter century ago.

I'm not blaming or accusing Alan Parker, who wrote and directed Bugsy, and especially not Scott and Jodie and their fellow cast members. But I do have to wonder: was I the only kid whose mind was introduced to the concept of kiddie porn by this film?

To Boldly Go... Atmospheric

I grew up watching Jim Kirk and crew on TV, speculating about the Trek universe was my favorite intellectual hobby, the Star Trek Classic movies were touchstones of my adolescence, and at the time I really wanted to make my own low-budget sci-film with whatever FX I could manage. So I couldn't help getting a big geeky grin from the attached image and the accompanying analysis on this site. It's like a scene from a missing adventure, and a real thriller from the looks of the full-size image!

A group of advanced Australian physics students put a model of the Enterprise (NCC-1701A, the movie version) through a wind-tunnel simulation of atmospheric re-entry, and confirmed that it's surprisingly aerodynamic. So that scene in the episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", in which the Enterprise is chased by a late-20th-century fighter jet, was actually possible! Their attempt to justify equating Mach 5 with Warp 5, and the speculative implications of accelerating to Warp 10 is a bit of a stretch, but if subspace bow-shock waves are really an issue, it would explain why Scotty always got so frantic whenever they went over Warp 8. And that snapshot of the result from a collission... {shudder}

"Shields up! Ahead, Warp factor 3, Mister Sulu!"

Swanson: Because It's Good to Be Obese

I don't watch lots of TV, and usually zip through the adverts, so forgive me if I'm a bit late in weighing in on this subject. I recently noticed an advertisement that amazes me in just how regressive the mentality underlying it is. It's for Swanson "Hungry Man" dinners, and the main message is that you're not fat enough.

I'm not talking about the basic concept of the product. The idea behind this line of frozen dinners is that competing products don't give you enough to eat. Medically speaking that's not really true (your typical frozen dinner gives you a hefty chunk - if not more - of the calories you actually need), but the marketing concept itself is... justifiable.

Where these ads amaze me is that they try to convince you that eating moderate portions is a Bad Thing.

Here's how the ad goes: Two men are in a locker room getting dressed. We can see that they're overweight because their potato-sack torsos are exposed. They start talking about what they had for dinner last night, and one of them - just as blubbery as the other - describes some fancy dish with the culinary flair of a queen (royal or homo). The other one points his blow-dryer at him, and the sissy (not being heavy enough, even though he easily weighs over 250 pounds) gets blown across the room into the wall. A voiceover assures you that this won't happen if you eat Hungry Man dinners.

Now, there's a not-very-subtle homophobic flavor to this, with one guy reacting to the other because he was talking girly and and turns out to be a "lightweight", but that's beside the point. Homophobes have a right to good health advice as much as anyone. And I can at least respect the satire in the guy's description of his dinner, which is a parody of current adverts for another frozen dinner that describe it like something from a fancy restaurant. If the sales pitch were "simple food for a regular-guy's tastes", that'd be fine.

But the message is that an overweight person should be ashamed of eating food that doesn't make him even heavier, and that's disgusting. Did these people get confused in January 2000 and set their calendars back to the 19th century instead of ahead to the 21st? Because that's where the mentality that a real man should be a fat man comes from.

I'm not suggesting that they should be ridiculing fat people or saying that these somewhat overweight actors are just a cheeseburger away from a heart attack just because they have large, soft tummies. But calling these guys underweight is as unhealthy as calling Britney Spears overweight.

I guess the one redeeming trait of this ad campaign is that it's truthful about the product. Hungry Man XXL dinners - which brag about containing over a pound of bar-quality food - do contain more calories than a typical adult male needs each evening (and enough fat and cholesterol in a single box to get him through a couple days), and will make him heavier. A man who eats these dinners regularly will not get blown across the room by a hair dryer (at least not until he develops colon cancer and wastes away during chemo). But it's a sad commentary on our society when Swanson can get away with calling this caloric overload a feature, not a flaw.

Tablet PCs Miss Their Market

According to a story in The Register, the hardware manufacturers who've been trying to sell "tablet" style PCs loaded with Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, aren't finding many takers. One of their complaints is that Microsoft's hefty licence fees for the WinXP Tablet software are adding too much to the price. (The hardware itself costs about the same as laptop with a keyboard.) Same old song, 37th verse. But the main problem is that people just aren't buying them. No kidding.

They've been trying to market these to executives, who (even today) tend to have minimal keyboard skills, viewing that as a "secretarial" skill. (That's silly elitist bullshit, but let's let that go for now.) It doesn't automatically follow that a computer without a keyboard is then well-suited for executives. They've got it backwards.

The tablet form factor is for "sub-secretarial" tasks, not "super-secretarial" tasks. It's best suited for taking inventory, collecting delivery signatures, and other tasks that involve walking around and recording data. That's semi-skilled clerical labor, not executive work. They could be useful in hospitals, but in the hands of nurses and interns, not doctors and administrators. In schools, they might be useful to students, not faculty. They're for peons (who can't afford Microsoft's surcharge), not the ruling class.

Furthermore, execs (and docs and profs) don't generally use pens any more than they use keyboards (except perhaps to sign documents generated by other people). Their job is to read stuff, listen to people, think about things, and talk to people (usually telling them what to do). A tablet PC assists with none of those. What they want is (yes, I'm afraid it's true) a voice-controlled system, the 21st-century version of a dictaphone. Give the tablets to the folks who could actually get some use out of them.

Mystic River - Hold the Pizza

my rating: Nathan's rating:

Mystic River should not be confused with Mystic Pizza, the fun small-town romantic comedy that featured young Julia Roberts 15 years ago. It is, in many ways, the exact opposite, with the only romance in the story quickly interrupted, and very little humor or even happy endings. The film is instead an urban character drama/mystery ruled by dysfunctional relationships between unhappy people, and a series of tragedies that end... in tragedy. And it's in Massachusetts, not Connecticut.

The story is about three boyhood friends whose lives were changed when one of them - essentially chosen at random from the three - was abducted by two Dirty Old Men posing as cops, then repeatedly raped before he escaped, four days later. The victim (Tim Robbins) became a psychological basket case, stumbling his way through life, though managing to find a wife and raise a reasonably well-adjusted son. Another of the boys (Kevin Bacon) became a police detective (a decision apparently unrelated to the childhood incident, the movie doesn't explain). The third (Sean Penn) drifts (again for reasons unexplained) in the opposite direction, into a life with a foot in a legitimate neighborhood business and the church, and another in the criminal underworld. As adults, the three have mostly lost touch, but all remain near the neightborhood where they'd lived as boys. A murder brings them back into each other's lives.

The three main actors and the supporting cast all do well, despite some Bostonian accents that ebb and flow. Keeping the accents minimal helps avoid unintentional comedy and keeps most of the dialog easily intelligible to non-New-Englanders, but that makes it more confusing when someone suddenly refers to a "cah" and it takes a split-second while you re-activate your dialect interpretter to figure out he's talking about a "car". But anyways, they're all believable in their roles.

The story has a recurring "not talking" motif, including Kevin Bacon's estranged wife, who keeps calling him but not saying anything, and the mute (but not deaf) brother of one of the suspects in the killing. It has to be symbolic, because the fact of their silence never plays a signficant role in the plot. Perhaps it's meant to tie in with a theme of the three friends no longer staying in contact, or the things that various characters don't tell each other, but it either went over my head or was insufficiently developed.

One message the film seems to be trying to convey (one of the characters suggests it, and nobody refutes the idea) is that all three boys were victims of the kidnapping. The thought that "it could have been me" was no doubt traumatic to them at the time, and clearly haunted the other two. While I don't disagree with this, it does seem to stretch the point a bit; Robbins' character was - of course - clearly traumatised more profoundly.

I was bothered, however, by the fatalistic attitude the film seemed to take about that trauma. In a crowd scene after the boy's escape someone refers to him as "damaged goods", and the characters all act as if no one who's lost his innocence so young could possibly come out of it with his sanity intact. Frankly, that attitude could be as harmful as the incident itself. Even more troubling was the notion - this was Nathan's puzzled interpretation of what the movie was saying - that Robbins would have been better off dead. At least it didn't make the assumption that he would inevitably abuse his own son as a result of being abused himself.

Nathan said he'd been told this was an "independent" film, and asked me what that meant, since there were obviously "real" actors in it. I don't know for sure, but I assume it meant that Clint Eastwood and his co-producers got the financing for it themselves, leaving whichever studio/distributor combo that's releasing it out of the process of re-writing it. Which would certainly explain the lack of an obviously Hollywood-rewritten ending. The ending does suffer a little, however, from an awkward attempt to put a final scene on a story that doesn't go for the easy ending. It takes us back to The Street Where IT Happened, for one last look at the characters, including a brief (wordless) interaction between Bacon and Penn, which just left me going "huh?"

Regardless, this film is a good example of why I like Clint Eastwood more behind the camera than in front of it (where he tended to play less interesting, flat characters like cowboys and Dirty Harry). This is an engrossing, thoughtful and thought-provoking movie, and I'd rather see a film of that sort that troubles me a bit, than the typical Hollywood fare of a forumulaic flick with nothing to disagree with.

Northfork - Subdued Surreality

my rating:

These Polish brothers are taking the box office by storm in a drama with a heavy metaphysical subtext, with black-suited agents and people who exist in two different realities. That's the Wachowskis and The Matrix films I'm talking about, but if you replace "taking the box office by storm" with "telling a story about a flood", it could refer to Mark and Michael Polish, the creators of Northfork.

The movie tells two interwoven stories, set in 1955 in the doomed rural town of Northfork, Montana, which is to be flooded in a matter of days by a newly completed hydro-electric dam.

One story is about several duos of evacuators, men hired by the government to get the remaining residents of Northfork to leave their homes, for which they (the evacuators) may be compensated with lakefront property. That story is laced with carefully understated and dark - but wacky - humor, playing the black-Ford-sedan-driving black-fedora-wearing government agents (particular the duo played by James Woods and his son Mark Polish), off against colorful locals, such as the bigamist and his wives who have converted their home into a small ark.

The other story revolves around a sickly young orphan who may or may not be something other than what he appears to be. Nick Nolte plays the priest who remains to care for him, hoping against hope to find someone to take him away. And then there's the quartet of markedly odd characters (including Daryl Hannah and Anthony Edwards) who - if they are real - are not of this world. This story is laced with mystery and overt surrealism. It's tempting to dismiss it as the fevered imaginings of the boy (and if you watch and listen carefully there's plenty to suggest exactly that), but it intrudes just enough into the other story to make that a little too simple an answer.

Not that there's a clear dividing line between the two plotlines. There's more than a little quirky humor in the orphan's tale and surreal spirituality in the evacuators' adventures. The whole film has a very distant and subdued tone; there's no chewing of the scenery, and the action is infrequent. Nolte in particular nearly whispers many of his lines, to the point of sometimes being unintelligible. But it's never truly dark, and has absurdity intermixed into every scene.

The movie begs for a philisophical or religious analysis. It's loaded with religious imagery and symbolism, including a vacated cemetary, angel wings, a church on blocks ready to be moved (the back wall missing), a man with nails through his feet, the myopic scrutiny of ostensibly-prophetic texts, a Mormon-esque zealot, a cross-shaped outhouse window, evacuators going out in twos like missionaries, and of course the ark and the coming flood. Given several viewings, I could have a field day with this.

But tonight was the final showing, because this movie by Polish brothers is only playing at the town art-film house, for one week only. Maybe after it comes out on tape. In the meantime, I'm not ready to declare it a masterpiece (although visually it certainly qualifies, I'm still not sure about the story) but it's definitely engrossing... in its own detached sort of way.

Call me "Herm"

Many men discover at some point in their life that they've turned into their fathers. That hasn't happened to me, and this proverbial apple's been kicked enough times in various directions away from the tree, that I don't think it will. Instead, I've turned into Herm Bradley.

When I was a young man in college, there was an upperclassman named William "Herm" Bradley in the fraternity I joined. (Actually "Herm" was his real middle name, but since everyone called him that, it seems appropriate to put it in quotes like a nickname.) Herm had once been an "A" (sometimes "B+") Chemistry student, a clever wit, and if not the actual life of the party, at least one of the players. But he was in a car accident one summer, which didn't permanently disable him, but still set him apart for a while from his life as he'd known it.

He was never the same afterward. He coasted along at school, never quite graduating in the whole time I was there. He took a part-time job which required no advanced education. And he settled into a daily routine that was utterly - and sadly - predictable. The best-observed part of it - especially the semester I shared a house with him and a few other frat brothers - was his nightly walk to the 7-11 about four blocks away. At 11:00pm, he would go pick up a 40-ounce Budweiser, a pack of Camels, and a bag of Doritos. He'd come home and watch TV, slowly working his way through the beer and chips, but saving some of the cigarettes for the next day.

Most of the details don't quite fit, but today I'm remarkably similar to Herm. My "accident" was the loss of my boyfriend and getting fired resigning from my job several years ago. I've been back in school ever since, and it'll be seven years when I finally graduate next year. I took a part-time job that paid about 2/3 what I was worth, and to supplement that I got a job as a paperboy.

With my restricted finances, I had to figure out a way to get my beer budget (inflated by my preference for imports) under control; buying by the case was cheapest per fl.oz. but I tend to drink more when there's an "unlimited" supply in the house. So I figured out that a single 22oz. bottle per day was the least expensive, especially since one of the local party stores was selling bottles of Red Dog for $1.00 "out the door", including tax and deposit. But not wanting to become Herm, I didn't make a nightly trip; I bought them two at a time: one for tonight, one for tomorrow. Yeah, right.

In another effort to limit my drinking and to keep from turning into Herm-on-the-couch, I also set a rule for when I would start drinking. I'm on a different schedule than Herm was (I get up early every day), so I set 9:00pm as the earliest I'd pop open a brew. But lately, I've been cheating a bit. I frequently stroll over to Smitty's or Sami's to pick up a couple Red Dogs at 7:00pm, and crack one open around 8:00pm. It doesn't take that long to put one away, so it's not unusual for me to cheat a little more, and drink maybe half of tomorrow's bottle... maybe all of it. Which sends me on a trek to the party store to restock the very next night. I've never taken up tobacco, and I don't (usually) buy chips, but the similarity to Herm's nightly routine is hard to deny.

I don't know whatever happened to Herm. I'm pretty sure he graduated (like I'm going to do next Spring). I'm doubtful he ever made much of his life, though. Which seems pretty much where I'm headed. So call me "Herm".

Economic Activism: Bookstores

Economic Activism Thought of the Week:

Bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and their online equivalent Amazon, are killing off independent booksellers. They arrange special volume discounts on books that smaller sellers can't match, and specifically target markets with large independent stores they can put out of business and replace. The largest chains are even buying out book distributors and publishers, leaving indy bookstores at a further disadvantage.

But independent bookstores are the ones that have traditionally championed new writers rather than whatever the big publishers decided to push, and actually stock (not just special-order) the kinds of unusual and interesting books that made a "free press" worth guaranteeing in the U.S. Constitution.

A single chain location may stock more different books than a single indy store, but collectively the indies support a much wider diversity of authors and publishers. And while a chain store may have a "feminist" or "children" or "mystery" or "spirituality" or "travel" or "sci-fi" or "lesbian/gay" section, it won't have nearly the depth or breadth of an independent bookstore that specializes in one of those niches.

The independents know what they're up against and are trying hard to earn customer loyalty, and they deserve your support. Some of the high-tech niceties of the chains are matched by independent bookstores who are on the web either by themselves or through BookSense.com.

WMD = Whupped My Dad

I think I've figured out a key to better understanding U.S. foreign policy, especially as it relates to Iraq. First "WMD" was cited as the reason for going to war immediately rather than later, and the ongoing search for "WMD" is the reason we have to keep our troops there since we "won".

This all makes much more sense once you realise that "WMD" doesn't stand for "Weapons of Mass Destruction". After all, there probably were none, and we're clearly not going to find any.

No, "WMD" is an abbreviation for "Whupped My Dad". The president - famous for the clever nicknames he assigns as a subsitute for learning people's real names - came up with this one for Saddam Hussein, whose less-than-total defeat arguably cost his father the election in 1992. So when George the Less insisted that we had to invade Iraq immediately because of "WMD", he was talking about Mr. Hussein, and now he doesn't want to pull out of Iraq until we find ol' "WMD".

See, foreign policy is easy to understand if you just know what all the alphabet soup stands for!

Runaway Jury - Good v. Evil v. A Third Party?

my rating: Nathan's rating:

With both Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman in a movie together, how could you go wrong? Have they ever done a movie together that was a dud?

OK, that's a trick question, because the closest they've come to doing a movie together was Hackman's near-casting as Mr. Robinson in The Graduate. But still, the number of terrible movies that either of them has done separately is pretty small. And Runaway Jury is not on the list.

Gene Hackman is a slick jury selection specialist, an expert who helps high-priced lawyers make sure they get jurors who will be sympathetic to their side. He's working for the gun manufacturer in a high-stakes civil trial brought by the widow of a shooting victim. Dustin Hoffman is the widow's attorney, a folksy but sharp advocate of gun control, intent on finally beating the gun industry in court. It'd be a standard courtoom drama if not for the two wildcards: planted juror John Cusack, and Rachel Weisz, his partner in a scam to "sell" that jury to one side or the other.

It's an interesting angle on the well-tread genre of courtroom dramas, looking at an angle of the legal system that most people aren't very familiar with. Which of course gives them a degree of creative liberty, since your typical movie-goer won't know what's realistic or not. Having been through jury selection and jury duty myself (albeit on a much lower-stakes case), I can confirm that jury selection does take place, but I can't see it getting quite this... overwrought, with levels of espionage that the CIA would envy. Not even The Bad Guys would be capable of all that.

"The Bad Guys" in this film clearly includes the gun manufacturers and their expansive legal team. Hackman is deliciously amoral and conniving throughout the whole story. Hoffman, with his one, relucatantly-hired minor-league jury selection expert comes across as The Good Guy, of course. Cusack and Weisz are harder to pin down, playing Good and Bad against each other. That's the key suspense of the case: figuring out how their elaborate jury tampering is going to play out.

The biggest credibility problem of the plot is believing that no one would blow the whistle on the scam. When both sides know that they're both being offered a chance to buy a verdict, it's hard to buy the notion that this scam will actually work. The losing party would squeal, using their knowledge of the tampering to appeal or get a retrial. But if you set aside that kind of reasoning and think like a movie-goer, it's not too difficult to just go along for the ride, wondering who will outsmart whom in the end, and how.

Nathan had no difficulty doing that; the law is not exactly his forté. He doesn't like guns, but that's just because he's afraid of them. It's not a political thing for him. So his biggest problem was the whole premise of the trial on which the plot was built. Having grown up listening to his parents and other elders belittle the whole idea of corporate liability - because it questions the basic tenet of capitalism that anything which is both legal and profitable is blameless - he couldn't accept the notion that a gun manufacturer could bear any responsibility for what's done with the weapons they produce. So explaining the difference between a criminal trial and a civil suit, and the basis of product liability law was a nice educational opportunity.

The movie actually showed only bits and pieces of the trial itself - the real drama was in the jury room and especially the aforementioned spy stuff and extortion scenes - so it's impossible to reach a real conclusion in this case. Which is something of a weakness of the film, because it does take a position before the final credits roll, and you're left either accepting it or not based on your own prejudices... not the evidence you never get to hear. In fact, I have some misgivings about the question of gun manufacturer's legal responsibility. They cannot be held liable for every heinous act committed with the products they create, unless they were complicit or blatantly negligent regarding them. Their moral responsibility is another question, however. A courtroom drama that argues the moral question rather than legal one is a bit of a dramatic cheat.

Make Me Pout At The Ball Game

I really do not understand all the (literal!) weeping and wailing over the near misses of the Cubs and the Red Sox at getting into the World Series. Why on earth do otherwise fuctional adults get so wrapped up in the fortunes of these sports franchises that they become so excited about the prospect of them winning, and reduced to tears when they lose? You'd think something had happened to them.

One clue is the widespread talk about "curses" against the two teams... something about trading Babe Ruth for a goat or whatever. Anyone over the age of 10 who actually gives more than a moment's consideration to such neolithic nonsense, apparently has some judgmental deficiency.

But the main issue is some kind of fixation on these outfits. You have people declaring themselves "life-long Cubbies fans" or profess that they "hate the Yankees". For them I have one question: Why?

I actually have asked this question of sports-team fans, and their answers generally amounted to nothing more than "because". At least when you ask someone why they're Christians or Muslims or Taoists they can often give you a thoughtful answer (even if someone else did the thinking for them) about how they came to have these beliefs or how those beliefs make a difference in their lives, or at the least an appeal to a divine authority that declares these beliefs to be an absolute universal Truth. There's no comparable reason for being faithful to the Sox.

As you've probably guessed, I'm not a "sports" kinda guy. I've never played on any teams, or even had much interest in the games themselves. I don't pay attention to who's playing against whom. But that's because I don't know any of them.

I do understand why people might take an interest in a sports team, cheer when they win, and be disappointed when they lose. If you're a parent and your child is on the team, you want to see your child do well, and since she or he is a member of this group, you want them to do well collectively, for the sake of her or his satisfaction. I can sort of understand why high school students would take a similar interest in their school teams. Unless you have a big school and/or a strong caste/clique system, odds are that most students at the school have friends or friends-of-friends on the team, and they want to see those friends succeed. I can see some of the same thing happening in college, though at most universities the odds of any given student knowing a member of the team become pretty slim. (I paid attention to my college's soccer team because my roommate was on it. I was aware of the football and baseketball teams only because I took photos for the school paper.)

Where it breaks down into nonsense is at the pro sports level. The typical fan of a given sports franchise doesn't know anybody on the roster. (If they are a fan of a particular player, it's because he's a player, not because they have some kind of prior relationship with him.) The team members generally don't even come from the same city as their core fans. Maybe once upon a time the Milwaukee Brewers were a bunch of guys from Milwaukee (some of whom had worked in a brewery), but that's ancient history. Today they're a bunch of guys who just relocated to Wisconsin for a job.

Now, if someone "adopts" a player they admire, and "follows" his career, that's a little more hero-worship-y than I'm comfortable with, but at least it makes sense. Devotion to - or even if we call it "admiration of" - a human being is a fairly normal human emotion. But being devoted to a franchise? Regardless of who's on the team? That's bizarre.

Americans often go "tsk tsk" over football ("soccer") hooligans rioting and brawling in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. But at least that particular lunacy has a basis in something. I'm no fan of nationalism, especially the kind the has people vandalising other countries, but at least I understand it. Same thing with civic pride that sends lads into a frenzy when someone insults their local football club.

But pro sports teams don't have anything to do with that. They're businesses. The Detroit Tigers have been based in Detroit for a long time, but that has nothing to do with the community of Detroit. Its just a business decision. They use the name "Detroit" for markeing purposes. (Some franchises use state names instead of city names for broader marketing opportunities.) If the owners of that business thought that they could make more money by relocating, they would. It's even happened before... and yet people still develop these irrational fixations on whatever franchise happens to be located in their city, or nearest to where they live.

So every rational - or even emotionally justifiable - explanation I can think of for this weeping at the fortunes of a corporate entertainment franchise, falls apart. Can anyone offer me a better one, or is this just another exmaple of people in our society just being fucking nuts?

Of Mice and Men - On-Screen Literature

my rating:

I've probably read more classic works of literature than average, but I'll admit to never reading John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Fortunately for me, Gary Sinise did. If the book is as good as the movie he directed and starred in (with no small contribution from John Malkovich) - and of course it's probably even better - then it's a powerful piece of literature.

The story is about George and Lenny, two drifters trying to get by and maybe someday fulfill a dream of having a small homestead of their own in rural Depression-era America. Their life is made difficult by the times in which they live, of course, but it's made worse by Lenny's mental disability. He has "the strength of a bull" as his companion - and caretaker - George puts it, but an intellect like that of a small child. George promised Lenny's dying aunt he'd look after him, and so he endures the burden of keeping him out of trouble and seeing to his basic needs, and gets unquestioning friendship in return. The movie chronicles a pivotal stop in their journey together, working on a farm where the boss' belligerent son and the son's flirtatious wife spell trouble for the inseparable George and Lenny.

Malkovich clearly had a challenging role in the film, and despite the inexplicable lack of an Oscar nomination, he pulls it off wonderfully. Although I don't know anyone quite like Lenny, I've know enough mentally challenged people to be a good critic of attempts by others to mimic them, and Malkovich captures the befuddled good-naturedness of a retarded man expertly. In some ways, Sinise's challenge was greater, having no obvious "schtick" to play for George, and thus having to make George's loyalty to this albatross he's willingly accepted seem believable. Sinise succeeds, and his dilemma in trying to figure out how to get them both out of Lenny's latest - and most profound - accidental mess feels genuine.

The story itself is very powerful and well crafted, and I assume Steinbeck deserves most of the credit for that. Like any good literature-class-worthy tale, it has recurring motifs, subtle foreshadowing, themes explored from various angles, and small bits of irony (e.g. the gentle giant's last name is "Small") that provide the mind with plenty to chew on. I don't want to spoil the ending, but it's surprising... while making perfect sense if you've been paying attention. My only complaint is with the character of the wife, who manages to be neither sympathetic nor contemptible (or maybe a little of both), as if she were scripted in different scenes by two different people.

My neighborhood movie house is doing a series of Steinbeck-based films this month, which should help alleviate my lack of exposure to his work in my own high school lit. classes. Time permitting, I'll be seeing Cannery Row and Grapes of Wrath (East of Eden was cancelled due to availability issues) in the next couple weeks.

Elk Grove v. Newdow, now Scalia-free!

Who knew that Justice Antonin "Benito" Scalia had such integrity? Justices aren't supposed to announce ahead of time how they'd rule on particular kinds of cases, because it indicates that they've made up their minds in advance of actually hearing the arguments and seeing the evidence specific to each case. Since he's already gone on record saying the the lower court's ruling was wrong, and he favors requiring schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to a nation "under God", he's recused himself from an upcoming Supreme Court case on that question. OK, so he had to be asked to recuse himself, but at least he did it.

Granted, we all know that Clarence "Uncle" Thomas and William "Über Justice" Rehnquist have already made up their minds the same way, and it's a safe bet that John Paul "Same Age as the Pope" Stevens and Ruth "Buzzy" Ginsberg have already made up their minds the other way. But it's a necessary fiction for us to pretend otherwise, on the basis that they've never said so, like Scalia did. The Supreme Court would never be able to rule on Key Issues Of Our Times, if the only people who could serve were those who'd never really thought about them before.

The whole question behind this case strikes me as absurd. Including the phrase "under God" in our national Pledge of Allegiance is clearly an establishment of religion. Hell, that's what the phrase is there for: to declare that this is a God-worshipping nation. Requiring schoolchidren to recite it every day (or face shunning by their peers over it) is religious indoctrination (or "education", if you prefer), plain and simple. What other purpose could it possibly serve?

The phrase wasn't even a part of the original Pledge. It was added only a couple generations ago, during the 1950's, when the U.S. Congress wanted to differentiate the United States from its Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union. This is the same Congress that gave us Joe McCarthy and the ironically named House Un-American Activities Committee, which engaged in political witchhunts that ruined people's careers, reputations, and lives based on coerced accusations and confessions. The same Congress that held hearings about the unscientific ramblings of Dr. Frederic Wertham claiming a causal relationship between comics and juvenile delinquency, which led to the formation of the Comics Code Authority, a cartel that suppressed the distribution of comics that didn't adhere to a conformist social agenda. The same Congress that added "In God We Trust" to all U.S. currency. (It was already on our coins, having been added during the religious anxiety of a previous war, in the 1860's.)

So let's recap the work of the 1950's Congress: legislative trials in which defendants were considered guilty until proven innocent, government endorsement of a trade-restraining trust dedicated to censoring the press, and the expanded use of a slogan that had originally been instituted specifically to identify the U.S. as a Christian nation. It was an vertiable orgy of legislation that defied the principles of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. So of course the addition of "under God" defied the First Amendment. It's what that the (Catholic) Knights of Columbus lobbied them to do. It's what the Congress was elected to do. (Evidently it's what they're still elected to do, as they've been falling over each other rushing to re-endorse this theocratic nonsense.)

But I don't trust the Supreme Court to acknowledge this fact. Even if they recognise what Congress was up to (as I'm sure most of these very bright women and men do). The Supreme Court was intended to be kept free from political pressure, and many times over the past couple centuries it has taken advantage of that to drag American society kicking and screaming into the future. But I don't think they have the constitution to do it in this case. Scalia's recusal improves the odds, but not by a lot.

For one thing, even the "liberals" on the Court are mostly pretty moderate. Classic reformist liberals like Warren, Burger, Brennan, Blackmun, White, and Marshall are all gone. Even Stevens, the remaining member of that pre-Reagan liberal majority, has always been more of a GOP-appointed moderate; he's a liberal mainly in comparison to the new kkkids on the block. And although some of these moderates might recognise that the current state of affairs is Constitutionally inappropriate, they also recognise that changing it could touch off a holy war, and they don't want to see that happen. (Almost certainly the next Supreme Court nomination would include a litmus test over this question, and no one less religious than the Pope could get Senate approval.)

Besides, the Justices are all theists: four Protestants, three Catholics, and two Jews. (In fact, only one person without a declared theological affiliation has ever served on the Supreme Court: David Davis, appointed by his friend Abraham Lincoln.) I suppose it helps that none of them except Uncle Thomas are among the Baby Boomers (and later) who grew up with the Pledge of Theocratic Allegiance, but that also means it was their peers who elected the Congress that did it.

Frankly, I kinda wish the Supremes hadn't agreed to take this case. I can't help thinking of fiascos like Bowers v. Hardwick (in which the Supremes upheld a law against private consensual sodomy) or Boy Scouts v. Dale (which affirmed the Scouts' right to practise discrimination on the basis of religion and orientation) which backfired by setting new legal precedents that would serve to undermine the rights the appeals were intended to strengthen. If the Supremes say it's OK for public schools to teach children to pledge allegiance to God's republic, then that'll make it harder to argue against (for example) spending government money to fund privately-run programs that require its participants to do the same (such as homeless shelters that require people to join them in worship before getting a meal and a cot).

Maybe I'm just too chicken-hearted. Maybe deep down I'm just too much of a moderate myself. I hope for the best. But I expect less.

Two and a Half Men

my rating:

OK, so there actually is something new worth watching on TV this year. And a sitcom, even. It's called Two and a Half Men, and it's on CBS on Monday nights. The "sit" part of "sitcom" is that Jon Cryer's wife has dumped him, so he and his young son move in with his bachelor brother Charlie Sheen. Hence the title. So you get something resembling a gay couple with a child... but with the only gay character being the infrequently-seen ex-wife. The "com" part comes of course from the fact that Sheen would kinda rather they hadn't moved in, but puts up with them because that's what brothers do.

Believe it or not, what drew me to check out this show was not the homoerotic undertones of the title. Not even Fox or UPN would put on something racy enough to actually live up to the image that brings up. No, what led me to give it a look was the producer: Chuck Lorre. He was the creator of Dharma & Greg, which was about a metaphysical odd couple who reminded me of my ex and me: a flaky pagan of hippy ancestry and an uptight nihilist child of capitalism... who happen to be in love. The show helped get me through the loss of my ex. Even though you could tell that Lorre was more on the sociopolitical side of the flake and her family, he didn't hestitate to poke fun of them or to portray the overclass family as likeable people. And it was amusing. He also inserted a different vanity card at the end of each episode, each with a brief textual musing (VCR/TiVo with freeze-frame required) that made it clear that this was a thinking person's sitcom.

But enough eulogising D&G. On to 2.5 Men. It's not so wildly good that I'm grabbing people on the street and telling them to watch it. And - rather obviously, now that I think about it, as the female characters all have the word "supporting" attached to them - it lacks the feminine coziness of D&G. But so far it's been funny without pandering to the stoopidity of the usual sitcom audience. And the vanity card message from the second episode (cribbed from Lorre's web site) gives me the assurance that it's the kind of sitcom I'm looking for:

We assume an intelligent audience holding remote controls. The only laughter you will hear is the laughter of real people. We will do no "very special" episodes. Nobody's having a baby. No one's getting married. Someone is getting divorced. Our characters are flawed, yet smart. The kid is, and will remain, a real kid. There will be no bachelor auctions. No one's getting stranded in a cabin or stuck in an elevator. There will be no dream sequences, talent shows, or fantasies.... at least in the first season. Ditto for homages to "Rashomon", "It's a Wonderful Life", and "A Christmas Carol". A car horn or other random noise will never be used to cleverly disguise naughty words. We will never have a character enter a scene if it reminds us of Lenny and Squiggy. Pop culture reference jokes are cheap, easy and date the show. We will not do them. There will be no pedantic, socially conscious stories. No matter how poignant the moment, we will never broadcast our studio audience going, "ahhh". Similarly, no matter how titillating the moment, we will never broadcast our studio audience going "wooo!". If we see 'it' coming we assume you see 'it' coming and we will therefore do our utmost to avoid 'it'. No fat jokes (unless they're really, really funny). The same goes for penis jokes. And finally, unless Chuck gets hit by a bus and Lee takes over, there will be no wacky scenes with little people or night-vision goggles.

Prohibition Lives... and Kills

I was chatting with an acquantance today, who is understandably a bit conflicted between her liberal ideals and her perspective as a parent on the subject of legalising marijuana. On one hand, she thinks that the government shouldn't be deciding what substances responsible adults use. On the other hand, she worries about the fact that legal marijuana would also be easier for her teenage sons to get, and she knows better than anyone just how responsible they are not.

I had no answer for her (I'm not a parent, how could I presume to?), so I changed the subject to alcohol, which is arguably less harmful than marijuana. It's certainly more addictive, more widely abused, and poses a clearer danger of overdose. American society's approach to alcohol is well-intended, but backfires badly.

In the early days of the Republic there were no laws restricting who could drink alcohol. Those were simpler, less legalistic times. In the 1920's alcohol was outlawed by Constitutional Amendment, an experiment which failed so badly that it became the only Amendment to be repealed. Afterward, the drinking age was commonly set at 21, but was lowered to 18 on the strength of the argument that someone old enough to sign binding contracts, or to serve in the military, should be considered old enough to drink a beer. But with 18-year-olds still getting the hang of driving automobiles, and going to the same high schools as 14-year-olds, that led to increasing traffic fatalities and under-age drinking.

The federal government's "solution" was to coerce state legislatures into raising the drinking age back up to 21. There's evidence that this has reduced the rate of drunk driving fatalities, which is good. But it seems to me that this is happening at the cost of turning more of us into alcoholics instead.

A drinking age of 21 cuts off a substantial number of high school students from friends who can buy for them. This doesn't stop high-schoolers from drinking, of course, but let's suppose it does. This means that, instead of learning to handle alcohol under the guidance of their parents, most people get their first unfettered access to it in college, or during their first few years living on their own after high school. A college freshman can get his hands on alcohol without too much difficulty, but he has to do it on the sly. Unless he's got a really good fake ID, he can't drink in bars or restaurants. Instead he drinks at keggers, or in his dorm room. Can you think of a better way to teach alcohol abuse? I can't.

Of all the environments in which a person could learn how to handle alcohol, I'd rank them in the following order of preference:
1) At home (i.e. where his family lives).
2) In a restaurant.
3) In a bar.
4) In his dorm room or apartment.
5) At parties with his peers.

Current drinking laws forbid (1), and a parent who lets their under-age children drink could face criminal charges and even loss of custody. Laws against (2) and (3) are usually enforced pretty strictly, with stings and PR campaigns routinely ensuring that these don't happen. Which leaves us with (4) teenagers drinking themselves into a stupor in their rooms (some colleges have rules against alcohol in dorms, which can make this difficult), or (5) going to a place where the main activity is drinking as much as possible and perhaps driving home! In other words, the more unhealthy the environment, the more likely that's where an 18-year-old is going to learn how to drink.

I consider myself kinda lucky in that regard. I drank a little in high school, but my social life wasn't that great, so it was fairly rare... a New Year's Eve party here, a 12-pack shared by a friend who nicked it from his parents, etc. But the year I graduated from high school, at the age of 18, a friend and I went on 6-week biking trip through Great Britain. Now, Britain's pub licencing laws were more than a little bizarrely puritanical (closed for a few hours in the afternoon, and shutting down for the night well before midnight), but they never cared how old you were, as long as you seemed "adult".

So I learned to drink: in pubs, with a good friend, in a situation where hangovers the next day would simply be a waste of the proverbial once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we'd each been saving up for. We drank, of course. In fact, we drank quite well, sampling beers that could actually be enjoyed for their flavor, not just for their alcohol content. (This was long before the "microbrew" phenomenon got underway in America. The most "exotic" beer available back home was Coors.)

When I got back to the Colonies and went away to college, beer was nothing new to me. Having to find someone to buy it for me was a nuisance, that's all. Meanwhile, my friends were getting their first taste of drinking without having to hide it from their parents. Sure, classes tended to keep the week-night drinking to a minimum, but on the weekends, it was off to the keggers. There was a sort of Darwinian angle, with those who couldn't juggle binge drinking with schoolwork flunking out. But that sets a pattern that's definitely going to lead to problems down the road.

I know there's no way the drinking age is going to get lowered. It'd probably just take us back to the Bad Old Days of high-schoolers wrapping their cars around trees on weekends. But maybe we could take a cue from the recent trend in how to handle driving privileges. Michigan has instituted a phase-in program, in which new drivers are restricted and have to spend a certain amount of time driving with their parents. I'm not suggesting that teenagers be required to log how much time they've spent drinking with their parents, but it seems to me that letting them drink under parental supervision (definitely at home, and why not in restaurants?) would go along way toward helping them develop responsible drinking habits, by letting them learn in the best environments possible rather than the worst.

And maybe once we figure out how to handle alcohol responsbily in our society, we'll have some answers for how to handle marijuana.

Trust the Government

It's tempting to read about incidents like this one (in which reporter Declan McCullagh received a letter from the FBI instructing him to comply with a law requiring ISPs to hold onto records that might later be subpoenaed, telling him they'd be coming after his notes of interviews he did with admitted cracker Adrian Lamo), and chuckle at how stoopid the Feds are. ("They don't know the difference between a reporter who publishes online, and an internet service provider. {snicker}")

But I don't think they're clueless. I think they're conniving.

They know the difference between a company that provides comm services, and a writer who uses those services. They understand the law. They just don't care. Their attitude is "whatever it takes to get the job done", so if that means taking a law intended for one purpose and applying it somewhere else... so be it.

It's kind of like back when the Feds couldn't pin any of Al Capone's criminal mob activities on him, so they brought him up on tax evasion charges, and convicted him because he obviously had more income than he was reporting. Today we look back and that and applaud them for their ingenuity. But only because their target really deserved to be locked up.

McCullagh didn't do anything wrong. Not even allegedly. But if he refused to comply with the FBI's instructions by acting as an investigtory agent for the government (and give up the professional independence guaranteed to him by the "free press" clause of the First Amendment), he could be charged with contempt for the courts, under the US PATRIOT Act. Fortunately various journalistic organisations quickly protested on his behalf, and it appears that the FBI has backed down from their threat. Not everyone has that kind of friends to stand up for them.

People try to justify the sweeping, unaccountable powers that legislation like this gives to the government, by saying that they need it to combat terrorism, and that the government won't use it against law-abiding citizens. Sure they will. They already are. Lamo isn't a terrorist; he's a smart, cocky kid showing off and sticking his tongue out at the grown-ups. And McCullagh isn't an ISP; he's a reporter with vital civil rights. Any fool can tell that. Including the FBI. But that alone won't stop them.

Kill Bill, vol.1 - To Be Continued...

my rating: undecided / Nathan's rating:

OK, first a confession... one which will certainly sabotage my credentials as a cinéaste: I've never seen a film by Quentin Tarantino until now. Not even Pulp Fiction. So all I know about his prior work is through the filter of the "Tarantino-esque" bits I've seen in other people's work over the past decade.

Second, I want to get this somewhat superficial observation out of the way: that we seem to be experiencing something of a renaissance of The Serial. Kill Bill turned out to be too long for a single screening, so Tarantino split it into two parts, to be released several months apart. Not unlike the sequel to The Matrix: filmed in one go, then released as Reloaded and Revolutions, again several months apart. And not altogether different from The Lord of the Rings, a single epic film released in three annual installments. (It's tempting to include the Harry Potter films or other pre-planned sequel movies in this list, but the better term for this is a Series, not a Serial, since each film tells a distinct story. Furthermore, the delays between installments are longer, dictated by production time, not marketing.)

But what about Kill Bill vol.1? I'm limited in what I can say about it because it really did "end" in serial fashion: with no resolution. OK, Tarantino didn't stop it in the middle of a scene, and even waited until the end of a chapter before cutting to the credits. But there's too much missing from the story to comment meaningfully on it.

But what we have so far is either a work of genius, or insanity, or both. In some ways, it's a parody of old action-movie genres. But it's not a "spoof", which makes obvious fun of its source material with the actors nearly winking at the camera. Tarantino has his actors play it all very straight, with a gruesome seriousness. Absurdities like firehose-gushing wounds share frames with tense drama about honor and revenge. The script contains silly Star Trek jokes on the same page as edgy hyperviolent exposition.

Tarantino is known (even by me) for his cinematic innovation, and here he pulls out a bunch of tricks. Each scenes is done in its own style, including a furniture-shattering knife fight in a suburban home, a hyperdramatic Japanese anime murder sequence, a black-and-white gymnasium-sized sword fight featuring a horde of minions, and a duel in a moonlit Japanese garden in the snow. I expect some kind of cowboy/western fight scene, and a dark urban street scene in vol.2.

Nathan was unimpressed. Although he claimed to understand the jokes (he cited the two Trek references), he didn't feel he really "got" them. He just didn't laugh when other people (including me) did. And I can see his point: it wasn't really all that funny. Especially if you're used to have a laugh track. I still left the cinema grinning, though.

One thing it definitely is is violent. A substantial percentage of the movie consists of fight scenes. There's blood... a lot of blood. Often so much as to render the scenes absurd. Which is presumably the idea. The fact that so much of it went clearly over the top meant that I could laugh with the director rather than sneer and laugh at him. Since fight scenes tend to bore me otherwise, this was a welcome change of pace.

Kill Bill is probably going to go down in cinema history as another creative masterpiece by Tarantino. It may very well be just that. But at this point I'm left trying to decide whether it's a 4-star work of genius, or just a 2-star piece of incoherent pretentiousness.

Almost Semi-Famous

OK, this is just weird. I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is by no means any kind of hotbed of comics-creating activity. Heck, the art school here just offered its first college-credit "sequential art" class last year. But today I've encountered two interviews with people from GR who are now doing professional comics work.

The first is an interview with three people who recently had internships with comics publishers, in J. Torres' Open Your Mouth column on ComicBookResources.com. One of them is Matt Dryer, who studied Illustration at Kendall College of Art & Design, and since graduating is now an assistant editor at Dark Horse Comics, one of the better "major" publishers out there. The thing is, I've been a part-time student at Kendall for the past 6+ years, and I'm nominally an Illustration major. It's not that big a school, either. So it's almost inevitable that I had a class with this guy at some point. But I'm lousy at picking up people's names, especially when they're just people in my classes, so I'm not sure. I'd probably recognise him if I saw him, and maybe vice versa. As if that mattered. So here's a really great networking opportunity that slipped away, just out of my grasp.

The second instance is an interview with Jeffrey Brown, creator of the graphic novels Clumsy and Unlikely, interviewed by Daniel Robert Epstein for Newsarama.com. He talks a little bit about how he used to live in Grand Rapids, and describes it pretty accurately. His religious background and development sounds a lot like my own as well. But I never met him, and now he lives in Chicago or something. I actually did get a little "advantage" out of his connection to GR, however: my local comics shop stocked his book, even before it got picked up by Top Shelf Comix (a truly cool small-to-medium publisher) and got national distribution. So I got to read it before most people did. Other than that, he's just another modestly successful cartoonist I might have known... but didn't.

They say that "networking" is the key to getting good jobs.... the old "who you know" factor outweighing "what you know". As brilliant as I am about networking technology, I suck at the inter-personal kind. So I guess these two examples help explain why I'm still unemployed. {shrug}

Governor Schwartzenegger

Remember in high school, how the smart kid with the well-thought-out campaign speech and ideas for how to make the school better would always lose the election for class president to the athlete or good-looking kid who just wanted the fun of running and the ego-boost of winning?

Yeah, that's what government elections are like as well.

But you know, if it's just a matter of being famous, maybe Martin Sheen could resign the presidency on TV (again) and run for president in the real world. We could do a lot worse, especially if he gets The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin as his chief of staff... or at least as his speechwriter.

Lost in Translation - Sweet But Not Sticky

my rating:

Lost in Translation is the story of the friendship that developes between Bill Murray (as a past-his-prime actor in Tokyo to shoot some wiskey adverts) and Scarlett Johansson (as a young college grad tagging along with her husband who is there for an unrelated photomarketing assignment). I wasn't blown away by it, but that's some of the charm of the film: it's low-key. Or at least as low-key as downtown Tokyo can be.

Some of the critic blurbs about this call it a "breakthrough" performance for Murray as if this were his first good "serious" or "dramatic" role, but I think maybe they're confusing him with some of his more manic cohorts on Saturday Night Live. When teamed with other comedians, he's always been the low-key subtle one, and when he plays the comic relief he's always brought as much depth to it as the script allows. He's never needed to wear bunny ears or do pratfalls to be funny. So I wasn't surprised by his acting here.

I was pleasantly surprised by how the relationship between the two characters develops. The two are drawn together, not by the allure of his celebrity or her youthful beauty, but by their mutual alienation both from the incomprehensible culture in which they're immersed and from their (for the most part) absent mates. Although I've never been anywhere I couldn't at least read the alphabet or without a generally "Western" culture, I can relate a bit to the cultural disorientation of being alone in a strange place, and being drawn at times to the sound of a familiar accent or the sight of familiar facial features... or even taking brief comfort in glimpsing an icon like McDonald's "golden arches". But they have more than just homesickness that draws them together, and their May-September friendship - note that I don't call it a "relationship" or "affair" - seems quite natural.

One problem I had with the movie is that it tends to caricature Japanese culture. Some of the bits - such as a picture menu where every item looks exactly the same, or the translator who clearly is not conveying the whole message - detracted from the realism of the story. But since the film is trying to capture the perception of the stranger in a strange land, where the ideosyncracies stand out and the commonalities aren't noticed, this is excusble. Especially since it doesn't look down on the eccentricities of Japanese culture, but rather presents Tokyo as "differently weird" from America.

Scarface - A Fucking Tragedy

my rating:

I understand that Scarface is getting re-released for its 20th anniversary this year. That isn't the way I saw it. Instead my neighborhood movie house is running a series of mob movies on Mondays this month. So I got to see it - nearly 3 hours of motion picture entertainment - for only two bucks. ("Oh, you saved up! How cute!" the woman at the box office cooed when I gave her my 8 quarters.)

It's the story of Tony Montana, a small-time criminal from Cuba, boat-lifted to Florida when Castro emptied his prisons in 1980. He gets involved in the latino criminal underworld, and through his sheer ambition and greed - considered virtues by many "respected" figures of the period - quickly rises to the top. Of course you know he's going to fall, and he does so spectacularly. I guess.

To some extent, Scarface suffers from the same changing standards that left me disappointed when I finally saw A Clockwork Orange a few years ago. While the largely unprecedented level of violence was shocking in its day, the many movies (and TV shows) that have followed its lead in the meantime have reduced some of the impact. Heck, it's become such a cult favorite among modern gangstas (apparently missing the irony), that it's practically a "standard". Which is why it's being re-released, I suppose.

Another thing that Scarface was noted for was its very liberal use of the word "fuck". There are several other vulgarities thrown in, but "fuck" is the real star of the script. At times it flirts with becoming an unintentional laugh line, almost like the dialog of Dennis Hopper's huffing psychotic in Blue Velvet. OK, we fuckin' get it. This is how criminals fuckin' talk. Fuck it and let's move on.

In a sense, watching Scarface is like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Almost from the beginning you can see what's going to happen, who it's going to happen to, and even how it'll come to pass. But you can't help watching it all play out. Pacino deserves much of the credit for that. Like a classical tragic hero, he's a man with great qualities but a tragic flaw - hubris - that proves his undoing.

Buffalo Soldiers - The War on Tedium

my rating:

If you don't see Buffalo Soliders, then the terrorists have already won.

This movie was a collateral casualty of the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. It was first shown (at the Toronto Int'l Film Festival) on the 10th of September in 2001, then shoved quickly into cold storage. In addition to featuring several explosions of various sizes (obviously unappealing in late 2001), it's rather unflattering to the U.S. military, and that was simply unacceptable in post-9/11 America.

Two years later, it's finally making its way into limited release. I managed to catch this movie at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts downtown; it didn't even make it to the one cineplex in town that runs "alternative" films. I don't expect it to get much further. It's too good. And too socially incorrect.

Joaquin Phoenix plays the likeable anti-hero Elwood, an enlisted clerk who carries on assorted black market dealings under the nose of his under-qualified commanding officer (played by Ed Harris), in Germany just before the Berlin Wall came down. They're a bit like an updated version of M*A*S*H's Radar and Henry Blake... if Radar were a convict serving a stint in the military as an alternative to time in prison, and dealt in heroin and weapons along with surplus cleaning supplies. Elwood's army is one of convicts and high-school dropouts, the o