Film Review: Across The Pond Edition

My plan yesterday was to see Hot Fuzz and Severance and write an all-British humour film review, but the movie times didn't work out for me, so I'm not going to be able to make quite as many wry observations about the differences between British and American comedy. Still, I'm glad I got the double feature that I did — I can't speak for Severance yet, although its reviews were generally less glowing than those of Hot Fuzz — I saw Once right after Hot Fuzz got out, and it was sublime. I seriously want Once singing through my head twenty-four hours a day, and I'd be a much happier person for it.

But Hot Fuzz first: It's not bad. It's pretty funny, and I laughed a good bit through it. But the creepy old guy sitting near me who coughed up his soda in the hair of the girls in the row in front of him, and who laughed his ass off during the trailer for Balls of Fury — I can see the reviews right now: Christopher Walken gives his best performance aimed at eleven-year-olds since Kangaroo Jack — he thought it was fucking hilarious. I'll grant him that Hot Fuzz isn't as, uh, subtle as your typical British comedy.

It's not as incisive a satire as the Shaun of the Dead, the previous collaboration of writer/director Edgar Wright, writer/star Simon Pegg, and awesomely laconic pile-of-blubber Nick Shore... or maybe it just doesn't translate from British to American so well. The zombie sub-genre, especially the George Romero take on it that Wright, Pegg, et al spoof, is in itself a commentary on commercialism, materialism, and other mindless patterns society falls into and individuals are too braindead to pull themselves out of. The zombies just need to be there, lumbering around in large enough numbers, to say all they have to say — Pegg's walk around London in the opening sequence of Shaun of the Dead tells us all we need to know about the non-zombies. The action genre, the kind of crap they show on TBS on the weekends, is more inane in its application. It's just a big, dumb kid talking shit about how awesome he is, Michael Bay looking for attention and believing (correctly) that if he makes an explosion big enough and films it from the right angle, you'll forget what a vacuous dumbass he is.

So the opening scene of Hot Fuzz — you've seen it in the previews — where Pegg's well-decorated police officer character is castigated (by woefully underused Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan, and Bill Nighy) for being too good at his job, that looked like there was some satirical possibility there. I don't know too much about British police, other than that they don't carry guns and wear ridiculous hats, but we've had at least one case in America where a prospective police officer was rejected from the force (or the "squad") for being too smart. Thing is, Hot Fuzz is too schizophrenic to really run anywhere with that idea... although Martin Lawrence has more or less demonstrated that "police are incompetent" conceit really doesn't travel well in the first place. The first half of Hot Fuzz targets the quiet hamlet of Sanford — I think it's supposed to be the British countryside version of Marc Cherry's Fairview: snootier, (much) older, and possibly whatever the English version of redneck is. I'm not sure if Sanford is supposed to parody a real sub-culture, like Fairview supposedly does, or if its self-parody of idealized British countryside living. When the town's Neighborhood Watch Alliance has a meeting and says that their biggest crime issue is the guy dressed like a living statue by the town fountain, I'm sure that's funny but I'm kind of puzzled as to why.

The second half of the movie is the action half, and it's much better done than the Bruckheimer crap it parodies. The characters may be deadly serious, but the people making the movie are, for once, aware of how preposterous their material is. I can't help but feel they're pandering a little bit though. Again, you've seen the preview where the town priest pulls two guns on our heroes. There's nothing inherently funny in that — it's even less funny within the context of the whole scene — but my audience, which consisted of me, the guy who laughed at Balls of Fury, the girls he coughed his soda up on, and two kids making out, thought that was a great moment. I could count at least ten better ones. In fact, I'll give Hot Fuzz more credit as an action movie — and a well-crafted one — than a comedy. I guess that Pegg and Frost are such good comedic actors that it's tough for them to top their previous work; Michael Bay is such a hack that just about anything spoofing his style automatically transcends its source material.

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I had reservations about spending my time on Once, because its an Irish musical drama about a street musician and a Czech emigré falling in... well, uh, here's the problem with the American romantic comedy. In addition to resuscitating the careers of some of our most annoying actors (I'm talking to you, Ashton), it's also killed off the beauty of true love, keeping it alive only in a trite vegetative state. To say that Once is about these two characters falling in love over their music makes it sound much cheesier than it is. Almost instantly, you're watching two people who you really like trying to find a fleeting happiness and hoping they can carry maybe a little piece of it with them once it passes.

I almost feel like not telling you what you're in for if you check out Once. It just reads so badly. It's a musical. It's shot in digital, handheld, and usually in pretty poor light. It's totally low-key. The only conflict to speak of in the movie is, "Will he let her drive his motorcycle?" The climax of the movie is these guys recording a song. And it's not like, will they record or won't they record, or will the record be good, will he get a record deal? That crap is for lesser movies, movies that need artifice to get you involved with the characters. Once strips out everything unnecessary — the glitter, the dance numbers, the melodrama, the orchestrations — and just lets these characters grow in front of your eyes like flowers.

I'm not doing Once justice here, or maybe I'm just spewing acclaim everywhere in my first-ever case of logorrhea. Once isn't merely good filmmaking: it does practically nothing yet elicits something in you, or in me, and it overcame my misanthropy and found something human, empathizing and connecting with these people. It's art, and as it left its protagonists, the guy and girl, a little better for having known each other, it also left me a little better for having known them.

Playboy: The Hot Former Justice Department White House Liaison Issue!

Our friends at the House Judiciary Committee held what had to be the steamiest, sexiest Congressional hearing since Valerie Plame gave Georgia Representative Lynn Westmoreland a boner during an Oversight Committee hearing. "Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me, but this afternoon my darkest high-level Bush administration official fantasy totally came true! I was minding my own business, watching C-SPAN when this hot, innocent, 33-year-old blonde lawyer came on to give some testimony, if you know what I mean. Sweet! So there was Monica Goodling, sweating behind that bendy microphone, getting asked all these questions — uncomfortable questions — by one tie-wearing, square-jawed, chin-dimpled Ohio Republican Jim Jordan and I was getting so horny! That's when the high school cheerleading squad dropped by... and we discussed the overturned conviction of Georgia Thompson."

The current theory, and there has to be some truth to it, is that Goodling wasn't hired for her extensively sparse credentials so much as for her affliation to Pat Robertson's Regent University law school. Because if there's one thing Jesus was a fan of, it's lawyers. And defense contractors. I'm sure if she went to college at Sodom Tech and law school at Gomorrah A&M, she'd be paying off her student loans as a drug rep, sleeping with doctors for commissions instead of fucking around with the Justice Department. But I have to believe that her qualifications for chief legal counsel to Gonzales and senior Justice Department White House liaison aren't just that she's a Christian fundamentalist; she got the job because she's a hot Christian fundamentalist. Sitting around the conference room, you've got that troll Alberto Gonzales, M. C. Rove, Kyle Sampson looking like a Karl Rove bobblehead doll, Paul McNulty, Harriet Miers, and they obviously wanted someone at the table you could look at for more than five seconds without your eyes melting.

Politicians, especially puritanical, sexually-dysfunctional right-wing politicians, are pervy like that. Gonzales was "comforting" Goodling during a "difficult period" in her life, our abstinence-promoting AIDS ambassador slept around with D.C. hookers, and Wolfie diplomatically negotiating peace in his own bedroom by giving his girlfriend (who always seems to appear in news reports as his "companion," whatever that means) a six-figure salary at the State Department. I'd totally not be shocked to learn that Rumsfeld used to be gay for Doug Feith. Really, it would explain so much. Love makes people do crazy things, like invading Troy. Or Iraq.

Bad Idea in Tennessee: An Update

"Fajita," who has thirteen blogs but still magically managed to find time to not only read but also comment (much appreciated) on mine, said I should follow up on the fake-gunman story out of Tennessee I posted about last week. The prank brought up two separate issues: The laughable one, how can you be a grown-up in America and believe you could pull this politically incorrect shit — with kids — and the entire community would just be cool with it. There are school districts that won't teach evolution because it's too controversial, but turning a retreat into a real-life Camp Crystal Lake is going to go over smoothly? (Also, Camp Crystal Lake is maybe one of those names, like Hitler Industries, Inc., that you might not want to give your business, negative associations and all. I bet this "outdoor education center" down in Florida was disappointed when they found out "campcrystallake.com" was taken.)

There was also the serious issue that rubbed me the wrong way: the teachers pulling off this prank by abusing their students' trust. As an educator, it's your job, for example, to remind the kids that tragedies like the Virginia Tech shooting are extraordinarily rare (at least in America). If there were a crazy gunman, the adults around would take responsibility instead of just telling the kids to duck and cover and gleefully watching them cry.

That being said, I found a follow-up article, and Fajita is right. The laughable point still stands, and the Thinking part of me has responded, "Good, the teacher and assistant principal are suspended without pay for the rest of the year and world makes sense." But there are mitigating factors, the main one being that they told the kids that there'd be some sort of prank during the retreat, so the whole trust-abusing thing pretty much goes out the window. Just don't make a career out of playing Ashton Kutcher, guys.

The ABC News follow-up article contradicts the Associated Press article I originally found. ABC News implies that the students weren't told there was a gunman on the loose; instead, they were told "there were people inside the state park shooting guns." Big difference. I'd be surprised if there weren't people shooting guns in a Tennessee state park. Yeah, it's an easy joke, but I guarantee you that as you're reading this, there's someone in that park hunting ducks or deer or something. Also, the ABC News article says that the group discussion the students had — the topic was "what to do if there's a gunman on the loose" — happened before the prank. (Editor's note: that's not explicit in the ABC News article, so I might have culled that from one of the less informative articles I found on the subject, or I could just be totally making that up.) Assuming it's true, though, if none of the students found the timing a little suspicious, well, joke's on them.

As our president once told the people of Tennessee, "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again." See, lesson learned.

Silent Single Mingle

The New Jersey Young Professionals held their "Silent Single Mingle" last night. The rules were cell phones off, keep whispering to a minimum, and passing notes is strongly encouraged. I'd been looking forward to this one for a while, since most of my NJYP events tend to be pretty silent anyway, the silent single mingle seemed tailor-made for me. And let me just tell you, it was freaking awesome! The first half-hour or forty-five minutes, especially...

I got there right at the beginning, cause I tend to do better at these social things when no one's around. People — guys — trickled in, and what happened couldn't have gone better if it was planned. Each of us walks in, takes a pad and pen from the table in the middle of the room, gets a drink (we scribble down our orders for the bartender), and takes it to a seat around the perimeter. And we sit there. Perfectly evenly spaced out, each by ourselves and no one moves for at least fifteen minutes. It's super-awkward, but I can't help from giggling: for once, the other party people are doing the same thing I am!

The good times didn't last. Girls showed up eventually, and twenty-something guys in the room coalesced around the six girls, and it wasn't silent anymore. Low point of the night: some bland douchebag Mike takes a break from chatting up a girl, who clearly has lousy taste, and turns to me, "Having fun?"

"Sure," I said with uncommon enthusiasm, the joy of the earlier sitting around like a lump not completely worn off yet.

"Hey, you're not supposed to speak," Mike chastens me.

Oh God, Mike, that was fucking hilarious! I bet you spent all night thinking that shit up! I left after that.

Mom told me about when she was in fifth grade, going to school in Newark. There was this boy who liked her, Charles Unger-something... I was too distracted by the idea that someone actually like-liked my insufferable Mom to pick up on the name. But Mom didn't like him, because he was a year older and he smoked. Mom's not exactly good at math, so I had to make sure she got the timeline correct here: Charles Ungersomething smoked — cigarettes — in the sixth grade. What, was he drinking coffee as an infant?

So I want all the anti-smoking nutballs out there to shut the hell up, cause when was the last time you saw an eleven-year-old smoking? The fifties, that's when.

In Today's "Bad Idea News"

CNN reports from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, "Teachers stage fake gunman attack on sixth graders." That's one of those awesome headlines that simultaneously tells you everything you need to know and leaves a million questions. I'll answer the most pressing one: it was supposed to be a "learning experience," like on one of those corporate retreats, where they make you fall backwards into the arms of someone else or do the zip line, except this was children "begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them," in the context of psycho mass-murderers saturating the media. Assistant Principal Don Bartch led the trip and tried to justify it afterwards, in that cautious manner public servants develop when they're surrounded by outrage. He comes off hilariously stoic, though: "We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation," he said, ignoring the fact that you can discuss that without the live simulation.

I'm surprised at how much effort these teachers put into frightening the kids.

During the last night of the trip, staff members convinced the 69 students that there was a gunman on the loose. They were told to lie on the floor or hide underneath tables and stay quiet. A teacher, disguised in a hooded sweat shirt, even pulled on a locked door.

After the lights went out, about 20 kids started to cry, 11-year-old Shay Naylor said.

I had teachers who wouldn't even bother to mimeograph their dittos legibly. Admittedly, this teaching strategy could potentially solve a lot of classroom behavior projects — "If I catch you passing notes one more time, I swear I'm gonna call in Johnny The Ax-Wielding Psychopath, and he'll give you so much detention...."

The parents, of course, overreact, but — unlike their poor kids — for all the wrong reasons. It's politically incorrect to make the kids think there's a gunman on the loose right after the Virginia Tech massacre, which is bullshit. I read the article the first time and I thought it actually sounded like a kind of cool way to play make-believe, like people who take vacations at spy school or something. Granted, you're kind of forced into this little mind-fuck here, but it's honestly no different than going camping late at night, telling ghost stories and holding the flashlight right under your chin, right?

You're scared cause you don't know what's out there. But you're also scared cause you're on your own... and so there really is something to learn from this whole fear experience, but it's not what do we do in the incredibly small chance we're being hunted down. I would feel betrayed, the lesson being not to trust the lying, manipulating adults around you — bet they're all back in the teachers' lounge having a good laugh about that one. And in sixth grade, too! Shouldn't you at least be allowed to hit puberty before turning all jaded towards the authorities?

Next Time, I'm Switching to Linux

My goddamn computer is sick again, for the third time in three months. The computer isn't finding the hard drive, and I screamed, "It's inside of you, you piece of crap! Next to your video card!" But that didn't help. Go figure. So now I'm peeved, like totally despondent, trying to remind myself of those poor Honduran children and how they're still using Amigas down there; but, away from my internet, Word, and games, I have little sympathy. I took my computer down to Tekserve where the prognosis looks bleak — their diagnostic software won't even start the machine — and this was when I, uh, thought it might be a good idea to purchase the extended warranty, while it's still available.

But my guess is that this whole broken computer thing is a scam Apple perpetrates: I have two major tech support issues right before time runs out on the warranty, and now that I have two more years of protection, I'm sure nothing will go wrong again... until 2009. The day the extended warranty expires, I swear.

So in addition to my computer frying itself, my iPod is also on its death bed, and the lack of options in the computer industry is incredibly frustrating. I can either replace the iPod with another Apple product that I'll have very little faith in. I can go for the Microsoft Zune, as if I've never had any crazy blue screen of death issues with any of Microsoft's products. Or I could go for something significantly less cool. Creative Zen player, anyone?

There's this guy at work who's trying to get me investing in the stock market, so I picked up a book and started looking through it, and... how is this even legal?! Just on the surface, it sounds like the biggest scam of all time. You buy stock, which means you buy part-ownership in a company, but you don't actually see any of the money that the company makes. As a matter of fact, the company can be losing money while the stock price rises; the stock's value is totally a function of how much the millions of greedy, fearful idiots in the market think the stock should be worth. It has absolutely no direct relation to anything concrete, and people can lose money off of well-run companies and can make their fortunes off of companies that don't make a dime of revenue. I wish I had more readers — like, lots more — and then I'd totally put bizarre financial pronouncements in my blog, just to screw with people. Mayonnaise is hot! Put all your money in mayonnaise! Then the next day: Sell your mayonnaise and put the money into the kitten industry!

What I don't understand is that since the value of these stocks isn't tied to anything, other than how much someone else is willing to pay for them, what stops me from just going around selling random worthless junk? Like, I'd try to sell you my dead skin flakes for fifty bucks. You'd be all, why would I spend fifty dollars on your dead skin flakes, and I'd say well, you'd try to sell them to someone else for sixty dollars. Ten dollar profit. But you'd go, who'd want to buy your dead skin flakes for sixty dollars? And I'd answer, someone who's going to try and sell them for seventy. This is essentially the stock market, except you do it wearing a suit and tie, and for a lot more than fifty bucks.

What The Hell Is Wrong With England?

They have a queen, for Christ's sake, and they treat her like freaking royalty. It's the twenty-first century. We've had an Enlightenment, invented democracy and liberalism: get with the program, England!

And get with the program America, while we're at it with the program-getting. Our President held a white-tie banquet for the queen and her totally emasculated prince husband, and seven-thousand of their closest friends. The White House spent the weekend getting ready, spending your tax dollars on floral arrangements, touching-up paint jobs, and gold-engraved invitations. It would be a obscene waste of money even if this weren't a president who hasn't bothered to attend a single funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq. I know, I know: our soldiers didn't have the good fortune to be born into one of history's most prestigious inbred families. Screw them. Well, I guess that's what the Bush administration's doing.

For some reason, whenever the British come and visit, Americans have to turn into the same foppish dandies our forefathers fought a revolution to get the hell away from. Have you seen Entertainment Tonight's coverage of David Beckham's move to Los Angeles? Or that Katie + Peter show on the E! network? Who the hell are Katie and Peter, why should I care, and what are they saying? You're from England; speak English, dammit! The queen's got to be the worst though, and Bush's usual obsequious nature in the presence of his political betters — Dick Cheney, queen of England, American Legion — is just sickening.

Here's the protocol: The queen shall be addressed as "Your Majesty." One does not shake the queen's hand unless she offers her hand first. After the queen is done eating, everybody is done eating. Um, has it occurred to anybody that maybe the other guests aren't finished? God, how I'd love to be the one greeting the queen here in America: "Welcome to America, we don't have royalty here. You can carry your own bags." The protocol may be fine when our head of state visits England's backwards aristocracy, but when you come over here, you follow our customs.

In other news, Paris Hilton got her ass arrested because she thought that, being Paris Hilton and all, it was cool for her to drive with a suspended license. You know, because she's more important than the rest of us. Her family actually got mad at the judge for sentencing her (instead of at the celebutard who drove drunk in the first place, then got and violated her probation), and Hilton apologists took time off from swooning over the queen to complain that forty-five days in rich white person Beverly Hills jail was too harsh. I see absolutely no connection between the two attitudes.

In Today's Ape News...

We have a headline from the Associated Press that reads Activists want chimp declared a 'person'. Animal rights advocates in Austria are petitioning a court to have Hiasl the Chimp legally declared a person — although not for the "animal rights' activists are nutballs" reason that you think. The sanctuary Hiasl calls home went bankrupt and is shutting down, and Hiasl's homo sapiens friends want to collect donations so he's not out on the street, dancing for food. Trouble is, under Austrian law, only humans can collect personal donations; hence the court case. I guess I'm the only one who thinks it might make more sense to change the law than to grant Hiasl human rights.

The story made me pine for the old days of Monkeynews, which was a regular feature on Ricky Gervais's former radio show. The show's star was this bald round-headed Manc bloke Karl Pilkington who had a gift for whatever the opposite of critical thinking is, and he reported on, among other things, the latest monkey news. Calling it "news" was a little misleading, since the Monkeynews wasn't timely or topical, and was pretty much always untrue. (Although there's this outfit here called "Fox News," whose stories are also made up — new study at James Dobson University reveals links between supporting Barack Obama and liver cancer — but they manage to hold on to their "news" moniker.) Typical example: There was this barber shop, right. And they were looking for somebody to do haircuts, but they couldn't find anyone. So one day, this monkey walks in, and the boss is like, "Well, hand him a pair of scissors, let's see what he can do."

And the story goes on from there, rambling through the inter-species behind-the-scenes politics at this haircutters. (The monkey could do haircuts but they wouldn't let it work the till.) Pilkington's ingenuous sincerity sells the whole bit — he found it online, after all.

I guess that's the monkeys' bad fortunes, sharing 98.5 percent of our DNA.

Matt Lauer was doing his annual "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" travelogue this week, instead of reporting on actual news. On Wednesday, Matt was in Bhutan, a country that you probably first heard about on Wednesday, and will never hear about again. My guess is that Today's producers chose Bhutan because it's a nation transitioning to democracy — peacefully — under the auspices of its royal family, and the Bhutanese recently held mock elections for practice. The Yellow Party won and the Red Party was the runner-up; the Blue Party came in third, and just like in America, the Green Party came in last. Goddamn Nader!

After visiting Italy last year, I've really wanted to do a lot more traveling. Like everywhere: I bookmarked the Lonely Planet website and everything. Bhutan isn't exactly listed in Tourism for Dummies; the country only issues six thousand tourist visas every year, is pretty unfamiliar with comforts of modern life like electricity and roads, and is physically challenging to get into in the first place. But that's part of its appeal over, say, Disney World. It was early in the morning, I had to go to work, and I was grumpy when out of nowhere, I asked Mom, "How come Matt Lauer gets to go to Bhutan and I don't?"

"Because Matt Lauer has a good job and you don't. Once you get a good job, you can go to Bhutan, too." Which is bullshit: when you have a "good" job, they expect you to be at the job, and not trekking the Himalayas in Thimpu. I decided to call Mom on it.

"You have a good job. How come you don't get to go to Bhutan?... Or anywhere else for that matter." That shut her up for a little while, until Matt Lauer starting talking Bhutanese politics again.

Bhutan is moving towards democracy because the Dragon King Jigme Singye Wangchuk is abdicating his post and installing his son, the Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Nagyal Wangchuck as the head of state. Matt pointed out that Jigme Jr. is the world's youngest head of state; he's twenty-six, less than a year older than I am. "Look at this," Mom said, still with that early-morning half-pissed facetiousness, "He's twenty-six and he's the king of a whole country. What have you accomplished?"

That shut me up. It's probably not as depressing as being in your fifties and walking into the office one day to discover that you now report to a twenty-six-year-old hot shot just out of Harvard Business School, but still. Ouch. I felt a little more cataplectic than usual. I'd make a good king of Bhutan — at least for someone who knows zero about Bhutan; I'm a fast learner — but it looks like that position is already taken.

Eloquent Quotes from Our President

Speaking of faux superheroes, our president, The Decider, has christened himself Commander Guy. At least that sounds a bit more innocuous than The Decider, who I believe was a rejected character from the Legion of Super Villains. ("What's your superpower?" "Eeny, meeny, miney, moe.")

Look, I know the man's no Cicero here, and while he's made more than enough verbal gaffes to support a thriving page-a-day calendar industry, I'm not going to fault him for sounding like he's twelve. I'm sure many of his constituents talk like they're nine. What's worrisome is that Bush actually wants recognition as the guy in charge of our troops in Iraq. Wasn't that supposed to be the responsibility of the war czar, anyway?

I liked the timetable idea, although I think maybe it's misdirected. The terrorists aren't going to just wait for us to pack up and leave, like the right-wing mouthpieces predict; in fact, the terrorists don't seem to be waiting at all. Success for our troops isn't... uh, whatever the hell Commander Guy says it is this week — usually something having to do with fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here, even though they weren't even in Iraq until we showed up. It has to be looked at on a more micro level, at least for now. How about we try to get the Iraqis to go a week without blowing up all that infrastructure we're apparently building and the media isn't reporting on? Let's shoot for a decrease in the violence.

Which is why I don't think the troops can leave: someone has to keep the mess we made from completely imploding, and it doesn't look like any other country is volunteering. I wonder why. But something has to change since our troops are easily eroding what little stability there was in the country — you know, in the five minutes between when Saddam was deposed and when the Iraqis went mad looting his palaces. Here's my idea: we've spent five hundred billion dollars already on this war. There are twenty-seven million Iraqis. (Love the favicon for the CIA's website, too. Screams "professionalism.") That's about $18,500 per Iraqi. So what would've happened if we just gave each Iraqi $18,500 in cash, told them to go buy a flat-screen TV or a hot tub or something, just leave each other the hell alone? They'd all be too busy partying to blow up marketplaces and stuff. Peace!

People are going apeshit for Spider-Man. Thing is, I can't think about Spider-Man without falling head-first into some gaping logical holes. Okay, he's bitten by this irradiated spider, and how does that make him half-arachnid? I've never lived on a farm, or been in 4-H, but I'm pretty sure you don't get a mule when the horse eats the donkey. There needs to be some fucking going on, and the offspring gets the magical powers, or the nearsightedness, exostosis, and sluggish metabolism, if your sire and dam are my parents. I can see a radioactive spider bite giving you cancer, maybe. Or this. (Warning: eeewwwwww.)

I don't know how other people aren't bothered by this. Are the special effects that great that you can watch the movie and not be like, "But... spider silk comes out of their butts. Why would Spider-Man's webs come out of his hands? And isn't that convenient, how the unstable radio-isotope he's infected with makes the webs come out of his fingers, and not, say, his ears?" Anyway, I went to this Spider-Man page on Wikipedia, and what starts out ridiculous just becomes insulting. Here's a partial list of Spider-Man's superpowers: he can heal himself rapidly, has enhanced resistance to drugs, has enhanced vision, has superhuman strength, clairvoyance, and — for some reason — is immune to vampirism. Yes, but can he also keep aphids from destroying crop yields? Apparently the one beneficial thing spiders provide to the ecosystem, and Spider-Man can't do it. Pathetic.

Hanami

Today was a sunny afternoon, around sixty degrees, perfect to spend at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden — unless God hates you and cursed you with allergies. I'm not a big fan of plants, but there are two good reasons to check out the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens when the weather's right: the Japanese garden and the cherry-blossom season, which is in peak bloom right around now.

I'm a bit jealous, since every plant I touch turns to dust in a matter of days. We've got something that kind of resembles a garden at our house, tulips and lilies, but its life cycle is so depressing I wish it weren't even there. Fifty-one weeks of the year, they're just these ugly brown leafy sprout things. One day in April, they bloom and they're gorgeous, and for the next six days, they pretty much fall apart, leaf by dying leaf. I don't know what I'm doing wrong: they get food and water and only occasionally run over by my car.

We've also got a bunch of hideous, non-flowering plants in front of our house and I'm surreptitiously trying to kill them, with no success at all. My dad actually pays to have these monstrosities put into the ground, and I'm supposed to water them. (Dad, plants have survived hundreds of millions of years without me watering them. We're disrupting their natural evolution! This is just playing God! Uh... plant God.) I don't get the point of non-flowering shrubbery — aside from their role in the carbon cycle and keeping life on the planet functioning, I mean. They're just big blobs of fauna, without any structure like a bonsai tree, shape like an evergreen, or color like flowers. And they attract bees, but thankfully not so many lately.

Seriously, pests though they are, the disappearing bees — colony collapse disorder — is a big damn problem. No bees means no pollination, which means no plants, which means no animals that eat the plants, which means no food for us. On that happy note, here's the obligatory pretty pictures.


Ironically, the cherry blossom garden and the Zen garden are both full of New York City's perennial Japanese tourist population. Which confounds me. When I get the time and money to visit Tokyo, it's not like I'm gonna be spending my vacation at Hyper-Convenience U.S. Mart.

Cool New MySpace People

I have lots of reasons for hating MySpace, although most of them are that MySpace is owned by a company called Intermix Media, which is owned by News Corp, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch... so every time you sign in to check on your top eight friends, it's like you're basically giving Sean Hannity a blowjob. Liberals in the media need to start spreading that image: A vote against H.R. 2060, the Internet Radio Equality Act, is like giving Rush a sensual massage — there's 336 dudes in Congress and I'd like to remind all of them that rubbing Limbaugh's junk is totally, a hundred percent gay, just in case the mental image on its own wasn't enough to discourage them. But today's reason for hating on MySpace is that they keep on suggesting I meet "Cool New People" like this:

I don't know about Ryan or Seamus, but Hillary? Really? Did they change the meaning of "cool" and forget to tell me?

Full disclosure: John Edwards is in my friends, but hey, at least he's got a well-defined universal health care plan and has taken responsibility and repudiated his vote on the war in Iraq. That makes him cool. I'm sure the entire MySpace demographic, which seems to consist of fourteen-year-olds, derivative alt-rock bands, and hacky, pandering stand-up comedians, will agree with me.

I'm a little disheartened by this MySpace electioneering, since most everyone on MySpace is either too young, too dumb, too drunk, or too much of an automaton selling home mortgage and penis-enhancement cream to actually vote. It's like campaigning at an underground rave, although who wouldn't get a kick out of seeing Mitt Romney in a mesh shirt, head to toe in body glitter and twirling a couple of lightsticks. Dude, Romney, if you do that, and drop some X, I'll totally forgive the whole Mormon, Reagan-idolizing Republican thing you've got going, which is being a whole lot more generous than most of your base would ever be.

By the way, did you hear that MySpace and Mark Burnett, also known as the guy who's responsible for shoving seventeen iterations of Jeff Probst in America's face, are coming up with a new political reality show. Bunch of people with webcams and free time upload audition videos, and — in a shocking twist for democracy — idiots vote on who's the most telegenic. It's all premised on the notion that anyone can make a good leader of the free world, even this jackass, who's flipping us off in his profile picture. Or this woman with presidential-sized tits. Or even this retard could be our president. I'm sure that's exactly what the founding fathers had in mind.

Despite the comparisons it's getting to American Idol, I'm not all that worried about MySpace Picks The President having a huge effect on the political process. See, with American Idol, all those millions of people keeping Sanjaya on TV for weeks had to do was send a text message or go online and vote. I firmly believe, and Hillary will back me up on this, that's all that the nation's youth is willing to do in order to make their voices heard. In the real election, you've gotta figure out where your polling place is, get off your fat ass, deal with the elderly people staffing the voting machines. Pretty sure the kids are all too busy posting panda fight videos on each other's bulletin boards.

While you were busy this weekend not running up extraordinary charges on your cell phone bill, the Korean electronics manufacturer LG was hosting our first annual National Texting Championship. Swifter, higher, stronger, abbreviated-er. The competition must have been thrilling: all the excitement of touch typing, but much, much smaller. Our first ever national text messaging champion is Morgan Pozgar, a thirteen year-old girl — I know, I can't believe our country's best text messager is a tweenager — or, as the AFP article I found described her in the headline, "13yo skool grl." Thanks, clever AFP reporter, for dumbing us all down like that.

I guess the plus side here is if, say, our army is stuck behind enemy lines in Iraq and they need someone to SMS the Defense Department "omg, nd 2 get outta here asap!!! lol!" in an emergency, now we know who to turn to. Thank God.

I do not understand the appeal of texting. I mean, you've got the damn phone right there, so why can't you just use it? The whole texting trend started in Europe, where they're apparently too good to actually talk to each other, and also too good to hit on me in the bars. The Finnish cell phone company Nokia popularized texting back in 1998, when they focus-grouped what the marketing department calls "a younger demographic." High school students. Nokia asked the same dumbshits who brought us Carson Daly and five direct-to-video American Pie movies what they were looking for in a phone. This explains why your cell phone has games that you'll pay $4.95 a minute for on it. You see, grown-ups were all using their phone for bourgeois things, brokering business deals or calling triple-A when the car broke down. Kids are supposed to be in school, but they've got more important things to do, like alerting their friends, "party @ jims house 2nite." Society began to crumble, and the super-classy prime minister totally dumped his gf via txt msg. Nokia stumbled upon the untapped market of people who find being a useful, productive member of society just a little too onerous, and the next thing you know, people are too busy Twittering and texting their votes for American Idol to reproduce, and that's the end of the human race.

And the prize for hastening our doom is $25,000, cash, which I'm sure tweenage Morgan will put to good use, donating it to cancer research or saving it in her college fund or... no, according to the article, "ozgar, who says she wants to work in fashion when she's older, had no hesitation about how to spend her prize money -- 10,000 dollars for the east coast championship and a further 15,000 dollars for the national award. She said she was going to hit the stores in New York City." You know, for that kind of money, you could buy like, two-hundred cell phones and text your 200 best friends simultaneously.

Now there's a competition that I would watch.

I think what I resent here is the cultural assumption that we're all too busy to have genuine freaking contact with each other. Every new technology seems bent on making our conversations even more vapid than they already are, while the proliferation of communication makes us think we're actually in touch with one another. I mean, no one ever gives me a phone call, except for my parents and my boss, and the fact that some people find the possibility of human contact completely gratuitous sort of irritates me. Just a little. Okay, who's in my chat room? Hundred people, maybe hundred twenty. I wonder what their vital stats are, that's definitely the first thing I care about when I meet someone. Is "skifan218" a dude or a chick? If I have sex with skifan218 — through the keyboard, mouse, the fiber optics, the TCP and ARP-routers, bits and bytes: it's all so hott! I'm too busy to spell correctly and I've got to express my deepest emotions in punctuation. "Jane and I live less than a mile from each other, and we never would've met if it wasn't for eHarmony!"

So what do we do? We legitimize this crap. We give it to the most well-adjusted people in our society, the children, we let them make up a new language, a new subculture. We have a reason for being our lazy, alienated selves: the kids are all doing it. I can't wait until we take the trend to its conclusion and infantilize everything.

I finished Foucault's Pendulum the other day, and I'm super disappointed after six-hundred forty one pages. The book itself is a glorious nightmare to puzzle through, a satire of conspiracy theories that's it's own remarkably well-constructed world domination plan spanning the past seven centuries and also total bullshit. My issue with Foucault's Pendulum, though, is how predictable it is. Might sound weird — but I freaking called it! The whole point and purpose of the book I summed up in my post from a few weeks back, more infelicitously than Eco, naturally. But also much more readably.

I should be a writer.

Vote "No" on Prop #2

Today's the Board of Education election, the most useless election ever. There's only one guy running for Board of Ed, so the good news is that I can fuck with our sacred democratic process by writing in Abraham Lincoln or Tom Cruise or Captain Crunch or something. (I think either Lincoln or Captain Crunch would make a better addition to our Board of Ed than any of the current members.) I wasn't going to bother voting, but there's also the budget issue, which I voted "yes" to, since I don't pay property taxes and therefore it doesn't affect my bottom line. And there's Proposition #2, which allocates money to spread Astroturf on the football and soccer fields behind the high school. Well, that sounds like hard-earned tax dollars well-spent, after all our high school football and soccer teams haven't done for me. How much money are we talking about here?

Two million dollars. For fake grass. I think for that sort of money, we ought to be able to Astroturf the whole town.

I wasn't on the football or soccer team back when I went to high school. I wasn't one of those aloof emo kids either; I joined the literary magazine, the band, the quiz bowl team, and probably some other stuff I can't even remember, and you know how much local money all of those clubs got combined? Not one damn penny. We had to sell cookies, magazines, bagels, oranges (surprisingly popular), any sort of crap just to make, say, a thousand dollars for a new computer. So I'm a little bit resentful that people are coming together for the sports teams the way no one, not the school or the PTA or the Board of Ed or the town helped us out.

I have a compromise. We spend the two million dollars on new books instead of Astroturf, but then we let the soccer players kick the books around outside. Everybody wins.

Call Center

We had this little cross-continental tech support incident at work yesterday.

Last week, the office became the proud owner of a Hewlett-Packard all-in-one scanner-copier combination device object thing. I plugged it in, but we were all dismayed to discover that it wouldn't make copies, at least not without resizing and shrinking the original. Much time was wasted. This morning, the hardware IT guy came in and made a call to HP tech support, which is evidently located in Bangalore, India.

Let me say that I am overflowing with sympathy for the poor people stuck working the help desk; I've spent days dealing with the less technically-inclined over the phone, and frankly the combination of confused half-wits who don't know a mouse from a hamster and angry jerks blaming their computer problems on you that you have to deal with would turn even the most patient saint into a raving mad Luddite. I honestly don't know how the help desk people keep their cool — not to mention actually solving customers' computer issues — unless maybe heavy, heavy doses of Valium are involved.

There was probably a bit of frustration in the air already, since we'd been looking forward to photocopying things full-size for a week already, and even sitting across the room I could feel the vibes of disgruntlement going down the phone lines, into the switchboard, beamed to a satellite, and bounced back to India. Just to boost the awkwardness, the hardware guy, interfacing with tech support, put India on speakerphone. It sounded like this:

"Did you press the 'copy' button or the 'print' button?"

"Did you install the HP 5570 Scandisk driver?"

"When you go to print, does a window appear on the screen?"

...and a little pitchier...

"Does the HP Document Center start up when you turn on the scanner?"

"Does the picture shrink in one direction or both directions?"

...India's voice turns musical....

"Is the scanner plugged into a USB 2.0 port?"

"And is the printer plugged into an IEEE-2848 parallel port?"

"Did you try resetting the scanner?"

I'm sure HP spent a good deal of money sending this tech guy to accent reduction classes (no way generous billion dollar company would make its beloved employees pay for their own training) but now he sounds like Apu from The Simpsons.

"Okay, when you want to make a copy, you need to go and scan your image into the Document Center. Then select Export to PDF from the File menu and open the PDF with Acrobat Reader..." which I'll admit sounds like a lot more work than just pressing the copy button and standing by the printer, waiting for output. This sent our hardware guy over the edge. "You know, this scanner was advertised as being able to make copies. If it's gonna be that much work, I'd rather just return it. What's your return policy?"

Thus starts like a five-minute debate on the topic "What'dya mean you don't have a return policy?" I'm almost certain something or other was lost in translation from English to heavily-accented English, but the gist of the conversation was as follows: The scanner is supposed to make full-size copies. Also, the scanner is not supposed to make full-size copies. Once you settle the contradiction without causing a rift in the time-space of the universe, you can't return the scanner.

"What's your return policy? Your return policy. We only bought the scanner a week ago. It's not functioning the way I expected it to function. It says right here on the box that it makes copies." And this is only the shit from one customer that one Indian call center guy has to take. Imagine dealing with this twenty-four/seven, a nation of a billion people, with nuclear weapons. All I'm saying is we should start building fallout shelters now. "But it should make full-size copies. If I want to shrink the copies, that should be my choice. Your return policy. How do I return this and get my money back? What do you mean I can't get my money back? You realize that you're basically telling me, and my group, and everybody in my organization never to buy another HP product ever again?"

And that's where I'd find license to just hang the fuck up, which is why I shouldn't be working the help desk.

Our guy was a trouper, though, staying on the line through repeated requests to get a manager, and then repeated requests to make sure he wasn't going to hang up on us while getting the manager, and then repeatedly telling us that the manager wasn't in. Even after we thought he hung up, and we were all making jokes about how much HP customer service has gone down the tubes since they outsourced it to India, he was still on the line, double-checking our phone number and everything. Man, if they gave out awards for the most tenacious call center guy, I'd totally nominate him. And if I'm ever in Bangalore, I'll be sure to take him out for a drink.

Fortunately, I don't think I'll ever be in Bangalore, so no having to follow through on that.

Film Review: The Lookout and Grindhouse

I want to spare you some of the disappointment I felt walking out of both these movies and totally lower your expectations. Not that either movie was bad at all, but the reviews were so glowing that both films' mere artful adequacy and eleven dollar price tags made me feel cheated in the end. Let's start with The Lookout, starring that kid from 3rd Rock From The Sun and directed by some guy. It got an 87% rating on rottentomatoes.com and a 73/100 rating on metacritic.com, largely on its success as a character study instead of a bank heist flick. A good chunk of my reaction to The Lookout was, therefore, honestly my mistake — you pick up on one stray reference to Memento in an obscure write-up somewhere and you start assuming this and that. Blatant thematic similarities to Rian Johnson's much more cerebrally engaging Brick — again, the former alien kid plays an insider-turned-outsider who becomes the center of an intricate criminal plot — also popped into my head. Despite what everyone who saw the movie before had to say about it, there just wasn't all that much to tickle my brain. I felt like I could totally disregard whole chunks of the movie, and worse, since I wasn't occupied trying to piece the thing together, or at least mesmerized by the cinematography a la Brick or (another one of my favorites I'll talk more about later) Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, my mind kept wandering back to the wrong questions, namely, "Doesn't the alien kid's mental disability seem a bit inconsistent?" I mean, with Memento, I had to watch the movie three times before I finally realized, "Hey, how does Guy Pierce remember that he has no short-term memory?"

I'll say that as a character study, looking at Joseph Gordon-Levitt's tragic collapse after breaking his brain in an annoyingly-filmed car accident and the conflict between his conscience and his desire to reclaim some his past glory — and independence, the film is truly successful, if not maybe a little too gentle. Even forgetting some extraneous scenes with a dopey comic-relief Jeff Daniels that bring the character study down, I could have done with more contrast, both internally between Joseph Gordon-Levitt's two desires and externally, between him and the stock but beautifully manipulative bad guys. It works, and all the pieces fit, but — and maybe this only because I had a different movie in my mind — I just didn't care.

---

Then I snuck into Grindhouse, which seemed appropriate, given the whole conceit of the movie. Not that that's why I snuck in — I would've snuck into a self-made Volver double-feature too — but I'd have a different justification. (I'm cheap and movies are overpriced.) Let me first say that I don't think Grindhouse is really for mass consumption, especially for anyone of my generation who's never been inside a movie theater with fewer than eighteen screens, stadium seating and reclining chairs, and Dolby 5.1 surround sound. It's for film pervs like Quentin Taratino — and I think "film perv" is an appropriate way to describe anyone who lists Manos: The Hands of Fate among his favorite movies — trying to relive the good old days when you couldn't be a hundred percent sure that the sticky stuff on the theater floor was just Coke.

Grindhouse is two full-length movies, four "previews" for fictional coming attractions, and I think there was a random cigarette ad in there somewhere too. Despite what often-wrong New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott wrote in his review, they're not funny, or sly parodies, or worth anyone's time. For example, one of the fake films is "Machete," starring Mexican Danny Trejo as the title character and some Mexican guy who looks like Cheech Marin but apparently isn't as a machine-gun shooting priest. Yes, they quip lame one-liners like they did back in the [fill-in-the-blank]-sploitation days, but so what? Those jokes started off life moldy and didn't age well. I was really hoping that "Machete" would be a slick commentary on America's attitude towards immigrants, like something South Park might do, but it's nothing more than an excuse to watch people get dismembered in various ways. Not that it's supposed to be anything more than that, but... I'll get back to this point.

The only fake trailer that I thought had potential was for a serial killer movie called "Thanksgiving," which features an old woman having sex with a turkey and not one but two scenes of some girl making out with a decapitated guy. Eli Roth (hack!) is already in talks with Lions Gate to bring it to the big screen for next Christmas. A. O. Scott found this trailer fucking hilarious. I did not. It could've been hilarious — and I was waiting for this reveal through the whole grotesque preview — if the crazed killer turned out to be a giant turkey, or a guy in a turkey costume. See, Eli, that's parody — taking something self-important and unaware of its own silliness and then mocking it by exaggerating that silliness. With these genre-blind morons, I can't fucking believe Mirimax isn't producing my serial killer movie already.

Scott writes that this old grindhouse fare has a sort of soul and individuality that the modern Hollywood focus-grouped and studio-produced Firehouse Dog crap can never hope to match. I won't disagree with him, but having seen tons of B-movie junk plus these faux-relics, it's pretty clear that the Grand Guignol tripe has a banality all it's own. Does it really matter if you liked the blurry rape and torture scene in "Thanksgiving" while the scuzzy guy two rows in front of you preferred the blurry rape and torture scene in "Werewolf Women of the SS?" There's a visceral thrill in watching gratuitous sex, violence, sadism, misogyny, etc., but let's not pretend that there's anything more profound going on. Or at least, if there is something more profound going on, let's pretend we're disturbed by it instead of inspired. (Another reason I love Lady Vengeance so much: it's got one of the most disturbing torture scenes ever in it, and most of the scene is completely off-screen. You see the elaborate preparations, and your fucked-up mind takes over from there.) The grindhouse sub-culture feels like the legions of internet porn, where there's something for everybody, but really, once you've seen one dirty website, you've seen them all.

Apparently nothing illustrates this better than "Planet Terror," the universally-acknowledged "bad" part of Grindhouse. I gotta say that the only time I really freaked out at seeing something gross on a screen was the grand finale of FOX's 101 Things Removed From the Human Body, when a doctor from India was telling us all about a surgery he was performing on a man with a distended abdomen and found a fully-grown conjoined fetal twin inside his stomach. (Or somewhere.) "Imagine my surprise," he says, "when I reached into his belly and another fully-formed hand grasped mine." Yeah, okay, that would make me drop my scalpel too. But I know people who cover their eyes at the gruesome scenes, and I can understand where they're coming from. However, a message to the gaggle of teenage girls in the Grindhouse theater with me: First, it's two in the afternoon on a Thursday. Shouldn't you be in school? And second, you don't need to freaking flip out at every disgusting thing Robert Rodriguez puts in front of the camera. It's just latex. It's not real. Chill. Like, the first time someone loses a fake limb with a hemorrhage of fake blood, maybe. (See Michael Haneke's Caché for an example.) After ninety minutes of this, can't you either become a little inured to it, or at least stop complaining about how violent video games make our kids violent? One or the other.

Okay, so "Planet Terror" was lame. Too sophisticated for MST3K, too pointless to justify itself any other way. But we knew that. I was there for Tarantino's "Death Proof," about a crazy guy who chases women in his crazy stunt car. As usual, Taratino's shit got excellent reviews — "Planet Terror" pays homage to the grindhouse, but "Death Proof" elevates the grindhouse to art, they say. But, just like Kill Bill didn't do with the spaghetti western and wuxia genres, it collects the thematic elements from its parent genre, adds a modern sophistication and Taratino's trademark constructed dialogue (which I love, by the way, and I wrote my film class final paper on) and then goes absolutely nowhere with it. Okay, not entirely true: Tarantino clearly uses his incredible film talent to satisfy his weird "Fox Force Five" foot fetish and Amazon fetish, which apparently distract him from the types of beautiful, redemptive stories he explored in Pulp Fiction and, to a lesser extent, Reservior Dogs.

I thought — I don't know — that the characters in "Death Proof" would... what's the word the formulaic screenwriters use? Grow. Here's "Death Proof" in a nutshell:

Act One. Group of women talk a lot. A lot. Stalked by misogynist serial killer stunt car driver. He drives his car into their car. 200 miles per hour. Body parts fly. Body parts fly. Body parts fly. Same shot, four times.

Act Two. Group of women talk a lot. A lot. Stalked by same misogynist serial killer stunt car driver. Crazy stupid woman ghost rides the whip out on the highway. He drives his car into their car. A lot. Big car chase. After like twenty minutes, the crazy stupid woman finally falls off the car. But she's okay.

Act Three. Group of women talk a lot. But they're in a car, driving real fast, so you can't hear what they're saying. It's unfortunate. Group of women stalk same misogynist serial killer stunt car driver. They drive their car into his car. A lot. Big car chase. Won't spoil the ending.

So back in the sexploitation era, when the women's lib movement was growing, cynical hack filmmakers pandered to both ends of the sexual inadequacy spectrum with X-rated filth that had titles like "Rape Squad" and "Hooker's Revenge" and, one of the "most depressing experiences" of Roger Ebert's life, "I Spit on Your Grave." They all have the same plot: in the first act, women are sexually degraded (dedicated to the sex fiend men in the audience) and in the second act, those women take their violent and often sexually degrading revenge (for the crazy feminists in the audience). Meanwhile, rational people might enjoy the cinematic renaissance of Scorcese, Coppola, or Lumet.

I have to say that the second and third acts of "Death Proof" are a lot of fun to watch, certainly more than the rest of Grindhouse, but what bothers me is that — especially when I combined "Death Proof" with Kill Bill — I feel like Tarantino films like he can simultaneously copy the depressing cynicism of his inspirations and transcend it because his films have the artistic credibility that the old B-movies lack. His dialogue really helps feed that narcissism. Artistic credibility, in my mind anyway, is linked to the filmmaker's expression — Tarantino clearly expresses his admiration for the grindhouse soul, which like I said above, I find feeble — but beyond that, the film is hollow, and the more I see of him, the emptier he seems inside. Given his film record, his scenery-munching role on Alias, that episode of CSI he directed, and his multiple drunken appearances on Jay Leno, what on earth fascinates this guy besides womens' feet?